Category: Announcements

This hashtag movement might as well be called “30 minutes for the world of tomorrow”, but let’s just say that the spread of yet another deadly virus can be an eye opener for many.

The intention between the hashtag is to raise awareness about how much we can do with a small donation of our time. I dedicate 30 minutes of my time, every day, to help my brothers & sisters through these trying times, in any way I can.

When I launched this hashtag, I used the 30 minutes (and a bit more) to write this:

http://mentatul.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus/^

#30minutes4covid

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I launched this website 4 years ago, to the day. I probably have less readers than I had back then. Not even my wife reads this anymore. And this makes me very happy. There is no pressure to perform, almost no one to please. I can simply output whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. The quality I strive to offer comes from a pure honesty to myself.

Slowly but surely, step by step, Mentatul becomes a wide collection of observations about humanity and ideas for social transformation. With it and through it, I get to grow as a writer and as a person. I am immensely grateful for having the opportunity to do this.

I don’t care about promoting any message. I don’t care about entertaining anybody or being right. The only thing I care about is writing to the best of my abilities, with an honest and healthy purpose: to do what I can to create a constructive, beautiful future.

I know that these words will reach exactly those that need to read them, when they need to read them. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to share a meaningful article to fellow beings who are ready to help our civilization take the next step.

That being said, the past year saw a further reduction in time spent writing here. This is because of my focus on family, which seriously reduced all available time. Then came a rebirthing of my career as a software engineer. But what affected Mentatul writing time the most was the serious prioritization of what has become my main creative venture, Nexus^, which is currently my absolute top priority in my free time.

The publishing of major articles has so far remained as before, bimonthly. What changed is that articles with recommandations are now bundled in bimonthly posts with a certain theme, thus reducing quite a bit of logistical & writing pressure. I also coded (via C#) a nice application for pre-formatting Weekly Song posts. This brought additional time savings.

I aim to keep the same frequency throughout 2020, even though aside from Nexus, a couple of promising additional side projects entered my life in the past 3 months. Two of them have a high potential for social impact, so I figured I might as well get in, experience and contribute to movements that I feel will be of great importance in the future.

I wish you all a beautiful decade!

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A week ago, Mentatul celebrated its third birthday. I’m happy with what I’ve achieved so far with this website. A collection of meaningful articles is beginning to coalesce into a greater work, which is still far from completion.

I hardly put any effort into advertising this website. As a matter of fact, I quite enjoy maintaining a low profile. I know that most of what I write is not exactly mainstream. Sometimes, it’s not even easily readable.

I made mistakes, I learned and will continue to learn… albeit at a slower pace. I’m taking a break from intensive writing on Mentatul, since I have other writing and family duties that absorb a lot of my time. Of course, should my millions of readers think otherwise, please feel free to donate and change my mind :D.

This change is meant to give me more energy to focus on the most important things I wish to have here, which are the bi-monthly analysis articles.

Planned changes:

• No more satire, futurology or travel log articles (unless something really important hits me).
• Recommendation articles to be bundled into a monthly article.
• Weekly Song entries to be removed from the main page (and the tag soup), but not from Archives or Categories. The reviews will be accessible via the Weekly Song category or the new main (top) menu entry with the same name.

What will stay the same:

• Heavy, bi-monthly analysis articles (this is the main purpose of the website and will not be altered in any way).
• The weekly song (although the reviews will sometimes be slightly shorter).

Duration of the break: at least three years (2019-2021), but possibly longer, depending on how my life will look in 2022. Of course, miracles do happen so stay tuned for other announcements.

See you on the other side!

Namaste!

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After about 13 years with the same web hosting company (IX Web Hosting, over in the USA), it’s time to move on. IX has been purchased by the infamous EIG. I didn’t know exactly how infamous they are, but I did notice when the quality of service instantly decreased to a staggering degree. Not only was the migration of my websites handled in an unprofessional way, with stuff breaking all over the place, but support answering times had increased to more than 48 hours. Sometimes, I’ve waited for 4-5 days for them to answer my tickets.

This led me to document myself a bit about Site5, the company which presumably had acquired IX. Well, guess what… Site5 is just a cover for a larger entity called EIG. In the experienced webmaster’s world, EIG are known to be among the worst hosting providers. It’s not that the performance is bad, but it’s definitely sub-par with the prices they ask while the answering times, professionalism and support staff attitude is also way below the competition.

What’s truly wicked about EIG is their insidious and aggressive strategy of purchasing web hosting providers with a good name. They get their customers and unfortunately, many of these customers stay in the EIG world even if they try to switch to another provider, simply because EIG controls a HUGE number of brands (about 70 at the time of this writing).

