Recently in June '23

June was a reasonably packed month: some times more eventful than others, but that’s how it always is. Let’s make a small recap of what has happened lately.

✍️ Website

During June, I made quite a lot of updates to my website. Some more visible than others. However, I think it’s time to give you a small gist of what has happened. One of the things I updated was the humans.txt to reflect more up to date information, which you also get by default when you curl my website.

I removed and cleaned up a bunch. Started by removing some old micro posts that were tied only to some social media, such as Twitter, but eventually ended up removing quite a lot. What I thought was worth preserving, I gave a title and moved them under ✏️ Articles. I did my best to ensure they return 410 Gone for correctness.

Still within the same topic, I removed the drinks and foods pages as they were painfully out of date and no longer relevant in my opinion. Nothing I would see myself maintaining in the future. With that being said, I cleaned up the Meta/Colophon page of this website and merged it under the 🧁 About page.

I also started using Linkding, a bookmarking tool to manage my bookmarks, which now backs my 🔖 Bookmarks page. Finally, I touched up the theme of this website, cleaned up a bunch of unused CSS and streamlined some looks. In addition, I got some new entries in my 📖 Guestbook suggesting me to make a dark theme. Should I? It’s not as easy as it seems!

🍄 Life

Quite some events happened this month. I feel like I say this every month now. Since it’s June, it’s Pride Month 🏳️‍🌈. For the first time, I attended a pride event in The Netherlands. I went to Utrecht for the pride parade in the canals. It was quite nice. Still within the same topic, I went to a Queergarten event in Eindhoven.

Other life events happened: friends visited from abroad, had BBQs, visited master thesis defenses and other things here and there. In one of the weekends, I also proceeded to do a “train chase” to see the new ICNG (InterCity Nieuwe Generatie) trains from NS. You can see some pictures below. I can’t wait to see these trains in other routes.

📚 Reading

I didn’t read that much during June. However, I managed to finish The Creative Programmer by Wouter Groeneveld, which I reviewed. I also started reading an easier version of Het Diner, but I never finished it. I will probably give it another take during my vacation in a few weeks.

🍿 Entertainment

Regarding entertainment, there are some things. We saw SZA live in Amsterdam. Sadly, I did not attend the full concert, but I was there specially for the pre-show. The pre-show was by Raye, which I think is a fabulous singer. You should definitely listen to some of her songs.

In terms of watching, I’ve finished season 1 of XO, Kitty and season 4 of Never Have I Ever. Not fantastic series, but entertaining enough. Now we’ve been watching Katla, an Icelandic series. This one I’m really enjoying. I’ve lately been appreciating more non-English series, such as Dark, 1899, and Young Royals. Just the fact that they have a different language gives them a different vibe.

This month I also managed to write more for this website, which made me happy. I hope you enjoyed the articles. See you next month!