I finished reading @Sasha 's book after reading a rough draft some 2-3 years ago. I wrote a review when she released the book but now that I finished it and it all is fresh in my mind I want to briefly say some condensed atom-sized thoughts about it, without spoiling it for those who have not read it.
This book can be deceiving. You may think it is about a small cute girl traveling around the world with very little money. And that is part of it, but the unique aspect of this book is the overall mental growth for Sasha. This is what I LOVED about it. To see how a human grows to understand how the world works and how that makes her react. All of the crazy and wonderful (at times scary) adventures are not just that, are part of the ingredients that create the cake.
And she is a wonderful cake.
The places that Sasha saw and got to experience
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I finished reading @Sasha 's book after reading a rough draft some 2-3 years ago. I wrote a review when she released the book but now that I finished it and it all is fresh in my mind I want to briefly say some condensed atom-sized thoughts about it, without spoiling it for those who have not read it.
This book can be deceiving. You may think it is about a small cute girl traveling around the world with very little money. And that is part of it, but the unique aspect of this book is the overall mental growth for Sasha. This is what I LOVED about it. To see how a human grows to understand how the world works and how that makes her react. All of the crazy and wonderful (at times scary) adventures are not just that, are part of the ingredients that create the cake.
And she is a wonderful cake.
The places that Sasha saw and got to experience make me feel like I lived in a cave my entire life. I bet many people will think that Sasha invented some of these stories because it is insane in a few years time to jump from tribe to tribe, meet locals, go live with them, have extraordinary experiences with them, have no money, then work a few months make a shit load of money, buy a car, live in the car; hitchhike the entire Europe, sleep in the middle of Australia, go and snowboard for free or little money on so many tall peaks from all around the world, become a divemaster, surf awesome waves in Hawaii, drive your car across the entire USA and swim with dolphins, sharks and manta rays.
Fucking shit! This human lived 55 lives in 15 years. You either get depressed at that, thinking like me that you have not experienced even 1% of what she experienced, or make you motivated to go see the world and free yourself from this trade based society (which also makes me want to do).
Sasha did a WONDERFUL job describing all of these places and experiences. No photos needed! And many of these adventures and places will forever live inside of my brain as if I was a close observer.
Best of all, in my view, is that now she signed a "contract" with me with this book, to join me in my battle! :) A battle of TROM vs Society! Her book is her contribution and there is more to follow!
With that she sandwiched her book perfectly - the beginning bun (prologue) that will give you a taste of what is about to come; in the middle are the many flavors of ingredients stacked neatly and chronologically on top of each other - some 300 pages of life; and lastly the top bun that perfectly brings it all together in a perfect taste, connecting the dots and making all of the ingredients and the bottom bun part of one big thing.
This is @[url=https://fosstodon.org/users/sasha]Alexander[/url] and her most valuable project to date:
A book. But a book is not simply a lot of words or a pile of paper. It is memories, emotions, worldviews, and a lot of work to put them all together. Her book is a story that spans over 15 years. But these years are hardly what most people experience on this planet.
She was born in Russia but at age 8 had to move to the United States and deal with a new world. New language, new culture, new people; her mom, her bother, and some pets. Her father went back to Russia, and that affected her a lot.
A mountain of changes to absorb as a kid which led her to a world of drugs and anger.
She details these struggles which at times feel like hard to believe stories – a 17 year old girl selling drugs in New York, crazy mushroom trips and adventurous thefts.
But she managed to pull herself together and change her life for the better. She was not impressed by the imaginary borders humans create and call countries, so she went on flying like a free bird :). From Canada to Mexico, Australia to Europe, Russia to Thailand. 15 years of adventures with almost no money. Because money won’t stop Small Sasha :).
A way to discover the world and yourself.
When you get to experience so many cultures and places, you can understand much better what humans are, and what makes them who the are.
The places she saw and the people she met are extraordinarily described in the book, in a way that you feel like you are there. No photos needed. You’ll laugh, wonder, or feel uncomfortable reading some of her uncensored experiences.
It is a galaxy of stories that she had to put together using notes from the past, photos, and her own memories stored in the mushy pile of cells we call the brain.
She managed to compile this massive story in a way that it is super fun to follow, but also to get a feeling of how she grew a mind in all of these years.
That mental growth and her experiences, made her realize how fucked up this society is and how much we are destroying this environment and the creatures in it.
She started to volunteer for some organizations over the years, eventually getting closer to the project I made, TROM. And so here we are, a book later, spending our lives together.
I cannot describe how wonderful this book is, how emotional and funny. So much fun, but also a lot of reality check for many people who are going to have their values challenged.
