About Me

Hi! I’m Avery, an undergraduate in computer science and game development based in Victoria, Australia. I fell into computer science and programming in my primary school years, moving from ICT labs in Scratch to my first taste of programming literature in a copy of the first edition of Python For Kids gifted to me on my birthday.

1 This blog was, in fact, written in Clojure using the lovely Powerpack toolkit.

 You'll most often find me writing Lisps -- namely Common Lisp and Clojure1, but I consider myself a polyglot before a proselyte. I've written other nontrivial programs in C#, Ruby, Lua, GDScript, Rust, and likely others that escape my mind. Perhaps the most important aspect of programming to my mind -- something that keeps me tied to the practice -- is the wealth of things to be learned at any given time. Nothing embodies this embrace of the paradigm shift in the way polyglot programming has; the methods in which certain languages lead you to drink at the water of their paradigms is a thing of beauty.2

2 Clojure’s abandonment of types and structs in favour of the noble map and lispy homoiconic approach to code, Rust’s control over memory management and Haskell-esque types and map functions.

Outside of programming and games development, I read and write with a voracity that can at times scare me. 3 3 I’m sometimes told that I tend towards “big words” and general verbosity, but I point to my parents’ allowance of five-year-old me to read the dictionary in bed as the source of these logorrheaic tendencies. The aforementioned father supplied my appetite for words in stacks of books, including Terry Pratchett. Growing up reading him has had a severe influence on my view of the world and the way that I write. More contemporary influences of mine include Mark Z Danielewski1, Seth Dickinson2, and Jeff Vandermeer3. Essays I’m happy enough with to post here are forthcoming, but nonfiction influences of mine include Jacob Geller and Austin Walker4. 4Whose nonfiction influence on me is for another page. I’m also very passionate about input devices. I own several nontraditional ones: ergonomic keyboards, a stenotype machine, trackballs, a rollermouse – just to name a few. I’ll have a post eventually for those who want to witness my sicknesses.

Contact / Socials

You can find me under several names in several places. Namely Mastodon, Twitter, and Github. You can contact me for any reason at all at inquire@blackmoonkite.cc. Ask me about my keyboards. Or fighting games.

  1. House of leaves has had a severe impact on the way I write and think about writing, and its layout influenced this website’s styling. I think often of the house on Ashtree Lane, and as of 25-02-11 am drafting several pieces of writing referencing the book across myriad topics. I strongly recommend you pick up a physical copy.

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  2. I would be remiss not to mention the ‘Baru Cormorant’ series, but my allegiances truly lie with the physical copy of Marasenna on my bookshelf. Some of the best characters and worlds I’ve ever had the privilege of digesting, some that inspire me still to dust off the games writer in my brain-heart. His writing is a major element of what made Destiny’s world the magical thing that it is.

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  3. There is not enough to say about the Southern Reach series in a footnote, nor a paragraph or blog post. A book may barely suffice. Coming into Area X where I did and bringing what I brought made this series deal some of the heaviest blows I’ve ever felt. A triumph for the new weird genre. Please do pick up a copy.

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