Desktop:

On the phone:

Quite the great timing, I picked it up to listen again right now! 😃

I went through their entire discography last year... and I loved their version of "Lay All Your Love On Me".

I use Vim for writing on my journal and everything else. It takes a while to get to a level where you can use it comfortably, but once you get there, for me I don't want anything else. It just feels like home. Very quick to navigate, you don't need to use the mouse for commands and stuff (keyboard only), highly configurable through a single file (.vimrc) on Linux and it's just a black screen where you put text (and code) in. For word processing and formatting, I use LibreOffice. At the end of the semester, I wrap everything I've written up in there and export to PDF.

This comment was written on Vim. ♥

No problem. Everything's working fine now. Thank you very much! :D

I loaded the link again, all I get is a blank page.

Is there a way to generate a bug report for you? Oh, and is the feed password protected?

What is your reason for not using the platforms and social media everyone uses?

- Facebook: it didn't really appeal to me. I don't share my life all the time with people and I found that engaging them over there wasn't very effective. Their attention was divided among many other things. Sometimes they wouldn't see what I posted because of the EdgeRank algorithm. Also, I felt much better when I didn't receive updates from everyone else all the time.

- Whatsapp (popular messaging app in my country): In the beginning, it was because of it requiring my phone number to use it. Other than that, since I'm not tied to any group of friends in these things, I took a look at the features. Didn't like it that I would have to ask permission to get in a group every time and that my number would be visible to everyone. Also, cryptography issues back then. I ended up using Telegram.

- Instagram: I don't really take many photos. Just of articles I read in magazines and posters I need to remember later.

- Reddit: I haven't mined a lot of information from there. Got some penpals once through /r/penpals and I'd hang out in /r/casualconversation, but... after a while it felt off to me. I didn't like the feel of the place. I also expected to meet more people from other countries, but most of them were from the US in these subs at the time (last year). In Telegram, most people are from Iran.

- RSS: This one was big back in the late 2000s, but now not many people use it because they get their news from their feeds in FB and the like. I use it to check my email, monitor some ongoing events, keep up with Hubski and follow the themes I'm interested in. I use it to run some Twitter queries too.

- Twitter: never felt like sending anything there, I just check hashtags for things I'm interested in and the trending topics once in a while. Tried using it with an account before, but I thought it was too disorganized. A lot of stuff thrown at one's face at once. Lists help organize things a bit better, but then the problem was checking them. I wanted to find a desktop client (because I'm too lazy to keep tabs open and refresh them). Since there wasn't any, I forked it to RSS.

- Youtube: I just go in there to do research too. Now I forked some channels to my RSS reader. When I can't find what I want there, I go to Vimeo or Dailymotion.

- Snapchat: Tried using it as a bridge between me and the people who use Whatsapp. I got it to run in an Android emulator, and the idea was to check it on my desktop, but that didn't go well. I scrapped the idea. Snapchat is more image oriented. Wouldn't be good for texts only.

This is pretty much it. I'm trying to use email more, so far I'm getting weather reports through there, and haven't found any newsletter that caught my eye yet. I stopped with the penpals too, we just drifted away from each other... and I rarely send anything at all. The more troublesome point was keeping contact with locals in my area, but I rolled back to phone calls and texting ,even though they charge per text and per minute spoken around here. I'd love to find a free alternative.

So, here's how I became aware of this post.

I was checking the new articles in my RSS reader today (the old FeedDemon). I saw @goobster's badged comment, skimmed it and checked the article. As I was reading it, I thought "wow... what he mentions in here is all the things I've been doing all these years!!".

From what was in there, the only missing part for me was meeting people face to face, due to my disagreements with local people and the difficulty in finding like-minded folks in my town. But I'm getting off the point.

I quit Facebook around 5-6 years ago. After blocking posts by a huge amount of people in my timeline (and cringing at what my parents posted). I decided to delete it. Not deactivate the account. Took me a couple hours to find that hidden link to delete the account for good. Also, 2 more weeks so they would delete my data. Allegedly.

Then I got in love with RSS. With it, I can pick my own sources of information. I don't have to go to the websites I'm interested in. They come to me. I don't have another entity or people curating my timeline, deciding what I should see and what I shouldn't. I think this is a good example of rebellion hinted by Stephen Fry in his article. RSS used to be popular, but with more people reading blogs and the like through social media, it fell to the sidelines. Finding good RSS feeds nowadays for me has been quite an ordeal. In the past month I got around that problem. Also, @mk, I'm really grateful that Hubski has easy-to-find RSS feeds. Thank you!

The other mainstream platform I was trying to circumvent was Whatsapp, ever since Facebook bought it. To this day, I haven't found a way to get things from inside that app. It was mostly to interact more with local people in my area. Then I found Telegram and started using it to talk to international users (which I still do and love it). Now, back to Whatsapp, after seeing what people do in there and comparing both apps, I said "hey, I don't want to tap in there anymore. Nothing useful to me". Another funny thing was that I met people who used a Telegram unnoficial client in Brazil called ZapZap, and they didn't know they were using Telegram itself! One woman even went and said "Telegram is crap"!

