About

My name is Desi Quintans. I am twenty-three and I live in Sydney, Australia. I used to be a pastry chef, but now I'm studying Medical Science at university, for whom I have Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and Carl Sagan to thank.

I am into typewriters and fountain pens and The Good Old Days, although video games and software programming are awesome cool, too. I do all writing exclusively on a Brother Deluxe typewriter (or with my online typewriter) and program in PHP and SQL. I also program macro scripts for Windows using Autohotkey. I am so-so at photography and suck painfully at drawing, which is why I often use other peoples’ photos in my webcomic. I own around 250 dead-tree books, and 400-600 ebooks, most of them about the wars, or science, or the unsung histories of salt or cod.

If I had to pick an ideal first date, it would involve wearing a dress (her, not me!), visiting used book stores, eating candy for lunch, playing Time Crisis or House of The Dead in an arcade from beginning to completion, and then going home to watch Man VS Wild episodes and laughing about how dumb most of the advice on that show is, while secretly feeling happy for Bear because he is living his dream and you are probably not, dear reader.

Also, vegetables are overrated, and I do not enjoy conflicting textures in food. And I love starting sentences with conjunctions.

The history of Paper Tiger

I started Paper Tiger on the 29th of July, 2002, shortly after a dirty and shameful break-up with my first girlfriend. For around a month Paper Tiger was a badly designed hotbed of misdirected and embarrassing emo-blogging.

At the end of that month I began re-reading what I had written. Pathetic.

I deleted the archives.

From then on I began writing pieces of short fiction. Almost all of them had a sad, longing tone because it had only been a month after my break-up and I was still pretty sad and lonely and when I looked around me all I could see were sad, desperate people who also wanted a place where they could vent all of their emotions without resorting to futile emo-blogging like I had.

This writing short fiction business continued for about a year, and I call this phase of Paper Tiger’s life the Glory Days. During the Glory Days I got an unbelievable amount of response from all over the world. I best remember a series of emails from a university student in India (a medical student I think) expressing surprise that I could pump out one quality piece of fiction every day. The amount I wrote was insane. One piece of good fiction a day, for a year.

When I switched blog software from Blogger to CheesyBlog almost the entire archive of the Glory Days was lost. At the time I didn’t really care, but now I’m torn up, and at times I pace about wringing my hands and rubbing my forehead in consternation.

In this phase of Paper Tiger I diversified by writing How To articles and other suchlike pieces. Articles with bad picture quality were made using a 2 megapixel camera I borrowed from my friend.

Now in the present day Paper Tiger is run by my own custom software, Writer’s Block, which is free under the GPL and available for you to download and use. These days my article writing has slowed down, and I mostly concentrate on phony gimmicks to attract teh big buckz0rz.

Half-way through 2009 I launched a webcomic called Gradually, But With Love. With all of my creative output going there, Paper Tiger is now just a stockpile of all the stuff that has nowhere else to go. Articles about fixing computer problems and pitches to get you to try my latest software, that kind of thing.

Paper Tiger is published using Writer’s Block, a Content Management System that I coded myself. Thanks also to my webhost, SmartArtist.

Go to the Contact page to contact me. There’s MSN Messenger, Email and a convenient feedback form set up for you.

And thanks for visiting me.