though tecnically this isn’t a piping video, it’s contextual and in the background you can hear me playing, i played a whole set of tracks with some musicians there
i haven’t been posting because i have been through many changes in my personal life. i changed jobs, continents, language and even name (since my name is never properly pronounced).
one thing i’ve been realizing while i’m here (in australia) is that the nationalist fervor around home grown produce, which before might have been just a nasty nationalist pride thing, has come full circle and become relevant to the environmental concerns of today
for the little bit i’ve gathered, which might in the end require further investigation, there are “australian owned”, “100% aussie”, “genuine australian” tags everywhere, on stores and food labels. while this comes off as cheesy pride, it actually means that there is a bridge to be built between the local nationalist prickry of the right and the buy local act local trendy leftist mindset. it is in practice irrelevant if the local consumer is buying because he’s a bigot or he’s concerned about the environment if the whole supply chain is already sustainable and local
in this sense, and this is one of the strongest ideas i’ve had of this country so far, is that of its tremendous potential to become an example of sustainable, local and good life. we’re not talking about outsource energy and emissions. we’re talking about fertile land, sun and great food. if we add to it the strong economy, australia is probably one of the best candidates to jump straight to a locally sustained society. obviously there are many issues, such as mining, immigration and the aboriginal community issues. but all that seems small when put in context: a huge, fertile, beautiful country that lacks only the drive to become an example. just this month australia passed its first carbon tax. if anything, i feel parallels with my country, a tremendous potential to elevate a whole nation into moderate local sustainability, the main difference being my country doesn’t have the economy australia does
i’m low on posts here but i hope to bring some new ones. as i’ve settled, the posts might start to flow again
some portuguese pipes again and another one of those weird traditional dances
more and more we share online. we share thoughts, emotions, ideas, photos, friendships. don’t get me wrong, i love sharing. but sharing has always existed in many ways and even online it has gone through some evolution. though i’m young, i’ve been a “netizen” for over a decade now, and i was fortunate enough to go online when it was mostly personally driven: animated gifs, funny personal webpages “this is me”, shitty search engines that forced everyone to spend hours browsing to find anything useful. luckily, this has changed. we now have faster, easier ways to connect to each other. this doesn’t mean they are new ways, since before the internet people made their “social networks” in other ways
one of the main evolutions of the internet has been the change into big business. being online back in the day meant you had a server, or at least some access to a server. universities, companies, allowed people to have their own personal webpages. they didn’t need ads because there were no infrastructure issues. webpages were simple, and people shared what they were passionate about. it was klunky to post, so it was common for articles to be lengthy and for pages to have a lot of very detailed information
but then, money joined and soon there were banner ads and big companies making money off people’s interactions. this was the beginning of the commodification of personal interactions. instead of making and elaborate description, i’ll illustrate with an example
let’s say that today you want to share something with your friends. since calling would cost you money and email would probably take a while, you’ll just post it on facebook. nothing wrong with that, right? it’s easy, fast and everyone (that wants to) gets notified. but as soon as you post, when your friends read it, they will read it with contextual ads. what you posted, no matter how naive or plain, will cause your friends to check it and with it, get ad exposure. whenever you share online, unless you own your website or your server, someone will be monetizing what you’ve done. no matter if it’s personal, deep or shallow. your thoughts are being monetized and your popularity among your peers exploited for profit
some might say that this is fine, the service has to be paid somehow, right? wrong. the internet works so that everyone can run their own server and above all, share with everyone else. fuck, even RSS has made federation easy. so it’s not that we’re stuck with commodification, we’re just lazy to do the extra work or shy about asking someone to help us
i’m not writing today to lecture anyone into anything. i believe people have the right to make their own decisions. what i’m proposing today, instead, is a different way of being online. i’m not the only one that feels a kind of “social network disgust”, as if in some weird way, we know we are being exploited. but i have a simple proposal that i call KItTY: Keep ItTo Yourself. sharing is excellent, if you have something to say. if all you are doing is contributing to the global random noise, then i don’t think sharing is good. a book i recently got, you are not a gadget by jaron lanier, makes a good case about how we’ve become a culture that praises the poorly performed and the amateurish.
i believe that it is important to keep things to ourselves until they mature enough that they are interesting and meaningful. because if we don’t, our contributions to society will become fragmented and disconnected
it is not important to post every picture you took when you traveled. it is important to post what was meaningful for you when you traveled. but one cannot extract meaning from things without building narratives, thinking about things, and above all, keeping most things to oneself. that’s what lets life experiences mature like good wine, that they are corked and not left out in the open. only after they have matured, they become good to our taste
this is my last post in my country, and this serves as a warning too. i don’t plan to make reports of what i do, because i believe in KItTY, keeping it to yourself. if i find something meaningful and interesting, for sure i’ll share it
if you don’t want to be sold out, just learn to KItTY!
