elke.cafe

i felt like having another presence on the internet. hello.

i'm elke, known as [REDACTED] in professional settings. my pronouns are zhe/er. i'm a transfem disabled gay cat thing in er mid-20s who touches computers for a living and spends most of er off-hours complaining about having to touch computers for a living. i also pretend to be a music producer and programmer/game developer sometimes, in reality i just kinda think about it really hard and hope that'll manifest something in my sleep. case-in-point: this website! i first thought about making this in early 2023.

i have started writing about some of the things i do, such as a programming language i want to make, which is at least 1 thing i can gesture at if someone asks about what i'm up to. you can see all of the posts i've made so far over here. eventually this site will have a more complete list of projects i'm working on or cool stuff i've found when i can be bothered to make something like that. unfortunately i am not medicated for ADHD so this may take several units of time.

infrequently asked questions

what is elke

a human person (perhaps surprisingly)
an owner of 1 cat and too many plushies
a cyclist who really needs to cycle more often
a big fan of post-metal, metalcore, and similar
extremely normal about making coffee

what isn't elke

a programmer who starts the projects zhe plans
a musician who finishes more than 1 song a year
a writer who does more than worldbuilding
a FOSS evangelist (i use affinity photo btw)
medicated nearly as much as zhe should be

why "zhe/er"

the short version is i stole them (from a friend who no longer really uses them anyway). from what i can remember it originally made them as an alternative to the more common zhe/zher. at some point in early 2023 i stole them because of the better mouthfeel and overall vibes along with a wish to move away from the normative pronouns i was using at the time, and over a year on i guess it just kinda stuck. as a nice bonus it means that if someone refers to me in the third-person then i can be almost certain it's me who's being referred to, since there's only 1 other person i know of who currently still uses them.

in the meatspace or in formal settings you may hear me being referred to (or referring to myself with) she/her instead, just because i tend to use that for people i want to keep some distance from for one reason from another. i don't really mind, but i do still prefer my silly neos.

why ".cafe"

i'm part of a plural system called tape noise café. we run 2 mostly-private fediverse instances which also use "cafe" in their names, those being tapenoise.café and shrimp.tapenoise.cafe, which i currently use for a majority of my interactions with the outside world.

as alluded to above, i'm also a coffee nerd. i started a table of the different ways i prepare coffee along with what beans i used which i may eventually put on this site once it's a bit more substantial, in case anyone's curious about what i do with coffee exactly. i mainly use a fellow ode gen 2 grinder and either an aeropress original or a fellow stagg dripper depending on how i'm feeling on a particular day.

i haven't quite got to the point of coffee autism where i can tell the difference between coffees grown in different regions or at different altitudes, but i'm working on it.