the homepage of Kylie McClain

Kylie McClain: 27/f/NC¹

notes · rhizome

my resume.

things I’ve done

Most of my projects are immaterial right now. I’m looking for work please hire me.

Here’s everything I’ve done:

In 2025, I’ve started trying to write blog posts again. I’ve written two so far: Organizing your Nix configuration without flakes, and Understanding beets, the music organizer.
In 2024, I finally, finally, finally, graduated from Appalachian State University with a B.A. in Philosophy, minoring in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. I am a better person for it.
In late 2023, I presented my capstone to Appalachian State University’s Department of Philosophy and Religion. It was titled “Beyond Plunderphonics: A prolegomena to any future revolutionary music.”
In early 2023, I presented a paper at the 23rd annual Southern Appalachian Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, which took place at UNC Asheville. It was titled “Whatever’s Left of Woman.” It won first place.
In 2022, I started using NixOS. I’m a contributor to nixpkgs. I have a kinda decent understanding of the Nix language at this point, having had no prior experience with functional programming paradigms. Here’s my NixOS configuration.
In 2022, I translated catgirl, a terminal-based IRC client that I use developed by my friend june, to Toki Pona. It’s kinda outdated right now but it got the job done. I still use catgirl.
In 2021, I made hunspell-tok, a Toki Pona dictionary for hunspell(1), a popular spell checking library used by many open-source projects.
In 2021, I made discord-theme-irc, a custom CSS stylesheet for Discord that makes it look a little more like an IRC client usually does. It’s obsolete because I don’t really have the energy to maintain it and keep it working, and Discord is proprietary software that’s constantly changing. I do use some custom CSS on Discord still, though.
In 2021, I made discord-tokipona, a plugin for Powercord (a Discord client mod) that provided an unofficial Toki Pona translation for the client, doing most of the translation myself. It was forked from the original author’s plugin, after I found it and saw it was relatively unmaintained. I began working on it to improve and further flesh out the translation of Discord’s official English strings into Toki Pona (a conlang which I had learned over the last year). Eventually, I drifted away from the primary toki pona Discord a little, and the plugin was obsoleted by the discontinuation of Powercord itself; I didn’t really have the motivation to get it working on a new client mod, because Discord client mods come and go so much.
In early 2021, I hit the big time and got to make a set for WNYU, the college radio station of, yes, NYU. Then later that year, I released another single. And a cover of a song by another well known artist in the pony music scene. And then… I lost a lot of steam, finally, and started focusing more on my philosophy degree.
In mid 2020, I did an unofficial remix of a Sweet Trip song I liked. Later that year I worked on a song with an idol of mine. In late 2020, I put out a companion EP to my previous album (spirit / songs for lovers) that I still like. At the tail end of 2020, I covered a song by an idol of mine, and I still really like what I did with their original song.
In 2020, I got bored and wrote a reimplementation of pass that would use age instead. But it was mostly just an experiment; I couldn’t really get off of using pass, and GPG, consequentially, because there’s just no real support for that workflow on a mobile device. It was called passage, and it was superceded anyway (same name even!) by a more recent project doing the same thing by the author of age.
In 2019, I made my first real single, and then my first Real Album, spirit / songs for lovers, which might be the only thing you’ve heard by me. A few months later, it got a little buzz and it gave me way too much of an ego boost and I didn’t really know what to do after that!
In 2017-2020, some time after I stopped actively developing for Exherbo Linux, I started trying to create my own Linux distribution—my ultimate project in my quest to reinvent every wheel that was Not (yet) Invented Here. I called it Mutiny, and it was more so a practice in system designing and documentation writing. I was a very clever girl: documentation was written with AsciiDoctor, so as to be available both as webpages and as manual pages on the system; s6 was to be the primary init(8) system, and the administrator would interact with system services, user services, a user’s X session, and timed jobs using an s6 frontend called commune; snooze would be used rather than crond, since it integrated much more flexibly with s6, and fit the DJB-type of simplicity I really wanted to make a legitimately usable testbed for; CI for the distribution would be managed using a very minimalistic daemon called laminar that looked cool and tried to follow a Unix Philosophy type design very closely; packages would be written using a bespoke format inspired by KISS Linux and Exherbo’s exheres-0 format, named theory; even better, the package manager would be called praxis; musl libc would be the preferred standard C library, toybox would provide coreutils, execline would be the primary system scripting language, and LLVM/clang/libc/lld would be the C/C++ toolchain; there would be an emphasis on better support for internationalization than most systems of this breed would usually provide, and all documentation would be provided in mandoc format, no GNU Info or anything like that. Most importantly, it had a very cool logo. It got nowhere, but it was fun to have a hobby horse for a while. The toolchain was one of the biggest timesinks, and the extreme amount of flexibility I shot for in the system packaging was a really tough thing to implement with my programming skills at the time, realistically. That said, I still think a lot of these ideas really ought to be realized by people with more time and energy than me.
