Araz Gray
type: channel
description: Latest updates from Araz Gray
items: Welcome to my Fediverse!
items: Infinite Mac
items: Adam Jacobs Collection
items: What If We Could Compile Intent Instead of Code?
items: Torlink
items: The Complete Nasreddin Journal Archive (1906–1931)
items: Let's Speak The Open Web (and stay readable by everyone)
items: Semantic Image Compression
items: Small Updates to Some of My Projects
items: az - sane terminal text editor
items: Shadow Libraries
items: Linkhut
items: Wave - right to the point internet radio
items: VIMSANE
items: Web Design Museum
items: Violence
items: How to stay kid (in your 30's)
items: No-JS Challenge
items: No-CSS Challenge
items: Why No One Reads Your Posts
items: Minimal (22) How much simplicity is enough?
items: Simplify
items: The End of Average Developers
items: How to set global key shortcuts in Wayland
items: You're not broken. The advice is.
items: Minimal (21) How to deal with noisy people?
items: How to wait
items: I made a Cyberpunk 2077 Tarot Deck
items: Cyberpunk 2077 Tarot Deck (22 Major Arcane, 4 Minor Arcane +3 Extra and Back Illustration)
items: It’s Your Life, It’s Your Choice
items: What You Need to Do vs. What You're Doing

Welcome to my Fediverse!
type: item
description: This is my personal presence on the Fediverse, powered by my own website rather than a centralized social network. You can follow me from Mastodon, Akkoma, Pleroma, Misskey, and other ActivityPub-compatible platforms using @arazgray@arazgray.com. Things you can find here: Posts: Posts Projects: Projects Gallery: Gallery Playlist: Playlist Links: Links How to follow From your Fediverse client, search for: @arazgray@arazgray.com You can follow this account from any service that supports ActivityPub. Why the Fediverse? The Fediverse is an open, decentralized social network built around interoperable protocols such as ActivityPub. Instead of keeping my social identity on someone else's platform, I host it on my own domain. My identity is therefore not tied to a particular social network. The domain is the identity. My website and the Fediverse This account is connected to my website. I may use it to share new posts, projects, links, thoughts, and other updates. Replies and interactions from other Fediverse servers can also be delivered back to this website. Technical details Handle @arazgray@arazgray.com Profile arazgray.com/@arazgray Protocol ActivityPub Moderation Interaction with this account is subject to the moderation policies of the servers involved. I may block or limit interactions from accounts or servers that engage in spam, harassment, or abuse.
date: 2026-08-08T13:18:21+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Infinite Mac
type: item
description: Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh and NeXT system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a web browser. URL: https://infinitemac.org/
date: 2026-07-27T10:00:46+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Adam Jacobs Collection
type: item
description: Adam Jacobs has secretly recorded over 10,000 concerts since 1989 URL: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection
date: 2026-07-21T19:39:04+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

What If We Could Compile Intent Instead of Code?
type: item
description: Large Language Models have fundamentally changed how software is written. Today, instead of writing every line of code ourselves, we increasingly describe what we want and let an AI determine how to implement it. But this raises an interesting question: What if we could describe software in such a precise, structured way that GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, or any future AI model would all generate essentially the same application? In other words, could there be an AI Programming Language—or perhaps a better name would be an AI Specification Language—whose purpose isn't to be executed by a CPU, but to be "compiled" by an AI? Programming Languages Already Solve This Problem Traditional programming languages are remarkably deterministic. Write the same valid C program and compile it using GCC, Clang, or Microsoft's Visual C++, and although the generated machine code may differ, the observable behavior of the program should remain the same. This works because languages like C have a formal grammar and well-defined semantics. Every keyword has a precise meaning. Every statement has predictable behavior. AI prompts, on the other hand, have no such guarantees. Create a modern login page. One model may generate React. Another chooses Vue. A third prefers Svelte. One uses Tailwind CSS. Another writes plain CSS. All of them are technically correct. The prompt leaves far too much room for interpretation. Prompts Are Specifications—Just Bad Ones Most prompts are simply incomplete specifications. Consider this example: Create a dashboard. Compare it with: page Dashboard framework: Laravel 12 frontend: Vue 3 database: PostgreSQL authentication: JWT theme: Light responsive: true charts: Chart.js tests: PHPUnit api: REST style: shadcn/ui Suddenly, most design decisions disappear. The AI has far fewer opportunities to improvise. This isn't code. It isn't a prompt either. It's something in between. Maybe It's Not a Programming Language Calling it an "AI Programming Language" may not eve…
date: 2026-07-21T17:22:57+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Torlink
type: item
description: A sleek, zero-setup torrent finder and downloader that lives right in your terminal. URL: torlink.bairon.dev
date: 2026-07-21T10:57:33+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

