Don't Think Again

I'm giving it a try to twitter. It's new territory for me, since I've kept myself slightly distant from all those new social-sites that got hyped. And now here I am, adding a twitter gadget to my own blog... oh, shame! Even though my blog isn't a place I devote myself to protect and maintain, feels weird. I like to write, and that is the reason why I decided to keep this blog. Twitter is nice because it's short. You're writing in a space limited to 140 characters, so you're forcing yourself to write in a small space. The end result, as for my scarce experience, is similar to the middle ground between a chatroom and a blog. You don't have to be logged in at the same time as everyone else. This is very cool, and will come in handy when I'm in Japan trying to have a fine and calm conversation with my friends from 12 hours into the past (will I ever recover from the jet lag?). Right now, I'm in the process of adapting to this "new" web app,...

As of today, you can access my blog directly on: www.dontthinkagain.com Nice, huh? So, go ahead and update your bookmarks. About promotional t-shirts... I'll need a couple of days on that.

Most relationships aren't symmetric at all. Even though romantic or love relationships might appear to work the same for both parties, this is almost never true. I say I love you, and then you say you love me too. The one who said it first is always the more vulnerable and the more forthcoming one. Most people would presumably prefer to be loved than love. That's what sounds cooler today, and that's what makes hip nowadays. Similarly, it's supposedly better to receive gifts than to be the one giving the gift. Personally, those two examples are just not my case. Having someone to scream out your name and cry for you and text message you everyday and night might sound appealing, but not to me. This is just someone who wants my attention, another person to bother me. Nobody likes to be bothered. The same goes for gifts. It's very nice to gain something, hopefully something that'll be usefull, and that you'd have bought yourself, hadn't it been a gift. How...

The blog where simply trying to use your previous ideas is a mistake. The best texts to read whenever you're sleepy, drunk or just have insomnia. A place without ads, without laws and without any sense at all. Most of my posts exist for no deliberate purpose, and that's deliberate. My point here, is that there's no point to this blog. Really. I won't try to sell you any ideas, software, services or political views. At the exact same time I'm writing this, I'm also figuring out what to do tomorrow and how to sniff network packets to peek on my neighbours' messenger chats. I have no commitment whatsoever to what I'm doing now. This is both saddening and freeing to me. To you, for some reason my reader, wouldn't you wonder with me... why are you reading?

Isn't this amazing? Technology, I mean. You people over there, you don't have to know who I am, you don't have to see my face, you won't want to feel my smell and you - definitely - wouldn't enjoy meeting me. Still. There was a very important connection made this week. I've found someone. No, I haven't met him (or her), and he haven't met me either. This doesn't matter, because he spent about 15 minutes reading around my blog. How cool does that make you feel? Guess what... his IP is from Japan. This feels great, because people around me like to read this blog, just because it's the blog of that guy over there. Geographic proximity still matters, so most of my visitors are in Brazil. However, a number of people from weird countries show up: US, Italy, Australia, Austria, Denmark and the list goes on. A few visitors each day, and they add up to some quite interesting audience by the end of the month. Oh, please. Don't think I'm tryin...

How blind have I become? How deaf, tasteless, touchless and blind? Thousands and thousands of beautiful concepts dancing around my head, supposedly making me see differently. Today this sounds like a placebo. I guess I haven't been taking the real stuff untill now. Reality check me, please. What about my life untill now? Has to be something that reeked for a long time on a forgotten corner of my waking life. It smelled bad for long enough before I found it and had to deal with it. A rotten mirror: my personal history. And looking through that mirror I could only see my own smelly rotten self staring back at me. Something horrible, that has been growing, hating and ignoring every achievement. Killing all illusions that would make me feel better. Trapping me inside that terrible place called reality. I'm on both sides this time. Having discovered that damned thing on my closet, or hidden inside a dirty plate on my kitchen. I looked straight into it, and having no one around...

Last night I was watching a really old episode of Naruto, and I think I got a lead on the answer for real sustainability. All of my brain skills have been developed and sharpened, not by school, but by the amazing puzzles of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64. The cosmology of my beliefs intertwines the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and Street Fighter 2 characters, like Zangief. I've always loved that name, by the way: Zangief. Maybe I'll name my dog or my son after Zangief. Oh, and how would I love to take Mr. Deleuze on a ride to Disneyland so we could properly discuss the implications of the Obama administration on the job market of cartoon writers. Wanna join our little chat? Just, please, will you turn off your cell?