She crafted this book so much, that at times you feel like Carl Sagan, David Attenborough and George Carlin contributed to the book :).
A wonderful read! A massive CONGRATULATIONS to Sasha for the immense work she put into this. I know too well how for the past 4 years she worked so much on this book that it almost put our relationship under a big question mark. I never saw anyone putting so much effort into anything. It was too intense!
But now it is OVER. Finally! I thought I will never see this happen. Wow!
After so many years of work, and almost no money, she is putting the book for free on her website https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/ in digital format, despite us not having much money to make a life for ourselves on this planet. But of course, if you want to support her (us) you can buy the physical copy too. Or donate if you can.
I helped design the entire cover and I am quite proud of it :).
Go read it! I know I will read it again. This time the physical copy, in a hammock somewhere in nature.
Sasha you fucking did ti!
PS: The book was made with trade-free software. LibreOffice, Krita, Inkscape.
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022-2024 2007 Freed from slavery (finished high school). Drove across North America 3 times. Lived in Whistler, Canada. 2008 Lived in Canada and California.
Thank you so much Tio, that was such a nice review that I don't even know what to say 😊 I'm so happy that you enjoyed my book and that you found something important in it. I'm so happy that you could feel my growth as a human- that was something I hoped to achieve in this book, but was difficult because there are so many stories, people, and so many things happening. Thank you for all your kind words and for the huge amount of support you've given to me and this book over many many years.
Sorry if I made you feel like you lived in a cave 😬 But you were actually doing much more important things than me in that "cave". You were growing your brain and making the important and inspiring content that brought me to you 😊 And this in turn grew my brain and the brains of many others 🙂 Thank you for your contribution to this book- the design, the emotional support, and even the content. Without you, this book would not have been the same (and neither would I 😉) 🙂
I already feel like living in a cave, lol 😄 Maybe reading your book will inspire me to go out more often 😁
> But you were actually doing much more important things than me in that "cave". You were growing your brain and making the important and inspiring content that brought me to you 😊 And this in turn grew my brain and the brains of many others 🙂
This is so true, Tio might be physically in a cave but he travels around the whole damn universe with his mind, haha 😂
When @Georgi shared a video from our documentary on Facebook and wanted to tag @Be Brave To Act Facebook page, she had no option but had it appeared as if this was a "paid partnership" with @Dima 's page. haha. Because as I said before, Facebook is not a "social network" it is an ad platform, so they naturally see these "taggings" between pages as partnerships.
Finally Sasha got her residency approved here in Spain after 4-5 years of us trying, spending money, being stressed. After being rejected once because we did not have enough money as a family - imagine that! That was the actual reason.
But now that I had a "job" they made us wait 7 months from the moment we applied, and 2 complaints later from the lawyer about why they do not approve it, it finally got approved. And the reason was ONLY because I was a "trader" in this bullshit trade society.
How terrible that we treat people like tools. The value is in what and how much you can trade. Does not matter if you are a good human being. Smart? Doesn't matter. Calm and helpful? Nope. Scientifically minded? Nah.
I spent my life doing free things for others, never made a profit, but this has 0 value in this society.
Anyway, fuck you to those who support a world where we are divided into tribes and languages, and treating people like sole traders/marketers and not humans. We have global problems but so many still want to have their own "separate" tribe and care only
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Finally Sasha got her residency approved here in Spain after 4-5 years of us trying, spending money, being stressed. After being rejected once because we did not have enough money as a family - imagine that! That was the actual reason.
But now that I had a "job" they made us wait 7 months from the moment we applied, and 2 complaints later from the lawyer about why they do not approve it, it finally got approved. And the reason was ONLY because I was a "trader" in this bullshit trade society.
How terrible that we treat people like tools. The value is in what and how much you can trade. Does not matter if you are a good human being. Smart? Doesn't matter. Calm and helpful? Nope. Scientifically minded? Nah.
I spent my life doing free things for others, never made a profit, but this has 0 value in this society.
Anyway, fuck you to those who support a world where we are divided into tribes and languages, and treating people like sole traders/marketers and not humans. We have global problems but so many still want to have their own "separate" tribe and care only about that. Fuck your flag, your language, your culture. Fuck nationalism. A primitive disease.
We are all humans with a 4 billion years long history, a mindblowing one. Single cells becoming what we are today. The way we are connected to each other, scientifically, dwarfs any bullshit man-made story about their own tribe. We have lego-brick-like structures we call the DNA that encode all of what we are. And all of what other creatures are, and how we are all connected.
We live on a giant sphere with a thin layer of atmosphere protecting us from the infinite universe out there.
