crissequeira's recent activity

  1. Comment on What is the truth about risks and benefits of seed oils? in ~food

  2. Comment on Everything is a remix in ~tech

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    Interesting. I just discovered that I actually had added Lessig’s book to my wishlist a long time ago. Thanks for telling me about it.

    Interesting. I just discovered that I actually had added Lessig’s book to my wishlist a long time ago. Thanks for telling me about it.

  3. Comment on Do you take inventory of your hobbies and projects? in ~life

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    oof I had this exact experience a while ago, and I seriously got depressed.

    I work from home on a computer all day and I found that not even getting up from my chair when I switch from work to gaming was seriously impacting all aspects of my health.

    oof I had this exact experience a while ago, and I seriously got depressed.

    5 votes

  4. Do you take inventory of your hobbies and projects?

    ~life Ask (survey)
    Most of my time in any given day is spent sleeping (eight hours), working (nine hours, plus another one or two for commuting), chores (maintaining the home, personal hygiene, etc.), and spending...

    Most of my time in any given day is spent sleeping (eight hours), working (nine hours, plus another one or two for commuting), chores (maintaining the home, personal hygiene, etc.), and spending time with my wife (and occasionally with friends and family).

    This means that I don’t have a lot of “spare time”. I maybe get one or two hours a day, and a few more on Saturdays and Sundays.

    I often feel anxious and depressed about this inescapable reality. I have a lot of projects and hobbies that I would like to fill my spare time with, but not enough for all of them.

    Years ago, I began to try to reframe the circumstances of my life in my mind in order to prevent a complete mental collapse. I tell myself that this life is finite, that I will never be able to have all the experiences that I would like to, and that’s OK. I can live with that reality. And I should instead, focus my energy on dedicating myself to the projects and hobbies that I absolutely do not want to miss out on.

    I still struggle to stick to just a few of those, because there are so many (especially creative) activities that I enjoy. I regularly go through cycles of taking on too many of these, then becoming overwhelmed because I don’t have enough time for each, then cutting out most of them to focus on the ones that I want to prioritize, and repeating the cycle.

    Today, I have reached the part of that cycle where I will cut some of them out.

    Whenever I do that, it really helps me to take inventory of what those activities are, so that I can stay focused, and delay taking on more or new ones until I am satisfied with where I got with my current ones.

    So, here are the projects and hobbies that I want to spend my spare time on, starting today:

    • Reading one hour every morning (been diligently doing that since January 1). Two books I am reading through the year. A third book I read as much as I have time left (have read more than ten this year already). I also occasionally read some blogs on Bear Blog.
    • Writing on two blogs (one daily, one occasionally), as well as writing my book.
    • Occasionally chatting on a forum, Tildes, and four Discord guilds.
    • Taking one daily walk while listening to a podcast.
    • Occasionally watching YouTube videos (I am—coincidentally—subscribed to exactly 50 channels, almost all of which have an upload schedule of one video every other week or slower).

    What are your activities?

    Side notes: The list above is a summary. My list is a lot more precise, to help me focus. Also, I’m currently unemployed, but before I quit my last job, I had actually been working almost without interruption for several years. My day-to-day routine back then was exactly as I described it in the beginning of this post.

    19 votes

  5. Comment on Introductions | March 2025 in ~talk

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    I give dating and relationship advice as a hobby. 😂 Haha. I never got paid for it (though I wouldn’t mind). In 2022 I gave a five-part lecture to a group of 15 young people ages 16 to 25 about...

    I give dating and relationship advice as a hobby. 😂 Haha. I never got paid for it (though I wouldn’t mind).

    In 2022 I gave a five-part lecture to a group of 15 young people ages 16 to 25 about dating and relationships, but on the Internet, I have chatted with thousands of people from all walks of life (all ages, locations, cultures, you name it). I love doing it.

    And no. I don’t have any education in the field. All of my experience is anecdotal, and all of my advice is based on common sense (and also noticing patterns after talking to thousand of people). I have also talked to many dozens in person, as opportunities arose. You’re correct that I’m all about empathy and communication, but I can also give you very practical advice.

    I am writing a book on dating and relationships. I am 11 chapters in. 11 more to go. I’m hoping to get it done before the end of this year. I also started running this little blog, where I aggregate real stories to serve as examples.

    7 votes

  6. Comment on Introductions | March 2025 in ~talk

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    You’re welcome. 😊 South. The region of the Algarve, to be precise. I miss it dearly, but can’t imagine myself going back. Portugal has become a bit of a fourth-world country in recent years. 😅...

