Hello World!

Hey everyone! Welcome to my blog!

My name is Andrew Augustine. I’m a student at FSU studying Computer Science by day, and an IT Sysadmin… also by day, I guess. By night, you’ll usually find me at home working on whatever project I’m enthralled with at the moment, or playing whatever video game that I’m enthralled with at the moment. Occasionally cooking too!

Introduction

Now, you may be asking, what the hell is a college student doing making a blog? Isn’t that some old, archaic technology that like only boomers use?

I mean yeah… But on the other hand, as I grow up I can feel myself slowly getting older with how I view tech nowadays. Lately I’ve been slowly easing off of social media, only keeping accounts alive for the purpose of saying I have them. I barely use any smart home items anymore despite friends loving them. I gave away my Google Home, disabled everything but the non-essentials on my Google account while I was at it. Hell, my latest job got me into using alpine as an email client, and I’ve entirely swapped from my position a few years ago of preferring graphical apps in comparison to a command line. zsh is my home now and I have absolutely no regrets. Needless to say, maybe it was my ongoing boomerfication that convinced me it was a good idea to start this thing up.

But really though, I wanted to start a blog up because lately I’ve found that, like many people, I have thoughts on a lot of things and love talking about things that I enjoy. I’ve been doing it on social media for a while now, but… social media isn’t the best place to do that.

As a kid, I used to use Instagram as my daily driver for socializing because everyone in high-school had an Instagram. That said, Lord knows why I thought it was a good idea to post rants and thoughts and whatever on there. Instagram is the platform everyone uses to post pictures of themselves doing things to make them look cool or boost their social cred or whatever. Posting geniuine thoughts on a platform as narcissistic as Instagram is the internet equivalent of talking to a brick wall. Real posts, concerns, thoughts, etc. get like zero traction; not a single person cares about reading a wall of text on that app.

At the start of college, I migrated to Twitter. It was better… but not really. Unlike Instagram where basically every high-schooler follows each other obligatorily, mainly for purposes of keeping up with the local drama, my friends on Twitter were actual people I had networked with up to that point, so I knew at the bare minimum that we had some things in common. Genuine tweets usually gained more traction, but once again I found myself out of my element. Any thought that’s longer than 280 characters turns into a thread, and no-one reads full threads unless they’re really riled up or really really bored.

So that made me think. What alternatives do I have? What’s the best, tried-and-true method for long-form text content?

Blogs. And honestly? I’m more than down to do one.

If you read a blog, it’s because you care what the writer has to say, right? It’s not like a tweet, where you have like what? Two seconds to get the average user’s attention? If you’re reading this, it’s because you actually want to read this, there’s something interesting in that blog post that keeps you engaged. The thing with blogs is that it’s a break from the extremely online and quick culture of modern social media. I just get to sit down and write to my heart’s content, paragraphs and paragraphs about things that I find interesting. And it lets other people join in on the fun if they also enjoy what I write about. I think that’s pretty neat.

Answering Anticipated Frequently Asked Questions

Now I know readers are going to have questions about the website, its content, my plans for it, technical details, et cetera. I went ahead and prepared a little FAQ to knock out as many as I could think of.

Why not use Substack, or Medium, or any other established website instead of Jekyll?

This one’s simple. Attention Defecit Disorder. Let me tell you, if a programmer with ADD is ever presented with the choice of either using a pre-existing solution for what they want, or spend hours reinventing countless wheels just because they think it’s cool, they’ll almost always pick the latter. It’s called hyperfixation, baby, and lasts until the next project that interests me  comes around. You ever hear about the trope that many hyperactive creators start countless projects but never finish any of them? Now you know why it exists.

Luckily this blog is a permanently ongoing project, so not finishing it isn’t a real concern.

What kind of content can we expect to see on here?

My long-form thoughts on whatever, honestly. Whenever I get inspired and I feel the need to write, I’ll write whatever’s on my mind. That said, I don’t mant to overextend out of the gate right at the start, so I think for now I’m going to limit the content on here to these 4 categories:

1. Meta: Everything relating to the blog itself
2. Games: Anything I want to post that deals with video games as a topic. Reviews, thoughts on game reveals, thoughts after beating games, etc.
3. Hacking: Anything I want to post that has to do with coding, reverse engineering, security analysis, information technology, etc.

• Note: I have a lot of reports that I’ve written over the past few months about a lot of things, ranging from game security analyses to binary exploitation lab reports for my classes. They’re all really neat and I’d love to post them here, but I need clearance from all parties involved first. :)

1. Politics: Anything I want to post that deals with politics as a topic. Political analyses of popular media, thoughts on major political movements, my experiece with various political orgs over the past few years, etc.

Just to start, here’s a few post ideas that I have in mind that I may publish sometime in the near future:

• [Games] The Flash Paper That Will Be Monster Hunter: Rise PC
• [Politics] America’s Critical Misinterpretation of Netflix’s Squid Game
• [Hacking] Reverse Engineering Lazy Monday Games’ Golf Gang

I also may add more categories later down the line, depending on the success or failure of this whle blog idea.

Isn’t posting your political views on a website that’ll most likely be permanently attached to your name a bad idea?

Yes! But you’re also wrong!

I’ve given it some thought, and I think it’s not a bad idea for several reasons:

1. Over the past few years, I’ve come to learn that my politics and I are intrinsically linked, and putting them aside for whatever reason just isn’t me. That’s not to say I can’t work with people who think differently than me; If getting my Eagle Scout as a kid taught me anything, it was how to handle disagreements with class and how to work with all kinds of people. But staying silent on certain matters is just wrong in my mind.
2. I also think this it’s not a bad idea mainly because it’s a method to track how my political views change over a long period of time. My story’s already been an interesting one up to this point, and I want to document where life might take me over the next few years.

I’ll try my best to not post any takes hot enough that it’ll dissappoint you, future prospective employers. ;)

What’s the posting schedule looking like, at the moment?

Short Answer: I’ll post occasionally.

Long Answer: I write whenever I feel inspired. At first thought, I’d like to hold myself to a standard of one post a week. But on the other hand, there’s no rush in making blog content as it’s not like a source of income for me or anything. This site’s a balance between making content often so I don’t leave it in the dust when my next project rolls around, but also making quality inspired content. So I guess I’ll tackle that bridge when I get there.

Do you use any analytics on this website?

Full transparency: Yes, but not Google analytics. The jekyll template I’m using recommended using an open-source analytics platform called GoatCounter, so I’m giving it a shot.

Analytics as to who reads my stuff is interesting to me, I’ve always liked poking through big piles of data. That said, I understand the privacy argument. I myself run uBlock on top of piHole for my daily internet usage, occasionally combined with a VPN. I entirely understand if you want to block analytics for privacy reasons. If you want to, the URL you’re looking to block is https://gc.zgo.at/.

Summary

I’m excited to get this thing started. Long-form writing has always appealed to me. Hopefully you all will enjoy this just as much as I do. I’ll see you all around!