Comic Books

My friends would all tell you how tired they are of hearing me go on and on about urban planning and infrastructure.

The ways in which our communities are built have such a large and profound impact on our lives, yet most people give little thought to it. IMO a great deal of the social woes we’re dealing with (at least in North America) are caused or made worse by our lack of sensible city-planning, from carbon emissions to social isolation.

There exists so many cool and interesting ways to build solid, sustainable communities! It’s really exciting! Sadly I have to live that excitement by researching other countries. The only form of city-planning that seems to exist here in Canada is “highway going through a parking lot interspaced with strip malls and encircled by single-family housing suburbs”.

Boardgames! I used to be more into trading card games like Magic, but got tired of the cost and constant churn, and then spent the last couple years delving deeper into boardgames, including hosting a weekly game night that regularly has 8-10 people :)

Mead. It’s such a simple recipe: Honey, water, yeast. Thats all you need to make a basic mead. Its so easy. Once you start researching more though, good lord. Ph balances, Sparkeloid v. Bentonite, fruit addition before, during, or after fermentation, Primary fermentation, secondary, racking. Don’t even get me started on the chemical additives for stabilization, and sanitation. My kitchen becomes sterile operating room every time I do a brew. I’ve also got this dope refractometer that makes me feel like a goddamn scientist every time I use it.

I am a computational chemist and biochemist. Ive been an insurance agent and worked in IT at the DOD, I am a masters Starcraft 2 player, Minecraft mod pack creator and Mod dev. Aside from English, there are 4 other languages that I understand well enough to be conversational. I have had some of my art featured in a museum. I am a mathemagician. I have tutored thousands of students in Math, chemistry, biology and physics. I built a spreadsheet that tracked 30+ parameters of 600+ foods that I used to help my mother with her kidney disease and me with diabetes. Her kidney disease has been stable for 5+ years and I dropped over 80 pounds in a year.

Take your pick.

I’ve fallen out of most of my hyperfixations (yay depression) but I used to be really into:

-Words, I loved the idea you could express entire and specific meanings with a single word

-Gemstones and their mythology. More around what people used to believe and cultures rather than current day “crystal” stuff. Also, they are mad pretty

-Chemistry, I used to do backyard chemistry and loved the feeling of alchemical-like hands on stuff. chemistry feels like magic!

-Plants/Toxins/Toxic animals, what more do I gotta say? Nature is metal AF and don’t give AF. It’s wild the solutions it generates and how humans use them or adapt them.

I am a bit nerdy about programming language and a lot less nerdy about hardware.

Honestly, I’m kinda afraid to think about it. There’s a nonzero chance I have no in-depth nerdery. Aside from introspection, I’m not sure there’s anything I really can consider myself knowledgable about. At least more than anyone who takes a cursory interest in anything.

As someone with ADHD, there is no end to the number of things that fascinate me in life, and as such, I tend to obssess and nerd out on a lot of things. Probably my biggest nerd things are this:

Sonic the Hedgehog: I was gifted a SEGA Game Gear with Sonic 2 for my 9th birthday (30 years ago) and I loved everything about the world and characters. I’ve been a loyal fan ever since. I own every American comic book that’s been released, I’ve seen all the various shows and movies, and I’ve played most of the games (minus the rare arcade games and games on consoles I never owned, e.g. the Nintendo DS). I even built a website to keep a logical reading order of all the main comic series that have been released. It’s a few months out of date right now; my personal life got super busy these past few months, but I’m finally free to update it again. It’s considered a valuable resource in the Sonic fandom, as the comics can get really confusing without a reading order to guide you. Especially the old “Archie Comics” Sonic series. They had so many miniseries and spinoff comics that it gets confusing really fast.

James Bond: I dunno why, but I really got into spies back in jr high school. Back then, I loved the movie Harriet the Spy and enjoyed the film GoldenEye. The video game GoldenEye 007 came out for the Nintendo 64 and my friends and I were obsessed with it. Then my dad bought me two VHS collections (yes, I’m old) of all the James Bond films and I spent my summer vacation nerding out over all the old films, from the '60s and onward. I learned James Bond was the origin of so many action/spy tropes I had seen parodied in cartoons and movies. The bald villain with a scar and a Persian kitty in his lap. The gadgets, the cars, the well-dressed gentleman spy, plots to rule the world, etc. All pay homage to James Bond films. I really got into it.

