Frequently Asked Questions
I’m asked a certain few questions from time to time. Thought this would help aleviate any confusion.
Where did you get the nickname “Sterling”?
I have a mild nickel allergy, so in order for me to play clarinet (and not be itchy), the keys have to be plated with another metal. The most common of these non-nickel key platings is sterling silver, and I always made sure to get the school’s silver-plated clarinet in my hands before anyone else (at least until I got my own). That’s when my classmates started jokingly calling me Sterling, and around then is when I thought I could adopt it as a pseudonym of sorts.
The extra ‘s’ in “ssterling”, my typical username, happened because “sterling” was already taken as a username on Fur Affinity, and I thought I might as well just tack on another ‘s’. I guess I can retcon it and say it means “Seth”.
Why do you use your middle initial on everything?
To differentiate myself from the other, more famous Seth Price, an artist in New York City. I’m not really of much note at the moment, but in case I end up becoming a name in avian ecology, music education or something else equally unexpected, I figure it’d be more useful.
ユーザー名の発音は？
ssterling です。sssssssssssssterling じゃないwww
Why does the site look like it came off late-2000s AOL?
What do you use as the backend? WordPress?
Ever since the very beginning, I’ve coded this site from scratch. At first, it was static HTML edited with Notepad++. I wanted to generate dynamic content (at the time, just consistent headers and footers), and after experimenting around, I settled on PHP for a few years. Recently, I’ve moved to a model-view-controller philosophy, so I simply pass largely unadulterated markup through a custom CGI program to attach headers, metadata and whatnot.
How well can you speak [language]?
Linguistics being a hobby of mine, I commonly get mistaken for a polyglot. Well, I might be one. Depends on your definiton of fluency
.
I’m a native English speaker, if that wasn’t a given. I can converse in elementary Spanish (though slowly and with some weird grammar); I can comprehend Japanese and French to a degree but struggle holding a spoken conversation; and I understand the slightest bit of Portugese and Italian primarily as a carry-over from Spanish.
I can somewhat read Arabic, Hebrew, Hellenic and Cyrillic scripts (because why not) but have virtually no comprehension of the languages associated with them.
Why do you even have this website?
It started out as a hobby, really. Now, it’s still that, but moreso just a repository of things I share with friends and other people. That’s literally all that’s to it.