One thing I never thought I would miss is… leaving windows and doors open in the house during the day/night while working, year-round. Like, insulation in Brazil is non-existent (reminder: insulation also helps to keep a place cool when it’s hot), so people just leave windows and doors open to create an airflow inside their house[1]. This leads to street …
Category: Rambling
Ramblings about this and that.
2,000 words on physical notebooks (sorry)
I don’t like writing by hand. It’s slow, it’s clunky, it’s not indexable or searchable, it consumes physical materials, and requires physical space. Digital note-taking, though, isn’t automatically better. I used to save drafts, links, images, and whatever else on OneNote and it was fast, but it became pure chaos of random things kinda-categorized-but-not-really, and finding stuff was a nightmare. …
“Rewilding the Internet”
Some time ago I read an article that compared the internet to a forest, and how it thrives on diversity in a plural and complex ecosystem instead of being a monoculture, like it is today. It’s a very interesting analogy and very well worth reading. I like this idea a lot. I’m not that old (I think?): I was born …
Ultima Online nostalgia
A trip down the memory lane There was a time when the genre of “MMORPGs” had more variety than just another copy-paste version of a single-player game story that you go through with a bunch of people over the internet, which is the common formula used today. I wish that the genre had gone in the direction of free-form exploration/roleplay …
I guess I don’t hate coding
Messing around with Decker and Twine is making me realize I don’t necessarily hate coding, I hate dealing with tables, arrays, matrices, and things like that. 20 years ago I got into a Computer Engineering major in a local college and, to be honest, it was quite alright. I was a good student and got good grades, but hated coding. I always liked the …
Visual creativity
Over the last few months, I’ve started to realize that I’m a very visual person, which is funny for someone who’s nearsighted, has a bit of facial blindness, and probably has aphantasia or something similar. When I started making music as a hobby, years ago, I trialed many different DAWs. Almost all of them have the same capacities, with a …
I miss my Mazda 323
It was not a great car. I mean, it’s a Mazda, so it’s pretty good overall, but it was a vehicle from 2003. That’s the last year Mazda made the 323 before switching to the Mazda3. So, great car all around, except for this particular one, which had gone around more than 200,000 kilometers before we bought it. We dipped …
Changing music services is a miserable experience
Why does changing streaming services, or even music player software, have to be an experience so hostile? The first time I moved from one “music service” to another was when I moved from Winamp to iTunes. Heresy, I know, but my music collection was growing fast and I wanted an easy way to manage all the files, and iTunes provided …
The phonology of European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese
There is some weird stuff going on with these two variants that I think it’s interesting to explore because they diverge in more than just vocabulary, as the phonology for each one moved in different directions — and in the European Portuguese case, removed itself quite a bit from the usual path Romance languages have been following. I should note …
Random nostalgia-inducing things
Whenever I listen to AC/DC, I instantly remember of Neverwinter Nights. It’s kinda weird, but it kinda makes sense: I bought my NwN’s hard box copy (which I still have) and a CD version of Back in Black together, in the same place. (It was in a hypermarket.) When NwN was being installed, Back in Black was playing on my …