2026-03-26 00:06:26
The drainpipe in my kitchen has been clogged for the last couple of weeks. I’ve been there with a wire every other day, messing around in the drain. It works OK for a while, then it’s clogged again.
Today I finally decided to do what actually needed to be done. I removed the pipes, cleaned them properly, and put everything back together. Work done.
It took twenty minutes. I’ve probably wasted more than an hour with that useless wire.
So stupid. Yet that’s often what we do when we dread something. We try everything to avoid it, while telling ourselves we’re doing good work.
You might feel the same about hitting the publish button. The post just needs one more read-through, a bit more polishing on that last sentence, maybe try a new blog theme first, or why not even another platform. That might do the trick.
It won’t. It never does.
I’ve tried cleaning my blogging pipes in every possible way to get things flowing, and the final solution is always the same:
Just keep blogging.
2026-03-25 19:50:59
Every one that knows me also knows me as the bookworm. I used to hold that title with pride and still sort of do. It’s more like a quirky thing that makes me „a walking lexicon,“ as one friend endearingly put it. What has made me a walking lexicon, however, was not self-help books. It wasn’t even non-fiction, but literally fiction. Fiction allows us to explore a different reality built on different premises than ours, making the abstract „college stuff“ accessible to a teenager like I was.
I only began reading non-fiction in 2024 at age 18 or 19. Back then, I started with self-help books and stopped after reading just two. I certainly didn’t stop because I realized I was above that genre, but rather because I realized I could get so much more than what these books could offer me from fiction. A recent example that absolutely transformed me from the inside out and which I’m planning to reread so soon is The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. I have been a convinced atheist since the age of 13 despite of, and probably because of, my environment being comprised of believers in a higher power more broadly and religionists more specifically. Additionally, I had been a convinced anarchist for a few years at that point and knew why I wasn’t simply a liberal, socialist, or similarly worshipping the boot. All this to say, I didn’t need a utopian novel to know that we could do better, and that the environment I knew was incredibly oppressive and irreformable.
Words could not even begin to describe what I felt reading it and how it changed my view on life in the months that followed me reading it. It pulled me out of a depressive episode, plagued by the crushing pointlessness of life in the face of climate collapse. It was neither a tutorial, a pamphlet for a dogma, nor a reproduction of our reality that works to legitimize it and paint dissatisfaction with it as a personal failure. What The Dispossessed afforded me was a critical discussion of a utopia, its fallacies, and its critical necessity for the continued existence of all life on Earth. In fact, LeGuin pioneered and popularized the critical utopia genre, so I wasn’t „fed“ a dreamy, perfect world, but rather what could go wrong, an approach to address staleness with a continuous revolution, and how obscene our world (which so closely resembles Urras) is in comparison to Anarres. It gave my vague dreams a needed grounding that gave them shape rather than nerfing them, something that no self-improvement/self-help book could’ve ever given me.
So with this post, I echo what Pirate and Ash have argued for in their own posts: Drop the self-help and read fiction, for fuck’s sake!
2026-03-25 10:10:00
A while back I was talking to a friend of mine about looking at the Google Street View images of the neighbourhood I grew up in.
"And look at all the empty space next to the church! You can see the next hill over. This house looks like war rubble but I'm pretty sure it was just abandoned."
"Yeah," said he, "I feel the same way looking over photos of my old neighbourhood myself. It looks like a warzone."
"Thank God I escaped there, man. Can you imagine if I was still there?"
Can you imagine?
A while back I ran a campaign of Delta Green, and the whole thing made me introspective.
Of the last players in the campaign, one was Finnish, one was American, and one was Brazilian like me. Despite that, in the absence of an interesting, deeper setting to study, I went and learned more about what the United States of America is like. I wanted to know what the streets of New Hampshire are arranged like, what the typical job of someone in North Dakota is, how much the crisis of opioids would have affected a small town in Kentucky. I realised I knew a lot about that already through media exposure, half-remembered factoids, and just interacting a lot with them over the past two years. None of it was as detailed as the knowledge someone who had actually been there could relate, but I'd say I got as close as I could have gone.
By the end of it, when I was taking notes on the effects of the atrocities committed by Purdue Pharma in West Virginia and Kentucky, it suddenly hit me: I had never ran a game that was as Brazilian as this game was American.
It is a common refrain among the youth to condemn, or gingerly admit, that we are "a colonised people - if not by the Portuguese, then by the Americans". Many are those who rage against American music, proudly extolling the virtues of Brazilian MPB and Bossa Nova; who reject those "foreign movies" in favour of our telenovelas and our own national cinema; who ask what need is there for Hemingway or Fitzgerald when we have Machado de Assis and Monteiro Lobato.
