a b o u t

what is fato profugus

who am I

why aswang

about this site

disclaimer

c o n t a c t  i n f o

e-mail

aswang@earthlink.net

AIM

nananaginip

Yahoo

nananaginip

ICQ

22085331

w h a t  i s  f a t o   p r o f u g u s

These are the opening verses of the epic poem The Aeneid by the Roman poet Vergil.

A rough translation: I sing of arms, and a man who first came from the shores of Troy to Italy, exiled by fate, he comes to the beaches of Lavinia. The powerful might of cruel Juno has thrown him about through many lands and through the deeps, on the account of her unforgotten wrath; through many wars he suffered, during which time he founded the city, and he brought forth his gods into Latium, from where the Latin race came, and the Albanian fathers, and the walls of high Rome.

Fato profugus means "exiled by Fate." I feel that I have been compelled to take the path I have taken by forces beyond my control. This site is my attempt at finding some sort of linearity in this otherwise chaotic universe.

w h o  a m  I

The short version

I am a first-year medical student at Finch University of Health Sciences/The Chicago Medical School who likes writing and screwing around with my computer.

The long version

I'll get to it someday.

a s w a n g @ e a r t h l i n k . n e t

I can't really explain exactly what an aswang is. Some describe them generically as sorcerors and witches or warlocks. Others equate them with vampires originating from Eastern Europe and similarly use garlic and crosses to keep them away. Others conflate them with the mananangal , a creature found also in Japanese mythology (I forget the name), which is a normal human during the day, but at night, the head and viscera detach from the legs and can fly around, eventually perching on the chimney of some unsuspecting pregnant woman and using its incredibly long tongue to suck the fetus out of her womb.

Why an aswang? Well, I got tired of my AD&Dish e-mail address in college, sorceror@uclink2.berkeley.edu (now long defunct) and I guess I wanted to name myself after a peculiarly Filipino mythological creature. Perhaps it was also an expression of my subconcious self-criticism of my artistic aspirations. I long to create original work, but somehow I always end up feeding off of others.

t h i s  s i t e

This website is best viewed with a browser that is capable of utilizing Cascading Style Sheets, i.e., Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher or Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher. I have tested this website mostly with Galeon, an open-source web browser that utilizes the Mozilla rendering engine, and requires GNOME.

In theory, this means that Mozilla (milestone 18 or higher) and/or a Netscape 6.0 would also be good choices.

For the most part, I have edited the pages of this site using Emacs.

Images were generated and/or processed with the GIMP.

For offline testing purposes, I am running an Apache Webserver on my Linux box, which simplifies things a bit.

A few of these pages (and eventually, hopefully, most of these pages) were originally written in XML and transformed into HTML via XSLT and Xalan, Apache's XSL processor which depends on Xerces, Apache's XML parser. It's a bit convoluted, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

Finally, the whole thing is all really held together by some Perl and bash (Bourne-again shell) scripts, for miscellaneous preprocessing tasks. They work just like duct tape. I'll put my sources up someday just for the hell of it, but they really are ugly, ugly kludges, and it would be great if you could suggest to me a better way to maintain this site.

d i s c l a i m e r

I disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss, injury or damage incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of the information on this site.