Also Sprach Zamo.ca NG

It's a new year, I have a new blog (or, at least, new look), but the same old subjects, blog-friends and recurrent topics. I salute my blogroll friend Krossfire, Dacia and differences.

First, Happy New Year, then let me disclose a project I've been carrying on my mind for quite a while and made a plan to make it real . It's a novel taking place in the Dacian era .

I present a conversation I had on Facebook with a protochronist lady; it’s an opportunity to recap some of my older articles on Dacians and Dacia and introduce a new hope (not the old one ).

Having heard of the magic of the new kid in town (DeepSeek), I put it through the paces of that “novel prompt” with quite impressing results and ask it for an illustration as well.

I’ve taken that prompt and fed it to Claude AI with amazing results. Here it is, and the Romanian translation will be more refined.

We’ve discussed in the recent past how the VERY sparse information we have about Dacians has allowed very little “certain” knowledge about our ancestors. And I just learned about a theft that happened on the last day of a travelling expo at the Drents museum: it’s catastrophic.

I felt that merely listing the Dacian toponyms isn’t doing anybody any favours. Much like most people didn’t know about the Dacian treasures until they were stolen, I suspect that most Romanians don’t know where the rivers are unless they see them on a map.

Given the recent surge in interest in Hidroelectrica (and Romanians trying to save money now that energy subsidies for everyone are ending), I took a deeper dive into Hidroelectrica, a publicly traded company on BVB under the symbol H2O.

Now that most stock markets plummeted on Friday, it is about time to complete my overview of how investing is reflected in Romanian mass media. Whereas before the pandemic lockdown most articles were asking “why aren’t Romanians investing”, thereafter we have a lot of reports of investments doubling every year.

As bitcoin is was plunging, it’s a good idea to look at how Romanians invest and financial literacy in general, while it hurts to own and before it jumps back up. We only have time to take a quick look at real estate as an alternative to crypto.

I’m not a oenologist, I’m not even a “connoisseur” and I drink next to never. But when I buy wine and especially when I’m in Romania, I’ll buy some Romanian wines and I’ll tell you about it.

Having found on Facebook the list of goods allowed under food rationing in 80’s Poland, I search the Romanian Internet as well as my own memory for fading images of the queues (called lineups in Canada) for food and how that happened in communist Romania. I discovered that it happened twice: first post-WWII, under Soviet occupation and again in the 80s, while Ceausescu paid off the external debt.