My point with this comment is to share my experience as a person who doesn't use the platforms and social media everyone uses. It's not easy and takes a lot of work to set up things, but in the end... it's worth it.

I hope so too! Wonder how it's going to turn out. :)

In good news, we finally settled down for a little while in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

I've been reading a lot about this place lately. Looks like a good place to stop in if you're a digital nomad. I wanna do that soon. The only problem is that my bugdet is extremely limited right now and I haven't found something I can freelance in online yet.

I don't know. I don't drink.

As for general drinks, we have cachaca. It's made from sugar cane.

Hi. Gonna open the bar.

Wow. I guess you're in the same situation as me then. Welcome to the club.

After reading a bit about Tomsk, well, yeah, we are on the very same boat.

Yeah, Meetup.com has a big portion of programming meetups. I haven't looked much into why that happens.

But there's hope, you're still in uni! You can find people close too your age there and it's easy to find them. When you graduate, it becomes harder.

Me? Well, I hang out there too, but I finished my course. I go there once a week to check up on the current magazines and newspapers. Another thing I end up doing is chit-chatting with the library assitant.

this New Year I've met in an unfamiliar company of people in a private library. It was a bit stressful until we got warmer to each other, soon after the clock rang twelve times.

Cool! I struck up a conversation with a Danish couple in Buenos Aires a couple years ago. Thought they were Dutch and started talking in English. It turned out that they were staying in the room beside mine. I could see that they enjoyed the surprise.

I presume that, had I a familiar person beside me and were I more energetic, the warming-up would have been much sooner: this is how I operate.

If the person was familiar to you, it could have given you more comfort to talk to them. If the person was familiar to them, I agree, things could have gone a bit faster.

But.

It's never easy to talk to strangers. Even after doing it for years, I still get butterflies in my stomach. You end up learning how to deal with it. At best, it becomes a warm thrill. At worst, it freezes you.

It also turns out that it's not easy for them either. Trying to intersect different worlds is no easy task. It takes time to warm-up. No way around it. Take your time. It feels very creepy when people force connections.

My thoughts exactly. =D

Global Metal is a thorough version of what's in this article. byonic, I suggest watching Metal: A Headbanger's Journey first.

You used to only be able to date people you knew and consequently would have to gauge the social or work related consequences of who you were going to go out with more carefully than an average tinder date.

chuckle That's the reason I don't date coworkers, right there. :D

Basically, I think the risk is too big for that setting. It can get nasty when you go on a date, get to know the person and end things badly. It's worse when you have to see that person every single day. At its worst they treat you as if you didn't exist. At best, you can still be kind-of-friends. Regardless, the whole workplace is going to know about it.

Anyway, I'm glad it worked for you! :)

Moving on:

You had to weigh the relative merits of the person and how they related to your world with some care

chuckle² I think so too.

There was always the cold ask out of a person you met while at a book store, the bar or a show but there were way less of these people to hook up with than there are now that the internet has aggregated demand.

There's a couple points I'd wish to put here:

1- I grew up in an open, "aggressive" dating culture. Brazilians tend to move things fast. You meet the person you want, ask them out, kiss on the first date usually (or even before the first date), and so on. There's still the tradition of the man asking the girl out, so girls get a lot of attention. The biggest part of it is unwanted attention.

2- I've never tried online dating before and I don't feel like doing so right now because I'm VERY paranoid about privacy. Just so I don't seem too much like an alien, I had some... caliente talks, for lack of a better word... on IRC and some online games. It was always the other person who initiated it. I'd just show up, say "Hi, how are you?" and that was it! There were some e-penpals too last year.

So, this is where I come from. I don't know anything about dating in the US, except for what I read.

On a side note, I wonder how Coffee Meets Bagel, Bumble, Happn and Once are doing right now. When is Tinder going to be overtaken? What's next?

I'm experiencing all this stuff as well. My parents are like that: mom asked for the divorce last year, my dad was like "what? why? I see nothing wrong with how things are now". Then they go through the legal process, mom shows up here once in a while, they fight, she sulks, dad goes after her and so on. The worst part was when they tried getting me and my brother to take sides, which I vehemently refused. I said "don't get me in the middle of your fight".

That's how it used to be. Things are better now: there's still some of that attrition, but the get-the-children-to-dislike-the-other-spouse phase is over. My mom has also put more distance between her and my dad.

It's tough. We get used to that person and they get used to us. Letting go is hard.

What can be learned?

In my case:

- I learned to ignore my parents' bickering and to not get involved in it.

- I learned to disappear from the ex's social circle when things end and not come back. People change over time, but I prefer meeting new people.

