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
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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 ❤️
“Big World Small Sasha” is a true story detailing my years of traveling continuously on a shoestring budget—from Hawaii to Siberia, from New Zealand to Nicaragua, and many places in between—couchsurfing, hitchhiking, and budgeting every way possible. The book also describes my reckless childhood years, my growth as a human being, and my growing awareness of our global world and global problems.
It is primarily a memoir, but it is also full of facts about our world, and criticism of our society.
It is hard for me to describe how much work I put into this book, I can only say that it is 470 pages long, it has been my main project for the past five years, and it took nearly all my strength and energy to write, edit, format, design, and publish this book.
It is also a deeply personal story, and telling it broke me down several
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Hey guys! Just want to tell you that my book has FINALLY been published!
“Big World Small Sasha” is a true story detailing my years of traveling continuously on a shoestring budget—from Hawaii to Siberia, from New Zealand to Nicaragua, and many places in between—couchsurfing, hitchhiking, and budgeting every way possible. The book also describes my reckless childhood years, my growth as a human being, and my growing awareness of our global world and global problems.
It is primarily a memoir, but it is also full of facts about our world, and criticism of our society.
It is hard for me to describe how much work I put into this book, I can only say that it is 470 pages long, it has been my main project for the past five years, and it took nearly all my strength and energy to write, edit, format, design, and publish this book.
It is also a deeply personal story, and telling it broke me down several times, put me on an emotional roller coaster, and eventually burned me out entirely. This is why it took me so long to release it, and why I haven't written any blogs in a while.
Now, however, I am ready to let it go—and I am very happy to share it.
There is a PDF that you can download for free, or read directly on my website, and there are also some options to buy a paperback copy.
Thank you to everyone who has supported me throughout my seemingly-never-ending writing endeavor. And a big special thanks to @Tio and @Roma . I don’t think I could have done it without you. Thank you, thank you, thank you! 🙏🙏🙏😊😊😊
Wooaa! This day has come! 🥳 My sincere and heartfelt congrats to you, Sasha! Amazing work! I am touched and pleased to help you out on the way, full of bumps and obstacles, it seems 😉 As one of a few who was honored though not to read entirely, but to get familiar with a few chapters of this magnificent book, I can only say that it is 100% must read and must become an unique shiny gem of somebody's book shelf or eBook collection 😌 At least mine - for sure 😄
I don't know why I still care about this society at all.
This organization was "featured" in the TROM II documentary. They are doing a fantastic work - they feed the ones that need to be fed. That's all they do. And now 7 of their volunteers systematically murdered by the tribe of Israel. (source)
Russia destroying big chunks of Ukraine, Israel leveling Gaza, and I bet Trump will become president again. How's China doing? Still enslaving the Uyghurs? Navalny dead?
Fucking terrible world.
Trying to stay away from these sort of news, but it is hard to. They are everywhere.
I'll try to reorganize my brain this month and star to film for the new TROM video series. Will see how that works ;).
This project argues that trade is the origin of most problems: from climate change to slavery, waste and pollution, corruption, crime, you name it. And if we understand the cause, we have a chance ...
Recently a backdoor was discovered in a core package that pretty much all Linux distributions use. Read more here. Since TROMjaro is a Manjaro fork (thus Arch) is very likely to no be affected by it. However it is better to be safe than sorry.
Thank you so much Eduard for becoming the 77th supporter of TROM! We run a unique fundraiser for TROM in that we need only 200 people to donate 5 Euros a month in order to support us for the long run.
Distributed support so that it won't put a big toll on anyone, and a limited goal so that we do not get rich.
If you appreciate the so many things that we do at TROM (see https://www.tromsite.com) then please consider supporting us.
„This project argues that trade is the origin of most problems: from climate change to slavery, waste and pollution, corruption, crime, you name it. And if we understand the cause, we have a chance to come up with realistic solutions“
=> what kind of solution could this be? I‘m just curious as I couldn’t find any hint on your website. How could a word without trade look like?
Since the topic is of course complicated it requires a longer answer.
