Establishing a New Blog

Intro Rant

This is a blog for my website БЕЗДНА (bezdna; abyss).

The website name is just edgy for the sake of it, and besides, it describes what this website is. An abyss. An abyss for my mind.

I just now spent many minutes of my life figuring out how to use my compose key in my editor (Emacs btw). I use Wayland on my (Fedora btw) operating system, so I had to recompile Emacs to use GTK (make configure="--with-pgtk" in the git repository).

It's funny. The most irritating thing about that bug in Emacs isthat the compose key did work. I could type “æ” and “‽” and these fancy curly quotes that I just used (“”). The only thing I could not type—to my frustration—was the em-dash and its relative the en-dash.

I love my em-dashes. They're a beautiful piece of punctuation. I can emphasize some information, or explain it instead—or even use it to interrupt my own sentences. I use them all the time. Sometimes in place of parentheses. Em-dashes have more… punch than a pair of parentheses. Parentheses seem optional. Em-dashes show off. Well, at least that's my opinion of em-dashes. Also, I hate to see that a sign of LLM-generated text are the appearence of em-dashes.

God I hate AI.

What is There to Expect From This Blog?

I explained that this blog was a catch-all abyss for my mind. But, I want to also describe some frequent hobbies I may share here.

First and foremost, expect emotional rants. Or rants of any kind for that matter. I'm lazy. That brings me to another thing to expect.

Don't expect frequent updates. Again, I'm lazy. One of my goals for this blog is to be able to easily update it. My plan for that is to create a program that parses a Markdown file and compiles it into an HTML document that I can easily include here. I can use Pandoc for translating Markdown files to HTML files. But only God knows if I actually complete this program lol. I don't complete projects often.

I like to read and write. Just as much as I like to talk and listen talk. So, expect some blog posts to be more intellectual and scholarly. Currently, I'm reading some practical non-fiction. How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren; The Intellectual Life by A. G. Sertillanges, O. P.; On Writing Well by William Zinsser; and The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, et al. I enjoyed Adler and Doren's How to Read a Book a lot. So useful. I re-read it whenever I can. Although right now I have not read the entire book. I'm chipping away at it—more like chewing and digesting it actually. It's a huge book. I'm especially enjoying The Craft of Research. Really cool book. As you could probably tell, I'm not doing so hot in my (American school) English classes. The Craft of Research really helps me re-learn everything about how to do research—from starting with a question, to finalizing a paper. In my opinion, I don't think school really helped me with proper English writing. And I don't mean the basic mechanics of English—grammar, spelling, etc—I'm beyond proficient in that stuff. I mean: how do I write a damn paper? Anyway, that's what I want to do in this blog. Write some damn papers. And share them with you.

Computers. I love them. Especially programming them. Expect to see some cool (or not-so-cool) programs. I'm incredibly interested in the low-level details of computer science, so I am currently tinkering with C and x86 assembly. C++ I will do later, because I'd rather learn the fundamentals through C, then through that I'll know what the hell I'm doing in C++. My future goals are to (1) create my own game engine using SDL3; (2) create my own programming languages, one interpreted and one compiled; (3) create my own utility libraries; (4) create my own text editor; (5) create emulators for some game consoles; and (6) create my own operating system. These are big goals, but I think that's a good thing. They're something to keep me motivated. Hopefully, one day, you'll see a link to source code of one of those goals.

Orthodox Christianity. I'm a relatively new convert (from non-denominational Evangelical Protestantism). I was baptized and chrismated this year actually. I won't talk about my faith and theology right now. I will, however, write about it in future blog posts.

Politics. Yeah, yeah, I know, politics suck. But since I'm writing whatever comes to my mind and wanting to write more complex works, I think this is inevitable. Oh and philosophy too. I would like to write criticism—good and bad—to some philosophers and their works.

Art! Not just visual, but also literal—and probably just literal; I'm bad at the visual arts. I hope to write some interesting stories and poems. Probably won't do that though. I'm more of a non-fiction guy, but I still appreciate fiction. Besides, I gotta train that creative muscle anyhow.

That's all I can think of right now. It's late. I'm pretty tired. This whole post might be published a month late lol. Still, I hope you like what you see. I think the main, main goal of this blog is to just share my thoughts and receive criticism. Please, comment—or email—anything that is on your mind. I appreciate any criticism. It helps me not only to write better, but to think better. Thank you.

~ Oliver. Finished writing on July 8 2025 03:35.