My name is Jon Tillman.
I am a full-time dad and part-time writer, farmer, photographer, and food nerd who immigrated to Asturias, Spain. I maintain Eating Asturias, the English-language encyclopedia of Asturian gastronomy and foodways. I live on a smallholding in a tiny village called La Casa MedioYes, my address, in its entirety is just “the middle house”, no number, no nothing. In this case it means the middle of the mountain, making the name of my village roughly translate to “that house halfway up the mountain” at the end of a one lane country road in the conceyu of Llangréu. You can read more information about me and how I got here, if you’re interested.
While my Asturian gastronomy project accounts for a lot of my time, I do have other interests, and some of them have little or nothing to do with Asturias, food, or Asturian food. I use this site as a place to explore those other interests and obsessions.
In general, those things are:
- Essays: long-form opinion pieces about various topics, mostly coalescing around the experience of becoming an immigrant in middle age. Also technical, political, and sociological ramblings.
- Notes: Learning in public is an idea that was (to my knowledge) codified by Swyx in his 2018 article of the same name. Small, less opinionated bits that have yet to be tied together into coherent essays, but that I find interesting enough to stick out here in the public eye in order to learn in public.
- Books: Not books written by me (those are still hiding in a mass of unedited notes) but the books I read and think are worth commenting on. Mostly this is just an excuse to play with the possibility of building my own Bookwyrm interface.
- Music: What I have listened to and enjoyed. Originally a whole blog of its own where I posted an album a day I found on Bandcamp. Now expanded to include essays and how-tos about my music collection and organization system.
- Food: Longish pieces about various topics in food that are not specifically about the experience of being an immigrant and wondering ‘why do these people eat those things when my things from home are obviously so much better?’