About

Craftinatorics is my website. I like to think about math. I like to talk about math. I like to make things.

Historical Context

You see an abstract pink animal from above. There are brightly colored triangles flying all around. Below is the animal's shadow. It is a quilt hanging on the wall.
My mom's pinata quilt, which she made right before I was born. I have spent many hours studying it.

I grew up around quilting. Some of my earliest memories are of studying my mom's pinata quilt. It's on a distorted grid: a bright pink pinata with a blue shadow and colorful triangle candies falling out.

I learned how to program in 2005 with Blitz BASIC, making silly little art and physics simulations together with a group that met every week.

Coding was a together activity. You shouted out suggestions to the person typing, and sometimes you typed too. I don't think many people who learn in schools get to experience that. It was really nice.

A lot of the stuff I use today was in its infancy in 2005. Git was released that year, but we didn't use it. I still accessed my language documentation offline. HTML5 was first released in 2008, and so was Python 3.

Three duct tape wallets with decorative covers: a rainbow, a rocket ship on the moon, and a grumpy monster. The opening of the wallet is its mouth.
Duct tape wallets aren't very practical because the adhesive oozes out in the heat and gets on your credit cards. Maybe I need to learn leatherwork.

I was just barely too young for MySpace: I learned my first HTML on NeoPets when I saw my friend making a message scroll across the screen on their little NeoPets home page. Everyone was playing RuneScape. I didn't sew much back then, but I was making a lot of highly-advanced duct tape wallets.

College

I went on to major in Physics in undergrad, and I really enjoyed the idea there of mathematical models of the world that are fun to play with in their own right.

White paper folded into a hexagon, covered in pencil doodles of stars, plants, and an eye with a heart pupil. It reads: Happy valentines day. To Lily, From Quin. 2015.
The first valentine I ever gave my wife was a hexaflexagon.

I minored in Math and especially liked my classes on combinatorics and discrete chaotic systems. I can't remember if I ended up officially minoring in Computer Science, but I absolutely adored my computer graphics class where we built a program that does everything the graphics card does (but slower).

I met my wife on the very first week of college. We bonded over a shared love of Vi Hart's math videos. We learned about slide rules, American Sign Language, and linguistics together. She's amazing at cooking birthday cakes, even gluten free ones.

The Present

Two cats, orange and tabby, are sleeping in an embrace. Their front legs are interlaced, and their heads side-by-side.
Our babies. They are good friends.

Now in 2022, I'm in a scramble finishing up grad school (and job searching, eek!), so I see the light of having more time for personal projects, but am still extremely busy. Expect sporadic updates, but hopefully I will be able to build a little refuge here away from traditional social media.

I learned how to knit and crochet during the early pandemic, when I was too sick to sit up at the sewing machine but wanted to be making something.

I'm gay, trans, tired, and in my mid-twenties. I live in the pacific northwest with my wife and two cats.