First is the book we wrote called The Origin of Most Problems where we talk about that. You can read it here - https://www.tromsite.com/books/#flipbook-df_6562/1/ . It is indeed a very long book but the way we make our books is different from "normal" books. We design them in a more "fun" way and make them interactive at times. This one is deigned as a comic-book.
Second, we released a documentary last year called: A Message to the Aliens - https://www.tromsite.com/documentaries/trom2/ - this addresses your question too. It is 5 hours long divided into 4 parts.
Lastly I made a presentation last year about our project and what a world without trade may look like - https://videos.trom.tf/w/6R
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Since the topic is of course complicated it requires a longer answer.
First is the book we wrote called The Origin of Most Problems where we talk about that. You can read it here - https://www.tromsite.com/books/#flipbook-df_6562/1/ . It is indeed a very long book but the way we make our books is different from "normal" books. We design them in a more "fun" way and make them interactive at times. This one is deigned as a comic-book.
Second, we released a documentary last year called: A Message to the Aliens - https://www.tromsite.com/documentaries/trom2/ - this addresses your question too. It is 5 hours long divided into 4 parts.
Lastly I made a presentation last year about our project and what a world without trade may look like - https://videos.trom.tf/w/6R92qduTeGHmavSWiDrMrR - some half an hour long. First 2 minutes the audio sucks, sorry.
ZDay: How to Grow a Saner Society. A Lifetime Adventure (improved)
On 26th of August, 2023, we presented TROM at the annual ZDay event in Prague. This was the last ZDay after a decade long of making them every year.
Our presentation was focused on showcasing in a unique way how our society works and how trade is at the core of most of our issues. In the second half we focused on the positive side: how we and others create trade-free good and services and why this can become a tsunami movement if more of us engage into it, in a decentralized way.
We put a lot of effort into creating a simple narrative and interesting slides with animations, to make it all more fun and easy to understand.
This was the first presentation for Tio and we hope more to follow.
Is this something that Friendica can also implement? It is something I've been vocal about for quite some time now. But I have no idea how feasible it is :)
Another recently merged feature is the new "severed relationship" notifications. Those will appear when a moderator or admin blocks a user or a whole domain and this action caused you to loose some follows or followers.
Those blocks used to be invisible to users, you maybe saw your follows/followers count decrease but nothing more. Now you can access a list of those blocks, and download a CSV file with the list of impacted accounts.
This is a fantastic idea. I mean, I totally get that sometimes admins are going to need to defederate from bad actor instances, but notifying users whose relationships with people on those instances should *always* be a notification event! Hopefully this can be pulled over to other fedi platforms!
YouTube will cut parts from your video now. Imagine that. In this case it is from a TROM II snippet that @Alexio shared on our "legacy" YouTube channel. Mind you the documentary is free for everyone and also educational, so in a sane world it should be fair use for whatever media we've used.
We are so thankful that @PeerTube exists! We can post all of our videos on our Peertube channel https://videos.trom.tf/c/trom/videos without being afraid that anything will be banned or cut out.
And to no surprise Facebook does the same:
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This is why we gave up Youtube officially:
YouTube will cut parts from your video now. Imagine that. In this case it is from a TROM II snippet that @Alexio shared on our "legacy" YouTube channel. Mind you the documentary is free for everyone and also educational, so in a sane world it should be fair use for whatever media we've used.
We are so thankful that @PeerTube exists! We can post all of our videos on our Peertube channel https://videos.trom.tf/c/trom/videos without being afraid that anything will be banned or cut out.
And to no surprise Facebook does the same:
Banned the same video in several countries....
Basically we are not using YouTube or Facebook anymore since 2 years ago. Only @Alexio and @Georgi post there from time to time, mirroring our Friendica or Peertube. We do that since there are still many people following TROM on those platforms unfortunately. We are always trying to bring them to the fediverse and to these sane platforms, but change is hard...
So for now at least if some of our content can be mirrored to these trade-platforms while encouraging those following us there to change their online habits and use these other trade-free alternative platforms, then so be it.
