Hello, Zuko here.
I grew up in suburban Vancouver, on the unceded land of the Kwantlen nation. My mum & dad’s families immigrated from England & Holland in the ’40s, to Brantford, on the Six Nations’ Haldimand tract. Before that, it’s pretty much history. I know that at some point, our ancestors were probably farmers & weavers — not a lot of IT demand, I guess.
I graduated with my BSc from UVic in 2014, joint majoring in Mathematics & Physics, minoring in Ocean Sciences. If you’re curious what that looked like in practice, here. Near the end of my program, I started auditing gender theory classes too. I began experimenting with my own gender, and it stuck.
Summer 2014, I became enamoured with text-based games.
I taught myself enough Python to make a couple of my own, then switched gears & developed an .xml GUI template for the expansive Discworld MUD.
In 2015, I moved on to speedrunning, and put my childhood Pokémon skills to the test glitching my way through the original games. Although it was a short phase, it piqued my interest in “retro backend” and in 2016, I began poking around my laptop in command line to see what I could find.
Turns out, a lot.
So, this blog is a bit of a cheatsheet on the things I’ve learned. If it helps someone else, that’d be pretty cool too.
These days, you might find me hanging around #hardfought on IRC, trying to rack up a new Nethack score.
You can also find me on Github, or reach me at tom.on.github@gmail.com.
Oh, and that’s me, I’m Tom - welcome!