Ever since I was a kid I got myself hooked onto electronics of all sorts. Mobiles, TVs, consoles, modems... you name it, I've most probably tried to pull it apart physically and virtually (not that I want to make myself seem as a jack of this trade). As much as I loved video games back then (special regard to all things Nintendo), soon enough it became more about spending time wondering how everything worked instead of dedicating myself to beating those games. Don't get me wrong, I still spend hours on end playing stuff that itch my brain nicely and ruin my posture while I'm on my chair. I just couldn't stop thinking about what was going on on the other side.

And so I got to work. I started messing around with the settings of anything I could find, then I started taking off batteries and screws off of old tech. I could see how everything was wired together with those pressed-down orange cables I thought were impossibly thin. Then I was looking at the boards to try and figure out what everything did. It was already fascinating getting to be face to face with layers of technology most of the world never cared to look at. Although I grew keen of hardware, I quickly realised that all of these chips and traces, regardless of their amazing complexity, and regardless of their near impossible physics, were really just pieces of a bunch of materials. Of course, the only thing missing was the programming. Taking things apart taught me how machines were built, but learning to program was what finally let me create that new type of life into them.

After relentlessly campaigning and protesting, I got my parents to sign up 8 year old me for programming lessons. Like about a good amount of people in my generation, I started off with Scratch, the codeblock development app made by MIT. My path in program development started with the notorious "When green flag is clicked" block and turned into hours and hours on end of creating stories with say() and wait() and bootleg platformers I tried to copy from Nintendo. It was (and still is) unbelievable how easy Scratch made it. Now, it's one thing that Scratch built my foundation for programming. It's another thing that my appetite kept growing. I couldn't just stop there.

Having done some Scratch, I had a short and forgettable stint with Stencyl, which gave me SOME insight into Flash game development, but I wasn't really that interested in it. Not that Stencyl isn't a good tool, but I just wasn't feeling like working with a limited audience in the Flash Player game scene. Flash Player ended up being deprecated later on, so I patted myself on the back for making the switch in time. After Stencyl, I made the big jump out of the codeblock environment into Python. Python was the genuine rocket ship which sent me to real coding space. While I also did work with Arduino tools and stuff, it just didn't influence that much. Anyway, Python became my bread and butter as I was actually getting really good at it. Writing logic and practical scripts became a pleasure, and it also helped me think like a true programmer. This and also picking up the web stack on the way, this being HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I had some work done with this one library called PonyORM which would let us work with databases by typing queries directly through Python with easier syntax... I probably shouldn't bore you with this kind of jargon anymore.

Now that you've read this far, I'm sure you'd think computer science would have been the obvious choice for me. For a while that's what I thought too. But as I got older, I realised that what I actually enjoyed wasn't necessarily just programming. I enjoyed studying systems, taking things apart then figuring out why they behaved the way they did, and then changing them to work how I wanted them to work. Programming was one way of doing that, and an incredibly useful one at that. But I didn't want my entire working life to happen inside a code editor. I was sure I'd eventually go insane or burn out. I want to work with things that have a physical presence in the world like machines, communications systems, vehicles. These are things that have to obey actual physics and work outside of a development environment, things that we animate. And, you know, this gradually led me towards aerospace engineering. It seemed to sit at a strange intersection of almost everything that had interested me as a kid: electronics, computers, communications, physics, mathematics and badass machinery. What matters even more is that it gave all of those interests somewhere to go, because thankfully I wasn't abandoning programming completely. I was finally figuring out where I wanted to use it. And, as far as strange intersections go, no cars will steamroll me in this one. I'm comfortable here.

Okay. Now you've read the important parts. If you really love me then keep reading. Aerospace engineering's not my only interest. Sure, if you met me we'd talk about it for a while, but there are other things that capture my attention too. I've had a hard time fitting in with my friends when it came to sport. I'd always get picked last or second to last when creating our football teams at school. It was the same for basketball, volleyball, the list goes on. And then I found tennis. Tennis I like, because in tennis I can focus on the game by myself and not think about 10 other people on my side the entire time. Besides this, the physics behind it just came to me naturally, but not to say that I didn't show effort. I started playing properly and, for once, I actually wanted to get better at something physically. I started paying attention to things I probably wouldn't have noticed before: the angle of the racket, where the ball would land, how much spin I could put on it, how my positioning changed the next shot. Tennis ended up becoming another one of those things where I could spend a strange amount of time thinking about why something worked instead of accepting that it just did.

And I think that's probably why I like it. Yes, it's competitive, but it's also so analytical. You've got nobody else to blame when you miss an easy shot but yourself, which, although deeply unfortunate, you can use as a source of motivation. You have to figure out what went wrong and try again. So I'm sticking with tennis.

Speaking of analyzing, my mind can't stop doing it. When I'm not doing that with tennis, I'm usually doing it with music. The road with music came out pretty similar to the road with programming. It started off by me just listening to music. I'll save you some time and tell you how the genres of interest evolved chronologically: It started with classical which is what my parents put me on when I was just a stupid little child, then whatever they had from the CDs in the car (songs from the productions of Quentin Tarantino, Coldplay, and more...), then to EDM as I took a liking in rhythm games, then to ambience and bashing hardcore. I eventually wanted to understand how that music actually came out that way, how all those channels of sound came to life and then came together... forever... But what do I know about poetry, anyway. So I started looking into samples of music, then saving up to buy licenses for digital audio workstations, then making those samples myself. And then putting them together, as my train of thought once were. It should also go without mentioning that I've done piano lessons throughout the earlier years of my life, but that skill gets rusty from time to time as I barely have any more windows to sit down and play. However you best believe I'm on that black stool whenever I can. So zysh Klodi, if you're reading this, I still think about you and all the lessons you gave me. I'm sorry if I ever made teaching me a chore because I was irresponsible and didn't practice enough. You I still keep in my heart, and the things you've taught me I still use to this day.

