iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 02/09/2026

Finally finished the Dungeon Crawler Carl collection! Took some time to get the English hard cover first book here. And then found out that there are two different English editions sold here: one from US and one from UK that are slightly different sizes and different cover styles/textures...

Book set of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series on a shelf

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 01/07/2026

July is #disability Pride Month worldwide. As I progress more into my academic career, I notice time and time again that many institutions usually will only do what is minimally legally required for accessibility, and minimally regard disability in terms of diversity. 1/

The disability pride flag. A charcoal grey flag bisected diagonally from the top left corner to the lower right right corner by five parallel stripes in red, pale gold, pale grey, light blue, and green

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 16/06/2026

We had a car fire outside our house, impacting our flat this morning. I learned through this that a Mercedes hearse burns hot enough to melt/incinerate an aluminum bike, but not melt steel. The picture of our garage next to the car shows this - two ash piles from bikes in the metal garage!

Photo showing a garage destroyed by a fire, with two piles corresponding to bikes that were totally destroyed, and a metal frame of a cart.

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 01/05/2026

It took me way longer than I care to admit, but I figured out how to get the journal style of DOI links in bibliographies in #typst. A combination of weird, janky hacks into the csl and regex matching in the template, but it seems to work! (The templates will be public if/when I get the ok!)

Example bibliography section of a Typst template showing links for the journal section of the reference that point to the DOI if it exists

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 30/04/2026

I made this a while ago as a bit of a joke, but maybe it's more relevant these days?

Initial mass function plotted as a function of stellar mass. Indicated are different mass categories: "Does not burn - just summer", "Brown dwarf", "Low mass", "Sun-like", "Intermediate", "High mass", "Very high mass", "Extremely high mass", "Super massive", and finally "Kaiju class".

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 24/04/2026

The award for the most bizarre #coffee I've had yet now goes to this coffee from Concept. It actually smells of strawberry, which is a very bizarre experience. However, it is also one of the best coffees I've had in my office! Sadly, this one was a limited run, so I can't get it again!

A picture from Kofio for the container of the coffee concept of LOVE from Concept coffee roasters. Shows the tasting notes of vanilla, white chocolate, strawberries, chocolate-covered cherries, and amaretto. The container is a dark brown cylinder with a screw on top and a pink middle band saying "filter roast, concept of love".

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 20/03/2026

Apparently, arXiv has been looking into adding support for @typst.app! I had idle hands during a day off, so I wrote up a template for the Open Journal @ojastro.bsky.social that is fairly complete with features (see image). It can actually do a bit more than the LaTeX template, from Typst!

Screenshot of a new Typst template for the Open Journal of Astrophysics, highlighting the title block, abstract, and section headings.

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 13/02/2026

I've been playing around exploring @typst.app quite a bit. It's been quite interesting to see how different it is from LaTeX, but I have definitely found it much easier to make what I want. I decided to remake a recent A&A paper I wrote, with a full template, and it came out pretty darn close!

Typst version of the Gaches 2020 A&A Letter paper "An analytic formalism to describe the Neff(H)-nH relationship in molecular clouds"

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 04/01/2026

For all my fellow #astronomers studying the ISM and star formation! Only a few more weeks until the talk abstract deadline for the Olympian Symposium 2026 (Jan 30). We have an amazing set of invited speakers and a great beachfront venue! Submit and register online: olympiansymposium.org

Conference poster for the Olympian Symposium 2026: The Evolution of Interstellar Medium Across Cosmic Times. Conference dates are May 18 - 22, 2026. Location: Paralia Katerini, Greece. Conference deadline Jan 30, 2026.

