Thoughts

Making Things Fast

Hello again! I'm a bit tired, I have been working on making the entire site work well on really slow internet speeds. Like Dial-up for instance. Some pages can load in around 1-4 seconds, although images obviously take much longer. I think this is great. But, I find it a bit funny that I am thinking about dial-up in 2026, since I highly doubt many people are making their websites with that in mind anymore. Still, I like how it forces me to keep things simple and fast, and makes the site work nearly everywhere.

I have also put a ridiculous amount of detail into the dialect page. It is really big now, while somehow being both a joke and something I am taking a bit seriously. I think it is pretty cool, and maybe one day I will show it to more people. For now, I am going to slow down the changes since it is getting close to being finalized.

A Romanian Dialect of My Own

I have been imagining my own Romanian dialect for a a long time now. I have worked on it a lot, changing the spelling, vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and all sorts of little things until it started to feel like an actual language rather than just a random idea.

I finally made a page about it, where I wrote down the rules and a bunch of the vocabulary I have come up with. It still needs a bit of work, though. There are plenty of words and grammar ideas that I am still figuring out.

A lot of the inspiration comes from Slavic languages, especially Serbian, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, while still keeping Romanian as the main foundation. I even got inspired by some other languages like Kazakh, Hungarian and German a little bit. If you speak Romanian or know a Slavic-based language, you might find some of it pretty interesting.

I also made some of the words deliberately funny, why not. Some sound pretty good, while others are a little ridiculous, which is honestly part of the fun.

I do not know how far I'll take this, but I have already spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about it, so I might as well keep working on it.

Why I have been learning Russian

Since quite some time ago, little by little I have been learning Russian, and there is a bit of a funny reason why.

When I was a kid, I went to what was basically a Polish school from kindergarten to grade 4. The funny part is that my parents did not even know it was a Polish school at first. It was not in Poland or anything, it was just a school in my country that happened to be based around Polish culture.

You were expected to already know Polish, though, so I did not really learn any there. It was mostly just a regular school with some Polish traditions and whatnot. In hindsight, it is pretty funny that I spent four years there and still came out with almost no Polish.

I do not blame myself for that. I still have a lot of good memories from that time, and I even met one of my childhood friends there.

Now I am learning Russian partly because of that. Russian is a Slavic language, so maybe I can pick up some Polish later too. I also just like Russian, and I have been exposed to a bit of Russian culture growing up. Masha and the Bear is a funny example, but it is still an example. Romanian traditions, food, and other things also have some similarities.

I have tried a few different ways of learning it already. Audiobooks, little tricks, random methods, you name it. Some helped, some did not. Eventually I just decided that I actually have to learn the language instead of looking for some secret shortcut.

The first thing I learned was Cyrillic. It was tricky at first, but once I could read the alphabet, I felt like I had finally gotten somewhere. It was nice being able to look at Russian text and actually understand how to pronounce it.

Then I learned that о can sound like а sometimes, which is quite annoying.

I like languages and cultures in general, and I want to know much more than I do now. Hopefully when I am older I will get to see more of the world and learn about all sorts of places and people.

For now, I am just going to keep learning more and more and see where I end up.

До новых встреч!

More Shenanigans

I have made quite a few more changes to this website lately, and I think it is starting to become a pretty cool little place. Some of the changes are, maybe, actually useful, and some of them are here because I thought they were funny. The piracy page is probably the best example.

I also made a little guide about running my own music server, so I can stream my own collection at home instead of depending entirely on streaming, (like most normies would). Seriously speaking, I like seeing the website grow with tiny handwritten informative pages and whatnot, instead of just one single homepage with a bunch of links on it.

I have also been thinking about making some of the smaller and more separate pages on the site much more old-fashioned, so to speak. Some of them really don't need the full site design, so I might just make them plain HTML, like an actual Web 1.0 page from the early 2000s. The rest of the site can stay the way it is now, which I think is like between web 1 to 2.

I think that would be pretty cool. Not every page has to look the same, especially when it's about personal websites. A page can just be some text, links, or maybe a couple pictures, and ironically it can look much greater than many modern websites.