So fuck you if you think your nationalism is so important, and your borders and stupid nonsensical laws.
I had to let this out because it is outrageous how primitive this society is.
Yea, it's fucking nonsense that they treated you both like that and I agree 100% about "nation" phenomena and I would even add how actually trade plays a major role in forming those tribes and nationalism in order to protect the historical, territorial and location advantages for milking the benefits and profits out of the things in possession and participating in global trading. If you think about it, even some of those entire tribes are nothing for the world, because from that perspective they have no "value", like we see by all what happens in Gaza nowadays. Imagine that. It's crazy how outdated and delusional our civilization's perspectives on what is Humanity real history and advantages..
In any way, as someone who has to pass through the same process every two years, even though I'm a way more "decent trader" from their perspective and it was way easier for me to get those papers, I congrats you both @Sasha @Tio. I hope it will really make your life at least a bit easier from now on 🙏
@Tio and @Roma you make such good points, I love you both and am so happy to know you guys, real humans- smart ones 🙂 It is unbelievable really, that you can't be together with your "wife" if you're just a good human and you do things to help others without asking for anything in return. Fucking insane. And true that borders and nationalism just benefit a few powerful players at the top, and the rest are their pawns without even knowing it..
Indeed @Sasha ! Agree about the power-players at the top and that no people should be treated like you were, especially such wondeful and caring Humans like you both are ☺️ Much love back! ❤️
Yes 100% @Roma ! Also politicians using this "nationalism" to et more votes, bcs that makes them more money if elected, and so forth.... ways important to understand where these issues arise from.
Oh, that's so true @Tio ! That's all politics are about - money.. Even the fact that you have no access to the election process and thus to the decision making without a huge amount of money, says it all about the systems we have.. it's a game for big daddies 😑
I love how you mention the actual scientific history of human beings! Countries and borders are man-made fiction/ideas that we choose to believe in, and they keep changing from time to time - there is a stark difference between that and the actual scientific reality of our world. Science is often a very humbling experience I feel like, think of the famous pale blue dot image and how carl sagan described it......
BTW, I'm glad to hear @bigworldsmallsasha is finally free to stay there in Spain, that must've been a huge relief after having to go through this much trouble.
"It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." C.S.
Welcome to planet Earth. A random rock in the Universe where the most "intelligent" species only cares about trade. Trade this for that. So that the members of its species spend all of their life trading. That's all it is.
It is not about creating smarter and relaxed humans, and a nice environment for everyone. Not about exploring and learning, or enjoying. It is about trading.
TROM II: A Message to the Aliens Year: 2023 / Duration: 4 parts, 5 hours We live in a world where everyone is busy, everyone is consumed, everyone seems confused. Money, social credits, ads, data collection, prices and billionaires.
TROM II: A Message to the Aliens Year: 2023 / Duration: 4 parts, 5 hours We live in a world where everyone is busy, everyone is consumed, everyone seems confused. Money, social credits, ads, data collection, prices and billionaires.
This is @Sasha and her most valuable project to date:
A book. But a book is not simply a lot of words or a pile of paper. It is memories, emotions, worldviews, and a lot of work to put them all together. Her book is a story that spans over 15 years. But these years are hardly what most people experience on this planet.
She was born in Russia but at age 8 had to move to the United States and deal with a new world. New language, new culture, new people; her mom, her bother, and some pets. Her father went back to Russia, and that affected her a lot.
A mountain of changes to absorb as a kid which led her to a world of drugs and anger.
She details these struggles which at times feel like hard to believe stories - a 17 year old girl selling drugs in New York, crazy mushr
... show more
This is @Sasha and her most valuable project to date:
A book. But a book is not simply a lot of words or a pile of paper. It is memories, emotions, worldviews, and a lot of work to put them all together. Her book is a story that spans over 15 years. But these years are hardly what most people experience on this planet.
She was born in Russia but at age 8 had to move to the United States and deal with a new world. New language, new culture, new people; her mom, her bother, and some pets. Her father went back to Russia, and that affected her a lot.
A mountain of changes to absorb as a kid which led her to a world of drugs and anger.
She details these struggles which at times feel like hard to believe stories - a 17 year old girl selling drugs in New York, crazy mushroom trips and adventurous thefts.
But she managed to pull herself together and change her life for the better. She was not impressed by the imaginary borders humans create and call countries, so she went on flying like a free bird :). From Canada to Mexico, Australia to Europe, Russia to Thailand. 15 years of adventures with almost no money. Because money won't stop Small Sasha :).
A way to discover the world and yourself.
When you get to experience so many cultures and places, you can understand much better what humans are, and what makes them who they are.
