A second notebook

I already have a site. victorantos.com is tidy, it has a purpose and an audience: people who want to know what I've built and how. It's useful precisely because it's narrow.

The trouble with a narrow site is that everything else has nowhere to go. Writing about Moldova, about what happens to the politics back home when you follow it from a distance, about the tools I use and why half of them annoy me — none of that belongs in a portfolio. So it ended up nowhere.

Antofica is the second notebook. No single subject, no publishing calendar, no promise that every piece will be well thought through.

What goes here

Three things, in proportions that will shift:

• Technology — not reviews, but what I've built and what I've broken. Small systems, architecture decisions that turned out wrong, tools worth your time.
• Politics — Moldovan mostly, European sometimes. I write as someone who follows it, not as someone who makes it.
• Everything else — whatever doesn't fit the first two and is too long for a message.

On the languages

Pieces are written in Romanian first. The ones that earn it get translated into English, Russian, German and French — not automatically, but because somebody might actually want to read them that way.

That isn't an editorial policy so much as an admission: you can't write honestly about Moldova in a single language. Half the real conversation happens in Russian, the diaspora reads in German and French, and English is the language in which something reaches people who have never heard of us.

The switcher at the foot of every page lists only the editions that exist. If a piece is Romanian-only, that's as far as it deserved to go.