The Complete Nasreddin Journal Archive (1906–1931)
type: item
description: The Complete Nasreddin Journal Archive (1906–1931) Today I am publishing what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first publicly available complete digital archive of the legendary Molla Nasreddin Journal. Browse, Read & Download the Complete Molla Nasreddin Journal Archive Molla Nasreddin Journal (Azerbaijani: ملا نصرالدین, Molla Nəsrəddin; Russian: Молла Насреддин, old orthography: Молла Насреддинъ) was an eight-page Azerbaijani satirical journal published in Tiflis (1906–1917), Tabriz (1921), and Baku (1922–1933). Founded by Jalil Mammadguluzadeh (Cəlil Məmmədquluzadə), the Molla Nasreddin Journal became one of the most influential publications in the history of Azerbaijan, Iran, and the wider Turkic world, combining satire, literature, political commentary, and remarkable illustrations to criticize censorship, corruption, injustice, and social inequality. For historians, researchers, students, and anyone interested in Azerbaijani history, Persian history, the Caucasus, Turkic literature, political cartoons, and early twentieth-century periodicals, the Molla Nasreddin Journal remains one of the most valuable primary historical sources ever published. The First Complete Digital Archive After years of searching through libraries, museums, private collections, and digital archives around the world, I was finally able to assemble what I believe is the only original, digitized, and complete archive of the Molla Nasreddin Journal available online. Almost every existing digital collection of the Molla Nasreddin Journal is incomplete. Most notably, the long-missing 1921 issues No. 5, No. 7, and No. 8 have never been publicly available together in any online archive. This archive includes those missing issues alongside every other known published issue, making this, to the best of my knowledge, the first complete digital archive of the original Molla Nasreddin Journal ever published online. Archive Includes Every known issue published between 1906 and 1933. High-resoluti…
date: 2026-07-20T11:17:09+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Let's Speak The Open Web (and stay readable by everyone)
type: item
description: For a while my blog had the usual stuff: HTML, RSS, a few alternate formats. That was fine. Then I started wanting it to play nicer with the rest of the indie web — without bolting on a heavy CMS or a pile of JavaScript. So I spent some time wiring up the boring, important protocols. The ones that don’t trend, but keep the web a web. Feeds, but properly RSS 2.0 was already here. I cleaned it up, kept Atom and JSON Feed in sync, fixed Open Graph so each post has its own URL and metadata instead of always pointing at the homepage, and made sure tags and authors show up where they should. Small things. They matter when a reader or a feed reader is picky. Microformats Posts are proper h-entrys now. The blog list is an h-feed. Titles, authors, dates, content, tags, canonical URLs — in the HTML itself, no scripts. If something wants to parse my blog the old indieweb way, it can. Webmention You can mention my blog from yours, and I’ll get the ping. Mentions are verified (your page has to actually link here) and moderated before they show up — same vibe as comments, not an open spam hose. And if I link out to someone, I can check a “Webmention” box when I publish and notify them. Not automatic on every save — only when I mean it. WebSub Feeds advertise a hub. Subscribers can get push updates when something new goes out, instead of polling forever. The boring infrastructure of “new post, please wake up.” ActivityPub My blog has a fediverse actor now. You can try finding @arazgray@arazgray.com from Mastodon and friends. Follows, likes, boosts, replies — the basics. Posts can go out as Create activities. It’s modular enough that I can grow it later without rewriting the whole blog. I’m not trying to replace a full Mastodon instance. I just don’t want my blog to be a dead end when the rest of the network talks ActivityPub. Accessibility (the quieter half) Same project, different angle: make my blog usable for more people, not just more protocols. Semantic HTML where it counts. …
date: 2026-07-12T12:28:53+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Semantic Image Compression
type: item
description: Semantic Image Compression (Left=Original, Right=Outcome) We've spent decades making image compression better. JPEG throws away details your eyes probably won't notice. PNG keeps everything but produces larger files. Newer formats like WebP and AVIF squeeze images even further using smarter algorithms. But what if we stopped compressing pixels altogether? What if we compressed meaning instead? That question sent me down a fun rabbit hole. The Idea The experiment is surprisingly simple. Give an image to one AI and ask it to describe every visual detail it can possibly see. Then throw the original image away and give only that description to another AI image generator. The goal is to recreate the original image as accurately as possible. Instead of storing millions of pixels, you're storing a semantic description of the scene. You're no longer saving what every pixel looks like. You're saving what the image actually contains. Is That Really Compression? Sort of. A detailed prompt may only be a few kilobytes of text, while the original image could be several megabytes. If another AI can reconstruct something visually close from that text alone, the compression ratio becomes surprisingly interesting. Of course, there are some catches. This Is Definitely Not Lossless Traditional image formats preserve exactly what was captured, at least when using lossless compression. This approach does not. Even the best description cannot perfectly capture every tiny texture, reflection, or random detail. On top of that, image generation models are not deterministic, so the exact same prompt can produce different results every time. The reconstructed image often feels less like an exact copy and more like an incredibly accurate memory of the original. The Prompt Matters More Than You Think I quickly discovered that ordinary image captions are nowhere near enough. A caption like "A person standing on a beach during sunset" is great for humans, but terrible if another AI needs to rebuil…
date: 2026-07-05T14:17:38+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Small Updates to Some of My Projects
type: item
description: Most of these projects started as tools I wanted for myself. Some are tiny, some are experimental, and some are slowly becoming more serious. But they all follow the same idea: simple interfaces, useful features, less noise, and more control for the user. Wave Wave is my small internet radio app. I redesigned it with a cleaner mobile-first interface, horizontal country tabs, a simple station list, and a sticky player at the bottom. The goal is still the same: open the app, pick a station, listen. No clutter, no heavy interface, no unnecessary distractions. Just radio. Awesome M3U Editor Awesome M3U Editor also received a lot of attention. It is a private, browser-based editor for M3U and M3U8 playlists, made especially for organizing IPTV playlists. The newer version has better group and channel management, multi-select support, rename buttons, editable playlist headers, improved metadata preservation, and a status checker for selected channels. I also fixed the export behavior, so the downloaded file reflects the current edited playlist instead of falling back to the original version. That was one of the most important fixes. Azerbaijani with Arabic Alphabet Keyboard I also improved my web keyboard for Azerbaijani with Arabic alphabet. The goal is to make typing easier for people who want to write Azerbaijani using the Arabic alphabet. The keyboard now has better touch and mouse behavior, a left-to-right layout, number and extra symbol layouts, emoji support, copy and paste support, persistent text storage, and a more natural mobile keyboard feeling. This project matters to me because language tools should not feel like a luxury. People should be able to type in their own language easily. Odak.app Odak.app is my distraction-free writing tool. It is built around a simple idea: give the writer a clean page, remove the noise, and keep the writing experience fast and calm. I have been working on the editor experience, Markdown behavior, local saving, export options, th…
date: 2026-06-09T20:10:43+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