But it is another reminder of the stupidity of our world, emerged from the practice of trade where even the reproducible at no cost digital content is "owned" and traded, so that ideas like copyright are invented to protect them. Terrible.
Te digital is abundant so we should not even put restrictions in place. But you can't do that in a trade society since so many would take advantage of that for their own gain.
This project argues that trade is the origin of most problems: from climate change to slavery, waste and pollution, corruption, crime, you name it. And if we understand the cause, we have a chance ...
mastodon has what, 15 million users ? hard to say with twitter, but FB is so much larger we aren't even round off error and , at least in biological science, most people are still on twitter
so why do you think anyone will care ? aside from you and me and one or two others ?
I for one started to care more when my videos started to be banned on those platforms, alongside some of my posts. Videos and posts that were educational and I never made any money off of them. So I, being hurt, started to care more about using other platforms. Thus, pain. That combined with my understanding about how these platforms like ytb, twitter, fb and the like operate, that they are in fact businesses/markets and not "networks".
So I think that's one way for people to start to care about changing some of their digital habits: to be extremely pissed off at those platforms, while at the same time have some curiosity to try something different.
It is very difficult, but from my experience what works is to be an example. I moved and gave no fucks about the other platforms so if anyone wanted to follow our TROM project or me, they had no choice but to move too. I made a bunch of people switch to these other alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
GPT-4V(ision) Unsuitable for Clinical Care and Education: A Clinician-Evaluated Assessment
Another evidence that LLMs and generative "AI" in general were just overhyped and overinflated by Microsoft and others. What was sounding horrifying and threatening for the people's jobs and work positions on the one hand and on the other as a new "neverseen breakthrough" for humanity, ended up as just a product of agressive PR, the same as crypto and web 3.0 a few years back, the same as any further potential bloated promises to raise the profits and sell more exaggerated innovations.
OpenAI's large multimodal model, GPT-4V(ision), was recently developed for general image interpretation. However, less is known about its capabilities with medical image interpretation and diagnosis.
100%, a technology is very useful, no doubts. But technicians should carefully position it as a tool that you may tune and use for your advances in specific areas and under certain circumstances, rather than overhype it to create a demand on false statements and exaggerations, to sell more copies of their "product", including medical research organizations. Take it calm, you know, like scientists do when a new theory about universe emerges, they test it first, critique, find pros and cons and etc. There's always a temptation to be overhyped, but at least in scientific community they manage somehow. And I'm not even starting my rant about how trade poisons the science.. 😆
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.
These days I will start to post snippets from TROM II on our Peertube and auto-reshare on our TROM Friendica page. There are around 50 such snippets and are all relevant.
I was planing to do this for some time.
Let's see if anyone wants to help out to share them on ytb and fb too, just in case... But I will not touch those platforms. We still have some legacy TROM accounts there that are not quite managed/updated but let's see...
I will do as much as I can by myself, however I need help to do more than I currently do. I do not have several heads with brains, and multiple arms....
This project argues that trade is the origin of most problems: from climate change to slavery, waste and pollution, corruption, crime, you name it. And if we understand the cause, we have a chance ...
Our Friendica was never as fast and awesome as it is now :D - the introduction of Channels may be overwhelming at first, but can be super awesome.
Listen.
Go to Settings - Display and then open Timelines:
Now you can enable different channels and make them available under the top bar.
For example I have enabled:
Latest Posts (so to see in chronological order the posts from the people I follow). Personal for the posts I am part of - either commented or posted these. Starred - those that I added to my favorites. Followers - since at times I want to see what the people following me post, in case I want to follow back some that I have not. I am thinking if some are following me, maybe we have common interests. Images/Videos - as an easy way to only sort out the p
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Our Friendica was never as fast and awesome as it is now :D - the introduction of Channels may be overwhelming at first, but can be super awesome.
Listen.
Go to Settings - Display and then open Timelines:
Now you can enable different channels and make them available under the top bar.