I have never felt at home with those people, because at the end of the day, those slogans feel more like out-loud confessions; a shameful admission of the guilt you feel for partaking in this "American colonisation" while not refusing it entirely.
After all, we can sing the praises of Chico Buarque and Tom Jobim as much as we want, it does not change that their main inspirations were foreign musicians: Caetano Veloso had the cash to "exile himself" in the late 60's and early 70's to sing about the Londonian Portobello Road, after all. Watch one hundred and one Brazilian movies, and you will notice the entire Cinema Novo movement was made in dialogue and response to the French New Wave and Italian Neo-realism. In the pages of our books from the 19th century (pretty much all of which were made in and about cities on the coast, particularly Rio de Janeiro), the reader will be showered with longing mentions and comparisons towards Paris and Lisbon.
Tarsila do Amaral, shortly after the Modern Art Week of 22 which inaugurated Modernism in Brasil, crafted the Abaporu as an open question: what does beauty mean in the tropics? What is left if you scrape off Portugal, France, and the United States from our canvases? The canvas was a challenge: here, I remove the face, the more emblematic aspect of many European screens, and I emphasize the body, the size, the hugeness.
I don't think anyone since then has meaningfully answered Tarsila do Amaral, only reiterated her question. And every single time they reiterated it, the patterns were updated, because Yankee and European culture kept seeping in here. How could it not?
Thus, the proud youth who loudly protests their Brasilidade always sound like they protest too much; that they feel the need to loudly proclaim they are not that, because to stop and ponder what is left if the foreigner isn't looking - to be left to wonder who you are in the dark - is a proposition none is willing to face.
Having realised this, I was left to wonder: when did all of this begin? We can go back as far as you want.
Shortly before independence, in the 1790's, the Minas Gerais Conspiracy attempted to launch a revolution in the shape of the American one - the conspirators even tried to get Thomas Jefferson to support them, but couldn't. Over the course of the 19th century we were at our most outward-facing, since the Imperial government did not want to associate themselves with the fractured, unstable, and "indigenous" Latin America, instead painting this country like an European monarchy that happened to be localised in the tropics - using the fact that the Portuguese royal family had fled Napoleon to Brasil in 1808 as evidence of that. Thus the gap between Brasilidade and Latinidad widened.
I thought to look for our first works of fantasy. Out there, the British, the French, and the Yankees had had very high literacy rates for a long time, thus being able to revolutionise popular and genre literature, which, through a convoluted process, slowly created the conditions that allowed for fantasy literature to be made.
We did not have that. Our literacy rates have always been quite low and it took a century of efforts to reduce it; magazines were generally not as big here up until the 90's (since the dictatorship of the 60's to the 80's did not enjoy "subversive material" such as... Superman) and most literature was published through feuilleton, sold along with the newspaper for the "doctors" - Law graduates, bureaucrats, the wealthy baronial class and the ascending middle class.
As far as I am aware, the first out and out fantasy novel that became famous here was Reinações de Narizinho (Adventures of Lucia Little Nose), published in 1931, which became part of the beloved series Sítio do Pica-Pau Amarelo (The Yellow Woodpecker Farm), which was later adapted as a children's TV show in 1952, and in every decade thereafter, embedding itself in our popular consciousness as deeply as Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan have in the United Kingdom.
One of the first fantastical elements that our heroine, Lucia Little Nose - an aristocratic child from the inner country in her grandma's slave-owning-coded farm - finds is the cowboy Tom Mix, the star of the silent-era American Western. He is portrayed as fantastical an element as a prince of fishes who lives in the nearby pond or a talking corncob, through the incredible power of being an American.
The hard truth I had to confront after this is that there is no "back then", when we had no interaction with the USA and Europe and art was genuine; no prior time to the current one, when the songs on the radio weren't covers from American songs with the words switched up, and the TV shows weren't a Brazilian version of "The Voice" or "The Apprentice".
Or rather, we did, but it did not survive. There were likely made-up stories of wondrous and woeful things found in the hinterlands, of mysterious hauntings and monsters, told by a parent in the dim light through a language that was not quite Portuguese. But much like Goya's Pinturas Negras, these creative endeavours were painted in oil on the darkened walls of a walled off room and left to rot. Whatever they were, they were either not written down, or were commercialised and turned into something else - something which could be repackaged and sold in New York City.
There is much bitterness in that proposition, and I don't think the average Anglo quite understands this DuBoisian double consciousness, because unlike in the society of that hallowed thinker, the North American is not looking back. We see ourselves through the disinterested eyes of those who do not look in our direction, and this can boil over into what some call the mongrel complex - a collective inferiority complex, nowadays used as derision for those who would espouse the views that all which is Brazilian is inferior, and which can be most often felt by constant calls of "Come to Brasil!" online; "Please notice us! Please validate us!"