az - sane terminal text editor
type: item
description: az is a small, sane terminal text editor written in PHP with NO external dependencies except PHP CLI. It opens ready to type, supports project folders, tabs, a project tree, quick opening, command actions, line numbers, simple shortcuts, syntax highlighting, and autocomplete.
date: 2026-05-28T13:31:32+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Shadow Libraries
type: item
description: A pirate libraries archive URL: https://shadowlibraries.github.io
date: 2026-05-23T11:08:03+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Linkhut
type: item
description: A small, fast, and surprisingly thoughtful bookmarking service inspired by the old web. URL: https://ln.ht/
date: 2026-05-22T15:50:52+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Wave - right to the point internet radio
type: item
description: It is simple on purpose: choose a country, pick a station, and press play. The player stays at the bottom, so the important controls are always there: previous, play or stop, next, and Shazam. It works nicely on mobile, uses a plain monospace look, and keeps everything focused on the music, news, and voices coming through the stream. No accounts. No noise. Just radio. Wave
date: 2026-05-21T10:46:14+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Wave - right to the point internet radio
type: item
description: I missed listening to radio in a simple way. Most apps around streaming radio today feel overloaded: too many menus, recommendations, popups, accounts, animations, and things competing for attention. I did not want a platform. I just wanted a list of stations and a play button. So I made Wave. It's a small radio player that stays out of the way. Pick a country, choose a station, and listen. The controls remain fixed at the bottom, so switching stations or identifying a song is always one tap away. The interface is intentionally minimal: monochrome, monospace, mobile friendly, and focused on keeping everything visible on screen without jumping between pages or panels. It is also just a single HTML file. No build process, no dependencies beyond HLS playback, and easy to modify if you want to add stations or host your own version. A quiet little radio app for people who still like radio. Open Wave View source on GitHub
date: 2026-05-21T10:46:14+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

