Who Am I?
I am a husband and father who lifts weights, writes fiction, drinks tea, builds with hand tools, and lives with a lot of questions. I teach English at a community college. I love learning new words and etymologies. I’m a recent convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. My name, atrus, which I’ve been using since the 90s, comes from a character in a popular video game called MYST. There was also a series of books related to the game. I always liked MYST’s premise, that books could be literal portals into other worlds.
My Top Three
I’m sure my tastes say something about me.
- Saints: Righteous Patriarch Jacob, Paisios the Athonite, Basil the Blessed
- Fiction Writers: Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, J.R.R. Tolkien
- Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kenji Miyazawa, Seamus Heaney
- Game Designers: Shigesato Itoi, Cosmo D, Chilla’s Art
- Artists: Kawase Hasui, Camille Claudel, Edward Hopper
- Comedians: Norm MacDonald, Million Dollar Extreme
- Musicians: Luxury, The Barr Brothers, All Under Heaven
Why This Site?
My design preferences for this website parallel my stylistic preferences more generally: I like simple, minimal designs because they’re better at conveying personality. Fidelity is a word used recently to mean higher resolution, better graphics, and greater detail. But those aspects no better capture the “truth” of their subject than dissecting a cat captures the truth of the cat. If you’re not familiar with the history of web design, it might seem strange to create a website that looks like this one. But there are a great many internet users who have turned away from modern centralized “platforms,” web bloat, and slick designs back to static, personal, “Web 1.0” sites. There are many reasons for these websites to still exist.
My goals for this site:
- To organize ideas and document my attempts at working through problems. The subjects of interest to me will be catalogued in the tags tab of the site. I will keep a running list of the questions currently puzzling me in the quest tab.
- I tend to forget what I’ve learned if I don’t write it down, and I want to be able to more easily see connections between ideas and track my progress toward specific questions.
- It’s probably an ok idea to have some kind of web presence.
If you have anything to ask, add, question, or comment, you are welcome to contact me at: atrusxyz@proton.me