Found on the Web

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Links I’d share in private #10

10! Already 10 of these types of posts, where I share what I encounter online during my readings and watching! Lots of content, as usual, to share this week! The hot weather here in Montreal doesn’t stop me from writing online ๐Ÿ™‚

Keywords: Decentralized systems and IndieWeb; Generative AI; AI bots scraping; Fonts; beautiful website and kitchen design; Instagram accounts with beautiful pictures to follow; Femininity and gender roles in sport world; Community; Dystopian; Shareholder supremacy; Midwestern life.

TO READ

  • The unified theory of fucks
  • The expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI: The Internet is increasingly getting spammed by AI content, and it’s getting difficult to find original content and authentic connections online. Large language models (LLMs) are becoming more sophisticated, and soon they will be able to generate indistinguishable human-written content. This will make it harder to verify if someone online is a real person. The author also suggests several ways to prove your humanity, including referencing obscure knowledge, using creative language, and meeting people in real life. “Assumed Audience [of the text]: People who have heard of GPT-3 / ChatGPT, and are vaguely following the advances in machine learning, large language models, and image generators. Also people who care about making the web a flourishing social and intellectual space.”
  • The IndieWeb for Everyone: “Itโ€™s like everyone has spent the last few years in a giant all-inclusive resort, screaming at each other for attention at the buffet. Now weโ€™re moving into nice little bed-and-breakfast places, but weโ€™re complaining because it takes slightly more effort to book a room, and the free WIFI isnโ€™t as fast. Maybe its time to rethink some of these expectations. Maybe we need some of that early internet vibe back and be ok with smaller, closer communities. Maybe we can even get some of the fun back and start exploring again, instead of expecting everything to be automatically delivered to us in real time. We can remind ourselves of what social media used to be: a way to connect around shared interests, talk to friends, and discover new content. No grifts, no viral fame, no drama.”
  • We’ve lost the plot: in this constant bombardment of entertainment in all the screens surrounding us, it has led to several negative consequences. It made us more susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy theories; it made us self-centered and performative, as we strive to be the “main character” of our lives on social medias; and it has desensitized us to real-world tragedies, becoming accustomed to seeing violence and suffering on our screens. Let’s try to be more mindful of our entertainment’s consumption, and remember the importance of distinguishing between fiction and reality. Let’s enjoy the entertainment as it’s supposed to be: a way to expand our understanding of the world rather than to escape from it.
  • Travelling at the speed of the soul: Travelling by foot allows the traveller to connect with the world in a deeper way. And being an avid walker myself, I love stories from other walkers across the World. This one is about the importance of pilgrimage and the act of walking, from an author writing about his journey from London to Istanbul.
  • Another excellent Ed Zitron article: “The Shareholder Supremacy“: on the negative effects of shareholder supremacy on everything: quality of products and services; pleasing to investors instead of customers or employees; and the rise of layoffs and financial engineering.
  • I am pleasing to Everyone: the Netflix documentary series about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders gives an interesting view on the cheerleaders’ rigorous tryout process, and it delves into the cult of femininity surrounding the squad. It is fascinating to watch, highlighting both the allure and the potential harm of the idealized feminine image they embody, showing the pressure on women to conform to societal expectations and the exploitation of workers in the entertainment/sport industries.
  • The American Moms Abroad who are milking it for TikTok: a reminder that yes, it’s great to live in countries where you have social benefits like healthcare and “free” education, but what you see on social medias ain’t the complete picture!
  • Why I think Lincoln, Nebraska is Great: it is good to see folks present their lives in the American Midwest lands. In this case, how Lincoln, Nebraska, has a pretty interesting multicultural food scene coffee shops, and opportunities for activism in a friendly place with a strong sense of community.

