About Me
Hello!
I'm Cascade! I'm called that because I like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) so dang much.
But that's just what I use instead of throwing my real name and face around, because I enjoy privacy and being an alternative silly creature on the internet is far more fun anyway. I have several characters, and many details about them! There will be a link here once I get those details better organized.
I'm a web developer, and I work in the higher education industry. It's a very peculiar intersection indeed. I hope my rambles about web development, video games, and art are enlightening!
Further down the page are the nitty gritties of what make me tick, and ways to contact me if you want to get to know me even better. :3
Why
The WWW is the greatest medium we have ever created. The last time something changed the game for human progress like this was the printing press.
Anyone with access can make a webpage with a plain text editor, and it can be readable by anyone else. The protocols are open, owned by no company or person. Democratizing knowledge and experiences has never been more possible.
My mission is to teach everyone how to use the web to share their thoughts freely. To do so in such a way that those thoughts are available to the widest possible audience, because everyone uses the internet in different ways.
Some use a mouse, others a mouth wand. Some can't differentiate colors, and others have dyslexia. Some have the web read to them, and others speak back to it. We all deserve access to the same knowledge, and the ability to add to the great conversation.
AI
There are situations where AI is truly very helpful, and I'm glad it's around. Suggesting tags for my bookmarks, a prompter to get me thinking about new ideas, a more accurate way to get medical diagnoses, or automatically charging my phone at the right time over the course of the night. Even autocorrect, sometimes. These are great.
However, I DO NOT CONDONE any use of generative AI.
Images: Need to break up your text? I would rather see a terrible MS Paint doodle, or indeed, nothing, than a slick generated illustration. I do not see any creativity being exercised by the generation of AI images. However much effort was put into a prompt doesn't come close to the creative effort required to get out a pencil and draw a circle with your own hands (or move the mouse in a circle on MS Paint, if that's easier). That's to say nothing of encouraging the criminality of corporations scraping the web (under a pretense of fair use for a different use-case, decided long before this was possible) and providing no compensation to creators in return.
Text: If an AI generated a blog post, partially or in whole, I write off the entire thing. LLMs' results are derived from the largest common denominator of language on the internet. There's no training objectives or controls related to truth. Also, good people with good intentions are fallible and make mistakes sometimes. Even if you edit afterward, there's a chance a hallucinated lie slips through. On top of that, I am reading your content because I want to know YOUR thoughts, not a robot's. Never mind the quality of the writing - writing is a skill that gets better as you do it, and I'm just glad to see more people writing. Generative LLMs doing it for you defeats the purpose of self-expression and self-improvement, unknowingly propogates lies, and pollutes the core of what makes the web a meaningful medium.
Interests
- HTML & CSS
- Video Games
- Sci-Fi
- Pulp Adventures
- Teaching
- Drawing
- Comics
- Cooking / Baking
- Spreadsheets
- Puzzles (The Crossword/Sudoku kind)
- Scavenger Hunts
- Many, many others
Get in contact
The easiest, fastest way to get in touch is to message me on Signal (Preferred) or Telegram. You can also email me.
If you'd rather just watch and see what I get up to, you can follow this site's RSS feed, or follow me on Bluesky or wherever you get your fediverses.