For a long time, I used to write my name as Ali Reza, which I believed was the correct way and form of writing it. Now I switched back to Alireza, which is the current standard and accepted way of writing it, and is how it’s written in my passport. I updated my blog and every online presence I could think of. Please, if you link to me anywhere, update it to this form.

Not that it matters but I needed a distraction from what is happening right now in my country.

I finally watched The Lord of the Rings. I can’t believe I waited this long. There are so many amazing movies I haven’t seen, and I am trying to catch up.

It took me four days to finish it, taking 10 hours of my time to fully understand everything and I realized I really need to watch The Hobbit and read the books to get the full story.

No regrets, though. I had a lot of fun, and I am really glad I finally gave it a shot.

It’s been weeks and I’m finally back online. Been a weird experience being this much offline but I’m finally here. Too much to catch up. Thanks a lot to any and all of you who messaged me. I’m truly grateful for your companionship.

Cheers.

It’s now the eighth day of the direct war between Iran and Israel. For nearly five days, we’ve been living under a complete internet blackout. Today, a few VPNs have started working again, giving us limited access to the outside world and letting us reconnect with family and friends abroad.

My email is still unreachable, so if you’ve tried to contact me recently, I apologize for not responding. I’m safe, and so is my family — something we’re grateful for.

To those of you who reached out in the early days: thank you. Your messages, your care, and your words meant a great deal. I’ve read them while I’ve been able to, and they’ve reminded me how lucky I am to have such awesome people in my life.

Thanks a lot and best of luck.

I’m also trying to read more books instead of constantly checking the web. I used to read Wikipedia pages about topics I’m interested in, or watch some of my favorite shows on video platforms but now I try to carry a book with myself and read it. I used to read a lot but now I find less time in my schedule, mostly because of the internet. It’s time to log off more and read some good books I have in my reading list.

Oh, I’ll treat RSS feeds the same as books.

The ActivityPub plugin for WordPress keeps improving. Exciting updates and great features.

I’ve recently been more concerned with my privacy, specially regarding my email addresses. It may be because of huge amount of spam I’ve been receiving recently but anyway I got a little more paranoid and became more concerned about this.

So I revoked my previous PGP key and created new ones for each email separately, which I would be sharing with people on demand. I also no longer answer emails with my private emails, keeping them each for a specified purpose for myself.

Now I have to handle multiple emails which may become somehow difficult but for now, I’m satisfied with my practice. I’ll try to limit my online presence even more and delete more unused accounts, as much as possible. I also should have a different approach on how I sign up everywhere so I also will use email aliasing services to prevent sites getting my actual email.

Oh, and opinions and ideas are always welcome.

I’m watching the play Nye and I couldn’t even wait till the end to recommend it. It’s just awesome. Brilliant actors, brilliant play, and wonderful art at presentation. You can stream it on National Theatre’s website but I don’t know if you can do so without running non-free software.

It’s been a while since I’ve written on this blog. If you haven’t noticed, it was shut down for a while. I was doing some digital detoxing, trying to remove whatever I don’t use and lessen my online presence as much as I can. The blog just felt too much at that moment so I took it down.

It’s back online now and everything is available to read and share again. I did some detoxing and much-needed cleaning. Everything’s back to normal now.

Why do Americans (or maybe some other people in west) only call eastern Asian people, Asian? Pakistanis, Afghans, Tajiks, Many Russian people, Iranians, Saudis, Omanis, and many other people are also Asians. Why do you (or them) don’t call us Asians?