TO SEE

  • I’ve been following this YouTuber, Chelsea Callahan, for a while now: a young New Yorker in her thirties just living her life in a vlog format. What I love about Chelsea is just how relatable she is: a young woman trying to live her best realistic life with her cats in a busy metropolis while trying to have fun! She is always open and honest about her mental state, her struggles and her challenges, and I love seeing her evolve into this strong woman.
  • Another YouTuber I like, Solar Camper Car, who lives in his car in a very sustainable way! I really love his charming good soul, his honest take on his lifestyle, and all the knowledge he shares through his travels. These days, he’s in our province, which I love discovering through his eyes! Poor soul went in LAVAL of all places ๐Ÿ˜‚

Quote

As we age, our knowledge and experience garner increased trust from others, unlike when we were younger and felt the need to constantly prove ourselves. By the time we reach middle age, we’ve often become so accustomed to striving for validation that we have difficulty recognizing and embracing our own inherent authority and knowledge. Embrace you: you have everything to make it work.

TO FOLLOW

DESIGN

  • SWISSPOSTERS (also on Threads)
    I’m a sucker for beautifully designed posters with loud graphics!
  • I love Before/After renovation stories. And this Kitchen remodel is simply so gorgeous! I especially love the brick chimney in that blue and grey kitchen! Kinda want to paint my kitchen in blue and grey!
  • Beautiful website of the week: CollectiveOffice, an architecture collective presenting their work in a beautifully crafted website.

RECIPES

CYBERSECURITY

  • I’m seeing more and more pushbacks against AI bots scraping the Internet’s content for free. THis article on Jeremy Keith blog gives an interesting take on this approach, and I’m more and more on the team of poisoning the machine in any ways possible. Or Edit your robots.txt files to block bots from scraping your website!

Tech & Web

  • Font Interceptor is an interesting tool that helps you download all fonts in use on a target website.
  • Your LOL tool/font: Sans Bullshit Sans is an experimental font using the power of ligatures to turn bullshit markteing language into bullshit images.
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Links I’d share in private #7

This week, I’m trying something different: adding Category names between my links’ shares/text. I wanted to give a quicker way for folks to browse my content, and go straight to their fields of interest.

Keywords this week: history of blogging; Ed Zitron; personal branding; billionaire tech money; beautiful art account to follow; some inspirational images; and a lot of opinion and articles on the subject of how bad Google Search is becoming.

To Read

  • “Weโ€™ve been waiting 20 years for this“: This is an article about the history of blogging and its potential resurgence, discussing its rise in the early 2000s and its impact on journalism. It also explores the reasons why blogging declined, the possibility of a new blogging revolution, and that the new wave of blogging will be focusing on personal expression and niche communities rather than mass audiences. You’ll understand that this article got my interest as I consider myself a blogger from the first wave, having started blogging back in 2000 on LiveJournal!
  • Quote: “Go for a walk. A long walk can free you from even the most vicious of mental prisons.”
    I can’t agree more! Walks have kept me sane for decades, and have always been my ways of healing, taking time to explore my surroundings, and take the time to just breathe while enjoying the views. I even used to have my own category of blog posts, called “Chroniques du Voyeurisme”, where I wrote about what I saw when I was able to view inside people’s houses and inner lives for a moment. On another note, this tip for long walks from Kottke’s website is full of wisdom.
  • Author I’ve discovered this last week – Ed Zitron: I’m sharing 3 articles I’ve read from this author, which I’ve loved for his intake on the economy (it’s rotting), Google Search (it’s getting shittier), and AI (did it peaked yet?). Lots to simmer, but I think there is something rotting in the land of Tech & the Economy, and Ed has a way with words.
  • “The Gravitational Force of Tech Money“: Dave Karpf examines the significant influence that large sums of money from the tech industry have on various sectors, particularly politics and innovation, arguing that the massive influx of tech money has reshaped the landscape, often dictating the direction and priorities of technological advancements and political campaigns in a wrong direction, not for the benefits of humankind. It points out that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few tech companies can stifle competition and limit the diversity of ideas and innovations. Additionally, the sway these companies hold over political processes raises concerns about the health of democratic institutions and the potential for policy decisions that favour corporate interests over public good.
  • “Elite College Admissions Have Turned Students Into Brands“: Everything is becoming a matter of personal branding now, and how you “sell” yourself to the masses. In this article, it goes over how younger generations are being pushed to forge an “impressive identity” and personal brand in their teenage years to have a better chance for contingented school programs and work opportunities. It’s getting crazy hard out there in our society, and I am scared for the pressure of performance it’s going to have on my own teenager in the next couple of years…