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 13/12/2025

The #astrochemistry review I wrote with my colleague, Serena Viti, has now been accepted by ACS Space and Earth Chemistry! We review ISM high-energy astrochemistry (X-ray and cosmic ray) and present a unifying definition of "high-energy astrochemistry" #astronomy #astrosci arxiv.org/abs/2512.10060

Image abstract for the review article "High-energy astrochemistry in the molecular interstellar medium." The image has two halves. One the left side it shows the gas-phase chemistry response to cosmic rays and X-rays, including the production of ions such as H2+, H3+, HCO+ and N2H+. On the right side is the ice-chemistry response showing production of complex prebotic molecules, including formamide and glycine by radical-radical reactions. The top left and top right show thumbnail images of a radio telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Bottom caption reads "Enegetic radiation processes in the molecular interstellar medium."

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 22/08/2025

I decided to make a little graphic demonstrating with actual #data (the awesome Cas A supernova remnant observed by #JWST) to highlight how different data looks depending on the colormap. I chose a few that I have seen used a bit from matplotlib & cmasher. What colormaps do you often use and why?

Cassiopeia A as observed from JWST, shown using four different color maps, clockwise from top left: lilac (cmasher), rainbow (matplotlib), torch (cmasher), gist_stern (matplotlib)

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 14/08/2025

Plus, this little nugget of ridiculousness in their footnotes. Also, it's quite bold to be a co-author on a paper naming a classification system after yourself. In their examples discussion, it is another clear example of a Loeb coauthor paper inflating their claims and ignoring scientific works

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 04/07/2025

For those who may not know, July is #disability pride month. Within #academia (& #astronomy), there are still many pitfalls and barriers that make things difficult for astronomers with disabilities. So, I figured throughout the month, I would share some of what I have experienced with my disability

Disability pride flag - a charcoal grey flag bisected diagonally from the top left corner to the lower right right corner by five parallel stripes in red, pale gold, pale grey, light blue, and green (Credit: Wikipedia for alt text)

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 10/03/2025

Ah, you're right! A bad typo in the label... I have fixed it, in case you have any use for it!

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 17/02/2025

Got bored again, and decided to update to include the Oxygen line for diffuse gas, and a version where the contributions are normalized to 1 instead of the temperature! (The temperature version taught me some lessons on quirks doing fill_between plots in log-space...)

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 12/02/2025

Thanks for the suggestion Ilsa! I had debated this beforehand, myself... here's a new version though with only sans serif fonts.

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 12/02/2025

"I'm bad at vacationing" Part 2. I decided to try to make an #astronomy #infographic on what determines the temperature of molecular clouds. Here's the result - let me know what you think! It shows the different physical mechanisms in the balance between heating and cooling in these clouds.

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 06/02/2025

I'm bad at vacationing. I get bored, and make plots like this, which puts into context timescales #astronomers often call "rapid". This shows a chemical model for dense gas in an energetic environment, highlighting the "rapid" freeze-out of CO gas onto ices and converting to methanol ice "rapidly"

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 04/02/2025

Cheesy advertisement: We're hosting a really cool special session at this year's #EAS2025 conference in Cork! The session is planned to include talks on #astrochemistry across scales - from galaxies to disks to stars to planetary bodies. Abstract deadline is March 3rd: eas.unige.ch/EAS2025/sess...

Silly meme about a special session accepted for the EAS2025 conference in Cork, Ireland

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 03/01/2025

The best representation I could find of the GOP House trying to govern

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 06/12/2024

Many of my colleagues have been using AI to uncover the mysteries of the universe and do amazing science. I took a different approach. As a theorist, I wanted to investigate a vital question: what if Jar-Jar Binks was secretly a genius? The results?

An AI generated movie poster for a parody of A Beautiful Mind called Nabootiful Mind, starring the Star Wars character Jar-Jar Binks.

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Brandt Gaches @brandt-gaches.space · 22/10/2024

My paper presenting the first results from the High-resolution Accretion Disks of Embedded protoStars (HADES) is now on arXiv! These high-resolution (maximal 0.1 mAU) simulations protostars highlight the role of the magnetic field in determining the accretion modes. arxiv.org/abs/2410.14777

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