For example I have enabled:
Latest Posts (so to see in chronological order the posts from the people I follow). Personal for the posts I am part of - either commented or posted these. Starred - those that I added to my favorites. Followers - since at times I want to see what the people following me post, in case I want to follow back some that I have not. I am thinking if some are following me, maybe we have common interests. Images/Videos - as an easy way to only sort out the posts that contain either. Lastly Global - to see what's happening in the fediverse.
I can switch between these with ease and it is so fast. I love it!
And in Settings - Channels you can even create your own channel with your own rules.
It is super great to be able to have such a control over what you want to see, but I think it is overwhelming. We have: Circles - which can have multiple entries. Groups - multiple choices Archives...
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
!Friendica Support Is there a way to remove individually the topbar buttons for network, contacts, global communities, of whatever one wants? I think now that the awesome channels are introduced we'd need a bit of decluttering. In my view we only need the Networks button and not the Global Communities one for instance. Also not everyone may want to use a calendar and so forth :)
It is super great to be able to have such a control over what you want to see, but I think it is overwhelming. We have: Circles - which can have multiple entries. Groups - multiple choices Archives...
@Tio I would like it if the user could decide for himself or set what he wants to see as a widget on the left and what not. The same for the bar at the top. I can't say whether this would be technically possible at all.
I was wondering what kind of "data plan" (internet) can you get in EU that is a bit saner? All are filled with so much shit: from TV channels, to "minutes", to "we give you a mobile phone for free", or the "unlimited" data that is in fact limited or throttled to a few GB per day.
Messy fucking world. I would want a simple: this is how many GB you can use a month, that's the speed and it is not intentionally throttled. Done. And no different rules from EU country to country. Is such a miracle in existence anywhere in EU?
I was wondering for when we plan to move in a motorhome and I would need a lot of GB per day, plus decent speeds...
If you use our Friendica instance https://social.trom.tf/ you will see older posts popping up in your newsfeed - it is because the 300.000 or so unfinished "jobs" in the queue are finally dealt with by our system after the latest Friendica update. In a sense that's great since I was wondering what can we do about those, why can't our system "finish" those jobs. And by jobs I mean things like getting the posts from that friend, getting the updates from the other, etc..
Soon (perhaps today or tomorrow) all should go back to normal and our Friendica should work better in that regards.
Oh wow Matthias and Ann :) that was such a great surprise! Very positive video to see these people doing something to protect these seals.
I have a "technical" question @Dima . Here https://videos.trom.tf/w/8cqikT49xCZXRVSWEQY1BY?start=2m55s did you put the sounds of that seal separately? When it was breathing? I've seen in many documentaries that they do the sound afterwards, even these little bits, and I think it makes it all more of a close-up experience. Because usually they film from afar and you cannot get a good sound of these creatures. And I love that effect of feeling the closeness of whatever nature they present. It makes it all so much better.
Anyway, I am very happy to see you continuing this work!
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Oh wow Matthias and Ann :) that was such a great surprise! Very positive video to see these people doing something to protect these seals.
I have a "technical" question @Dima . Here https://videos.trom.tf/w/8cqikT49xCZXRVSWEQY1BY?start=2m55s did you put the sounds of that seal separately? When it was breathing? I've seen in many documentaries that they do the sound afterwards, even these little bits, and I think it makes it all more of a close-up experience. Because usually they film from afar and you cannot get a good sound of these creatures. And I love that effect of feeling the closeness of whatever nature they present. It makes it all so much better.
Anyway, I am very happy to see you continuing this work!
Thank you Tio! Yeah, I was staying at Matthias places for a few days while I was in Belgium. And he also invited Ann to join us when we went for the seals :)
So it's very weird, But I was surprised by this sound. The fact that it was so audible, although I was quite far away. No it's real sound :) Imagine that! I just lower a little bit background noise and raise a little-bit his sneezing snoring :) But even without a tweaks it was audible quite well. I have a small shotgun mic on my camera, and it works very good, but it turned out also for a long distance. I really was surprised by that, normally you wouldn't hear that without very long shotgun mic. And I was quite far away :)
But quite often in such videos it will be different sound which is put on top, because it's quite hard to record a video of a wildlife and also record proper sound of it. Especially in a distance.