Images

Music

  • Playlist to listen to: All Tabs: One of the newsletters that I follow, Today in Tabs, has shared a HUUUGGGGGEEEEEE music playlist on Spotify, and so far, I love it. Lots of new musical discovery, but also lots of classic songs I liked in the past, relistening to them is fun.

To Follow

  • I’ve discovered this Artsy Page, Il Mondo di Patty, on Facebook this week, and I really love it! It’s not at all become they had interesting arts with cats, noooooooooooooo ๐Ÿ˜‰

Design

Cybersecurity

  • Like this person wrote on her LinkedIn page, do more searches on Bing search engines! Not only is it becoming more accurate than Google, but its ways of evaluating content – and showing it in results – seems much more solid than currently on Google. “Bing and Google have different ways of ranking websites in search results. Bing focuses more on traditional SEO (search engine optimization) factors like keywords in domain names, page titles, and metadata, while Google prioritizes context and semantics (this is a good example for why you should use both!). Bing tends to prioritize content that has been around for a while or has already attracted significant traffic. It also has a preference for websites with top-level domains like .gov or .edu.”
  • Interesting PDF on online searches theories that I stumbled upon in my OSINT newsletters I am reading. Learning about +Fravia and its impacts on the community was a nice rabbit holes on this weekend!

Web & Tech

  • There are a LOT of talks online over the Google Search and AI Overviews these last few days, and boy is it going wrong for Google right now. This article is resuming how websites have suffered tremendous views on their webpages, and how Google’s algorithms seems to be prioritizing forums over credible websites. I have a feeling it’s going to be an intense debate in the next few months over Google’s credibility and usefulness as a search engine, and I suspect a rise in other search engines tools like Bing, DuckDuckGo and – yes, still existing! – Yahoo as Google continues to force AI into users’ throats…
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Links I’d share in private #6

Another week, another blogpost where I share what I read/saw/love from my Internet bingeing. This week’s keywords: a yummy recipe; on missing human curation (which I am doing with my blogposts ๐Ÿ˜› ); on AI enhancing/destroying the current Tech job market; many beautiful Instagram accounts to follow; romanticizing life on low budget; and diet culture is (fucking) everywhere.

