I’m a big fan of the “about page,” particularly on personal blogs like this one. Its the best place for me to provide a little introduction to who I am and what I’m trying to accomplish here, and if you’re looking at this site, and saying, “dude, what’s up with that,” it’s my hope that by looking through this, it’ll all make sense.
Most of all, thank you for reading, and if you have any questions that would be best answered outside of the context of comments on a blog, do contact me.
I’m a twenty-something, geek, blogger (obviously), knitter, science fiction writer, user-facing technology specialist, technical writer, and virtual community nerd.
I’m interested in historiography and in the processes of cultural memory, in political economy, in software freedom and open source technology, in ethnography and the anthropology of collaborative technology.
I’m an avid user of quirky open source technology, including the awesome window manger and emacs.
In addition to the mostly daily posts that I do here, I have a couple of other projects on the internet.
I’ve recently launched an open source and virtual think-tank dedicated to exploring the interactions between technology, the people who use technology, and the unique technosocial phenomena that emerges as a result of these interactions. This project is called The Cyborg Institute, and includes a blog called “Cyblog”, and an awesome wiki.
I’m looking to create and host a next-wave science fiction publication that I call “Critical Futures,” it’s dormant as of Summer 2009, but I hope to bring it back with renewed awesomeness in the near future. You can see the remnants of the old CF site here.
Oh, and about the name. My given name is Sam Kleinman, but I’ve been writing this blog and working as “tycho garen” in a number of contexts since early 2007. I’m not sure what the divide is, really, and it’s kind of an open secret. The “tycho” comes from a novel I wrote when I was in high school–which wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been–and tycho was a very derivative leading character.
tycho has become the header for all of the projects “I do for me,” the fiction writing, the blog, twitter, and so forth, and in this it gives me freedom (within reason) to write and explore issues and ideas because I want to. And there seems to be value in that. I just don’t want to mislead anyone.
Oh, and I’m queer. This used to be a huge part of my world and my worldview and I wrote about gender and sexuality stuff here all the time. A lot of my initial connections and role models in the blogging world were the queer bloggers in late nineties and early ‘oughts, and I consider myself part of that community, but it rarely percolates to the top of the “things I’m blogging about” pile. Turns out, I’m happier when that’s the case.
Ok, the basics pretty much cover everything… I totally expected to need a section with sub-pages here called “The Full Story” but I managed to be concise and get everything in. None the less, I have an old about page, that I wanted to preserve. That’s located: here.
I may add more to this as things change.
If you need my PGP public key (which no one ever does, alas), it’s here, and here.