About
Nice to meet you, my name is Dzsekszon[1].
I'm an electrical engineering student from Hungary currently employed as a level 1 C++ code monkey. In my free time I usually shitpost on the internet, learn Japanese, work on my hobby projects and play the guitar. I also love listening to music and I'm especially a sucker for doujin music. I'm a huge fan of Stargate, Touhou and Half-life series.
Ever since I discovered what HTML was I enjoyed web programming, but never really made a site worth showing to the public until now. For me, this site serves as a programming/sysadmin exercise, a writing practice and - most importantly - place I can call my own. According to the modification time of the project files development started on September 28, 2018 and the site has been progressing slowly but surely since then with some major breaks. Acquisition of the domain jpdream.org was a notable milestone for the project as well as for me.
I'll be mainly posting in English for the sole reason of reaching a wider audience, however there will be occasionally Hungarian posts as well and someday I'll even try posting in Japanese. The topic of posts will usually be my interests outlined above mixed with some technobabble I find worthy to write down. Aside these, I want to put my Japanese knowledge to good use by translating shit no one has done before and posting it here.
1. The English name "Jackson" spelled phonetically in Hungarian
Shit nobody asked FAQ
Why is your site ugly?
Japanese Dream seeks to replicate the aesthetic of webpages from the 00's, back in an era where internet wasn't about aggressive advertising and constant attention-whoring. I only started using the internet in 2004, but I remember it being very much different from today's World-Wide-Web Experience™.
The decision to use a simpler design came after another failed attempt to hack into an already existing design: since I suck at designing stuff, I used to use templates made by other people. But the last one employed the Google material design and hacking it was such a nightmare that in the middle of work I said fuck it and deleted the whole project. Then I began working on this site and I can tell you web development haven't been so much fun since I started exploring HTML back in 2013!
When I was designing the whole website I had one global objective in my mind: For the end user the site must be usable with javascript turned off. I wish more webdevs would adopt this mindset.
Why are phones banned?
The technical answer would be that the site renders horribly on smartphones - broken footer, overflowing text, chaotic
webp support etc. Fixing
this would require a complete redesign with a mobile-first approach - but then the site would look like an Android app
and that is what I'm trying to avoid. Initially I wanted to ban every Chromium-based browser as well, because those browsers
are a privacy nightmare. But after some thinking I concluded that denying access to 90%+ (a number pulled out of my ass) of your
potential visitors was not the brightest idea. This feature still exists in the codebase, it's just turned off.
The biased answer is that I fucking hate smartphones despite owning one: they are convenient for some things, but certainly
not for web browsing. I also hate the smartphone-zombie kind of people; this filter is targeted at them, not the casual
mobile user.
Edit: Phone banning has been disabled since mid-2020 and its code has been removed. You can access the site from your shitphone, but I cannot guarantee it will display correctly.
While I'm at it I would also add that the only browsers guaranteed to render the site properly are Waterfox and Pale Moon. Since these two are Firefox forks stock Firefox or other forks should be fine. Behavior on other browsers is not tested, but rendering basic HTML and CSS should not cause any problems.
Why are comments unavailable?
The main reason is that I'm lazy to implement it. Also, I don't think anyone will visit my site let alone leave feedback, so allowing commenting would only serve as an attack surface for bots. If there's a demand on this feature I'll eventually add it, however at the moment I don't know how could I make a captcha system without JS.
What's with the site name?
I totally didn't name it after a certain weeb song.
Misc
About the themes
Some look good. Some look stupid. Some are experimental (gyate, yukari). None of them are properly tested from UX point of view.
You can also set the theme by appending ?theme=<theme_name> to any URL (useful e.g. when adding a bookmark). Encode whitespaces in theme names with a plus sign.
Known issues
I try my best to fix my fuckups that slipped through, you can do nothing about those. But below are some issues I discovered that I have no control over.
- When using Pale Moon the background image on the theme "yukari" may display with inverted colors. To solve this set gfx.color_management.mode from 2 to 0. Restart your browser.
- When network.http.referer.XoriginPolicy is set to 1 it blocks requests sent by
fetch()- this may affect the JS gallery. Either set it to 2 (send referrer only on same-origin) or 0 (never send the referrer).
Privacy notice
Since the introduction of GDPR every site in the EU must let their users know how are their data stored and processed, otherwise the owner can be fined and the site nuked from orbit. To satisfy the retards who made these laws have this little explanation I wrote.
It may come as a surprise since not many sites are like this, but my site collects almost zero information on you
mainly because it has been designed to function with Javascript turned off. The site is not loading any third-party
content, everything is hosted locally. The only cookie stored is the session ID cookie,
which is used to uniquely identify your browsing. A cookie is basically just limited-length text stored in your browser.
To understand the harmlessness of the session cookie, consider this analogy: you are waiting at the Kormányablak
post office with a numbered ticket. The number on the ticket uniquely identifies you in the queue, but tells nothing else about
you. The ticket can only be seen by the administrator and you, and when you leave you throw the ticket into the
trash can. Pretty secure and harmless, isn't it? Be aware that cookies in general are an easy way to track users across
sites - to avoid tracking I suggest you do some research on cookie management.
Although the site loads several Javascript files they are actually not necessary for pages to work/display properly. In fact, I actually encourage you to turn Javascript off - you'll experience faster load times and reduced cpu usage (not sure if the latter is still relevant in $CURRENT_YEAR when 4+ core CPUs are the norm). There is a Firefox addon to do this conveniently.
Your IP address is also stored to count unique visitors; however this function is not yet implemented, so the data are
just sitting in the database for now. Remember that one cannot tell your name, your postal address, your browsing habits etc.
by knowing only your IP address, to obtain these informations other means of data collection are needed, of which many are
Javascript-based. I've removed user counting a long time ago because only bots visit my site
BTW this site runs on 100% free software. I write code with Emacs using the Witchmacs distribution. Other backend-related programs are not disclosed for security reasons, but believe me they are free as in freedom and as in beer.
Copyright notice
All work on this website is mine unless otherwise stated - except for most of the images, they are either public domain or stolen; sauce linking is already on the todo list. Verbatim copying of content is allowed as long as a reference to the exact page is provided.
Sauce listing
Linking to boorus because modern pixiv is full of ads and 3rd-party trackers and the images don't even load on my browser. Boorus on the other hand work with Javascript disabled and they usually credit the creator on the sidebar.
Banners:Contact
Until I get my shit together and reenable the IRC your best bet to reach me is by writing a mail to dzsekszon strangeletterA protonmail 点 ch
