Karthik

I love writing, exploring, and reading. By day, I build good products. By night, I train myself to be a space captain, intergalactic super-spy, zombie apocalypse pilot, and ninja. On weekends, I have no idea what I do!

Temporal Dreams

Slipping away from the passivity of the tunnel, I walked towards the light. As the damp blur of jarring rocks cut off, the radiance of the sun, through the clouds and the canopies, hit me with all its bloom. And there she was, a grey whale. It swam through the rain clouds and soared with […]

Threading fediverse and ActivityPub with some necessary evil

I dream of an open and free social web. A social ecosystem where for-profit corporations function and compete solely as ‘providers/operators’ rather than ‘controllers/owners’ of an individual’s identity and their data, while the individuals, as a community, start self-governing, influencing, and evolving the fediverse themselves. Right from defining protocols to the freedom of expression, all […]

An escapade at 5

A self-photograph of Karthikeyan KC from the reflection on the windows of the Vande Bharat Express train.

Through a field of dissonance and harmony, with the waves, I travel, just like everything else in this universe. An eternal journey, this is. Oh, and the undiscovered depths of it all, I too shall see it someday. But to pause, take a breath, and to look through the cacophonies for harmonies, all the while […]

Portals

Oh portals, I conceded, Had I shown my wings? Had I read my mind? Had I found my ground? Oh portals, I departed, With wingspan grown. With mind space tranquil. With ground pale blue.

My 2020 recap – On reading, writing, and creating

A photograph of my phone's digital library with fiction books like Dischafer and non-fiction books like Permanent Record in focus.

In 2020, I found myself away from people yet close to them at the same time. My family. My friends. Even strangers. And through the engulfing darkness, I was quite surprised to find my timeless retreats like reading, writing, and coding were still intact. Like food, water, and human connection, these things helped me get […]

On Interoperable Internet

Interoperable internet is an idea that’s worth investing resources into. Apart from bridging communities, it can help shift the authority back to the public. Undeniably the only solution to solve the tech lock-in disease! Rancid platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the prime suspects who are desecrating the open web. This shall very well pave the way to a more complicated interoperable space of IMs.

Crash courses, Humans, and Mindspace

Arclind Mindspace is a free crash course platform from Arclind. Developed and maintained by Karthikeyan KC.

Remember the first time calculus made sense? Or better, think about all the ‘aha’ moments you had since school or the day you started realizing that you are indeed a mass of flesh called the brain that is orchestrating a mesh of dependent bio-frameworks to consume information. Sounds quite joyful, right? That right there is […]

Metamorph

When the pressure dropped, gravity lost its love on me. I felt pain. A sharp pleasant twinge at the back of my head. Everyone I loved and lived waved at me in my thoughts. It was like unfurling my favourite book, the one that I hadn’t touched in a long time, but only a few […]

The Cook

Lora always spent hours on admiring those embellishments of the facade. The microscopic chisel work on the marbles, the details on the quaint sculptures, the tantalizing mix of the colours on them, all made it look like a gateway to the heavens. She would either do that from the gardens or sometimes wait by a […]

When the power goes down for 20 hours

Thanks to the thunderstorms, I had to spend a whole day (and a dreadful night) without electricity. The blackout made me do a lot of things. I read. Slept. Rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Read again. Tried to sleep. And by evening, shot some random stuff.