Ahh ok. Interesting, that for sure must've been loud. Because I thought you added that effect after since you were quite far away from what I could see in the video.
Our Friendica instance got updated to the latest stable and all of our custom themes were updated and we added 2 more: Brown and Grey.
Go to Settings - Display to test them out.
They will be shared with the Friendica's developers if they want to include them in the default Friendica's themes or get some ideas about future changes.
Big thanks to these people who create Friendica for being so awesome and for keeping Friendica so useful and feature-rich!
I am working on the new themes for our Friendica. From scratch and this time with the least amount of changes so that they will be compatible with future changes to the core friendica theme. And I will share these ones with the Friendica devs maybe they wanna include them in the official Friendica release or get inspired idk.
I think I will be done with them in a day or two.
So for now the friendica update went well. All seems to work. Except that I see a ton of processes in the queue...
The old issues....will have to check these days in more detail. I hope Friendica won't collapse because of that 😄
If you are using our Friendica instance you can already use the TROM Red Light theme that's almost done. And the "Test" theme that's the dark variant of it - but that's not fully done.
hahaha yes. but the thing is the YNH package will take some time probably to update to the 2024 one. plus we need to test some stuff for the ynh package.
That's the building of European commission, I would say one of the most important buildings in EU. And you can feel it, first of all you need to register way in advance before the event, they made you a pass for the day, and not only day but only for the specific hours of your visit.
The place feels like an airport, they have quite serious security and scanners like at any airport.
It's a huuuuuuuge building, I can't even imagine how many thousands of people works or present there every day. Last week I was visiting it as I took a part in Climate Pact Conference there. I am climate pact ambassador of Latvia, and that was my first offline event at this position. The whole building is full of artworks, paintings, sculptures and countless maze of halls. By the way I wasn't allowed to freely walk there, there was always people who was making sure that we are staying only in the places we supposed to stay.
So yeah, quite fancy and stylish place. During the day I attended several talks, discussions and panels. There were about 170 attendants, some like me ambassadors from other countries. It was a nice mix of various people from all possible backgrounds but all sharing the same passion and dedication for ecology. I've met marine biologists, actors, molecular scientists, photographers, politicians, business people, athletes, musicians, engineers. And I love the idea and the fact that each of them doing something trough their field their expertise for the climate.
I was sitting in such chair listening and participating in some climate related discussions. For example about online green washing or climate deniers online. How algorithms push conspiracy and anti climate change topics and so on.
All day was fun and good, they even served everyone vegetarian and vegan food. In fact it was only that, there was no meat or fish. Which is awesome. So what I have learned and took for myself after whole day there ? Well, honestly not much.... As soon as I left the event and was about to call Mara, I stopped and tried to realize, ok what should I tell her know. What was all this event about. And you know what. I couldn't remember anything... I was almost like blinded, someone erased my memory. During the day I heard so many politicians, MP's, presidents of all kinds of departments. They been talking, talking and talking. On a simple question they will give you 15 minute long answer, so while they are replying you already forgot what you been asking. And the end is always the same, it's Yes, but No. Or not Yes or not No. But since you already forgot the question and they speak so much with smart terminology you are just confused.
The main realization was that we have politicians only to speak. It's their job - speak. And that's it, they don't need to do much more, maybe vote :) But mainly speak and speak and speak. So the whole day felt a bit like a fast food, you eaten something, but you haven't received any nutrients and after 1 hour you will be hungry again....
I was thinking maybe they will inspire me to do something more, or they will offer some kind of projects, collaborations or so on. But no, I was naive, or I have no clue what politics is about. I think politics is not for me. But as yesterday my friend told me even if it's small changes that can be done with the help of politics and policy making it still worth the fight. It kind of encouraged me. And he is right, we should fight even if there is some slight chance for a change or improvement. So I will see how my "political" career will unfold :) for know I am mainly researching and looking into it, if it's something I can do. But still at the moment I feel for me it's better to go and plant a tree or save a turtle rather than attend a conference.
