~a

i have approximate knowledge of many things. perpetual student. (nb/ace/they)

contact me

Chat (XMPP)
a@trwnh.com
Mail (SMTP)
a@trwnh.com
Social (ActivityPub)
mastodon.social/@trwnh

loosely categorized soup

general stuff

you can probably find me around the web with the username "trwnh". it comes from my fleshform's legal name, "abdullah tarawneh"; just take the vowels out of the family name. 2014 they was so hipster. although nowadays "i" mostly just go by "a". historically i've had a really tough time with identity, so this is the best we're gonna get i guess.

concert/music/band stuff

i've used the names "obvious_humor"/"obvioushumor" for my vaguely music/band fandom stuff, and "birdsounds" for more creative stuff like my concert photography. both names are references to lyrics by Circa Survive, one of my favorite bands.

Make your move, obvious humor
Desperate and respiratory plight
Always on, dressed to impress
I'll be the last one to find out why
Time takes its toll on us (this changes everything)
And I'd be a liar if I denied you at all
Oh, now that I know
This changes everything
I've been trading ideas with intriguing men, and I
I perceive an honest solution to all of your pride
[...]
I'm going home, but my own way
Going home on my own
I'm going home, but my own way
Going home on my own
Circa Survive, "The Great Golden Baby" -- Juturna (2005)
And it remains the only meaningful mistake
But you won't let go, you don't know how to
And every morning I begin my dreams when I'm awake
Empty bird sounds are reminders
You're not awake at all
Circa Survive, "Bird Sounds" -- Violent Waves (2012)

links to some of my concert/music/band stuff

  • birdsounds.media -- my concert photography.
  • youtube.com/@obvious_humor -- my concert videos. (also my de facto main youtube channel, but my youtube presence is really messy)
  • society6.com/trwnh -- on-demand custom merch printing service for my concert photos. (i haven't uploaded all my good photos there but there are a few. ask me if you'd like to buy a print of one of my other photos, and i can upload it.)

gameing

most of my "gamer" stuff is under the name triggerofsol. the name came from boktai; in the first boktai game "boktai: the sun is in your hand", if you 100% s-rank and get all items you get "the highest title of the delegate of Sol the solar will -- Trigger of Sol". idk the boktai games are kinda quirky and left an impact on me during my formative years. vampires, norse mythology, magitek, post-apocalyptic absurdism, lotta good stuff in those games.

"So you're the Trigger of Sol? How embarrassing..."

Sunflower Girl Zazie, in response to Solar Boy Django losing his Solar Gun "Gun del Sol" at the start of Boktai 2 and being unable to defeat a low-level skeleton

links to gameing stuff

i am consumed by a desire for learning

varied interests here. i went to college for biomedical engineering and computer science. i took cs for """fun""" but i suppose it ended up sorta working out, because i don't really plan to do anything bme-related in my academic or professional life.

particular areas of (current) interest:

  • the Web. not just the World Wide Web, but also the Semantic Web, Linked Data Web, Social Web, and all that jazz.
  • communication. protocols, paradigms, and so on. one of the things i've been working on recently-ish is a sort of "grand unified communications theory", where i take a look at the existing open protocols and map them onto the pure abstract paradigms of communication -- publishing, subscribing, discussing, messaging.
  • identifiers, particularly how to deal with root authority and delegation. resolving those identifiers in a decentralized and persistent way is something i wish i could find a solution to.
  • i'm learning a lot more about concepts like the actor model, message passing, object capabilities, verifiable claims, distributed systems, trust and authority, and way more.
  • ...but i also can do web dev and web design and stuff like that if i really had to. i don't really have anything noteworthy to show for it though.

look at this computer stuff

  • git.trwnh.com -- personal stuff goes here
  • github.com/trwnh -- this is where pretty much everyone is forced to collaborate due to network effects, so that's where you can find my contributions i guess
  • SocialHub -- this is the forum where ActivityPub and the fediverse get discussed a lot

support me

look, i'm gonna level with ya. i need money to live. most of the stuff i do is what you might consider "socially useful" but also "generally unprofitable". given our capitalist society, my "value" is judged by the latter criteria rather than the former. you can skip past this section but consider maybe don't.

ways to support me

in order of most effective to least effective:

donate directly

here's how this one works: you can just give me money. i'll keep doing the stuff i do. this option is good if you already think the stuff i do is cool and worthwhile and valuable without me needing to convince you.

hire me to do something for you

i can explain things and i can do websites. generally, i'm really really really good at thinking things through and analyzing them. i put stuff up on abdullahtarawneh.com last year and i kinda stalled due to a lot going on in my life and not much going on marketably. but maybe check out the following pages:

buy something from amazon and tell em i sent ya

can't say this is something i recommend doing, EXCEPT IF you were already going to buy something from amazon. the more expensive the better, since it's percentage-based. but don't go buying things using this referral link just because of me, y'hear?

https://amzn.to/2rydvvC

my pitch is basically this: if you can't avoid amazon and you're going to buy something from them regardless, then at least use my link so that they pay me a bit of the revenue and so that it slightly reduces their profits.

some questions you might have

"yo why is this website so plain"

i used to have a nicer-looking one-pager on here. at some point i decided i'd rather actually update my website with actual information instead of worrying about fitting things into some grand design. and for a one-pager, using a static site generator like hugo, which i usually use for this sort of thing... well, that's overkill, isn't it? i'd rather just dump some html in a text file and call it a day. maybe a touch of css, for legibility and a lil flair.

this style of website has other advantages too, y'know. it's lightweight and performs well on pretty much any device. and it respects people's defaults. some people like to change their fonts or font sizes, and i don't wanna get in the way of that. it's just text, after all. you should be able to read it on your own terms.

in any case, the main takeaway here is that anything worth doing is also worth doing poorly. it's better to actually do the thing instead of dreaming about how to perfect the thing and ending up with nothing at all.

things people have said about me

done here? check out some other things if you want