Yet the eyes remain not being ours. Nothing can change the fact that, when we turn on the television to watch Everybody Hates Chris, his rowhouse downtown apartment in Bedstuy in the 80's appears luxurious; that the snow he is complaining about is wondrous to those from this snowless land. No American will quite know what it feels like to grow up listening and singing songs whose words you don't quite understand; celebrating Christmas with faux snow decorations in the middle of tropical summer; having someone with brown skin call themselves "black" rather than "pardo"; watch your little cousin romanticise owning Air Jordans before those were even sold at shoe stores.
But there is something comforting about that - there is to me, at least. I find some solace in the idea that our birthright is that discomfort, that constant search for identity and that constant adaptation of the foreign into something that can be recognisably "ours". It's what rappers did in the 80's and 90's, openly discussing James Brown in their lyrics; it's what MPB did in the 60's and 70's; what Bossa Nova did in the 40's and 50's, and so on.
In many ways, to be "Brazilian" is to be in tension with what it means to be Brazilian - an identity you know is real to some extent, but which was so haphazardly cobbled from different cultures that one can barely put into words what it means. An identity of opposition, characterised more by what we are not than by what we are; an identity sewed together by an aristocracy that put to death all those who fought for autonomy and freedom. As the song goes: "And from war to peace, from peace to war / Every time the folk from this land can sing / They sing of pain."
To a hungry nation like Brasil, every piece of culture is a mouth chewing forever; a stray dog gnawing on any bone it can clench its jaws around; a toucan happily drinking from an open coconut. None of this is original, this was the conclusion the Anthropophagic Movement reached - a movement inspired by Tarsila do Amaral's Abaporu. I, too, appear not to have an answer to her question, because the question "What does beauty mean in the tropics?" might have an answer in the Caribbean or the Andes, but in Brasil, the colossus which stands together yet apart from Latin America? That question might as well be the defining characteristic of Brasil, of what it means to be Brazilian. It has as much of an answer as "Was Napoléon Bonaparte good?" has for France - how much time do you have?
I did not have a lot of money growing up. A lot of Brazilians who can speak English will follow up a phrase like that discussing how their parents, who have university degrees and Italian or German last names, made a "modest living" through some mean or another which allowed them to "take a trip or two to Orlando or Paris", to get haircuts with the same price of a brand new Playstation 3 videogame, among other scabrosities.
I am not that fortunate. My mom is a telemarketer with no university degree, her mom was a stay-at-home wife and charwoman after her husband - who worked construction - passed away from a brain tumour - and her father, my great grandfather, was a Portuguese man from the Ilha da Madeira who owned no land, worked the ground as much as he could, and when he couldn't, worked as a night watchman. My father lucked into his first job without a degree and managed never to get fired. and thus makes a pretty good living, all things considered; my grandfather is a self-taught almost-illiterate electrician, and my grandmother a seamstress. I come from a long line of proletarians.
The place I grew up in were the outskirts of my city - Campinas, which in the times of slavery was used as a threat, the place where rebellious slaves would be sent to. Dialectically, it was also the place where Luís Gama made his career, the first black lawyer in the country. I attended school right next to where the street ended and there was just undeveloped tall grass. To the side of where I lived, just beyond a tall wall, was a pasture. The community was quite literally at the end of the road. This is what it looked like when I was about 11:
This is what the church I attended looked like:
I spent a lot of time at my aunt's house, whose neighbourhood was also the last one before undeveloped land that looks about like that.
Odds are that when you think of Brasil, you don't think of a place like this. You might think of beautiful beaches, dramatically mountainous geography, half naked brown bodies tanned by the sun playing "soccer" or dancing samba. If you are Brazilian, you also don't think of these places. Even if you think of poverty, you think of the dramatic northeastern arid lands, mud soil cracked by the sun; or in the massively sprawling favelas, the concrete panopticon.
The big difference is that those places have a culture of their own. The favelas are the birthplace of the now-internationally famous funk music, if you go on the internet you can find a reason for them being there, an explanation that one day, long ago, presidents decided to demolish downtown tenements, and all those poor and desperate people had to go somewhere, even if it had to be up the mountain.
And the northeast is the ground-zero for Brazilian culture; some of our greatest works of literature describe the poverty there (such as Vidas Secas and Grandes Sertões: Veredas), some of our greatest movies describe the dramatic violence that took place there (such as Black God, White Devil). It is a land of much pain and much culture - my grandpa came from there.
