About.

19 December, 2012.

My name is Desi Quintans. I used to be a pastry chef but now I’m studying science.

I like cold weather, sarsaparilla, chewing gum, jerky, and old things (especially mechanical things like typewriters). Video games and software programming are awesome cool, too. I write web stuff in PHP and SQL, program macros and apps for Windows using Autohotkey, and write video games with Unity and C#. I am so-so at photography and suck painfully at drawing. I’m not bad at sculpture though, and I enjoy carving plaster of Paris. 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.

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

And hey, it was nice to see you.

A short history of DesiQuintans.com

(You can also read about the design considerations of the site.)
  1. I founded this site on on 29 July 2002. I called it Paper Tiger (because I was a teenager, y’see), although the domain was always under my name.
  2. For a year, I cranked out a piece of fiction every day. It was pretty intense.
  3. I lost almost the entire archive of that period when I switched blog software. At the time I didn’t really care, but now I feel kind of bad about not having them.
  4. I started 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.
  5. I needed a CMS that had a better fit with what I wanted to do, so I wrote Writer’s Block. I’ve been using it to run this site ever since.
  6. Around the time Facebook came out, my activity here slowed down. Personal blogs aren’t that popular any more (Facebook status updates are much better directed at the small number of people who’d care about your personal life).
  7. Acknowledging the changed role of this site, I redesigned it at the end of 2012. I no longer call it Paper Tiger, and have now made it more useful as a way of semi-permanently sharing the things I’ve done with the internet, in a broader fashion than other social media would allow.