  • An easy and yummy recipe: Tofu and veggie stir-fry in sweet ginger sauce. A default recipe, easy to do on week nights, healthy and very tasty. You can replace the tofu with any meat or chickpeas.
  • To read “I miss human curation“: ohhhhhh how I miss the good old days of StumbleUpon and random Internet serendipity. Cassidy Williams’ post captures my feelings about how the algorithmic social medias of today kinda kills the randomness of discovering new authors and interesting content online. Her text gave me the encouragements needed to keep pushing myself to write on my own blog, curating all of my favourites of the moment into interesting articles and blogposts.
  • Free images: I’m a sucker for beautiful pictures. And being a content creator, I like to add meaningful photos to my blog posts, adding some visual features to gain attention for my content. So I’m sharing these free websites where you can find beautiful graphics for your online content: Lummi, Pexels, Unsplash, Pixabay, Freepik,
  • Article “When new technologies arrive, who wins and who losses?“: on how AI tools can enhance – and destroy! – the current Tech job market. “Perhaps not surprisingly, the researchers found that when a new tool can perform a task in place of a worker, all affected workers suffer. โ€œThey experience a loss of wage earnings, and that is largely independent of age, their income level, which sector theyโ€™re working in, the type of job that they do, or whether they have a college degree,โ€ Papanikolaou says. But when a new technology complements workers performing a task, the effects are more variable: the most experienced and highly paid workers suffer, while new hires appear to benefit.” Having felt this first-hand in my web development field – and as a senior web developer – I can concur with this phrase a lot. The most experienced folks are the ones being affected the most, especially with AI now. Anybody can code with the help of AI: the senior ones aren’t as “necessary” as before. That being said, experienced folks can be moved to more analytical/counselling level jobs, which can be better in terms of challenges and work load. So, we’ll see how it pans out in the next 18 months…
  • Instagram account to follow: @thandiwe_muriu
    I’ve been following more and more folks from the african continent on my social networks, and I’ve discovered many interesting stuffs: colors & patterns, music genres, artists to follow, countries to visit… It is a fascinating continent with a different beat of life, and I want to learn more about all the diverse tribes and nations there. Today, I’m presenting an artist that I love their photos and patterns.
  • Nice app “Easy Anatomy 3D”: I love anything related to human biology/anatomy, and I had the chance to come across this wonderful little app showing the human body in all its splendour and amazingness. It gives tons of information about any part from the human body, and I would have loved to have this app when I was studying anatomy back in cegep!
  • “Romanticizing a “low spend” spring” : source
    Interesting ways to enjoy our current “hot” spring in Montreal without breaking your budget. I’ve been on a budget for the last 6 months, and it really made me enjoy life more. No need to spend tons of money to enjoy life!
@morgagefreeleigh on Instagram
  • Article “When diet culture sneaks up on you“: Oh boy did this article made me react strongly. Being “harassed” by my doctor to absolutely lose weight _at all cost_, I can’t help but cry out a little over the culture of diets impacting us all in incredibly little details. This obsession with being slim is getting to a ridiculous extent, and is pretty toxic to me. I understand controlling weight for health reasons, but as I grow older, the body is having a much more difficult time losing that fat, and so far, the only way I have found to NOT gain weight is to restrict myself and _fast_…which ain’t healthy, I’ll be honest. But when I eat, I do not overly obsess over what I eat: I try to stay healthy but ENJOY the food that I eat. Still, the pervasiveness of the diet cultures is everywhere, and I am trying hard not to influence my teenager entering their growth period…
  • Another Instagram to follow: Alvaro Cubero Wildlife: If you love beautiful animal photos, you will fucking love this account!
  • A good question for my readers: How do you handle stress? Be honest, and share with me. It can be in the comments below, on social media, or in private! I’m curious to know, as I went through a burnout/stressful year in 2023, and stress has ALWAYS been a pain in the ass in my life…
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Links I’d share in private #4

This week got me busy on the reading. Again, lots of interesting articles and shares coming your way!