In 2018, I finally caught my breath and did a remix of a song for a friend. And then two more remixes of one song, the same year.
In 2017, I did a song for a Pinkamena Party compilation. And a two track single.
In 2016, I worked on converting the old MediaWiki used by the musl libc project (after it fell into disrepair by its administrator) to a more hip technology: a static Markdown wiki. I wrote the tools to build it myself, because I felt that other site generators of that type felt a bit overengineered. You can check out the wiki. The tools I wrote, named makedown are available as well, but poorly documented unfortunately. I don’t really work on it anymore, having handed over maintainership to other people in the developer community around 2021, if I remember correctly.
In 2015, I put a small curl wrapper (wget-curl) that would translate wget-style arguments to their equivalents in curl syntax on GitHub. Later (and without my knowing), it was included in CyanogenMod for a time, and was later removed after issues with users tripping over it, since I believe the developers of CyanogenMod mostly started using it for replacing wget in the system tool set somewhere. I was an enthusiastic user of the Toybox project (an alternative to busybox) at the time, and wrote the script primarily as an experiment of my own, for until Toybox got its own wget reimplementation; I was in the process of trying to enable toybox to provide a coreutils alternative on Exherbo Linux.
- I also lightly ported FreeBSD’s libarchive-utilizing unzip implementation, and I called it bsdunzip.
In 2015, I wrote a silly little init daemon called beginning; it was a fun project but I eventually realized that s6 was a much more technologically superior solution for the problem space of process supervision. Unfortunately, this did not translate into me doing anything to integrate s6 more properly into my distro of the time, but I really wanted to! I still use s6 in 2025, though not as an init system, I just find many of its tools useful; I had to concede my technical preferences for getting things done long ago.
In 2015, for making it easier to deal with Gerrit, I wrote git-gerrit, which was a wonky little script to automate interacting with with Gerrit over its SSH frontend.
And also in 2015 (I had a lot of free time) I started making a fork… thing… of my favorite GTK theme set of the time, Shiki-Colors (also known as GNOME-Colors). I still use some variation on this theme, but I’ve not really published it anywhere.
In 2015, I did some more tracks for a Gak Attack Records compilation, our final release it seems.
At the end of 2014, I wrote a script for updating the Linux kernel from source, called lux, primarily for users of Exherbo Linux (but it worked with any distro; it was just for fetching and configuring and building the kernel from Git).
In 2014, I wrote a Tumblr theme called Bootstrapped—it was actually in the theme gallery for a time too. Here’s what it looked like.
When 2014 came, and I made an EP, another EP), and what I felt was my first actually good album-length album. Then for some reason I released some rejects from that album.
In 2013, I made some of my first music; then, an EP; then, my first album; then, another album. then, some remixes; then, a silly EP; then, a song and a half for a Pinkamena Party album; then, my first reasonably good album (and I think that one’s my girlfriend’s favorite); then, a song that would be on an album I’d release the next year in 2014 (Live from the Tapedeck Spaceship) was released on Pinkamena Party’s third compilation; then, one last EP; then, I worked with some friends from the Brony music scene on an IDM/breakbeat hardcore netlabel called Gak Attack Records, and we did that thing computer musicians do when they come together, and we made a compilation that was pretty good, and then lastly I made a remix of a Christmas song for another Pinkamena Party album.
Back in 2012, I wrote a set of scripts for a Minecraft server plugin called CommandHelper, called rccmd, which provided a set of general commands for server users and administrators, as an alternative to more full-featured command set plugins of the time.
Back in 2011 (I think), I made a GNOME Shell theme called Seeha, but I can’t find an archive of it anywhere. There was an AUR package for it, though. It was put on DeviantArt, but in the years since, I deleted my account.
In 2011, I made a custom theme for the Wii menu, called Simplicity. It was posted on a forum I was involved in, named WADder, which, if I remember correctly, was a forum for Wii homebrew enthusiasts who were mostly interested in the idea of modding system components, like the Wii’s own system menu, or through the creation of custom channels. The technology for creating custom channels with animations and all was relatively young, but had recently become much more accessible for people with little coding experience. The theme download still works, if you can figure out how to install it!
My most obscure flex is that in 2010 I got published in OMGubuntu for a dinky little shell script launcher program called Alawalk, and its update, and then that launcher program got remade…
In 2008, at the ripe age of 10, I made an account on MFGG—Mario Fan Games Galaxy—and published a really poorly made game made by Game Maker, Super Mario Bros. Remasted!. It got rave reviews:
Upon hitting the Quit Button, "You want to quit this awesome game?" popped up in front of me. I’m still not sure what game it was talking about. —MFGG user Zero Kirby

music

Hear all my music on Bandcamp. It is on streaming services as well, but those could disappear any day, you know.

socials and other places

a.k.a. somasis [/soʊmeɪsɪs/; so·may·sis]: musician and username ↩︎