Lemon Tangents is the personal blog of John Herrington.
Any questions, concerns, or inquiries about licensing may be directed to: contact@lemontangents.com
Table of Contents
Who Am I? In Short
I was raised in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. I currently teach history at Odessa College, a community college in Odessa, Texas. I love video games, metal music and dungeon synth, and writing.
Who Am I? In Detail
A slightly more detailed biography snippet–it is by no means approaching completeness or comprehensiveness.
Early Life
I was raised in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. I had what by all means might be called a normal suburban American childhood: I was friends with the kids on the cul-de-sac, we ran around outside or played video games inside when school was out for the day, my biggest concerns were getting good grades and having fun, etc.
Educational Career
By the time I reached high school, I was set on attending my local community college’s ‘early college high school’ program. In said program, high school students from the county enrolled as full-time students at the community college; since high school diplomas have similar credit requirements to an AA in general studies, most students were able to complete both simultaneously–as was I.
Initially, I wanted to pursue entering some kind of STEM field (the specific field fluctuated based on my mood on any given day); I was interested in physics, biology, chemistry, zoology, geology, etc. By “interested,” I really mean that I enjoyed listening to clips of science lectures or New Atheist debates on YouTube back in its earlier days, not that I was genuinely passionate about (or capable of doing) scientific work itself. I also considered pursuing a STEM degree because that was (and still is, to a lesser degree) the common wisdom: if you get a degree in anything outside of STEM, you’ll never get a real job and die penniless and alone… or something like that. Nonetheless, I dropped a couple STEM courses in community college while increasingly gravitating to the subject that truly galvanized me: history.
This is perhaps the part where I am expected to look back and identify with perfect clarity why I was drawn to history, both in general and specifically as the major to pursue in university. However, I simply cannot. What I do remember is that the history courses I took in community college comprised those rare moments wherein I truly had fun–where I did not need extrinsic motivation to engage with the material.
So, as I approached the end of high school and community college, I applied to major in history at the University of Texas at Austin beginning in the fall semester of 2018. I earned a BA in History in 2021, and began graduate school at Louisiana State University in the fall semester of that year. Graduate school was–and some of you know this feeling well–a hellish experience that I am nonetheless grateful for and occasionally even miss. In fact, graduate school was so hellish that I am immediately skeptical of the credentials of anyone who says their MA/PhD program was easy, fun, a good time (without caveat), etc. In my experience, people who enjoy their graduate programs wholesale and without exception either went to degree mills or unfunded, unrigorous programs that probably should not be accredited in the first place. Or, they earned an Ed.D., which is perhaps a repetition of the previous sentence.
Nonetheless, I earned my MA in History in 2024, and set about searching for a community college to teach at.
Work
Like most who enter the unforgiving arena known as the academic job market, all the full-time positions I initially applied for completely ignored me. Even most of the adjunct (part-time) jobs never responded to my application. However, College of the Mainland was willing to give me a chance (which I am ever grateful for) and allowed me to build up a year of adjunct teaching experience in fall 2024 and spring 2025. With that experience, I was accepted to a full-time position at Odessa College.
I have taught history at Odessa College since fall 2025. It is a community college in the unremarkable (read: fairly ugly) town of Odessa in the desolate desert that is West Texas. My title is technically “instructor” of history, but I find that a bit cumbersome in ordinary conversation; I usually refer to myself as a teacher when asked what I do for work. Though I detest the ceaseless emails and pointless meetings, I genuinely have a lot of fun in the classroom (unless it’s a night class–those should not exist).
Hobbies
Some of my earliest memories are of video games; I began playing video games so young that I actually can’t remember what my first video game was. According to my mom, I started playing video games around the same time I learned to walk. The earliest games I remember playing were Billy Hatcher on GameCube and Spyro: Year of the Dragon on PS1. Other games that occupy those earlier memories–and which I am generally fond of to this day–are Pikmin 2, Ocarina of Time, Luigi’s Mansion, Digimon World 3, Yoshi’s Story, Iggy’s Wrecking Ball, Tail Concerto, Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, and a whole host of games that are eluding me at time of writing.
Video games are still my main hobby, though these days I exclusively play on PC rather than console. I am sometimes asked “what kind of games do you play?” and my answer is one that unfortunately sounds like a cop-out, but is actually true: “basically all of them.” I mean, I’m not fond of realistic-looking racing games like Forza–and I absolutely despise sports games–but in general I enjoy the vast majority of genres. Among my favorite video games of all time, the genres span from puzzle games (Talos Principle) to RPGs (Dragon Age: Origins) to platformers (Spyro) to simulation (Spore, Mount & Blade: Warband) to shooters (Red Dead Redemption), and so on.
Beyond video games, I enjoy listening to metal–black metal and folk metal in particular–as well as dungeon synth, dark ambient, and their related genres. I believe my first exposure to actual metal music (not hardcore, pop-punk, rock, nu-metal, etc.) was in the 5th grade, when I was recommended Heidevolk, Korpiklaani, Ensiferum, Kalmah, and others by YouTube’s recommendation system. My initial interest was almost exclusively in folk metal, but in recent years I’ve become increasingly fond of black metal. I believe my exposure to dungeon synth also occurred via the YouTube recommendations a few years ago; Quest Master and Depressive Silence ignited my passion for the genre.
Okay, now for the rapid-fire list of other hobbies I have but don’t feel like explaining in detail: writing, film (especially horror movies), chess, spending time with my wonderful girlfriend, and indulging in expensive rums from the Caribbean and Latin America. Oh, I also really like Taco Bell and Pepsi.
Why Lemon Tangents?
I suppose that is actually two questions, and thus deserves two answers. I’ll start with the easier of the two questions: why did I choose the name Lemon Tangents for my blog? I knew that I wanted my blog name to consist of two words, and I wanted the second word to be something along the lines of rants, ramblings, screeds, etc. I am fond of alliteration, and so considered names such as Radical Ramblings (which appears to be a TERF YouTube channel?), among others. I was workshopping potential blog names with my girlfriend when she mentioned that she likes when brand names have an identifiable object in them, like a kind of food. Lemons! I love lemons, or at least lemon cake, lemon candy, lemon cookies, etc. Tangents immediately careened into my mind for reasons beyond me, and despite its lack of alliteration, I decided to go with it. What particularly made ‘tangents’ stick with me was that tangerines are citrus, and so are lemons–that’s really it, it’s not that deep.
The other potential question here is: “why did you start a blog in the first place?” I don’t know, call it narcissism or egomania or something else like that, but I just enjoy making my opinion known. I enjoy writing as well, though I feel quite rusty and out of my element–I think the constant stress of grad school actually pushed me to produce my best essays then. But then again, such is the curse of eternal self-doubt that plagues so many of us. More than anything, I wanted a platform outside of social media (I deleted my accounts long ago) that I could use to push myself to keep writing, and to develop my opinions in a complete and coherent way.
I don’t suspect a single soul will read any of this.
~John Herrington, September 2026