- I learned to not get involved romantically with people I see often, like work.

- I learned to be picky about the people I let in my world. Because of ex #1.

I'm glad things are going well with the "prince"! :)

Hi!

I want to ask you if there are any Meetup.com groups in your area. They seem to be a good way to meet new people. Too bad there's only 4 in my city (3 of them dead) and the nearest "hub" of people is 200 km from here.

Ok, on to your post.

From what I'm reading, it's not about making people like me to be friends with them, it's about finding people I'm comfortable enough with to be myself.

This is pretty much the gist of it. The problem is:

It's most reasonable, but I haven't found such people nor see the prospect of finding them any time soon.

Hence the question about the groups. Volunteering has been suggested here by goobster, which works. I see it as a big group of people whose objective is helping others. :)

As I've written before, my problem is a lack of public meetup groups in my area which cater to my interests. I volunteered before, didn't really work for me. Tried connecting to the groups in the other city, turned out to be too expensive for me financially (travel costs).

Some more points:

Is it possible that I've already found people that could be my true friends and am just reluctant to admit it because it would mean I'd have to trust them?

When people like that show up, they make the effort to earn your trust. They go the extra mile. They reach out for you. Find those who do it and there's your answer.

How much do I tolerate from people, especially when they're being self-centered assholes?

This falls into the "up to you" area. Tolerate as much as you think you should.

For me, the tolerance level is VERY low.

I've dealt with self-centered assholes before (one was a close friend). In the end we just drifted away from each other

because it was always about him and never about me. What HE wanted to do. What HE wanted to talk about. My suggestions were always disregarded. Also, emotional abuse from his part.

To end this in a better mood:

What do I do? How do I lose the neediness? How do I make friends?

Be comfortable with being by yourself. You are your best company. When people who add value to your life show up, it's going to be a bonus. We have a saying in my country: "It's better to be alone than in bad company".

Also, seek the others. And hey, there's Hubski! :D

Ouch. It's going to be at 5 AM here... I'll have to take a rain check on this one.

P.S.: My bad. This is the first time I heard about Central Time. I put "1 pm ct to cst", the result was 5 AM. Using the proper abbreviation (cst), I got the correct answer (5 PM) and after learning what CST is, it checks. As you see, I'm bad with timezones.

So yeah, I'll probably be there.

You reminded me of a talk I had with the girl I coached. She said the same thing: "oh, I don't breathe music like you do". I'm gonna put the same thing I said to her:

It's OK if it's not a huge passion for you. It's OK even if you're not that good! As long as you are a cool person to be around and willing to learn, people will want to play with you. Just have fun (and try playing with others right now)!

Cool! It's about consistency in the end.

BTW, I used to teach guitar a long time ago and coached a girl in my first group.

For me, I didn't feel the difficulties that much. The problem was my peers: I play left-handed, and everyone wanted me to play the usual way, which I didn't do. Of course, I went through the usual hurdles (bar chords, learning stuff by ear).

I know that feeling when you listen to something and have the urge to pick your instrument and jam along. Right now, I'm drawn to the songwriting side of things. I feel I transcended my instrument: I don't think about the guitar exclusively anymore. It's more like hearing the song as a whole. That's why I want to play everything, hahahahaha!

What do you like most about the guitar?

So, it's limbo time again. That time from Christmas until the New Year.

Everything slows down around here. As for the music business, the year ended in November. Looking forward to some releases in January (Garbage, Megadeth, Foxes, Gorillaz, Testament, XX and Soundgarden. I don't believe in Metallica releasing something next year. It'd be cool, but I'm not counting on that).

Spent some more time doing nothing, having energy spikes, going to bed earlier than usual out of the blue, playing video games a lot, binging on books, waking up earlier than normal, playing the guitar and reached album no. 700 in my list. \o/

Today, I feel light and happy about the new year. Really looking forward to it. Having a year off opened up my mind, even though there were turbulences along the way.

This year, I want to have a great view of the fireworks. Just me on an open field, lying down on the ground, gazing at the stars... away from all the noise in town...

Here's to 2k16. Happy New Year, people!

So they like North America and Asia, but not Europe or South America?

I can only speak for Brazil. We are left out of a lot of things. But hey, we end up finding other ways to get the content we want.

This is the first time ever I had problems accessing music videos on Youtube. After searching a bit, you can find it on Spotify.

Speaking of Spotify, it took 6 years since it first started to open shop here (May 2014). It sucks. I don't know how Tidal or Apple Music deal with us here because I don't use their services.

Thanks for helping me anyway. :D

Yeah, that's a bummer... which country did you set it to? I tried UK and global, didn't work. And of course, doesn't work in Brazil. I'm glad it's working for one country at least. :)

some copyright holders wish it was still the 20th century.

This is a great time to be alive. =D

Can you watch the video?