    You’re welcome. 😊

    South. The region of the Algarve, to be precise. I miss it dearly, but can’t imagine myself going back. Portugal has become a bit of a fourth-world country in recent years. 😅 Bureaucracy, healthcare, jobs, housing, everything is on the brink of collapse. There have been three successive governments in the last three years, and the latest one was dissolved a few days ago. It’s still a beautiful, sunny place, with lots of great food, and a welcoming culture, but it’s become unlivable to poor people like me.

    Latvia is very flat, very green (one of the few countries in Europe where more and more trees are growing), full of beautiful forests, lakes and swamps, but also cold and cloudy most of the year. It snows heavily in the winter. The food is good. The people tend to be distant. In every other way that I complained about Portugal though, it’s doing a lot better. If Russia doesn’t invade or nuke us, then Latvia (along with Estonia and Lithuania) is a fast-developing nation that could become a great place to move to in the future.

    Language is very hard to learn though (and very necessary).

    4 votes

  7. Comment on Everything is a remix in ~tech

    crissequeira
    Link
    I don’t understand why people are so indifferent about this topic. I think it’s one of the most atrocious modern crimes that the rich and powerful are perpetrating right under our noses. It really...

    I don’t understand why people are so indifferent about this topic. I think it’s one of the most atrocious modern crimes that the rich and powerful are perpetrating right under our noses. It really riles me up.

    I think that copyright, patent, and trademark laws have gone far beyond their original intent, and rather than encouraging innovation, have actually only served to stifle it, and have allowed large corporations to engage in anti-consumer practices, completely unchecked. What’s worse, is that these same corporations have successfully lobbied ignorant politicians into tightening their grip around their “intellectual property”. This documentary, along with many other videos from the same creator, gives lots of great examples.

    I think that the concept of “intellectual property” is as dumb as it sounds. You can’t “own” ideas anymore than you can own a virus. They’re everywhere. They’re freely transmitted without us even realizing it. So often, when inspiration for a creation or an invention strikes us, we’re not even aware of the thousands or hundreds of sources we drank from, sometimes long ago, which all melded together to bring about the “original” idea that came to our minds. This documentary is really good at explaining that process.

    I believe that the current “tech fatigue” that we are experiencing, is the final warning that our society is being given, before the entire system collapses. We are one humanity. There is no logical reason why we should withhold knowledge from each other. The public domain ought to be steadily enriched so that we can continue to improve upon it. I will die on this hill a thousand lifetimes over. And if you are willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, then I invite you to watch this favorite documentary series of mine, entitled Everything is a Remix, by Kirby Ferguson.

    17 votes

  9. Comment on Introductions | March 2025 in ~talk

    crissequeira
    Link
    How long have you been on Tildes? How did you find out about us? Four days. I got invited by @winther. It was kind of funny how I ended up here. The absolute TLDR is that in late 2023, I made a...

    How long have you been on Tildes? How did you find out about us?

    Four days. I got invited by @winther. It was kind of funny how I ended up here. The absolute TLDR is that in late 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution to delete all of my social media (and other) accounts and stay off them in 2024 as a challenge (with a goal of staying off them in perpetuity). That succeeded. I have since gotten more into writing. During 2024 I used Substack, but got tired of it. Out of desperation, I googled something about “simple blogging platforms” and somehow found Bear Blog. Then one day I wrote a post on there inviting people to a Discord server that I specifically designed to work more like IRC. Winther then joined and eventually mentioned Tildes to me.

    How did you choose your username?

    Just my first and last name. I have long given up on anonymity on the Internet. lol

    What are your interests?

    Writing and reading (non-fiction), YouTube (history, geography, technology, psychology, and more).

    A/S/L (age/(gender|pronouns|identifier)/location)

    35, male, Latvia. I’m from Portugal. My wife is Latvian.

    What do you do? This could be in your spare time, for work, your passions.

    I have been unemployed since May. 😂 💀 Been really struggling to find a job... Before that, I worked at a warehouse since late 2018. In my spare time, I give dating and relationship advice on the Internet (been doing that since 2016 as a hobby, which is my greatest passion), and engage with the interests listed above.

    Do you want other users to PM/DM you from this thread?

    Sure.

    Give us a fun fact (or a link!)! If there is anything to know about tilderinos, it's that we value knowledge sharing!