I also made a Romania button. It kind of sucks lol. I made it myself, though, but I like it anyway. Maybe I'll make it less terrible later.

Speaking of buttons, I have found a bunch of cool ones to add on the main/index page, they are really nice, and not random. I could add on more later, hopefully it doesn't get very distracting, but the more the merrier, I suppose.

Oh, and I added a few tiny JavaScript effects too. I know I said I wanted this site to be free of JavaScript, but these are basically useless little jokes, and the site doesn't depend on them at all. You can turn them on and off from the main page. I still occasionally wave my cursor around just to make a bunch of bubbles appear, because apparently I find that a little entertaining.

Anyway, I really like how this website is growing. It is becoming less like a project that needs to finished and more like a place where I can keep adding random little things whenever I have the time.

Birthday

My birthday was on the 13th, and it was really great. I got some new shoes and a jacket, and we went out for some really good Chinese food. Nothing super major happened, but I think that is what made it nice. I got to enjoy the day without trying too hard to make it special.

I am 16 now. I do not really feel older, but over time, I have changed quite a lot. There are things I used to like that I barely think about anymore, and other things have become much more important to me. I guess getting older is mostly just noticing that you are not the same person you were before.

Do you feel older when your birthday comes around, or does it just feel like another day?

People Disappear

I used to have a friend who I knew for a long time. We went to school together, and later mostly talked online. About a month ago, I found out that he had deleted all of his accounts. Discord, Steam, email, YouTube, all of it. There was no explanation, so I just had to accept that he was gone.

The strange part is that my life did not really change much. I was sad about it, but most of our friendship had already become online. We never really got the chance to meet outside of school. It is strange to know someone for years and still never really get to know them in person.

It made me think about how easily an online friendship can disappear. Have you ever lost touch with someone without really getting a goodbye? Did you miss the person, or just having them around?

I am also going to make a new Discord account. I do not usually like social media, but Discord is one exception since so many people use it. I made my old account when I was younger, and mostly used it to troll and mess around. I have changed since then, so I think starting fresh makes sense.

Moar Big Changes

I spent a lot of today working on this website, and I think I made some pretty big changes. I have been trying to make it feel like an actual personal website from the early 2000s, rather than a modern website with a few old colours thrown on it.

I changed the overall look quite a bit, including the dark background, warmer reading areas, and a lot of little layout and stylesheet changes. I also worked on several pages. Photography / Art is now more of an actual archive, Other Links is a proper directory, and I gave the Macau page its own old card-game style. I also made some more changes to the GNU/Linux and WHYT pages.

I spent some time looking at old websites for inspiration too. Some of them had really simple layouts but still had a lot of personality. That is probably the main thing I am trying to get out of this site.

Bring back the Old Web

Is it just me, or do modern website designs look terrible? Personally, I really don't like the complicated, bloated, and rounded designs that seem to infest nearly every website. I think we should return to Web 1.0 and pre-Web 2.0 design. Websites were so simple, yet they had a lot of personality and were genuinely fun. They loaded almost instantly, and it felt like you were actually "surfing the web."

I am trying to design this website with that style in mind, roughly inspired by the web of 2000-2006. As of now, there is also no JavaScript used here, pure HTML (+ some css)!

Big Changes

Recently, I installed Linux Mint on one of my computers, and I have just realized that everything I use now runs on GNU/Linux. I have wanted to do this for quite some time. Although I am already quite used to the Linux environment, it still feels a little foreign. Nevertheless, I am getting much, much more work done than I ever did on Windows 11.

From my experience with both Linux Mint and Arch Linux, I can definitely see the difference in speed. I also like how GNU/Linux encourages you to use free software, (libre, not gratis), which is always important to me. The GNU system was developed with the goal of creating a complete operating system that would be free software, which in turn can be used and modified by the user to their need, you probably can't get that from Windows.

Send me an email if you use GNU/Linux and have any tips or good software recommendations that I could use.

Middle Name

I think that, unofficially, I have a middle name now. I thought long and hard about it and asked most of my family what they thought. I think Nicolae would work for me, although it kind of sounds like Nicole, which is a little weird. It is similar to Nikola or Nicholas, but I am still thinking about it.

As a kid, I always thought that people with three names were cool.