Alan L. Wong

A man of letters called Porfiriy Sacramentoskiy

About me

Hello, World! My name in the world is Alan. My formal training is in philosophy, linguistics, computer science and business, but my experience in these fields has led me to focus my attention on the Church, history, and how languages, communication, and art/music have taken shape therein. My day job is drawing cabinets (a kind of scribe, draftsman, engineer, contractor position).

My current "blog" is my Substack.

You may have previously encountered my work online though my Miscellaneous Stuff Blog. Here, I posted articles, diary-entry like things, and other content. Of particular interest is my documentation of my experience of the whole 2020 COVID narrative. Shortly after, I began a YouTube channel. There, you'll find longer form content going over many relevant technology, society, language and communication topics including a commentary on Jacques Ellul's work The Technological Society (translated to English in 1964).

View my Languages and Linguistics site to explore the world of human communication.

profile

Here's a picture of me in my studio.

Beyond me

On Great Saturday of 2022, I was baptized an Orthodox Christian in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) with St Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia as my patorn saint. In Slavonic style, I am called Porfiriy (Порфирий).

Seek and Ye Shall Find

If you have problems with "Christianity" as you have encountered it, I encourage you to look into the history of whatever worldview you hold (whether it is the teaching of some organized religion or from your own reasoning) and consider why you regard this path as correct. Or, maybe you have just found yourself following the "path of least resistance" and are not particularly attached to the teachings you've been given. Many different things have been called by the same terms and often to understand some one term it is necessary to study a whole system!

Just as different people might mean very different things when they speak of "success" (or "love" or "happiness") so too we can see how the words we use depend on how we understand them—more words can often multiply confusion rather than bring clarity.

How do we sort through all the different teachings of the world, our own opinions and biases, and pressure from all different directions to do all sorts of different things? This was one place I started from—looking at various different teachings, what they claim to be true, and how they know that to be the case...

Ongoing Projects

Beyond Church and my day job, I am involved in a number of projects. It is a goal of mine to make every activity I do somehow be "beyond me" and include others. It is good to do things together.

  • Language Study
      Russian, Slavonic
      Greek (Koine, Modern...)
      Latin (and modern Latin-based varieties, e.g. Spanish/French)
  • Conquering Cyberspace: I am interested in which technologies are best and extracting maximum value out of useful, available tools.
  • Orthodox East Asia (Abroad): As a person of Chinese ethnic lineage, I first studied the civilizations of East Asia before becoming reborn as a Half-Greek, Half-Russian, Exiled to the West. Now I buy take-out Chinese food for Nords who have watched more anime than me. I am working on seeing if other students of East Asian languages/cultures are interested in standardizing some materials to study (translations of Scripture, prayers, and more) so that we may speak the same idiom.

Contact me

You can mail me directly at
captainalan 4t gm4!l d0t com.

You can also reach out to me through social media. I typically don't respond instantly (can't be staring at a phone all day!), but I do respond to nearly all messages I receive within 48 hours. When sending a message, make it clear you aren't a bot 🤖

Social Media

Having multiple channels of communication available can be helpful as you never know when you might have your access privileges revoked.

I'm a regular on a few Discord servers. Get in contact with me if you would like to know where these places are.

Developer stuff

Over the past few years, I've worked on closed source projects in React and Angular for work. On my own, I've studied a whole bunch of programming and computer science topics, including statistics and data science stuff to see what the "cuttinge edge" has to hold. See my Github and Github gists for my most recent (open source) practice/work. Since 2021 or so, seeing how many technology companies were at the forefront of promoting policies/practices I oppose (namely, building up of the bio-medical security state), I've largely stepped away from pursuing a tech-related career though I retain the knowledge I've gained from working in web development and studying technology related topics for many years.

Tutorials

These are resources I originally created for my own use but now am sharing with the world 🗺

Arch Linux Install for n00bs

Follow these steps to get a working installation of Arch Linux! Written for a n00b (me).

MongoDB, Express, React, Node (MERN) Stack Quickstart

Made this tutorial as I began my journey into web development.

Black Hole Image on a Budget

Some of us can't afford science. Fake it till you make it? An image manipulation tutorial to make images similar to NASA's black hole image.

This site

The site you are visiting is my latest work—designed to be robust to technological change. View my older website which uses the React web framework—a cool tool for many things, especially sites that rely on dynamic content.

This website was authored using VS Code and GNU emacs (editor) with vi emulation via evil. Mobile responsiveness and some nifty styles come from Bootstrap. This website is hosted by Github Pages and uses git for source control.

Feeling generous?

Join Coinbase to use Crytocurrency. Or, send me,
  • Bitcoin (BTC) at 3PLqqb2LdCHNBJcLpU5yK1UGvX6RYgStnQ

  • Ether (ETH) at 0xF2b6a0cbA61d459a66fDAFDBDF64e6ec816475C5

  • Litecoin (LTC) at MJmSj2HXkjPxSSg97dVnZ1AJ3cMNX6DDY4

You can also contribute via Paypal:

Everything else

Sometimes I have fun with GIMP and other graphics software.


Copyright © 2019–2022 — Alan Wong.
All rights reserved.