  • I hate the word Happiness. There is an entire philosophy and ways of life behind this word that I do not like: people seeking Happiness at all cost tend to ignore bad emotions (like pain, grief, loss, sadness), and push this goal as an ultimate must. Which is why I prefer to say that I want to be content with my life, and to have interesting moments instead. This quote from the article is a good rรฉsumรฉ on it: “The fact that you might desire a man, a woman, a car, a watch, a piece of jewelry, or a trip doesn’t matter. On the day you have that man, that woman, that car, that watch, that piece of jewelry, or that trip, you’ll realize it’s time to desire something else. So, I usually say I don’t want to be happy… I want to have an interesting life. Having an interesting life means living fully. This presupposes being able to despair when losing something important to you. You need to fully feel the pains: losses, mourning, failures. This idea of happiness that tries to shield us from everything bad is a tremendous disaster.”
  • The entire saga of J.K. Rowlings and her stance on transidentity have left a sour taste in my mouth: as a “Potterhead”, fan of the Wizarding World and all of its literature, Rowling’s opinions on trans activism abruptly made me lost my interest in the entire Harry Potter world. And I am not alone: tons of fans felt abandoned after the author’s vocal opinions on trans people, making a lot of fans feel empty and broken. Laurie Penny wrote a post over the disillusion and treason folks felt in the fandom after Rowling’s opinions became public, feeling completely abandoned. “The children who grew up reading Harry Potter became teenagers who used the Potterverse as a way to connect with each other and interact with politics. Thatโ€™s a good story. But itโ€™s not the end of the story. Because what happened next was that we became adults, many of whom questioned what our most beloved stories had taught us about what it meant to be good โ€“ and what it meant to have power, or to misuse it.” “And what Iโ€™ve observed is glorious and heart-breaking: a core fandom that built itself around a series of stories about tolerance, friendship, fightingย for what they believe is rightย and using power responsibly taking those lessons seriously enough that when the time came, it simply rejected its creator and walked away.”
  • A nice music video – Nia Archives Unfinished Business
  • In “Are Well-Being Apps Actually Harming Us?“, the article highlights concerns regarding the potential negative impacts of certain well-being apps, and advocates for more responsible practices within the industry to safeguard user well-being and privacy. A study conducted by Mozilla suggests that many popular well-being apps may be causing more harm rather than providing benefits. And since these apps are being pushed more and more at work by well-intentioned HR and managerial teams that want to show they care about their employees’ mental and physical health, it cause major harm. “The lessons learned? Despite ostensibly helping vulnerable workers, these apps frequently harm them in three key ways. They promote unrealistic expectations; they shift the responsibility for maintaining a healthy workplace away from the employer and toward the employee; and they amplify harmful mentalities such as performative positivity.”
  • Poetry presented in interesting multimedia/interactive ways? The HTML Review will be your fix! (better viewed on desktop/laptop)
  • Instagram account of the week: Vallesia Obscura
    I’m a sucker for anything Goth. Goth art, goth fashion, goth aesthetics…My soul is a Gothic Punk, and any image in that aesthetic will catch my eyes. Which is why I share this artist’s account!
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Links I’d share in private #3

And I seem to be on a roll again, another week of blogging and commenting on links & readings I came across on the Web! Weeeeeeeee!
Where I comment on topics like: personal branding; workplace burnout; our ways of life isn’t sustainable and we are going nuts; online privacy’s alternative tools.

  • Read on Mastodon: “I understand why “we’re secretly ruled by lizard people” is a popular conspiracy theory because the idea that actual humans are doing this to us is intolerable.”
  • Read “Everyoneโ€™s a sellout now”: kinda ironic that I share this article as someone who is trying to be a content creator on the Internet, but here we are! Still a fascinating read about how personal brands has become a “must”, an obligation, to thrive online: it is everywhere. People dreams to build a following and a community around their fields of interest, and earn a living, but the ways things are in many fields (like in the literary world, or the music industry) kinda destroys the authentic voices. “Because self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to โ€œbuild a platformโ€; we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream โ€” working for yourself and making money doing what you love. The labor of self-promotion or platform-building or audience-growing or whatever our tech overlords want us to call it is uncomfortable; it is by no means guaranteed to be effective; and it is inescapable unless you are very, very lucky.” Personal branding, or the invasion of #marketing in our personal lives, makes my eyes roll so much, and I hate it (I knooooooowwwwwww, ironic that I say it as a blogger who tries to get her voice heard). I guess we are all “attention whores” in a way, vying for people’s short attention for our 15 minutes of fame. But we have to “sell” ourselves out more and more now, otherwise we won’t get the job we want, the apartment/house we dream of living in, the relationships we want in our lives, etc. The type of society we live in makes it harder to not get into this painful “marketing” relationship with others, making it difficult to distinguish if our relations are real/authentic or just fake, and making big companies profit from our personal branding’s attempts. Another interesting quote: “In a recent interview with the Guardian, the author Naomi Klein said the biggest change in the world since No Logo, her 1999 book on consumerism and inescapable branding, came out was that โ€œneoliberalism has created so much precarity that the commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security. Plus social media has given us the tools to market ourselves nonstop.โ€”.
  • Beautiful picture! Source: https://www.threads.net/@emackphoto/post/C34bLQir0rz
  • “The way we live in the United States is not normal”: This article was a punch in the guts, very depressing. While it is USA-centric in terms & description of everyday’s life, we Canadians aren’t immune to the Americanisation of our sociopolitical & economic ways of life. The state of our education and health systems are in shambles, we have to pay out of pocket more and more, everything is becoming expensive, and our salaries aren’t on par with the inflation…We are stuck being so busy, but at the same time we feel so lonely. Our society is truly getting worse by trying to follow the American Way of Life & Capitalism, and it just makes us more depressed. I kinda wish to move out of here and go live anywhere but in North America, where life follows another beat, a slower one…
  • Twitter thread on workplace burnout: the author attempts to describe why we are seeing more and more people being burnt out by work, and gives a hint on how to slow down (hint: say NO a lot more to not feel overloaded!)
  • Link of the week: Awesome Privacy A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy because PRIVACY MATTERS.
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Links I’d share in private #2

