Who built this piece o' crap, anyway?

Given that I have a plethora of passions which generally involve things that are much older than I am, you can call me an_achronism!

I've been pulling air into my lungs since 1990 and pulling computers apart and putting them back together since roughly eight years after that. Since then, large portions of my time have been spent diving down research rabbit holes and indulging myself in a series of vaguely related hobbies, usually somehow relating to either creative pursuits (such as art, writing, and music) or some form of technology or another.

Many things I've done in my life have necessitated some pretty deep dives into subjects like motion picture film and vintage computing. For example, I went through a phase of obsessively pulling apart and modifying '80s game consoles (primarily SEGA Mega Drives and Mega CDs) to do things like play games from any region in the world instead of just the one they were supposed to be compatible with which happens to be exactly what I'm doing to a Mega Drive II in my avatar:

an_achronism's avatar, consisting of a cropped photograph of his right hand cutting one of the traces on a printed circuit board from a SEGA Mega Drive II with a retractable craft knife, as part of a region modification procedure

However, if you know me already, you almost certainly know me as That Guy With Way Too Many Vintage Computer Keyboards (or, maybe, as That Guy With Way Too Many Topre Keyboards, but... keyboards one way or another).

photograph of a Happy Hacking Keyboard 2 shown sitting on a desk just above a HHKB Professional HYBRID Type-S Snow model released for the original HHKB's 25th anniversary, the latter of which has some of its keycaps replaced with blank ones to highlight the special Fn layer functions on the remaining keycaps, which are those inherited from the original model

I am a well-intentioned but sporadic Twitch streamer, which usually involves me doing Keyboard Stuff but will occasionally branch into other interests such as vintage gaming (e.g. doing stuff with hardware or playing some old point and click adventure game). For this reason and some others, I choose to keep myself relatively anonymous in the online communities I frequent, and ask that those who know me in the meatspace respect that and keep it that way.

Despite the state of this web site, by day I am generally writing code for a living (no, really!) in my house in Scotland.

If you want to have a poke around things I did before I made this web site (and yes, I am intentionally and obtusely calling it that rather than a "website" because I like to party like it's 1999), here are some links to other spaces I occupy on the world wide web:

If you need to get in touch with me about something to do with this web site, you can either do so via the links above or by sending me an email using the contact form that I haven't made yet.