naman kumar @matcauthon49
cryptographer and cinema enthusiast. i really like driving.

I am a cryptographer and computer scientist. Currently I'm at IRIF as a PhD student. This is my personal webpage—if you're looking for my academic information, you can find it here.

I am interested in film, art, and sports and partake in a variety of activities related to these pursuits. These include taking photographs, translating movies, writing about films, origami, calisthenics tricks, and so on. There's a bunch of information about this stuff here, along with futher permanent documentation of the vast number of ways I have discovered I can waste my time.

The blog is largely a feed consisting of updates about dumb things I've been doing and thinking about. Any additional information you'd like to know about me can (presumably) be obtained through browsing the contents of this blog.

faq

  1. What is the meaning of @matcauthon49?

    Good question. The answer is that it doesn't really mean anything because I just picked this as my forever-tag when I was 12, or something to that effect. “Mat Cauthon” is one of the protagonists of the Wheel of Time book series that I used to like as a kid—I've revisited them since then, and unfortunately they're not very good.

    49 is just a really nice number. It feels like a prime number, but isn't, and it has two squares in it (4 and 9) while being a square itself. I call these “faux-primes”—same as 91, which is the alternative in case someone's already used @matcauthon49. There's also @idontplaytetris, but I don't know where or how I became associated with this.

  2. Will you write for me?

    Yes! Especially (but not exclusively) if you can pay me. Send me an e-mail. I'll write about film and (the negative impacts of) technology, or really anything else so long as it's not something I have a moral disagreement with, which is a pretty low number of things if you're just a regular person.

  3. Can you recommend me some movies?

    Sure. Watch Ocean's 11.

some reads

  1. Sam Kriss's Blog: Numb at the Lodge.
  2. Justin Smith-Ruiu's Blog: The Hinternet.
  3. Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe: A Vaporwave Forum for casual discussion of internet phenomena.