After all the years of piracy and privacy talk, who is been left behind? Who's getting the worst part of the deal? Not surprisingly, the individual is the one who suffers the most. Nowadays, surprisingly, individuals who create and individuals who appreciate were both been sent to the guillotine alike. Anyway, this is what our contemporary world looks like: people getting sued, then suing back . Who's the big bad wolf on this case? Of course, a corporation: people working trying not to get fired, trying to save a dead company, who once was part of a presently dead industry. Nobody needs CDs anymore, DRM is just a bad joke. The worst part is not this, however. Remember the people who created art? And there's a lot of people like that at this moment, writing, playing, recording and distributing. Those people had no one to look out for them, and they were ripped by the companies who promised to protect them, for a reasonable fee... Just like a school bully: you'll pa...

I was thinking, this morning, about getting a custom shirt made for me. Nothing too elaborate, only the words: "I'm ludicrous." Written in a nice font, accross my back and on the left side of my chest, like a trademark. Yes, simply accepting how ridiculous I am is no longer enough. I have to expose this to everyone else. Knowing how weird I am made myself a very nice person to be around, and that's the effect I expect with you too. Would you mind living alongside me in a tremendously improved version? Well, I enjoy this and I'm not going back. But some people simply don't want to see this, to see me. And then I have to pretend for them. How could this get any more familiar? Oh, man... I don't wanna keep hiding something from everyone, even when they've made it clear they don't want to see it. Did you ever have a girlfriend who was so shy she'd always keep dressed up around you? In the moments after sex, what would you be doing? Catching a...

Trying to give advice to anyone has to be the most futile endeavor ever. Nobody listens, nobody stops. There are rare moments, usually on some kind of real or imaginary crisis, when you'll find yourself talking to someone willing to listen. Am I like this too? The whole point of having someone listen to you is not making them do what you want. Far from it, what's cool is that people pay attention to each other. Yes, we have that ability, buried in the depths of our beings. And that's a very cool thing to do, you know... pay attention. But you don't have to just sit around paying attention to each other. There are a multitude of actions you might take while shifted away from the noise of your own thoughts: dialogue, eat, fuck, walk, write (yes, together), sing, touch, cuddle... the sky is the limit. Please, don't get me wrong, ok? I wasn't always this cinical.

I'm here for you, ok? You don't have to worry about human rights or other similar constraints. At least, not around me. I might be both killing and dying, over and over again. Yes, I'd be delighted to show you around, have you escorting me, or would you rather have me act as your guide? Your answer will be thoroughly heard, heavily distorted and then ignored. Even so, you'll think I'm trying to please you. Can you understand the irony? The hate I feel for not been able to say anything? I despise you, and I always will. But, then again, why would I ever want to say anything to you? Just like that hidden scar or tattoo. It changes everything just by being there. It doesn't matter if nobody knows it's there, except you. What matters is that you know. But I've seen that tattoo. We were fucking, but I couldn't get my eyes off it. It frightened me. By the way, can I get you a cup of coffee?

Understand people isn't all that hard, if you really put your mind and eyes to it. Everybody keeps sending out signals from their entire body all the time... Just know this is neither science nor superpowers, but mere observation. But what happens when you think you saw or felt something very unpleasant? Examples, examples: you realize your girlfriend pays more attention to some other guy she's just met than to you; you move back to your house and suddenly realize nobody really wants you around; you get a gift that's clearly meant to alleviate the "giver" from its "giving" responsibility, rather than to be useful or nice for you. This might not soudn exactly the way I expect it too, but I'm very polite, so I seldom act rude. This is a big deal for me, so I'm still polite even in somewhat extreme situations. When I realize, in the middle of a conversation, that I'm been shutdown, I immediately go away: "Oh! Gotta go!" or "...

