Hello World: Welcome to Asya's blog

Hello, and welcome to my website, specifically my blog.

What's going on with the whole "do you know love" thing?

So, when I was first learning programming, I made a game in Processing. I wanted to make a peculiar online psychology quiz, so one of the questions was "Do you know love?" with the only answer being an hard-to-click "YES". I was inspired by Lacan's contention that jouissance is a phenomenon unknowable to humans, but as I needed some sort of "click" interaction to trigger the next question screen, I asked the question not about jouissance, but rather something more people are familiar with: love.

Shortly thereafter, I put the graphic from that quiz on the splash page of my old website, xnast.asia. You could only enter the website if you successfully clicked "YES". This was back in 2016. In 2022, I decided to make the website that you are currently on. I knew I wanted to have four different sections:

1. info / about me
2. portfolio / work case studies
3. blog
4. page of things that i love

I had an epiphany while gathering the inspiration and ideas for the design and development of asyaplugged.in that I could articulate the menu of my new website with the splash page title of my previous website, just like so:

I'd be interested in hearing from you what you think about this articulation, whether it was confusing for you, etc.

What does asyapluggedin mean? What happened to xnastasia?

Someday I will write a separate post about the permutations of my identity / avatar / sense of self, but until then, this brief explanation will have to suffice.

I felt that the xnast.asia url and xnastasia username was too hard to pronounce, and had a little bit of a pornographic vibe. Every time people typed "x...n...a...s...t..." into a search bar, I would never be the first thing to auto-populate the field. I've still held onto the url and most of the usernames, but once I came up with asyapluggedin I was so happy to swap all my online pointers to that.

My father has had the username mattpluggedin for the longest time, and so the "plugged in" username always made me feel nostalgic for the whole early internet / dotcom boom era, which plays a significant role in a lot my work. But I never thought to inherit the username before I came across the sci-fi book "The Girl That Was Plugged In"¹, which also is the title of an episode of sci-fi TV series "Welcome to Paradox".

Do you have an RSS feed? Can I tell you if something is broken or typoed?

Yes and yes. You can access the RSS feed for my blog via asyaplugged.in/know/atom.xml.

I would also be very happy to hear any feedback on my blog or really, any aspect of the entire website. You can make a pull request on github, where my website is hosted, or just send me a message on whichever platform you prefer.