despite the song being from galicia, this is a nice video of the northern mask traditions.
even though i’m not from there at all (only if i trace my roots) and didn’t grow up the tradition myself, i decided to prop up my act with a costume.
i’m still not sure about the mask, but this one is just a small sheet i can fold into my bag. i like the wooden ones better but i couldn’t carry them on the (several) planes i’ll be taking.
as many people know i’m leaving the country soon. i decided to take with me what i consider to be some of the most interesting (and exotic) features of our culture, and that in a way ties me to local national legend. to be accurate, bagpipers wouldn’t dress up like this usually, instead wearing more formal clothing. but since i’m just making my own interpretation, i’m not worried
as for the busking act itself, i haven’t been very successful, but also haven’t been practicing much. percussion is essential but i’m usually alone, so i decided on this suit because it also has some cow bells around the waist, which adds to the sound.
there are several big issues when busking with this instrument: it’s too loud, sounds creaky if not played right, and people get annoyed after 15 minutes. this means the show has to be short and dramatic. at least that’s the way i see it, since i don’t have drummers to play with me.
this volume has been a great challenge for me, since i can’t play in a way it doesn’t damage my ears and the ears of people around me if i’m indoors. since it’s so loud, people can’t come close which constrains the busking to open spaces.
the repertoire choice is also a challenge, since most people won’t recognize any song at all. hell, even the locals don’t recognize songs. i’ve been trying to see which songs people enjoy the most, but i’m trying to expand my repertoire to songs outside the standard piping traditions. one of the things i’m enjoying is exploring modal shifts with the minor as a baseline. in regular jazz we take the major as the baseline, but with a minor-tuned instrument, it’s interesting to explore which modes are easier and harder. anyway, the philosopher bagpiper, coming soon to london and sydney
cool portuguese tunes played by foreign people. our gaita is getting popular. today we’re doing a small diy segment again
me and T first prototyped a solar pouch almost a year ago. we designed it because one of the issues with solar chargers by themselves is that you have to carry them along side your electronics. putting them in bags is common, but expensive, so we designed a pouch with a panel and a charging cable.
since the first test, i designed an improved version of it using a 6V panel that is a single piece, versus the other diy segment i did previously that used 1V cells. with this 6V panel and a diode, i made a trickle charger for the cellphone. basically, if there’s enough sun, it charges the phone. if you put the phone inside the pouch, it charges it and also it protects it. it’s handy and feels more organic than having a separate unit. the jack for the charger on this model is on the side, which makes it kind of ridiculous to use. i guess i could mod the phone, but instead i’m willing to bend the jack a little.
feel free to copy this design, it is under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. if you want to sell them let me know and we’ll work something out. here’s how to do it:
materials
6V solar panel with less than 3W (in this case, 2W) so it doesn’t burn your electronics equipment (see what the power of your cellphone charger is and choose a panel below that power)
diode (any diode works, a shottky would be better, but i had a lot of regular ones). one advantage is that on a 6V polarization the diode should be at about 0.7V, which in turn makes the whole thing output 5.3 ~ 5V for the cellphone
a jack for your phone. i cut mine from an old charger. make sure it works (this was the second one i used, the first one didn’t work)
fabric, velcro and glue for the pouch. be creative. bland black pouches are so passé
soldering iron, multimeter, solder and whatever you enjoy to have around when you do electronics
instructions
sew a pouch that has about the same size as the panel. make sure it swells enough to stick to the panel even when the electronics are in it
solder the diode to the panel (to the plus terminal, make sure it is polarized correctly so that current flows only to the cellphone)
test the panel in direct sun. if it doesn’t work now, start again
solder the other end of the diode to the cable and jack (check the plus and minus with a multimeter)
test the panel on the jack terminals. if it doesn’t work now, start again
glue the pouch to the panel using whatever glue you may have. put something inside the pouch so that you don’t glue the pouch to itself
test it under the sun and happy charging!
results
it works! that’s it. this is an easy (and less extreme) way of doing a self-powered device. be creative! stick panels on everything!
demo video. i wasn’t drunk, i was filming with one hand, so i couldn’t plug the jack. the main thing is there: it charged!
i found this panel on some online store. just look for 6V panels and you’ll find some. these weren’t that cheap but they are sturdy and give enough juice to charge the cellphone in about 3 hours. also, on a lithium battery, you don’t want to charge all the time. but it’s definitely handy to have around. thanks for reading!
in sync with all the studies i published, CS has finally become a for-profit organization. as some other organizations have done, they started as a pseudo-non-profit (they never got the status approved) and with it, accepted donations and volunteer work to make the website grow. thanks to all that volunteer work, the website grew to a staggering 3,000,000+. once it got too big to fail, they sold it off and now it’s owned bycompanies such as ebay to investment groups that have in their funded website list organizations like twitter and are owned by, among others, the people behind ebay. while this is a big blow to volunteers, since i never volunteered more than my own couch, i don’t feel as bad as many do right now.
but that’s not really what i’m writing about today. today i’m writing my eulogy to my own participation on CS. i might still use it, but i certainly won’t use it the same way.