I especially loved learning about Ian Fleming, the original author of the James Bond books, and how he was a British Naval Commander during WWII and worked Intelligence for the allies. His work was more boring desk work than save-the-world action, and his original novel version of Bond definitely had more desk work than his movie counterpart. I actually did a whole James Bond movie marathon, including all the official and non-official films, and reviewed them in depth on my movie review blog. I even compared them a little to the books they’re based on, where it was applicable. Most of the movies are completely independent of the books. Some only share a book title and nothing else, e.g. Moonraker. The books and movies are very different from each other.

Movies/TV shows: As you may have guessed from my last link, I also nerd out about movies and TV shows. I’ve watched thousands of films in my life and hundreds of TV shows. I still consider it a fun hobby; I haven’t gotten to the point of learning about filmmaking techniques, obsessing over actors or directors, watching awards shows, etc. But I really enjoy getting lost in a good story for an hour or two, and I started a review blog to analyze and break down just what is so good (or bad) about the storytelling in movies and TV shows.

My last movie marathon (a Studio Ghibli marathon) was interrupted by an Internet outage and I haven’t had time to pick it back up in a long while. But I finally find myself with loads of free time again, so I might finally complete that marathon in the coming months.

There are so many other things I’d consider myself a nerd of, but these are a sample of the larger nerdom topics I enjoy.

Preaching the use of GNU/Linux & GPG. Only had one or two takers. Both I built and maintained for. I’m married to one and the other lives an hour drive away and I don’t drive.

No one listens. No one ever listens bar my wife. I’m offering free computers in exchange for practicing the art of preaching. No one has even accepted it bar my wife. facepalm We’re all gonna die very very soon now.

I’m a nerd about translation, translation choices, and differences in cultures. I find it fascinating that the tiniest details in your language choice are capable of changing the meaning entirely. I also happen to be a Russian, so maybe this example for the Russian-English language pair would be interesting to you:

Given: комната = room мальчик = boy одна из = a (one of) эта/этот = the (that) в = in вошел = walked

В одну из комнат вошел мальчик. A boy walked in a room.

Этот мальчик вошел в эту комнату. The boy walked in the room.

В эту комнату вошел мальчик. A boy walked in the room.

Этот мальчик вошел в одну из комнат. The boy walked in a room.

English uses a/the to define what’s known/unknown, and Russian doesn’t have a similar tool but it can change word order and add some extra words for more precision. Russian also uses a lot of cases to define who does what and when, and English just doesn’t need that, the word order does it all.

Looking at all that makes me feel like I’m watching something beautiful. Like I find solace in the fact that there is more than one way to see things.

I’m a bit of a grammar/language nerd-- I think it’s interesting to see the different structures of languages and the various ways concepts get communicated. Also by looking at what’s on the level of single words you can get an idea about what’s important culturally.

For example in Japanese, there’s not really a word for brother or sister, you always have to say olderbrother or youngerbrother. That’s because the hierarchy of ages was important enough culturally to get codified into the language.

I maybe partial to some Lord of the Rings.

Rabbits. Had them as pets throughout my childhood and I was fascinated with their behavior. Sadly, some of my knowledge came from irresponsibleness as pet stores used to sell them willy nilly without good care instructions. This was also during the dial-up modem era so there wasn’t much on the internet then either.

Here’s some things to know:

1. You have to handle them a lot when they are young or they will not make great pets.
2. You can litter train them. They can’t use cat litter though as clay dust is bad for their lungs.
3. If you don’t get them fixed, especially the females, they can be predisposed to a lot of reproductive system cancers and be extremely aggressive.
4. They are highly social animals. It’s especially cruel to keep one alone for its entire life.
5. They are somewhat opportunistic carnivores.

Elasmobranch reproduction and embryology. It’s just a topic that has always been interesting. Sharks, rays, and skates are all rather closely related. But we have skates- which lay eggs (oviparity); rays- which give live birth, via internal egg incubation (ovoviviparity); and sharks- which, depending on the species, lay eggs, incubate the eggs, or experience a more “mammalian” pregnancy known as vivparity. And then, there is the intrauterine cannibalism that is known in the species Carcharias taurus, where the fetal sharks are still developing, the yolk sacs have been depleted, so the fetal sharks eat the others within the uterus, resulting in the birth of two offspring (sharks have two uteri, so one from each).

And then there is the parthenogenesis phenomenon, that we only know about because of captivity. Certain sharks- notably bamboo sharks- if absent of a mate, can trigger a response that causes ova to mature and develop into a clone of the mother. This is also known to happen in lizards.

And a large number of female elasmobranchs can also store the sperm of males after copulation to fertilize their eggs for years.

It’s just a fascinating topic all around.