introductions, reintroductions
8/4/25
coming back from a long time away and making major changes about it. explanations, introductions, and what (I hope) comes next.
explanations
So I kind of didn't update the site for well over a year... whoops.
In my defense though, that year was a very busy one for my offline life. In the time since the last update to the old version of the site (6/2/24, judging by my old changelog page) I traveled, got really into motorcycles, moved houses, started grad school, did my first ever solo trip... to go see motorcycles, and failed very very hard at the staying-just-friends part of "friends-with-benefits." Roughly in that order.
Mostly the long hiatus is down to the grad school thing, to be totally honest. Everyone says the first year of a physics PhD is the hardest year— I think they're all lying, to be clear, but it's definitely Busy if not overly Difficult.
Also, though, in that year I changed a lot. I present myself much differently now— I've come into my own a lot more as a person in the last year or so. The way the site looked and the content that was on it was very much reflective of the place my life was in, two or three years ago; I'm very glad I'm no longer in that place anymore. And like... yes, you are a collection of all your past selves and such, but also it gets suffocating surrounded by the remnants of people who aren't-really-you anymore.
Hence the more major changes since I've been back. A new layout, yes, but also resetting the blog, the thoughts page, and the changelog back to a blank slate— no more cringing at my old blog posts whenever I want to make a new one. The writing pieces will all stay up, because despite everything I am still proud of them. And if you're for whatever reason really missing one of the old posts they've all been preserved on the Wayback Machine.
reintroductions
So if I'm not the same guy as I was back in 2024, who am I now? I've always been terrible with introductions, which hasn't changed (writing the about page was like pulling teeth), so I guess we start with the basics.
Name's still Aster— pronouns still they/them. I still like astrophysics enough to be doing another degree in it, still like coding for fun and for profit. I still like fiber crafts but I don't do much of them these days, having made writing fanfiction my main hobby. Fanfiction of what? Not Disco Elysium, these days. Instead it's the aforementioned motorcycles or more accurately the men that ride them, having developed a special interest in MotoGP and fallen down the accompanying RPF rabbit hole.
Let's see, what else is new... I've been wearing red a lot more often these days, in large part due to a comment made by my partner where he said my vibe is like a red-orange type of color. It was one of those things that just kinda throws your perception of yourself for a loop, yaknow? But I've decided that they're not wrong, which is why the site looks like this now.
what's next
Really the thing I'm most hoping for is that I get to updating this site on some sort of semi-consistent basis instead of my pattern thus far of updating in spurts for a few weeks and then being absent for months. I have a few ideas of things I could do that will hopefully end up achieving this— first being that I want to make use of the blog a lot more.
For example, I want to potentially move a lot of my MotoGP fandom discussion onto here, potentially by doing formalized writeups of my thoughts on each race weekend. I'd normally do this on my Tumblr sideblog but I dunno. The MotoGP community on Tumblr is very tight-knit; despite being active in it for about a year I still feel like I never really gelled with the rest of the group, and I have an unfortunate tendency to get in my head about it. I think moving stuff here, where there's no real way to track who's seen it and who hasn't, will help.
I also want to use the blog to do more journaling. I've never been able to keep up a journaling practice but I think it would be good for me, especially as I move into the parts of the PhD that I think will be much harder than the first year. It'll be good to keep track of where my head is at and hopefully help remind me that I have a life outside of the program— I definitely want to keep this site away from just. work discussion. I'd say weekly updates but I know I'm never gonna do that so. Monthly? Hopefully?
And beyond that I really just want to see where things take me. I'm slowly chipping away at the site layout update, combing through the old stuff to figure out what should stay and what should go, but once that's done more of my energy can go towards making new stuff to go live. Thank you for bearing with me— god knows I love to ramble— but if you got this far I hope you'll stick around.