broken symlink (previously known as "nullroute |¦|") is grawity's personal website and more broadly a personal computing environment.
I am usually known as grawity online (any of "he" or "she" or "they" will do).
You can contact me via email (either at this domain or at gmail.com), or through fedi, and yes, also via IRC.
I am also known as M——s (he) in the real world, or W————t (she) in virtual worlds. You can find these names with no effort, but unless we meet in those worlds, you do not actually need to know them.
I live in Lithuania (though do not wish to be located). I enjoy music, anime, books, fanfics, and forests.
I'm a sysadmin by occupation and nature, and genuinely enjoy managing my own network infrastructure, probably to unhealthy levels of pointless tinkering (and little in the way of making or inventing).
My technology interests and obsessions are:
The latter was shaped by media such as Hackers (1995) and Serial Experiments Lain, and probably also depression.
To this day I'm fascinated by the ability to ping something on the other side of the world, and very much obsessed with the idea of computer networks as places in and of themselves, with spatial relationships between hosts and routers; ssh or telnet being the equivalent of GO EAST in text-based adventures. This website (hence its name) is one such place.
It is built using whatever text editor is at hand. Sometimes that's Nvim, sometimes Notepad2 or VSCode (and sometimes it's Nvim within VSCode). FrontPage is not out of the question.
My previous website was likewise built by hand, with just one set of pages (the blog and its accompanying CDF & Atom feeds) being statically generated. For my own lack of design skills, its look was strongly inspired by such webpages as Administrative debris and Practical typography, with book-like minimalism and posh typography.
The current site is a reduction of that – symlink is an imitation of old-school 'personal servers' like Chiark or Kitenet; it is meant to feel like a place, a collection of mysterious infrastructure that you snoop around – and intended (at least originally) to display the same in Mosaic as it does in Firefox. (It still works in Mosaic, I believe.)
For a while, both websites existed with a strict separation between them: one my personal site, in its early days of finally settling down after having roamed the public_html of many 'shell account' servers; and the other representing the domain as a whole and my own network that comprises it. (In part this was due to ever-increasing fascination with computer networks as locations; in part due to a desire to continue the existence of something that would be useful to other people, after its antedecent's demise.)
But with grawity being the sole proprietor of the domain the entire time, their purposes gradually merged – my blog was abandoned, while the domain's website was increasingly more about my own projects, machines, experiments, and such. Yet, having been hosted on no less than 15 different places, to this day it tends to use relative paths and static files, with the remaining apprehension of eventually being packaged up and moved to yet another uncertain address.