I wanted to build a website that could grow with me as I get older, and this is it. It keeps me accountable and pushes me to learn new things. Right now, it features movie and book reviews, a blog I plan to post on more often, a map page with travel goals, and a page with some of my photography and videos. I didn't know what shape it would take when I started, and I still add new pieces from time to time.

I've been collecting personal data on this site and built my own AI-powered recommendation tool. Because of it, I now have an ever-growing list of books and films to explore. Recommendation engines are powerful; they are a big part of how two of the most influential companies in the world make money, through targeted advertising and recommended content that captures your attention. AI lets anyone build a personal recommendation engine, not to drain your attention or sell you things, but to help you accomplish goals and thoughtfully explore any topic you like. The possibilities feel endless, and this website has been my main tool for exploring them.

Media Page

This is the first page I made on my website. It is simple I write reviews for films, books and shows I watch and this has been by far the most useful thing I made.

Having data for your own movies is awsome I built an actual good way to explore new media.

Map Page

HOLY SHIT WE FINALLY FOUND A SOURCE OF TRUTH

https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/50m-cultural-vectors/

ALL WE GODAMN NEED IS STATES of a few countries and countries

In creating this map I've really learned a lot. I had to constanly balance performance, aesthetics and accuracy.

I first made a 2d map using a simple map library.

Then I tried to use a threejs globe, which looked great but long loading times which stalled the site an made the whole experience not smooth. I was also facing some memory leakages, and made my minimal fork of the three-globe library to attempt to fix the memory leakages, but still which was great but it could just not perform wel for the absolute amount of data I want on the map.

For countries, borders everything there is no perfect source of truth. There is no such thing as a perfect map, a perfect division of things for every single county.

I had to choose my own imperfect sources of truth for these countries, for the map, for my particular use case I don't need fine map data all I need are political borders and then also a way to segment into different states regions and I wanted the mercator projection because it looks best on the web and hollyyyy shittt this sucked.

There are standards but they are imperfect standards that don't cover everything, there is no id you can link every single piece of land to. My basis for my linking is ISO-3166. You can very easily get countries by ISO-3166-1 codes linked and can easily get the file size down to next to nothing for optimal performance, but to get the states and subdivisons it is so annoying. The only good geoson I could find was not iso so I had to fuzzy match to get iso names and try to link them, but its imperfect, and I'm done.

I like flags, it's cool to look at flags, but I do not want to have to manually scrape every single flag for every single arbitrary division in our country, my map is not perfectly split into ISO there a

If I could do the map page over again I'd just use the google maps api or open streetmaps, but this is fine enough, broken in some respects but a cool way for me to view the world.

I have ways for me to write travel posts and put them as dots on the map.

I scraped some

Photography

Simple place for me to showcase my photography. I am not a great photographer, I can't say I'm taking photos all that often. I have a Cannon EOS R-100, about the cheapest mirrorless camera you can get. I learned all about optimization of images for web performance in making this page.