VIMSANE
type: item
description: Sane VIM configuration for my personal use
date: 2026-05-18T11:56:16+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Web Design Museum
type: item
description: Dive deep into the roots of modern web design and trace the history and evolution of the web design trends and techniques. URL: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
date: 2026-05-14T10:06:32+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Violence
type: item
description: The only solution for bad and violent people are good people that are more skilled in violence. Japanese Samurai Code Bushido
date: 2026-05-14T08:08:35+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

How to stay kid (in your 30's)
type: item
description: Most people don’t miss being young. They miss being alive. They say they want to stay a kid. What they really want is curiosity, energy, joy, friendship, wonder. Good news: those were never owned by children. Children just have easier access to them. At 30s, you’re not losing youth. You’re losing defaults. As a kid, life gave you curiosity for free. Now you must choose it. As a kid, play was built into the day. Now you must schedule it. Curiosity Kids ask endless questions. Adults perform certainty. Better to be interested than impressive. Learn useless things. Try hobbies you’re bad at. Explore your own city like a traveler. Ask people questions you genuinely care about. Curiosity is youth with direction. Play Adults often only allow fun if it is productive. Terrible trade. Play games. Draw nonsense. Dance badly. Build pointless things. Make jokes. Kick a ball around. Fun that serves no purpose serves the biggest purpose. Body Many people think they feel old. Often they feel neglected. Walk daily. Lift things. Sprint sometimes. Stretch. Sleep enough. Eat food that looks like food. An exhausted nervous system feels ancient. Friends Adults say friendship is hard. No. Passive friendship is hard. Kids become close because they repeatedly do things together. Use the same formula. Weekly coffee. Monthly dinner. Friday football. Shared hobby. Regular calls. Consistency creates closeness. Self-consciousness Children waste little energy managing image. Adults burn years there. Be enthusiastic. Laugh loudly. Wear what you like. Admit ignorance. Try things badly. Coolness is expensive. Aliveness is cheap. Small joys Children know treasure when they see it. Rain smell. Favorite snack. New notebook. Fresh sheets. Music in headphones. Sunset walk. Adults often don’t lose joy. They lose attention. Feelings Children feel honestly and recover quickly. Adults suppress until nothing moves. Speak truth. Cry when needed. Celebrate openly. Show affection. Let excitement be visible. Numb…
date: 2026-05-13T12:21:11+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

No-JS Challenge
type: item
description: I challenge you to open your website in a desktop browser, disable all JavaScript, and navigate through it, testing the functionality you expect to work. Then, share the results here. If it doesn't work, feel free to fix it and share a before/after comparison. I'll post the results in this post.
date: 2026-05-10T05:57:59+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