The place I was raised in isn't like that. There is no drama there, there is no history. Look up any place there online, you will find nothing. Try to find any artist from this land, and the name of Hilda Hilst will politely turn up - a poet known for her isolation - or the composer Carlos Gomes, who left this land behind for the northeast and Rio de Janeiro as soon as he could.
All that is there is cattle, dirt roads, and a piece of concrete too prosaic to feel like a half-remembered dream, or someone's memory of a town, or any florid descriptor you might want to attach to it. No one has any deep ties to this place, most people's grandparents, like mine, migrated here during the rural exodus and built this city in the 50's to be a place of work. No one has any stories of "what was once here", no folklore was brought, no one's parents tell them mysterious tales of what might lay just beyond the pasture, because we know there is nothing there. The TV shows all come from America, the songs my parents heard in their youth were whatever was on the radio - to my mom, Hall & Oates sound like "music from my generation". The culture I was weaned on in the 2000's featured next to nothing produced in Brasil, by Brazilian sensibilities, with the intent of stimulating a Brazilian culture - and all that did felt terribly coastal. No literature I read in school told me of what laid in the fields next to my house, they talked of the distant metropolis of Rio de Janeiro; no telenovela I watched impatiently while waiting for my time on the TV to come on took place in a tiny apartment on the edge of town, where shirtless boys rode bicycles and confabulated about having seen a strangely shaped shadow through a window once.
When I and many like me were children, we felt on our sun-tanned skins the reality that underpins those faux nationalistic calls for a "more Brazilian culture" - and many of us are glad we escaped the cultural wasteland that are the parts of Brasil that the eyes of the foreigner never saw. Therefore I feel no guilt in picking and choosing from what comes my way, in eating from every morsel of culture and digesting it into what can be called "mine". Let English become overgrown. Let the jaguar who lost its forest claim the plantation for its own. English is mine, my forest, growing in my homeland. It is not my mother tongue, but I refuse to die hungry.
2026-03-25 06:32:00
Some weeks back there was a popular post on the Discovery page recommending another blog (I don’t want to call anybody in particular out, because this is just an example of a society-wide trend!). This was an authentic human saying “I love this blog, the writing is beautiful and it really speaks to me”. Wanting to feel inspired myself, I checked out this other blog and every single post was AI-generated. Specifically, it was very obviously ChatGPT. It was generated last year so before so many people were wise to the tells, and did have the em dashes edited out, but otherwise every paragraph was packed do the absolute gills with doing things "quietly" and introducing thoughts with "And honestly?" and if you're familiar with LLM writing you get the idea.
If you aren't — I've noticed people can get a little defensive and uncomfortable when a so-called "LLM tell" is a word or phrase they use in their own writing, but I really don't think this is necessary! Despite people's fears that they'll be mistaken for AI I've yet to meet anybody who's natural writing sounds anything like AI. You might have one tell but not all of them at once.
Anyway.
One one level it shouldn't matter if one person found a robot thought-provoking. Or when people rely to a ChapGPT slop post on Reddit with "oh my gosh this was so well written" or a ChapGPT quip with "hilarious!!!!!" We can find meaning wherever we want! But whenever I encounter somebody who likes this stuff I feel this growing sense of dread and it's even worse when they clearly don't know it's AI they're responding to.
I guess it's scary to think maybe I'm getting tricked somewhere, by more subtle LLM product, and I have no idea.
And those of us who want to write, it's distressing if some people think a robot does it better.
But I also just get mad. This is what people want?! This is crap! Most of this kind of writing doesn't build to anything, doesn't say anything. It doesn't even try to make its paragraph different lengths.
Ultimately I just get worried that I'm going to spend the rest of my life running from my least favorite author of all time. I checked out a physical book from the literal library that had ChatGPT-generated text in it! Who will stop this bastard?!
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This post was last edited 1 day, 9 hours ago.
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2026-03-25 04:00:00
Cash is universally accepted within the boundaries of your country, predictable and anonymous. Transactions require no intermediary, nor a processing fee. It is tangible and has no cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
We might only realize what we had once it is gone. If you can, use it more often.
2026-03-25 02:53:37
This website is for me. I’ll probably do a future post about what that means. For now though, I want to share how I avoid seeing any the site’s metics.
What gets measured, gets done.
I host this site on Bear Blog, which measures a few thing by default:
Here’s how I turn them off.
On your Dashboard, go to Settings
and then Advanced settings
. Uncheck Collect analytics
and hit Save
.
Add this to your theme’s CSS:
#upvote-form .upvote-button .upvote-count {
display: none;
}
Click Save
. Boom! Gone!
You can hide any blog from your Discover feed. I hide my own. It’s not like I need to discover it.
If you really want to make your presence known, get in touch.
5-a-side was cancelled, so I'm having a chill evening at home.