I’ve been gradually building my DVD collection for the past year and I’m very proud of my CRT TV setup. Most of the time I understand technology on an abstract level (just enough to nerd out about it) but I’m always baffled by how human beings could come up with such complicated stuff. Every time I see my TV I marvel at it, and I specifically got a prison TV so I could see all its innards >:) Old tech is slightly easier for me to actually understand, and I find the shit resolution and a million conversion cables charming ok.
Physical media in general is very special to me. I’m starting to build a CD collection as well... and speaking of music, I love radio. I’ve been hosting a show at my local station since 2022. I’d love to join ham radio someday lol. One thing about me is I love fantasizing about a technology apocalypse and all the ways I’d be prepared for it and therefore better than all those other modern chumps. I imagine myself fat and happy with a massive DVD and CD collection, and in my wildest dreams I partake in ham radio to broadcast music for the local masses.
I adore robots. Again, I usually don’t understand all that goes into making them work... and I tend to be more interested in fictional robots than ones in real life. Honestly, I’ll hear about new robots like E*** M***’s or the ones that have a humanlike musculoskeletal system and feel sort of offended, and if I ever met an intelligent robot I would most likely not trust it. But C-3PO and Astro Boy have my heart. Toy robots are very fun, too.
Recently I’ve been dressing kinda normie :( But I am very interested in fashion. I’ve just sat here for a minute before writing this sentence thinking over how I’ll describe my interest without going on for ten paragraphs. In short, I find so much joy in fashion magazines and treat magazines as ceremonies. I also enjoy learning about fashion history and then immediately forgetting it because I don’t have pretentious friends who question me and keep me in line. (“Oh, you know fashion history? Name three people who sucked Saint Laurent’s rosary. Tell me the length in centimeters of Anna Wintour’s bob.” No one is guiding these nuanced discussions in my life.) I’m an avid thrifter and have been since I was young — some people call it being broke, I say I’m a trailblazer — and I value good quality, sustainable fashion. I will judge you for your Shein hauls. This is not a safe space for you.
One of the terrible patterns I fall into with fashion, though, is having a style I love that I somehow can’t manage to recreate. I am pretty self-conscious about my body (my BMI is perfectly normal) and I think that plays into it; I admit that I think if I were skinny I’d always look good in clothes. Which I mean. Is kind of true. Because clothes are generally made for skinny people. And then sized up without much thought to proportions. But I digress. Recently I’ve gravitated towards a style that I’ve stupidly decided in my mind is “grungy monk.” You can imagine my struggle to recreate that in my wardrobe. I have t-shirts and jeans and a dream.
I touched on this in my About Me page, but I’m deeply affected by my environment and I feel most myself when I’m in nature. I enjoy it most when I’m by myself, which is sort of unfortunate because I simultaneously want to introduce people to hiking and good “spots” and things like that. In my heart of hearts, I think a lot of the blame for faults in modern human beings falls on the separation of man from nature. I’m not saying that people should hunt their own food every day or go without clean water, but that there’s a very important spiritual aspect to being “in” nature and fully appreciating it. Nature humbles us in such terrible, beautiful ways.
After my first year in college, I went and worked on a mountain for the summer. The environment was so incredible I still sometimes cry when I think about existing in it. The work environment, however, was really, really not. I left a couple weeks early. When you do seasonal work like I did, you depend on your company for everything — food, housing, transportation — so if they’re a shit company, then everything about your living situation is shit and you can’t really escape it. Except by quitting lol.
One of my main personality traits is that I’m a radio DJ. Sadly I am also proud of that even though I don’t even mix songs I just put my little playlist on the air and talk here and there. My show highlights underground and local artists, so I feel like I’m leaving a good impact. I also love being a radio DJ (and not just on a stream or something online) because I can imagine aliens picking up the radio waves and listening to my show a billion lightyears away when I’m long gone.
I actually tried to change my major to astronomy, but it was impossible because I was in the middle of my second year and I wouldn’t have been able to get the prerequisites to transfer. But I’m fine with how it all worked out; my current major gives me a lot of wiggle room for my career options, and I’m not dead set on any particular field. Now, I can enjoy learning about space and time and the weirdness of existence without the added anxiety of deadlines and grades lol. I go to observatories fairly often and love learning about science outside of school, though I’ve been having trouble finding a good source for news! I’ve been relying on the benevolence of the YouTube algorithm for a while, but I’d love to find a publication or organization or newsletter to subscribe to.