But all fights are important, and we should do everything what is in our capabilities. If you would like to support me and read more of my blogs you can join me on patreon : https://www.patreon.com/BeBraveToAct
We provide Mastodon/Peertube/Nextcloud/Friendica and more, as a service. For a cost. Just order and have your own instance, no headaches.
I always do trade-free stuff, but since I am trapped in this trade-system and I do not get enough financial support via the projects that I do, I have to also trade a bit.
WebApe https://webape.site/ is what I do to trade. Basically we create websites, install Mastodon/Friendica instances, Peertube, Nextcloud, etc.. We setup, manage, update, customize.
We try to do something decent and make some money with that, to then support our free projects.
So if you want a Mastodon instance for example, or any other website/service, please see https://webape.site/. I have lowered the prices now, so a Mastodon instance starts at 30 Euros per month.
We will take a limited amount of websites so to not overwhelm ourselves.
Please share if you think others might be interested. In a way, we can make the fediverse more known and accessible via the WebServices that we provide.
The paper world. Spain is the captain of bullshit. Sasha's papers, to allow her to stay legally in Spain, are still in waiting.....6 months on, after tried for 4 years and we've been told it will only take 2 or so months when we last submitted the papers 6 months ago.
Anyway. Now I lost my bullshit paper with my residency. I only have a copy that I have used successfully whenever needed, but for the driving school I need the original one.
Listen to this: I go to the local police to report it as lost. They say "Oh no, we do not deal with this, go to the regional police.". I go to the regional police, they tell me "Oh no, we do not deal with this, got to the national police." We call the national police, they tell us that in fact a sub-division of them deals with this.... We call the sub-division and they tell us "Oh no, the national police deals with this..."
I swear I can't make this shit up.
Eventually we are given a website that we can use to make an appointment. We try to make one for the past hour, we can't. We are told "try later...". We know this onli
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The paper world. Spain is the captain of bullshit. Sasha's papers, to allow her to stay legally in Spain, are still in waiting.....6 months on, after tried for 4 years and we've been told it will only take 2 or so months when we last submitted the papers 6 months ago.
Anyway. Now I lost my bullshit paper with my residency. I only have a copy that I have used successfully whenever needed, but for the driving school I need the original one.
Listen to this: I go to the local police to report it as lost. They say "Oh no, we do not deal with this, go to the regional police.". I go to the regional police, they tell me "Oh no, we do not deal with this, got to the national police." We call the national police, they tell us that in fact a sub-division of them deals with this.... We call the sub-division and they tell us "Oh no, the national police deals with this..."
I swear I can't make this shit up.
Eventually we are given a website that we can use to make an appointment. We try to make one for the past hour, we can't. We are told "try later...". We know this online appointment thing in Spain and it never works. We know people here who tried for several years (no joking) to make such appointments.
Yeah. Planet Earth. Welcome to the Paper World. Are humans the "only intelligent" species in the Universe!? FOR SURE! :)
Omfg.. this is nonsense 😑 Took me half of a year to renew my papers as well but more than that is just a fuckin joke 😡 I share your frustration about this fuckery. Hope it will happen soon for Sasha 🙏 Entire system is bloated and ineffective af..
Yeah we are all trapped in nonsense....and for what!? Fuck nothing. But I will survive. We will survive :). I know how much shit you also had to go through. Insane.
Since there are still some people who donate regularly via Patreon or Liberapay for our project, we have added that amount of money to our 200 for TROM campaign, as "people" supporting us. In a way that would be around 76 people out of 200 that we need. https://www.tromsite.com/donate/
Not bad. Almost 40% of the support that we need.
If we'll reach 100% then TROM will be sustainable indefinitely.
Massive THANK YOU to the anonymous donation that covers all of our backups for another year! Massive thank you! https://www.tromsite.com/trom-backup/
This for sure boosts the confidence around TROM, that there are some people out there who can help out when TROM is in need. Hopefully more updates to come the following weeks about the new video series!
