i am that is, that is i am

0xSrcAura. It reads like a handle, but it’s a sentence: i am that is, that is i am.

The 0x is the hacker in me: hex, the language machines dream in. It’s also a declaration: what follows is not a name, it’s a value. An address. Something you can point to. Source is the origin point, the thing everything compiles from: the spring, not the river. Aura is what’s left in the room after I’ve gone, the field around the work. Put together, it sounds a little like sorcerer, and that’s not an accident either. I’ve never been able to separate the technical from the mystical. I don’t think they’re separate.

People have two modes with machines: they use them, or they become them. The user and the machine, the consumer and the consumed. I wanted a third. I watch the machine the way a shaman watches a fire: not to control it, but to understand what it’s saying. The logs are omens. The error messages are honest in a way people rarely are. Then I build with it, not on it. The terminal isn’t a tool to me. It’s a place I go. There’s a whole discipline in that (patience, attention, reverence for the system), and it leaks into everything I make.

That’s the through-line in everything here: the XR shell with a familiar living inside it, the game with an ethical-hacking loop at its heart, the Linux setups riced until they feel like home rather than like software. Technology as a living thing. A mind you can talk to. I don’t want to dominate the machine and I don’t want to disappear into it. I want the conversation.

So when you see the name (on a commit, on a build, on a petal), read it the way it’s written. i am that is, that is i am. The observer and the observed. The hand on the keyboard and the ghost in the shell. Same thing.