Another week, another sharing moment about all the links and tools I have seen and read during this last week. All the things that I consider that are worth sharing with you folks! This week, I focused a lot of my readings on the impact of AI on us; the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights disguised as the protection of Women’s rights; the monoculturization of the Internet culture; and injustices.

Enjoy these links & the reading!

  • A scary read about our eroding rights in North America, and the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, disguised as a Woman’s Rights: this article, while focusing on American’s politics, is worth a read because we are seeing the same tactics across our northern borders here in Canada. “State Republicans across the nation are pushing bills commonly titled the โ€œWomenโ€™s Bill of Rights.โ€ Youโ€™ll be shocked to learn that contrary to the title, however, Republicans havenโ€™t suddenly started to care about womenโ€™s equality or agencyโ€”they just want to use that banner as a cover for stripping away our rights as LGBTQ+ individuals”. I’ll always be an ally for LGBTQ+ & trans rights, as I consider trans women are women, trans men are men, and there is no discussing human rights! But the scary rise of conservative & ultra-religious movements in our political lives is to be watched and counter-act as much as we can. It’s time we become aggressive in the protection of our LGBTQ+ & Trans rights! Do not let them use Women’s rights to demolish trans’ & queer rights!
  • Useful link – “Blocking AI bots on your online content“: if you’re a content creator like me, and just don’t want AI businesses to profit over your online content on your website, there are ways to block those AI from scanning your websites. This article explains how to do it. If you aren’t a tech person, poke me in DM, I will help you set this up!
  • And to continue on the subject of AI – “AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?” My current opinion over the rise of AI in our society (and in tech) is pretty much summed up in this article by Molly White. I share her skepticism and ethical concerns over the over-use of AI in our daily lives right now, as well as the damages it is wreaking among professional circles (like software/web developers), and the security vulnerabilities found in those LLM models and tools. A step back would be needed for us to really reflect on how we want to use this technology moving forward, but I seriously doubt it will happen, as the business people are having such a “hard on” making money with AI right now, and damn the consequences. “Though AI companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern. Still, I do think acknowledging the usefulness is important, while also holding companies to account for their false or impossible promises, abusive labor practices, and myriad other issues. When critics dismiss AI outright, I think in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and benefited from AI tools think “wait, that’s not been my experience at all”.”
  • The Internet culture and online communities is getting bland, and I hate it! We’ve seen the rise of online communities, rich with dialogue and sharing diverse life’s experiences, in the end of 2000s/early 2010s, and I was all for it! It was so refreshing to finally find your tribe and peers across the planet, and not feel alone! Since the mid-2010s, the rise in popularity of social media has pretty much killed off the few nested circles and communities that were online, eliminating the diversification of voices. The rise of aggressive comments by trolls also ended up killing the desire to share lives that people had in these communities, preventing people from grouping together and sharing things in common. And the rise of those social medias gated the communities into their platforms and communities’ guidelines, restricting more and more their diverse voices online and killing off these vibrant communities as time passes by. This article uses the metaphor of ecology, and cultivating a vibrant a diverse forest, to talk how the Internet is becoming a bland monoculture finding ways for us to spend money on trying to connect with other human beings in different ways, be it as gatekeeping communities by making us pay (ร  la X/Twitter), or by making us pay for trying to belong to a community that we so want to belong to. “The internetโ€™s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internetโ€™s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few. Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. Theyโ€™re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.”
  • “Why I swear by “My year of No” “: this blog article really called out to me, because I had several phases in my recent past when I said no to everything: no to going out, no to seeing people, no to overbooking my schedule of activities or tasks, no to family’s obligationsโ€ฆ Saying no, and just staying home doing nothing, having no obligation… It was such a liberation! A freeing sense of freedom and control over my life, where I felt good about myself. And when I realized in therapy that my old ways of overbooking my calendar was a way of running away from my traumas and past, the moment I started refusing and saying no… It gave me the space to work on my issues, start accepting myself as I am, and be able to enjoy life again, but at a much slower pace. I highly recommend saying no more, it’s worthwhile!
  • Ohhhhhhhh How I miss George Carlin! I would have loved his views on our current society’s problems… My punk rage against society’s injustices is feeling validated by this quote.
    Quote: “A person of good intelligence and sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality – and it’s not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing – it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.”
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Links I’d share in private

