Miscellanea

Here are some miscellanous things I do.

Conlangs

Conlang stands for constructed language. Many people created conlangs for hobby or as linguistic experiments.

I was inspired by the conlangs in Inheritance Cycle and The Lord of the Rings, as well as others like Esperanto, Dothraki, Toki Pona, et al and conlang from time to time as a hobby. None of my conlangs reached its maturity, though, mainly due to loss of copies and lack of time.

Some of my conlangs:

• Hàäsdáïga
• Ravna
• Isanercent
• Djanzi

Books

I’m not the bookworm I used to be, reading mostly mainstream books. Some books I read and liked:

• Dế Mèn phiêu lưu kí, a famous children book in Vietnamese about an arrogant cricket who learned humility and altruism during his journey.
• The adventures of Valya and Karik, a Russian children book (my copy was a Vietnamese translation) about the adventures of shrunken children in which they learn about small animals around them.
• Sans famille, a story about a child who had to leave his family for poverty, though now that I think about it, it sounds like children trafficking and child labor.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dystopian tragedy that is often mistaken as criticism of socialism, while the actual object is authoritanism and mass surveillance.
• The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the well-known fantasy franchise
• Inheritance Cycle, often labeled as rip-off Star Wars by haters
• Gulliver’s Travels, a book that’s supposed to be satire but I didn’t know enough to understand these deep meanings.
• Le petit prince, a novella with a childish theme but discuss many aspects of life in a lighthearted way.
• Ellana (Le Pacte des MarchOmbres series) (French)

Books I’m reading:

• Ellana: L’envol (Le Pacte des MarchOmbres series) (French)
• Tous les hommes sont mortels (French)
• The Necromancer (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series)

Dropped:

• XKCD what if
• A Storm of Swords(A Song of Ice and Fire series)

Project ideas

Here are some project ideas that I have in mind, yet don’t have the time to implement any of them. You’ll probably find some drafts, but practically no work is done:

• a small shop management app
• a modern text browser with vim keybinding
• several non-standard libs:
  • a rewrite for time module in Go
  • internalisation modules
• universal internalisation package, which contains common phrases like “Settings”, “Log in”, “Account” pre-translated
• redesign this blog
• smaller and more maintainable, more packageable Anki clone

Comics

Reading comics is my pastime. I follow several webcomics, some of which you may have heard of:

• Pepper & Carrot
• xkcd: nerd stuff
• SMBC: more nerd stuff, and usually less concise
• Oglaf: silly and occasionally NSFW comics
• Dinosaur comics: a 5-panel comics with only dialogues changing

I also enjoy drawing every now and then, not that I want to be an artist or I draw well. I just find scribbling something fun. I recently decided to post my scribbles on this website.