The places she saw and the people she met are extraordinarily described in the book, in a way that you feel like you are there. No photos needed. You'll laugh, wonder, or feel uncomfortable reading some of her uncensored experiences.
It is a galaxy of stories that she had to put together using notes from the past, photos, and her own memories stored in the mushy pile of cells we call the brain.
She managed to compile this massive story in a way that it is super fun to follow, but also to get a feeling of how she grew a mind in all of these years.
That mental growth and her experiences, made her realize how fucked up this society is and how much we are destroying this environment and the creatures in it.
She started to volunteer for some organizations over the years, eventually getting closer to the project I made, TROM. And so here we are, a book later, spending our lives together.
I cannot describe how wonderful this book is, how emotional and funny. So much fun, but also a lot of reality check for many people who are going to have their values challenged.
She crafted this book so much, that at times you feel like Carl Sagan, David Attenborough and George Carlin contributed to the book :).
A wonderful read! A massive CONGRATULATIONS to Sasha for the immense work she put into this. I know too well how for the past 4 years she worked so much on this book that it almost put our relationship under a big question mark. I never saw anyone putting so much effort into anything. It was too intense!
But now it is OVER. Finally! I thought I will never see this happen. Wow!
After so many years of work, and almost no money, she is putting the book for free on her website https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/ in digital format, despite us not having much money to make a life for ourselves on this planet. But of course, if you want to support her (us) you can buy the physical copy too. Or donate if you can.
I helped design the entire cover and I am quite proud of it :).
Go read it! I know I will read it again. This time the physical copy, in a hammock somewhere in nature.
Sasha you fucking did ti!
PS: The book was made with trade-free software. LibreOffice, Krita, Inkscape.
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022-2024 2007 Freed from slavery (finished high school). Drove across North America 3 times. Lived in Whistler, Canada. 2008 Lived in Canada and California.
Wow thank you @Tio This is too nice, I don't even know what to say :) Thank you again for putting up with everything. It was a lot, I know. And thank you for helping me so much, I couldn't have done it without you ❤️
Also, how hilarious is the notion "war crimes". As if war was not a crime in the first place. Israel killed so many innocent people... to still "wonder" if what they are doing is wrong, is wrong!
Also this:
Our place in the universe, galaxies and galaxies that we can see from our little rock. How shameful to create a society where humans are divided into little groups: nationalities, beliefs, patches of land, etc.. And to kill each other and destroy this planet....
But if we are to get ourselves out of this shit, we have to first understand why this situation was created in the first place. What forces pushed humans to end up in this disastrous situation.
Oh look if you buy a "modern" car that has a "cool-screen" and useless features, it costs you money to update that shit.
How cool. New business opportunities for the traders. Since you can't really make these boxes on wheels more useful than they already are, now they are adding more and more useless "Features". That's the incentive in a trade-based society.
those look like basemaps for the navi, which are outsourced to TomTom (who at the same time have managed to enshittify the otherwise reasonable standalone satnavs by using poor quality batteries in later models)
to be entirely fair, satnav companies have been doing this since the early 2000s at least, it's just that with modern cars the manufacturers can cut out the middle man there and just run the annual update racket themselves instead.
The far more dodgy aspect is that eg. BMW lock features like remote heating (so you can turn the heating in your car on in winter from your house so the car's warm by the time you get in) behind a literal monthly subscription
like with maps they'll be licensing the map data from someone else and passing the cost on (and of course that in itself is a Capitalism Problem), but for things like letting you turn on the heating via an app it's just pure greed
Yes indeed. This is just an example, but since the navigation is perhaps the central point of such a screen, and can be useful, it is ridiculous that you have to pay to update it. Because if you do not update, then it becomes entirely useless. All of those GPS modules, the hardware, and everything else. Pointless.
I suspect that's "for now".... but I had no clue about these. This is a car my parents bought and honestly didn't consider the GPS to be that important since you can use the phone for nav anyway. But thanks for the headsup I had no clue.
@mark I would quite like to swap out my current dinosaur burner for an FEV at some point but also even this car which is almost a decade old now has an infuriating amount of extremely locked-in technology about it and
like what are the chances that EVs don't even have DIN form factor dashboard computers anymore so you just straight up *can't* switch the manufacturer's audio/satnav system with one that isn't, as they say, a physical instantiation of a business model
@mark like on this car I could buy an aftermarket fascia and just stick a 2-DIN Android radio thing in there to have OpenStreetMap and a Subsonic client to use with my home server and connect a reversing camera that doesn't cost hundreds because the manufacturer radio will only work with the manufacturer's cameras
and somehow I highly doubt any of that is possible on a modern FEV
Welcome to Earth, where trade is the main practice that everyone is a follower of, willingly or not. Where humans care mostly, if not entirely, about trade and how to maximize their advantage.