No-CSS Challenge
type: item
description: I challenge you to open your website on a desktop browser, remove all the external, internal, and inline CSS from it, take a screenshot, and share it here. If it doesn't look sane, feel free to fix it and share the result as a before/after. I'll share the result in this post.
date: 2026-05-10T05:54:01+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Why No One Reads Your Posts
type: item
description: We're all looking for someone to look up to, someone whose perspective, skills, or experience can help us grow. When people sense that kind of value in you, they become genuinely invested in your world. They'll read your casual updates, follow your thoughts, and care about things you'd never expect them to notice. Think about it: when was the last time you eagerly followed someone's writing and felt they had less to offer than you? It rarely happens. We naturally gravitate toward those we admire. That's why how you present yourself matters. Your audience came to you for inspiration, insight, or guidance, and that's worth protecting. Sharing vulnerability isn't inherently bad, but there's a difference between being human and making your struggles the centerpiece of your platform. When your content shifts from value-giving to processing personal hardship publicly, people quietly drift away, not out of cruelty, but because the connection they were seeking has changed shape. Keep the difficult moments close to your chest, or at least frame them in a way that still serves your audience. There's a version of honesty that uplifts; there's another that simply unloads. Your private life can stay private. It doesn't make you less authentic, it makes you someone worth listening to.
date: 2026-05-09T16:14:55+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Minimal (22) How much simplicity is enough?
type: item
description: As far as it looks sane to you. You decide. It's your world. It's your design.
date: 2026-05-01T08:40:53+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Simplify
type: item
description: “If you're stuck, simplify. If you're still stuck, simplify again." Unknown
date: 2026-04-23T13:31:53+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

The End of Average Developers
type: item
description: In recent months, after watching wave after wave of automation tools and AI copilots flood the industry, I had to ask myself an uncomfortable question: what does it actually mean to be a software developer today? Not five years ago. Not even two years ago. Today. For a long time, writing code was enough. If you could implement features, build internal tools, connect APIs, and ship on time, you were safe. That safety is gone. Not because developers are useless, but because routine implementation has become cheap. Very cheap. If we are honest, much of what used to take hours can now be generated in seconds. Identity Is the First Thing That Must Go The biggest mistake is identifying with a tool instead of a problem. When your professional identity is tied to a language or framework, you are standing on unstable ground. Tools evolve. Abstractions rise. Automation expands. The market no longer rewards syntax knowledge. It rewards system thinking. If your value is “I can write endpoints,” you are replaceable. If your value is “I can design a system that reduces operational cost by 40 percent,” you are not. This shift is uncomfortable. But necessary. Competing With AI Is a Losing Strategy Trying to out-code AI in speed is like trying to out-calculate a calculator. You will lose. The better strategy is simple: use it. Aggressively. Study how large language models work at a conceptual level. Understand embeddings. Learn what vector databases are. Experiment with retrieval augmented generation. Build small tools that integrate AI into real workflows. The goal is not to become a machine learning researcher. The goal is to become someone who can orchestrate intelligence. The people shaping this space, like Sam Altman and Andrej Karpathy, are not spending their days implementing forms and pagination. They think in leverage. That is the real lesson. Move Up the Abstraction Ladder Low level implementation is being commoditized. Architecture is not. Boilerplate is cheap. Judgment i…
date: 2026-02-27T09:32:06+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

How to set global key shortcuts in Wayland
type: item
description: If you're a dropdown terminal person, you know the deal: one key, instant access, no friction. I've used the grave key (`) to show and hide my terminal for as long as I can remember. Then Wayland came along and decided that key is off-limits for global shortcuts. Relearning decades of muscle memory wasn't an option, so I found a workaround. The fix Install Input Remapper, a tool that intercepts your keystrokes at the device level, before Wayland gets a say. sudo apt install input-remapper sudo input-remapper-gtk Open the app, find your physical keyboard in the device list, and set the grave key to remap to a safe shortcut that Wayland does allow as a global hotkey, something like Ctrl+F1. Then go into your dropdown terminal settings and bind that same shortcut to toggle visibility. The chain works: you press grave, Input Remapper turns it into Ctrl+F1, your terminal responds. One more thing Since you're remapping the grave key entirely, you'll lose the ability to type a grave or tilde normally. Fix that by adding two extra remaps in Input Remapper: Shift+grave to output a grave, and Alt+grave to output a tilde. Not perfect, but it gets the job done without giving up your muscle memory.
date: 2026-02-26T08:25:05+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