That being said we have removed the email notifications when new posts are created for all of our websites: tromjaro.com, videoneat.com, directory.trade-free.org, and so forth. This was done because the plugin we were using was discontinued for security reasons, but also because it is not a great idea to send emails like that, from a Wordpress website. And on top of this very very few people were using this feature.
All of our websites have a "follow" page where you can follow them via RSS or the fediverse.
We are so surprised to see Spain struggling with one digit temperatures while poor tribes in the Eastern EU are doing just fine with minus degrees outside. In other words, in Spain you'll freeze inside your home in the "winter" even if outside are no less than 10 degrees and sunny, simply because they do not insulate their houses much. Thus, it is a massive loss of energy (and thus pollution), and a lot of discomfort for people. It is not unusual for people here to stay with their shoes on and their jackets inside the house...
Insane! I bet there are thousands in Spain that also die because of this.
So not only that it is a massi
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We are so surprised to see Spain struggling with one digit temperatures while poor tribes in the Eastern EU are doing just fine with minus degrees outside. In other words, in Spain you'll freeze inside your home in the "winter" even if outside are no less than 10 degrees and sunny, simply because they do not insulate their houses much. Thus, it is a massive loss of energy (and thus pollution), and a lot of discomfort for people. It is not unusual for people here to stay with their shoes on and their jackets inside the house...
Insane! I bet there are thousands in Spain that also die because of this.
So not only that it is a massive energy loss and pollution as a result from using fossil fuels to create that energy; not only it is a lot of discomfort for people. But some are dying as a result, possibly thousands....
And all they have to do is to INSULATE THE HOUSES. Easy!
Thank you Wojmir for the 10 Euros donation! Let us remind you that we desperately need help to fund our backups for all of our projects. We need to raise 300 Euros in less than 2 weeks. https://www.tromsite.com/trom-backup/
To keep on doing trade-free things in a trade-based world is a fight that requires a lot of struggles, almost like swimming against a tsunami. But what is the alternative? Give up and not do anything? That's by far the easiest solution since the water current will push you into the "normal" direction. But for now we are still trying with TROM. We have reached many thousands of minds and with very little funding required. Thus, if you think TROM is still relevant, consider to support it since I (Tio) cannot push it all by myself.
Big thanks to the few people who are still supporting TROM, financially or not.
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....
We have 2 weeks to raise 300 Euros to pay for our yearly backups for everything that we do for TROM. From TROM.tf services to our materials, our Nextcloud instances and everything in between. If you can please donate here https://www.tromsite.com/trom-backup/
If we cannot cover the costs of the backups then we will cut the backups short and not backup several of our services for more than a day or two. This will lead to the future cuts we will do at the end of the year if we cannot get enough financial support for TROM overall https://www.tromsite.com/donate/. It is unfortunate and I (Tio) will do my best to keep this project active and relevant, but I cannot run 20+ projects without enough financial support.
It is unfortunate and it makes me very depressed to accept that, but I am ready to accept it if by the end of the year nothing major changes in regards to the financial support we are receiving for TROM.
I will still do my best to start a new video series for TROM this year and will see what more.
Much respect for those who are still supporting TROM financially after so many years.
One of the things I've learned from the driving school is that newer cars that have a lot of safety features, are involved in more accidents than older cars that lack these features. They say it is because people do not know how to use these features or are more confident while driving thinking that the "safety" features are going to protect them.
Isn't it interesting!? Where is that news ha!?
Everyone talks about the new cool features in these new cars, but isn't it extraordinary to learn that they are less safe than old cars?
it's unfortunate that you're having to learn from a bad English translation, but relevant info like this is what they should be teaching at driving school.
We need help to pay for our backups. This is a yearly funding campaign that we do, so if you can help us please see here https://www.tromsite.com/trom-backup/ - we only need 300 Euros for a full year of 4TB encrypted backups.
This means everything from our videos and documentaries, books, websites, including trom.tf (meaning all of the files that users have uploaded to our services - from Peertube videos to Nextcloud files). Everything!
300 Euros to make sure that we have everything backed-up in a secure place.
Please help if you can and thanks a lot for doing that!
Sasha
in reply to Tio • • •like this
Tio and Roma like this.