October 23, 2018

About This Blog

I’ve been working on this blog for a very long time… nearly 2 years I think? It started out as just a portfolio to help me land my first job post college (and I think it helped!). Then I got more into the idea of blogging, but I wanted to build the site myself rather than use a traditional platform. So I found GitHub Pages, which can host static websites for free. I taught myself the basics of Bootstrap, which got me to about where this website looks right now. Then I started reading up on Jekyll, which GitHub pushes pretty hard. I converted my site to Jekyll’s format, which helps automate many of the more tedious and error prone bits of updating & maintaining a website. Now I’m thinking about writing a guide for Jekyll.

What does the title of the blog mean?

I’m honestly not the biggest fan of anime/manga, but there are a couple that I really love. The Ghost in the Shell is one that I recently got into at the recommendation of some past coworkers. I could go on and on about it tbh… To be brief, a major concept in the story is about how the mind (ghost) and body (shell) are separate. Does one or the other make us human? Is it the combination of both? Is it something else? And the story is told through the lens of someone who may or may not have a human brain that is encased in an entirely cybernetic body.

In a way, this blog is a representation of my ghost… and it will live on without me should anything happen to me 😢.

I also just really like the general aesthetic and artistic style of the author and artists behind the (several) works.

I’m an engineer, not a writer…

Yeah, so I’m not really the best writer, but I enjoy it nonetheless. I took a poetry class and a hiphop class in college that really opened my mind to different art forms that I was otherwise put off by.

I’m really just doing this for me. I may or may not try to advertise my work to my friends/family (I haven’t decided, yet).

I don’t even really know what the content will comprise. Radical political rants… Sci-fi raves… Raves 😉. Maybe a recipe here or there that I like. I’ll most definitely talk about music and programming as those are my main passions.

The playlist above is called _motoko_kusanagi (the name of the woman in the above picture). I think it’s an amazing collection of music inspired by the Ghost in the Shell (best listened to on shuffle). I would love it if you followed me on Spotify!

Side note: The embedded Spotify playlists check to see if you are logged in as a premium subscriber (if you’re not, you should be). If you aren’t you get a low-quality, 30 second preview, but if you are then you get full quality, full length songs/playlists. It seems to work well on Chrome (not tested on Firefox because who uses Firefox??), but it doesn’t work very well on Safari. I suspect it’s because Safari has some deep anti-cross-site-tracking thing. I hope there is a workaround/fix, but for now just note that Chrome works well.

Side side note: Cutting My Fingers Off was my “playground” for testing post styles and checking how the music worked and how the images looked. Just lyrics to a song I love. I was thinking of deleting it, but I kinda like the way it looks lol.

Well, I hope you’ll hang with me…

Otherwise, it’s just me and my ghost 👻.