You're not broken. The advice is.
type: item
description: You won't find this one in your usual self-help feed. Most guides out there are quietly telling you that you're doing something wrong and they've got the fix. This isn't that. "Stop eating to lose weight." Okay, but that's literally the only good thing going on right now. Hard pass. Make your bed, it sets the tone for a productive day! But also, don't make your bed, your joints are stiff in the morning and you'll mess up your cartilage. Drink coffee! Actually, skip the coffee. Start your morning with lemon water and a side of breaking news. Yep. Really. The contradictions are endless and honestly a little funny if you zoom out. Science doesn't always agree with itself, and that's okay. What's not okay is the pressure you feel when you can't keep up with whichever study went viral this week. You're carrying a lot. Bad sleep. No real downtime. A mind that won't stop running. The weird tension between the world you grew up in and the one you're living in now. Memories you'd rather not have. A future you can't quite picture clearly. That's not weakness, that's a very full plate. Here's something that doesn't get said enough: you deserved a calm childhood. If you didn't get one, your nervous system has been working overtime ever since and that's not your fault. Your brain learned to stay on alert. It was just trying to protect you. And now you're living in a world where every idea, every brand, every opinion is competing hard for your attention, spending real money to get inside your head. Of course it's exhausting. You're not failing at life. You're just a human being navigating something genuinely overwhelming. You are a person, not a productivity machine. Please be a little kinder to yourself, you've earned it.
date: 2025-10-11T05:07:55+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Minimal (21) How to deal with noisy people?
type: item
description: Run.
date: 2025-10-05T19:45:12+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

How to wait
type: item
description: You've probably been in situations where you had no choice but to wait. For people like me, especially with ADHD, waiting can feel like genuine torture. Waiting to reach a mountain summit while hiking. Waiting to hit a 2-hour walking record. Sitting through a party you were sure you wouldn't enjoy. Surviving a 3–4 hour flight with no internet. Just for fun, I Googled it and read the top three results (+, +, +). Pure fluff. Like most advice out there, the research was completely disconnected from reality. When you're actually in a situation where you need time to pass before reaching a goal, it almost always turns out to be far easier than you imagined it would be. My conclusion: patience itself isn't hard. What's hard is the anticipation of having to be patient, and that anticipation is what stops people from doing things in the first place. So if you're facing something that requires waiting, don't stress about it. Most of the time, the experience is much smoother than you expect.
date: 2025-10-05T16:07:02+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

I made a Cyberpunk 2077 Tarot Deck
type: item
description: I made a Cyberpunk 2077 Tarot Deck. It has 22 Major Arcana, 4 Minor Arcana, 3 extra cards, and the original back design from the game. Most cards are from the game itself, originally made by Jakub Rebelka, and the extra three were designed by an unknown artist, with descriptions I wrote. These are the highest-quality versions you can find on the internet, and the most complete set. You can preview and download it here.
date: 2025-09-28T19:30:30+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

