History — how we got here

A chronological narrative of what has been worked on in Aletheia and its surrounding projects.

Site foundation (Jekyll)

Built as a Jekyll site (GitHub Pages, github-pages gem) and pointed at the custom domain aletheia.attieretief.com (CNAME added; baseurl/url updated in _config.yml).
SEO and structure hardened: jekyll-seo-tag, sitemap, feed, structured data, og:image / social sharing image, page descriptions and lang.
Navigation and responsiveness iterated on: sidebar nav, desktop nav overlap fixes, and a bilingual (AF/EN) toggle with full English translations added across content; later fixed the language toggle overlapping the mobile hamburger menu.

Reeks 1 — Grondslag written and completed: 8 sessions on the reality of God (classical theism, metaphysics, consciousness, morality, desire) plus oorsig/slot and a draaiboek.
Reeks 2 — Wetenskap & Werklikheid written and completed: 8 sessions on science and faith.
Confessional/reference material added: Heidelberg Catechism (kategismus/), Canons of Dort (leerreels/), confessions (belydenisse/), glossary (woordelys/).
Major refinement pass (latest commit): “Refine Reeks 1–2, ground material in the classical tradition, tidy bibliographies” — pulling content firmly onto Augustine/Aquinas/Cappadocians/Bavinck and away from single modern sources, and away from any ID/creationist framing.

Session pages moved from self-hosted video to YouTube embeds with an end-overlay and a hard-stop enforced at each session’s youtube_end timestamp.
A faceless-video generator (scripts/generate_video.py, scripts/README.md) was built: ElevenLabs audio + SRT → Claude-generated cinematic prompts per paragraph → Replicate Wan clips → stitched MP4. Prompts can be reviewed before spending on generation.

Extensive testing of Afrikaans TTS and avatar tools. Chatterbox, Fish Audio, and multilingual/Dutch models all failed Afrikaans pronunciation; Synthesia and HeyGen were unsatisfactory for Afrikaans lip-sync. ElevenLabs settled on as the only tool that handles Afrikaans properly.
A working ElevenLabs API podcast generator (aletheia_elevenlabs.py) was built (reads CSV scripts, per-speaker voice IDs, controls inter-speaker gaps, stitches to WAV). A full Chatterbox pipeline was built and tested on an M4 MacBook Pro (48GB) then abandoned.
HeyGen’s browser editor caused severe Mac CPU issues (runaway HCWebControlService), reinforcing the move away from talking-head avatar platforms toward audio + AI b-roll. Noted ElevenLabs’ own Image & Video beta (Studio 3.0) as a way to keep the whole workflow in one place.
Dropped from a higher ElevenLabs plan to Creator after CSV analytics showed video generation was ~79% of monthly credit spend.

Podcast defined: “Aletheia: Gesprekke oor Geloof, Waarheid en die Werklikheid van God” — two-person Afrikaans format, first episode recorded on iPhone with JDI Mic Mini mics, guest Douw Kruger. Advice covered minimal iMovie punch-in editing, a reusable branded intro/outro (piano sting — Attie is a pianist), and distribution across Spotify for Creators (host) → Apple Podcasts / YouTube.
Built the file-based crew/ production system (role playbooks, production-board.md, weekly reports, produce.py/stats.py) with a weekly heartbeat and two human approval gates.
Two episode scripts drafted (Afl. 1 from Reeks 1 Sessie 1; Afl. 2 “Ontmasker die strooipop-god”). As of mid-July 2026 both sit at skrip-konsep awaiting Attie’s approval; nothing published yet.

Attie is simultaneously writing a book, Cosmic Wonder — Superfluid Vacuum Theology (at ~/Documents/Streams/Cosmic Wonder), mapping Euler’s identity onto the Christian narrative via the superfluid-vacuum hypothesis. Its refined humanisation voice discipline is the standard Aletheia content should move toward.