I'm not really sure as to why, when or how it happened, but living my own life hasn't been my only way to access life for a really long time. Films are yet another method to do exactly that, and this must be one of the reasons why it hurts so much to watch a bad movie, and also why I like to watch good ones over and over again. Who said you have to actually live through something to understand? Bottom line: you don't. Besides films, songs and books have lifes of their own. Alongside their own lives, all these works have a distinctive place in our lives, such as the day we watched it for the first time. Three big movies come to mind: Se7en (1995), As good as it gets (1997) and Fight Club (1999). Today, few movies have touched me deeply, but the series called Dexter have made its impression. Friends read the book and told me it isn't all that good, so I'm glad I didn't read it.

Surely, Seth Godin has posted a great entry about his 3000th blog post . He has very nice writing, and most importantly, he doesn't repeat itself over and over. Most books in english that I've tried to read have shown themselves worthless and repetitive. As much as I might enjoy reading him, I'm not a marketer, and I'll hopefully never become one. I've written for a long time now. Not always in english, not always on this blog. I've done some stuff I don't enjoy, but a small part of it really makes me feel better about myself. Writing is a sensation for me. And that sensation is not something personal, but I'd rather believe it's all around me. I can't think of myself as the single source of sensations. I'm not a source of anything... a filter, at most. That's why I write on this god forsaken blog: a need beyond that of simply attaching words to my petty personal feelings. I have to show this to people who've seen what I'v...

Lately, finding something has become quite simple: two or three searches on google. This wasn't always the case, and google's reward for making the world a better place has been lots of money. However, this isn't all about roses: SEO is the price to pay. People tweak their old sites or even build their entire site based on google's search engine. This basically means that yet another step has to be taken... Google's take on this seems to be working around getting people to give up their privacy, signing up their habits so that they'll know what you're looking for, even if you don't. The downside is that search engine optimization might leave out interesting stuff. My greatest example is the blog of a man called José Saramago . His blog won't come up if you google his name, but he writes on it everyday. You'll probably get some articles on him, and a wikipedia page.  But his blog won't show up. Something to do with relevance, the language ...

Going inside someone's house is quite a trip. Even if you've olny lived a short amount of time in a house, looking at someone's place is like looking at the world of a person. Like seeing someone from the inside. I got to thinking about this mostly because I had to find something else as a place for "I" or "me". Using those words, I could talk about my personality, but that's not really me. I could try to describe my body's atributtes or even my intelectual abilities. But that's also not me. I am a foreigner, a traveller, an alien, a nomad, an itinerant. Wherever I might be, I feel like an outsider like an outlander. I can't get used to places, or accept that the people before my eyes are necessarily part of my world. I go away never to return again. I disappear, even in plain sight. I stop going to places I used to love. I'm never comfortable, no matter how I try. I try to mimic the behaviour of the "natives", I try t...

I'll be taking off of Brazil shortly, flying half of the world to Japan to pursue a Master's degree on engineering. But the engineering-education world is quite cloudy nowadays. And there are lost of reasons for this: There are lots of "types" of engineering (mechanical, civil, electric, production, etc) and counting, but they're not really different things. Most areas and subareas of engineering have grown too large for their own good, but most universities seem to simply jam up more courses and requirements. The usual or old-school method for teaching engineering (board, chalk, standing teacher and sleepy students sitting) just doesn't prepare students to be engineers. New perspectives point to a "problem-solving" approach to engineering, but this simply doesn't translate to changes on classrooms (except for PBL ). We're mostly been asked to rethink the role of the faculty, without rethinking the role of the engineer . I'm don...

This could have been anticipated, but now that it's happening, there's no more need to argue anymore. Finally, the RIAA is being sued for fraud , abuse and legal sham . Now try to concatenate the effects of this lawsuit with the layoffs and their suing of tech investors ... They're suing investors! I still can't believe it... They've done a lot of harm to the industry, and I hope that the people responsible for this can finally become aware of what they've done. I'd say Seth agrees with me on this one. One would hope that the similar industries would learn from these mistakes and try to improve their approach on piracy. Why would anyone flame out against file sharing? Probably, they thing they'd get something out of it, like the RIAA must have thought. The same thing appears to be happening to books and movies (MPAA). I love Nintendo, but this changes it... Seems like everybody is a pirate nowadays. But I think each industry will have to take...