Cyberpunk 2077 Tarot Deck (22 Major Arcane, 4 Minor Arcane +3 Extra and Back Illustration)
type: item
description: Originally made by Polish cartoonist Jakub Rebelka, These are tarot cards that appeared in Cyberpunk 2077 (Main Story and Phantom Liberty expansion). The first 22 cards (I-XXII) represent the major arcana, followed by four minor arcana cards (XXIII-XXVI) that belong to the Phantom Liberty expansion. The next three cards (XXVII-XXIX) were designed by an unidentified Chinese designer (cards only, with descriptions written by me). The final image shows the card back design extracted from the game itself. Download Cyberpunk-2077-Tarot-Deck.zip (~90 MB) Cyberpunk 2077 Tarot Deck (30 Cards) I The Fool The Fool is everyone - including you and me. Each step he takes on his journey feels like stepping into a brave new world. Ultimately, the journey will change him. But as the card shows, he's a trustworthy lad whose tireless hope drives him toward his goal. II The Magician The Magician is the card of self-confidence and adapting to situations through intellect and sheer will. The Magician is a schemer who always has one last trick up his sleeve, who despite everything manages to stay afloat and remain in control of his own destiny. III The High Priestess The High Priestess is a card of mystery. It shows how all our secrets hang by a delicate thread and the struggle between common sense and intuition. The High Priestess symbolizes the cold, calm waters as well as the mysteries hidden in their depths. IV The Empress The empress is a card of femininity and motherhood. She is authoritative, knows what she wants, and exhibits refinement and sensuousness. The Empress symbolizes creativity and growth, and instructs us not to dismiss our unconscious impulses, but to trust our intuition. V The Emperor The Emperor represents patriarchal control and is pleased with the authority and power he possesses to shape the future. The Emperor makes the rules and enforces them for the common good. But prestige has its dark sides – the Emperor is dominating and ruthless and will climb over a moun…
date: 2025-09-28T14:27:22+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

It’s Your Life, It’s Your Choice
type: item
description: There’s a quiet strength in feeling different. Many people grow up in environments where conformity is praised, where society tries to write the script of your life before you even start living it. They tell you what to celebrate, how to dress, what to say, and even how to think. But here’s the truth: you don’t have to play by those rules. Feeling different? Keep it that way. That difference is not a weakness, it’s your power. Language is one of the clearest examples. Maybe you naturally slip English words into your conversations. Maybe you feel like “freedom,” “chill,” or “vibe” carry something your local language just can’t express with the same energy. That’s not a mistake. That’s not disrespect. It’s simply you being authentic to the way you think and feel. If your audience doesn’t understand, that’s on them, not you. Language evolves, cultures mix, and sometimes a borrowed word says what an entire sentence cannot. Celebrating international holidays is another way of claiming your freedom. Why not put up a Christmas tree even if it’s not part of your official tradition? Why not throw a Halloween party, eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, or mark Thanksgiving with friends just for the joy of gratitude? These holidays may come from different places, but joy has no borders. It’s your right to celebrate life however you want. You’re not betraying your roots, you’re expanding them, adding more colors to your palette. And yes, people will talk. Society always talks. Some will call you “too modern,” others will whisper that you’re forgetting your culture. But culture isn’t a prison. It’s a foundation. You can stand on it, respect it, and still look beyond the walls it tries to build around you. You are not obligated to fit in. You are obligated to live your life in a way that feels real to you. So keep being different. Keep mixing languages, keep celebrating what excites you, keep standing apart if that’s where your truth lies. Life is too short to let others dictate the s…
date: 2025-09-25T15:15:09+00:00
creator: Araz Gray

What You Need to Do vs. What You're Doing
type: item
description: You want to blog What you need to do: Open an account on bear.dev or WordPress, or install it on your server and start writing. What you're doing: Designing a new theme for the 100th time or building a new CMS for others. You want to organize your life What you need to do: Use a to-do app, make a list, schedule your tasks, and actually do them. What you're doing: Creating your own to-do app instead of using one. You want to play What you need to do: Buy a PlayStation, turn it on, and play. What you're doing: Thinking about opening a video game club. You want to get fit What you need to do: Put on your shoes, go outside, and start walking or running. What you're doing: Spending weeks researching the best workout plan, shoes, and supplements. You want to learn a language What you need to do: Open Duolingo or a textbook and practice 15 minutes every day. What you're doing: Reading endless blog posts about “the best method” to learn languages. You want to start a business What you need to do: Pick one small idea, launch it, and learn by doing. What you're doing: Writing a 200-page business plan and waiting for “the perfect moment.” Seeing the pattern? Got the problem? Stop overthinking, stop postponing, and start living.
date: 2025-09-22T08:15:21+00:00
creator: Araz Gray