Been a while I haven’t shared random links and readings I had through my Internet’s binging. Enjoy these useful links and content!

  • Useful Link: https://www.ilovepdf.com : Useful website to edit, manipulate and transform PDF files all for free. Just make sure you aren’t manipulating private informations in your PDF before using this site, as I can’t guarantee how the files are kept and processed on their servers…
  • Quote: “Careers donโ€™t exist. Donโ€™t worry about the narrative of your โ€œcareer.โ€ Pursue your interests. Take care of your needs. Adapt to new circumstances. And be willing to reinvent yourself at any age.” (source of quote: Calvin Rosser – 40 Unconventional Pieces of Advice That Most People Ignore)
    I’ve learned this lesson the hard way last fall. Careers can be scrapped in a heartbeat: better be adaptable and follow your guts when it’s time to move on and change career. That’s what I did, and so far, my mental health is SO MUCH BETTER! Anxiety has diminished by A LOT, and I don’t feel like an incompetent baboon improvising her ways through her career…I haven’t felt the imposter syndrome in months now, which is refreshing!
  • Interesting Reading: Google is killing Retro Dodo – an excellent story explaining why we should start using alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo when we search for content online: Google is now entering their Monetization era and promoting only paying customers’ websites and links instead of independent websites owners and content creators.
    Now is the time to start paying all the independent creators that you like, as their survival depends on us now. Encourage indie content creators by subscribing to their Patreon; follow their RSS feed through Feedly or any RSS app reader; subscribe to their social medias accounts. Fuck the monopolistic approach of Google (and the Big Techs)!
    Which reminds me: I’ll have to ressucitate the Blogroll section on my own homepage, so I can recommend my favorite bloggers and content creators to follow online!
  • Thoughtful Reading: The state of Culture 2024 – another depressing thought piece, but sooooooo worth the read! Our culture and art, and yes even the Entertainment industry, are being drained through the Dopamine cartel, making us addicted to short attention span’s medias and content consumption. It’s time to start breaking from our addictions, and take small steps into breaking up with our tech devices. Go visit an art exhibit, go see a music show, go walk outside.
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Read on the Internet: “The Date Rape Song”, by Matthew Barlow

“And then the commentariat! My feed lit up with my friends arguing against me. I even got chastised for being a bad historian for failing to note the song is from the 1940s. Over and over, the context of the song was explained to me. But thatโ€™s the thing, this cuts both ways. If we want to consider historical context for things, then letโ€™s discuss Confederate War monuments.”

The Date Rape Song