How can we get ourselves out of this shit, unless we start by understanding what the shit is made of!?
First: understand the problem. TRADE. The fact that we've built a society where you cannot survive unless you trade this for that. Once we understand this, hopefully we can tackle it. Give people a way to have a decent life, access to at least their basic needs as trade-free, and then try to replace more and more trade-based services (like say transportation) with trade-free alternatives.
Volunteers plus trade-free goods/services can create more of them, replicating over time and replacing the cancerous trade-based practices.
Learn how to fight deforestation in paperback :) haha Some time ago there was an album of singer Jack Johnson who with it was fighting the plastic pollution. He made a nice music video collecting plastic on a beach, and was promoting especially problem on the beaches of Hawaii, of course the album was in a plastic CD format :) I pointed out that in the comments, and I believe his manager replied that if I don't want CD i can buy digital download :) But the fact that they are selling hundreds of thousands of plastic CD's haven't confused him at all :)
Yeah I am so not surprised. I wonder if these people understand the irony and choose to ignore it because they make money off of it, or simply they cannot see the connection there....
Thank God that companies are now starting to become more environmentally conscious!
100% recycled paper. Tell me that does not give you more confidence that we are going to, finally, make this world a better place.
So what that inside of it are 2 plastic bags full of chips!? I mean, they are at least trying!
I find it so hard to take this idiocracy of a society seriously. I think it is me who is in the wrong here, trying to think that this society can become sane. But perhaps I should take it for what it is: a total joke.
I don't know how this specific product was packaged before the paper bag, but IMO this kind of green advertising just adds an additional paper waste to the existing plastic waste.
yes ofc....I was sarcastic. that's a lot more waste. they already put the chips in a plastic bag so there is no need to add yet another layer of paper on top of that just so that they can pretend to be "green"
haha, i thought the same when I have bought this chips in Spain :) I was actually angry at them, it feels like they tricked me, and not even 1 plastic bag, 2 of them :)
So ridiculous how people think that they are "free", when in fact we are all imprisoned by rules and laws, many of which are entirely harmful and primitive.
So ridiculous how people think that they are "free", when in fact we are all imprisoned by rules and laws, many of which are entirely harmful and primitive.
When nine-year-old Maya Kowalski was admitted to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in 2016, nothing could have prepared her or her family for what they were about to go through. As the medical team tried to understand her rare illness, they began to question the basic truths that bound the Kowalskis together.
@gnutelephony This is just inhumane..... There is no other way to describe it and I'm so sorry you had to go through that. Often times when people bring up issues regarding racism and such I've never seen many of them mention this one, maybe there needs to be more awareness about this issue 'cause it's an important one.
Sasha
in reply to Tio • • •Thank you so much Tio, that was such a nice review that I don't even know what to say 😊 I'm so happy that you enjoyed my book and that you found something important in it. I'm so happy that you could feel my growth as a human- that was something I hoped to achieve in this book, but was difficult because there are so many stories, people, and so many things happening. Thank you for all your kind words and for the huge amount of support you've given to me and this book over many many years.
Sorry if I made you feel like you lived in a cave 😬 But you were actually doing much more important things than me in that "cave". You were growing your brain and making the important and inspiring content that brought me to you 😊 And this in turn grew my brain and the brains of many others 🙂
Thank you for your contribution to this book- the design, the emotional support, and even the content. Without you, this book would not have been the same (and neither would I 😉) 🙂
like this
Tio and Georgi like this.
Rokosun
in reply to Sasha • • •I already feel like living in a cave, lol 😄 Maybe reading your book will inspire me to go out more often 😁
> But you were actually doing much more important things than me in that "cave". You were growing your brain and making the important and inspiring content that brought me to you 😊 And this in turn grew my brain and the brains of many others 🙂
This is so true, Tio might be physically in a cave but he travels around the whole damn universe with his mind, haha 😂
Sasha likes this.
Tio
in reply to Rokosun • •hhahahaha thank you that made me feel a little bit better :)
like this
Sasha and Rokosun like this.
Sasha
in reply to Rokosun • • •Rokosun
in reply to Tio • • •like this
Tio and Sasha like this.
Rokosun
in reply to Rokosun • • •BTW, noticed a few typos in your post, just letting you know:
> because it is inane in a few years time
I think you meant to say "insane" here.
> the begging bun (prologue) that
Did you meant to say "beginning bun" here?
Tio
in reply to Rokosun • •Rokosun likes this.