about the webmaster
Call me Aster! I am nonbinary, more specifically agender, and I use they/them pronouns. When I'm not spending too much time on the Internet, I am a full-time astrophysics PhD student in upstate New York.
My current obsession is MotoGP (aka the bikefuckers, aka that sport where men ride death machines in circles real fast), but notable past obsessions include Disco Elysium and Detroit: Become Human. Beyond these, I also enjoy writing— fanfiction/RPF mostly— and various crafts including bookbinding and yarn crafts.
about the site
I started this site in August of 2022, for no real reason other than I thought making a personal site might be a fun project, and might also give me a place to put the things I've made where they won't immediately get buried in the deluge of posts on my Tumblr.
These days my relationship with social media is still as unhealthy as ever— I spend way too much time on mindlessly consuming content, time that could otherwise go towards making things, or going places, or other things that add value to my life. Other platforms move too fast; by the time I can take part in a trend everyone has moved on to the next thing. I find myself caught up in the popularity contests, comparing myself to others, getting pissed off by other people and yet not feeling like I can speak my mind. It's not good for me. Quite frankly, I don't think it's good for anyone.
So my hope for this site is to be somewhat the opposite— somewhere I can move at my own pace, where I can do my own thing. Where I can yell whatever I want into the void and not worry so much about whether other people will see it or what they'll think of it. I'm not going to get rid of my social media anytime soon, but I do believe that the slower-paced, small, independent web offers a valuable alternative. My hope is that by tending this site, I can be part of keeping the small web alive.
technical notes
Everything currently on the site was hand-coded by me using W3 Schools and the MDN Web Docs as resources. Feel free to rummage around in the code using Inspect Element if you're curious how I did something.
For my fellow typography nerds, the font for the headers is Space Mono and the main body font is Libre Baskerville.
For my fellow space nerds, the background image is this JWST image of the star-forming region NGC 604 in the Triangulum Galaxy.