To see what all this is based on, please read this review of EIG:

EIG Review

Fortunately, this spring when the acquisition occurred, I just had about 4 months left in my contract. During the past week I’ve been busy migrating all my websites over to A2Hosting^, after a review of 2 other web hosts. The migration went fine and A2Hosting support staff & performance is way up there while the price I got for my first 2 years of hosting is really good. Even better, the site is now hosted in Europe.
I wish A2Hosting stays away from EIG!

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How time flies. It’s been almost a year and a half since I launched^ Mentatul. So far, this proved itself to be a very beautiful adventure. The website started as a source for objective analysis of important contemporary issues combined with an assortment of subjective musings on art topics (so far, only music). Soon, I added the Recommendations^ category, where I share with readers various interesting or inspiring links that I stumble upon during my online journey.

However, like any long-term writing commitment, the project evolved. My urge for writing kept seeking new ways through which to express itself. About 9 months after the launch, in September 2016, I wrote the first satire^ article. Afterwards, in November I added two^ new^ categories based on real life adventures that I was fortunate to experience. I began 2017 by adding two^ more^ categories. Here’s a short description of all these recent changes.

Satire

I believe that sometimes laughter is the best way to highlight or even handle a problem. I find it very entertaining to write satire. The idea for the first article in the category – about Musk escaping to Mars^ – hit me so hard I just couldn’t resist publishing it. Every now and then some funky thought goes through my head and it’s so good to be able to laugh about it together with you.

Travel Log

I’ve been writing travel logs in Romanian for more than a decade but I haven’t published anything. A fascinating day in Scotland^ convinced me otherwise. Even though I published a satire article before the first travel log, this is the category that really opened the door for these recent changes on the website.

Life Fragments

Since I already started writing about some of my life via travel logs, I decided to share some funny or interesting things that happened during my days. The storyteller in me needed the exercise long before I launched my literature website (Michael Axonn^).

One of the “secret” goals I had with Mentatul was to diminish the strength of my inner critic. I’ve more than succeeded in doing this. Branching my writing into these new areas has been one of the things that helped a lot. Even though Mentatul now has two “log” categories, I still don’t consider this website to be a “blog” (it’s a writing project), but I won’t be insulted if you do :).

Parenting

I’ve always been fascinated by how much parenting can differ between cultures. It’s also one of the most polarizing topics ever. Now that I am a parent, it’s the perfect time to join the millions of writers that have spoken their mind about that which is the world’s most important responsibility – educating the next generation so that we may survive as a species. I actually started with an article that can be seen as “anti-advice”^.

Futurology

This category has been a long time coming. There’s sometimes a sea of ideas swirling in my head – I’m sure many readers know exactly how this feels. I actually had plans to launch individual websites with proposals and solutions surrounding topics such as the Internet of Things^ and Mixed Reality^. Alas, having a day job makes this quite difficult so, ultimately, I turned to Mentatul to publish all my ideas.

In all futurology articles, I invite readers to become participants and share their awesome ideas on various topics. Don’t worry about contributing amazing solutions with huge potential – unless you actually have the capital and tools to turn them into reality (patent applications or actual products). Otherwise, I think it’s better to bring these ideas out in the open, with your name next to them. I would actually be extremely happy if anybody is inspired by an idea of mine and turns it into something beautiful, credit or not.

It’s still just the beginning

Mentatul is not even two years old. But in this short time, I already see how the website has started to develop its “personality”. I don’t expect to see so many new categories added in such a short time again, but I might surprise myself.

For now, my focus will go into perfecting what is. I wish to write well and to offer a beautiful experience to those that visit. I hope that your stay here is enjoyable and, of course, I thank you for being here^.

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A lot of people are celebrating Christmas these days. Even more are just enjoying an extended weekend. And even more people are happy to be alive. Even more are… simply alive.

I wish you beautiful days, regardless of what you’re celebrating or doing :). Have lovely times with the family, friends, have fun, play games, do nothing, sleep, take a walk on the wild side :D. I think the only thing that really matters is that you love. Love what you do, love what you have around you, love who you are. And if things are difficult (as sometimes they can be) and the feeling of love isn’t easy to come by, well then I have some for you, in the form of thankfulness:

Thank you for being here! Thank you for shining the light of your consciousness upon these words. Every single person shines a different light, but all these different, unique colors are still part of the rainbow of love :).

Here’s a little Christmas carol in my style:

http://mentatul.com/2016/02/24/infected-mushroom-pink-froid/^

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