Welcome to J.A. Brown’s Website!

About this site

This site serves as both my personal website and that of my business. It was coded in PHP by yours truly, in probably less than 500 lines of code all in all. I originally used WordPress for this site, but I’m in the process of ‘de‑WordPressifying’ it. That is why all the blog posts are currently unavailable, in case you were wondering where they went. Don’t worry, they’ll be back up eventually.

In the future (as part of the de-WordPressification process), I plan to redo this website using a RESTful API for the blog posts. At first, I planned to do that with JAX-RS, because that’s how I learned to do it, but now I’m thinking since this whole site is otherwise coded in PHP, it might make more sense to just write the API in PHP too. I might also turn this site into an Angular or React web app. If all that sounds too technical for you—again, don’t worry: it means the look and content of the site won’t change, but everything will run a bit smoother behind the scenes.

About me

Currently, I work as a software developer for a small company that makes enterprise resource planning software. I am also the founder, owner, and sole employee of a small business bearing my own name, also called the “Department of Post‑Chomskyan Linguistics”. Previously, I was a student of linguistics. I graduated with my MA cum laude from Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 2020. I came up with the concept of “meaning science” to describe my research interests in as few words as possible. (see “Whence ‘meaning scientist’?” for more information).

Besides my two current main interests (information technology and language), I am interested in many other things, including but not limited to: philosophy, psychology, religion, physics, design, data visualization, (video) gaming, the arts (actually, I consider games a form of art), auto racing, association football, cartography, and typography. The concept of “polymathy” is one I greatly appreciate, and I aspire to be a polymath. My favourite non-fiction authors are Douglas Hofstadter, Alfred Korzybski, and Jordan Peterson, and these three have greatly influenced my worldview, probably more than any other thinkers.

Politically, I consider myself a moderate centrist (or, if you want to get technical, a “moderate liberal progressive conservative”. If that sounds incredibly contradictory to you, feel free to shoot me a line and I’ll be glad to explain it in detail). A strange development has taken place in my life that I would describe as “leaving the Left Pole”—similar to Dave Rubin’s “Leaving the Left”, except I was not just on the left, I was on the Left Pole. When you’re on the Left Pole, you’re so far left that the only place you can go is right. So naturally, to the people who are still there, I must be some kind of deranged far-right lunatic, but I don’t care about that at all.
My political philosophy, just like my life philosophy, is based on the thinkers mentioned above, as well as on Stoic philosophy, the insights of economists such as Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman, the mindset propagated by bosses like Akira The Don and his “meaningwave”, and the age-old wisdom of Socrates: moderation in all things. Isn’t it amazing that a wisdom originally recorded twenty-four centuries ago can still inspire political philosophies today? The world changes very fast nowadays, but human beings don’t change that fast!
I believe that if your political philosophy aligns with your life philosophy, that’s good. Otherwise what you want for yourself is not aligned with what you want for the world, which would create tension, I imagine.
I also think freedom of speech is very important, and I fear that Western society is increasingly limiting it. If we do not want to end up living in a totalitarian society, we must continue to stress the importance of freedom of speech. This is one of my main concerns for the 21st century.

Current projects

In September 2022, I started working on a podcast titled De Krodkast. The podcast is in Dutch, aimed at a Dutch audience, and discusses general subjects of my interest. To listen to all episodes, or to find out more about the podcast, go to the relevant page under the “Projects” menu. 🡢 Project status as of June 2023: We weren’t able to use the microphones we bought at the end of April, because I accidentally did not buy the proper connectors to connect them to my computer. I have now bought a brand new audio interface that lets me connect up to 4 microphones on my computer, so we should definitely begin recording this month.

Last year, I announced the FISA World Stock Car Championship, the first championship broadcast through my new project Events Related to Potential. For more information about both Events Related to Potential and the FISA World Stock Car Championship, go to the relevant page under “Projects” or click the link at the top of this page. 🡢 Project status as of June 2023: TV graphics as good as done (for some good-enough definition of done, good enough for the first race at least). Currently working on TV broadcast intro screens.

I’m working on an AI chat bot. A sort of alpha version of this bot, with very limited AI capacities, currently runs in Discord and will be available to the public on the official J.A. Brown Discord server. 🡢 Project status as of June 2023: Haven't worked on this in May as I was busy with Events Related to Potential. More refactoring needed. Once this is all finished, maybe with some small added functionality (= version 2), I want to start trying to improve the machine learning capacity. Planning to throw source code on GitHub with the release of version 2 (probably sometime in August; this is a low-priority project at the moment).

Also, I’m still redoing this site so that I won’t need to use WordPress anymore. One part of the site which is currently not available to the public, but which is slated for public release in 2023 at the latest, is a wiki on which I record information about myself and the various projects I’ve worked on over the years. Currently, only a private version of this wiki exists, which only I can see. 🡢 Project status as of June 2023: Haven’t worked on it since January when I updated the MediaWiki installation. Ever since, there’s been a slight problem with the logo AND all images need to be reuploaded (still missing a few). Needs about 1 more article fully done before I can make it public. Not actively working on it though, since other projects (ERP and De Krodkast) have more priority.

Finally, I have a YouTube channel that I use to broadcast my opinion (some might call it ‘ranting’) on current affairs related to freedom of speech, politics, philosophy, and so on, as well as one-off videos like “hood vlogs;”. I also publish my thoughts and commentary on Locals and on Twitter (WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SHITPOSTING), and I have a Twitch channel where I stream myself playing games (all I have streamed so far is rFactor).
I’m not really using the YouTube and Twitch channels at the moment, although I sometimes randomly upload on YouTube. Twitch will be used again in the future to stream Events Related to Potential.

Future projects

I’m planning to roll out a new business activity late this year or in Q1 2024. A separate division of my company, it has its own website which is currently under construction. Check out the page “Professional” for details.

I’m also working on a comedy TV series. Right now, I’m writing the screenplay for it. It is still very early stages, but the goal is to create a pilot episode and offer it to various broadcasters in the Netherlands. If you are experienced with creating TV shows and/or have a good network in the Netherlands and are interesting in collaborating, drop me a line using the email link at the bottom of the page.

In the future, I plan to create a new social network. This will combine the benefits of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, but WITHOUT the privacy-invading tracking, targeted advertisements, and algorithms that curate what you see for you. It’s an effort to return to what was good about social networks, while getting rid of all the cruft they have accumulated over the years.

Past and shelved projects

Since the age of approximately 6 or 7, I’ve worked on various creative projects in the areas of design (graphic and industrial, but mostly graphic), comics, animation, music, video editing, and gaming. My own projects are my pride and joy. A few examples are showcased on this site. They can be found through the “Projects” menu.

I have composed music using Online Sequencer. While it’s fun, I don’t use it that much anymore nowadays, because I have an actual MIDI keyboard.

I have taken part in simracing events organized by Classic Motorsport Hub, who have, or at least used to have, a GREAT team of simracers and modders. The community has been in a bit of disarray lately, but as far as I know they’re still organizing races. In the future, I plan to buy a gaming steering wheel and pedals and take part in them again. Their events are streamed on their YouTube channel.

Before my friend Nico stopped working on his project Polymath University, I worked on scripts for a few introductory videos about linguistics, to be shown on his YouTube channel. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, we ended up never recording them. I don’t know if I will ever pick this up again, but I remain interested in it from the point of view of science popularization.