P.S. if anybody ever shows you any TikTok videos where I'm yelling and playing the piano, that's my evil twin. Don't trust them!!!

If we're talking about samples it's always usually been within drum and bass. If you peek into my Logic Pro library, that's 50% of what you'll find. The remaining 50% are other ventures like in ambience, rock, hardcore and dumb songs I made with my friends whenever they were over. I'll probably put those out one day, if I have the guts to.

And then there's Minecraft. Minecraft has probably been around for so much of my life that it's difficult to remember a time when it wasn't. When I was younger, I'd go over to my friend's big house and we'd spend what felt like entire days in his huge basement playing Minecraft split-screen on his PlayStation 3. Four little squares on one television, everyone arguing about who got which controller, and absolutely no idea what we were supposed to be doing other than building increasingly stupid things. We even tried to replicate our town mall once. When I wasn't there, I'd be playing it on my iPad, usually in whatever strange position my eight-to-twelve-year-old self had decided was comfortable.

I also grew up with C418's music in the background of all of it. I don't think I realised at the time how much of it would stick with me. Sweden, Mice on Venus, Subwoofer Lullaby, Key, Oxygène and all the other pieces of that soundtrack became associated with a particular period of my life, but somehow they never really stayed there. I can hear them now and immediately get the same strange feeling I had sitting in front of that PS3 years ago. I can hear all the blocks being placed and broken, all the creaking wooden planks I've stepped on, all of the doors or trapdoors I've opened or closed, all the ladders I've climbed or went down, each and every villager, cow, pig, sheep, cat, zombie, creeper... There's something about that music that's become a big part of my mind. Quiet, lonely and hopeful. And I wish I could put this someway else.

And I've watched Minecraft change along with me. The game I played as a kid is not the same game I play now. There's new blocks, new mobs, new worlds, new mechanics, entire updates that would have seemed completely absurd to me back then. I've gone from playing split-screen in somebody else's basement to running my own servers and messing around with the game in ways I never could have imagined as a kid. And somehow, after all of that, I can still load up a new world, punch a tree, hear that first block break, and immediately feel like I'm eight years old again. This is what makes Minecraft so special to me, it's changed constantly without ever really losing its grip on what actually made it Minecraft to begin with. I've grown up with it, the same way it has grown up with me. I've taken breaks from it, come back months or even two years later, started completely new worlds and still somehow ended up walking around wondering what I should build next. It just never seems to get old. These and all those Roblox games from back then, but that's another conversation.

That's probably enough throwbacks for the moment. Back to now again.

So, radio... This is probably the most difficult interest of mine to explain without sounding like I only wear 72 hour deodorant. The idea that you can take any sort of information, send it travelling out and about into space, and then have another piece of hardware somewhere else turn it back into something meaningful was absolutely mind-bending the first time I heard it. It's just electromagnetic waves. What's even worse is how much is actually happening underneath something that feels completely ordinary. You make a phone call, connect to Wi-Fi, listen to the radio, use Bluetooth headphones, open a website over mobile data, and somehow all of this information is being thrown around through the air constantly, without us being aware it's there (meaning we just can't look at it, plus it's abundance would be all we'd see anyway so, good for us that our eyesight is such). I started thinking about what was actually happening between the moment I pressed a button on a doohickey with a blaster and the moment something happened on the receiving end. Did you know that if you cut a piece of paper a specific type of way such that it resembles the infra-red "stand by" signal chronologically, hold up a lighter to your TV receiver and then slide that piece of paper across your TV receiver, your TV will turn off? Me instinctively jumping into this rabbit hole got me into learning about all sorts of things like frequencies, modulation, antennae, signal propagation, protocols and all the other lovely pieces of jargon that make absolutely no sense to a majority but make sense to me. I like that radio sits somewhere between the blurry spectrum of physics and computing. You must understand how the waves move, but you also must understand how you're gonna say what you're gonna say through the air. It's not just FM and AM.

If you ever want to take a peek at the field for yourself, I suggest looking up "WebSDR". It'll let you browse through a good enough slice of the radio spectrum and see what's actually going on. There are people talking, digital signals, Morse code, SSTV (which is fancy for color pictures through radio), FAX, navigation beacons, random bursts of noise and all sorts of things you probably didn't know were being transmitted through the air. You start hearing all this stuff happening and, suddenly the idea that the air around you is full of information stops being a lecture on physics that's migraine-inducing.

So now you should understand why I chose aerospace. I spent most of this page talking about my interests which at first might look like they have very little to do with each other, but all that stuff, tech, radio, scripts can't help but bring me back to the same place. It's important for me to understand a machine well enough to help make it work like it should, and with aircraft and/or spacecraft, that means I'm supposed to figure out how the full "stack" works together. Structure, hardware, software, and the signals travelling between it and somewhere very far away. I find each of those things interesting on their own, so the possibility of working on something that needs all of them is something I can't let slide by. Now, there's still obviously a ridiculous amount I still have to learn before I can do any of that properly. But this is something I want to put good effort into, and that’s probably the clearest answer I can give you.