CS changed my life more than any other online community i’ve been a part of. not because it is very good as an online community, but because it promotes offline connections. this allowed me to meet almost 1000 amazing people from all over the world, allowed be to grow and test my own political ideologies, and most importantly, establish a network of friendships all over the globe. let me make it very clear: CS has made my life incredibly better in many different ways, and i’d be a fool to get angry because they decided to go a different ideological route than they did at the beginning.
what CS does is priceless in terms of breaking cultural boundaries in a select group of the traveling population. in practice, a couch is not commonly given to the poor, the needy or the oppressed. i ran the tests, see GDP data. the people that use CS are the people that don’t need to use CS. but that’s what makes them special. these are travelers that (still) believe traveling is more than a tour guide and a hotel, and no matter how naive, superficial or materialistic they might be, these core values create a very idealistic community.
it was there that i got the support and like-mindedness to advance my ideas for community building, and most importantly, understood how diverse we are and how important it is to listen to each other.
so seeing CS go for-profit (even if they call it “B”, it’s still for-profit), is both its coming of age and mine. since i started, i have been on permanent state of deepening my own understanding of how things work between common people. what i found, that can be seen in all the studies i’ve done all these years, has not only surprised me but given me a stronger basis for when i say people are generally good, trusting and above all, creative and empathetic. i have gathered evidence that demonstrates that age, race, gender or nationality are irrelevant, and that what still matters is the real human moments created and the setting they are created in. it matters more if you are tired and need a bed, hungry and need food, or lonely and need a hug, than whether you are rich or poor, black or white, man or woman or other.
i have also learned one of the biggest lessons of my life. though this wasn’t through CS, it was thanks to CS that i met the amazing people that helped me achieve it. i learned that the homeless, the weak, the junkies, petty thieves and low-lives that surround us are not hopelessly trapped, not invalids and certainly not lazy, no matter how the capitalist individualist mindset tries to push that through propaganda. i have seen hiv positive people with their eyes lit about the future as they worked for a common goal even though their lives had been dramatically shortened, i have seen junkies reduce their drug use for the simple fact that they were fed and happy. above all, i have see that social justice and a meaningful existence are the most powerful tools one can have to change the world around us. empathy and compassion but also bravery and relentlessness to exert them.
but it was also through these experiments and experiences that i learned that new ideas are necessary. i grew frustrated with the middle class european activists that i would meet, that seemed to be more focused on hypothetical situations and impossible practical options than getting their hands dirty. and above all, the overwhelming majority of humans that though having their hearts in the right place, feel they can’t do more, powerless to do more, and hopeless for the future.
i can say that certainly there is little hope, but hope is for those who don’t know what the consequences of their actions are. we are only hopeful and faithful if we don’t know what will come of our doings. i have no hope and no faith on my own future now because i understand what works and what doesn’t, and above all, have finally detached myself from the veiled need for survival.
i grew frustrated, as time went by, of how many people were telling me they wanted to change the world. of how many were telling me others were wrong and they were right. but when asked a concrete ideal for our present, there was none. this is the value crisis we live in, and this is where i focus my ideological work now.
none of this would have been possible without CS and the wonderful people i met through it. but CS itself was an organization i had a high moral respect for. what they were doing, though naive, was sending a message to the world that borders and property weren’t realities, but man-made fictions. what CS confirms now is that the idealistic, when naive, are quickly capitalized by the unscrupulous elite. CS has gone from the wonderful idealistic and incompetent group of people that just wanted to meet foreigners and do parties with all of them, to a serious business venture. this, therefore, makes it incompatible with the way i see things should be done. either one is for profit openly, as airbnb for example, or one is for other goals, like servas. what CS did was a bait and switch: get volunteers, raise enough social capital, and once you’re big enough, sell and go for profit with all the work done by the volunteers. the only thing wrong here is the fact that there was a clear claim they were non-profit when it wasn’t true. i certainly don’t appreciate being lied to or deceived, so now i will provide alternatives to whoever seeks equivalent systems.
i wouldn’t say CS owes me anything or that i owe CS anything. for the years i worked with it, it was more of a mutual reciprocity exchange. now that my experiences will be sold, i feel that trust has been broken and will move on.
here’s my list. i recommend anyone who hosts on CS and wants to leave to maintain their profile and write to people to request to them through other networks. that way, one can transition people from CS to other networks, to stop the deception.