I'm putting up some more pages on my site, to share a few tidbits of specialist information to the Web. It's a fun endeavor.
I was introduced to the Uses page by Daniel Flanagan's page. I loved it! I've since put up my own Uses page here.
I have a few articles in the pipeline, but what I'm most excited for is a series on how I compute: a tour of my desktop environment, which I've customized and tweaked to quite a heavy extent over the years.
J'apprends le français — I'm finally finding French to be penetrable! I'm experiencing a sort of cross-pollination in learning where I'm starting to pick up context in French, thanks to some context I've already built up with my budding Spanish and Latin (and a tiny, tiny bit of Italian!).
I've always had the idea that French was so unintuitive. But once I learned the mapping between orthography and phonology, it was like that opaque mental wall became transparent for the first time, and I finally started seeing it for the Romance language that it is!
I've had some cool realizations about languages I already know, as well — notably English! The inversion we do when asking questions ("Did you know?" vs "You did know") is something we also see in French! That must've been where that came from!
I love the way how learning a new language opens a floodgate of different connections with all the languages you've learned before. All the different threads weave together, and they start drawing strength from each other — much more than you would expect. It's such an addicting way to learn!
Incidentally, that's exactly the same reason I love learning such a wide variety of programming languages, too.
I'm also starting to pick up a tiny bit of Greek, bit by bit.
I've had the preconception that Ancient Greek would be much more difficult and demanding compared to Latin, so I wanted to leave it until after I feel fluent in Latin.
On a whim, though, I tried approaching Modern Greek, and it's surprisingly pleasant! Pretty different from anything else I've learned so far, but
I've also learned how to read and write Baybayin, one of the precolonial Filipino scripts. ᜃᜏᜌ᜔ᜃᜏᜌ᜔ ᜐ ᜋᜅ ᜉᜒᜎᜒᜉᜒᜈᜓ ᜇᜌᜈ᜔!
I picked it up much faster than I thought I would; it took me about 30 minutes to commit all the graphemes into memory.
I think it's a testament to the power of phonemic orthography: Baybayin fits Tagalog like a glove, which is a language I'm already deeply and intimately familiar with. Learning Baybayin feels natural to me — I understand why it is the way it is, almost without thinking.
Perhaps unexpectedly, though, I felt a sense of defamiliarization, as well: I've always felt Tagalog (and a lot of the other Philippine languages, like Waray and Bisaya) were some of the easiest languages to read and write because of how closely they follow the spelling, but the idiosyncracies of Baybayin pointed out to me some idiosyncracies in the languages themselves that I had been taking for granted, such as the da/ra metathesis, or the e/i and o/u vowel alternations.
Because of my experience picking up Baybayin, I challenged myself to pick up the Arabic alphabet, too. Which I have!
I'm still in the incredibly early stages of learning the spoken language. But I like how it's opening the gate to Semitic languages, and — again, under the same theme of cross-pollination — it's introducing me to concepts like n-consonant roots that look to be shared across other Afro-Asiatic languages as well, even Ancient Egyptian!
After hitting my (so far) all-time low of 9.5% body fat, I started bulking. I'm really happy with my progress so far! I'm finally starting to feel muscular.
I'm on a lean bulk, so my body fat just orbits around the 10-15% range. At 177 cm, I currently weight about 74.0 kg.
Tracking a food diary has really paid off: it was easy for me to switch between deficit and surplus (I'm targeting 2800-3000 kcal a day now) without worrying about whether I'm eating too much, or eating too little, or losing out on macros.
I've also been able to piggyback off that habit to build some new ones:
I find it really fulfilling to be making progress not just with exercise, but also with nutrition and sleep. I get the feeling that I'm truly focusing on health holistically!