    I don’t understand why people are so indifferent about this topic, but it really riles me up. I think that copyright, patent, and trademark laws have gone far beyond their original intent, and rather than encouraging innovation, have actually only served to stifle it, and have allowed large corporations to engage in anti-consumer practices, completely unchecked. I think that the concept of “intellectual property” is as dumb as it sounds (you can’t “own” ideas), and the current “tech fatigue” that we are experiencing, is the final warning that our society is being given, before the entire system collapses. We are one humanity. There is no logical reason why we should withhold knowledge from each other. The public domain ought to be steadily enriched so that we can continue to improve upon it. I will die on this hill a thousand lifetimes over. And if you are willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, then I invite you to watch my favorite documentary series of all time, Everything is a Remix, by Kirby Ferguson.

    15 votes

  10. Comment on 𒀱 in ~test

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    Wow. I can’t believe it. I copy-pasted that onto Sublime Text, and sure enough, it reads “Column 30000”. Insane.

    Wow. I can’t believe it. I copy-pasted that onto Sublime Text, and sure enough, it reads “Column 30000”. Insane.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Are you tech-savvy enough? in ~tech

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    Haha. No problem. Sorry. My bad. I went back to read what I wrote and realized that I didn’t give you a complete answer. With Windows I basically experienced everything from XP and up. I had...

    Haha. No problem. Sorry. My bad. I went back to read what I wrote and realized that I didn’t give you a complete answer.

    With Windows I basically experienced everything from XP and up. I had several desktops and laptops. I bought my last Windows machine in 2018, a Lenovo laptop. I held onto it until last year. I sold it because I was basically not using it for anything (since I had fully migrated to Apple). That’s the machine that I experimented with Linux on.

    My “tinkering” on Windows was limited to installing random programs for very niche uses, messing something up to the point where the system feels (very subjectively) like it isn’t working properly anymore (random crashes, and errors, and whatnot), and factory resetting the machine. 😂 I am pretty sure that I did that more than a hundred times across all the Windows versions that I used throughout the years. I just became really proficient at breaking the system.

    I had less experience with Linux, tried out just few distros (mostly between 2005 and 2008), and only seriously invested myself into Ubuntu during 2019. I went all out with it, trying to customize just about everything. I was trying to see how far I could take it by asking myself: “This minor thing here. Can I tweak it to make it work 100% the way that I want it to?” Surprisingly, the answer was almost always yes. I was really impressed. And that’s coming from someone who is not tech savvy. I wasted hours reading documentation to figure out how to achieve these very niche tweaks.

    Then I got an M1 Mac Mini in 2020, and that was when I truly began to shift towards Apple.

    I should add that I had a mid-2010, 13" MacBook Pro between, well, 2010 and 2018. Miss it dearly. It literally lived with me trough some of the most important years of my life. It was even streaming my wedding to my family. 🥹

    2 votes

  12. Comment on Are you tech-savvy enough? in ~tech

  13. Comment on Are you tech-savvy enough? in ~tech

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    I think that I understand what you mean, but I want to make sure. You see, I have this thing where “user interface consistency” is really important to me. I am very sensitive to visual...

    I think that I understand what you mean, but I want to make sure.

    You see, I have this thing where “user interface consistency” is really important to me. I am very sensitive to visual “inconsistency” of any kind on the screen.

    So, one of the many reasons why I locked myself up in the Apple ecosystem and threw the key away, is because across all of my current devices (a Series 3 Apple Watch, an iPhone Xr, a 2020 Mac Mini, and a 2022 iPad), there is that coveted “user interface consistency”.

    Even between macOS and iOS I rarely feel like my brain needs to switch between how I use one or the other. When I was using Windows + Android for several years ago though, I felt like I was being tortured.

    This is purely a me thing. To use a real world example: I used to live in an old studio apartment where every room had a different style of wallpaper and it drove me up the wazoo.

    I’m, of course, not saying that macOS/iOS UI is perfectly consistent, but it gets a lot closer than anything else, for obvious reasons.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on Are you tech-savvy enough? in ~tech

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    Probably around 2019? I didn’t have the update issue that the author wrote about though. My “issue” was that I got addicted to customizing everything about my experience on Linux, to the point...

    Probably around 2019? I didn’t have the update issue that the author wrote about though. My “issue” was that I got addicted to customizing everything about my experience on Linux, to the point that I wasn’t doing any work on it anymore. Like I said, if I had the time and the money, then I’d have a separate machine to tinker around with Linux, because I do enjoy the tinkering for the sake of it.

    5 votes

  15. Comment on Are you tech-savvy enough? in ~tech

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    Protected as he lives and breathes. I can hardly believe it. What a small world indeed.

    Protected as he lives and breathes. I can hardly believe it. What a small world indeed.

    7 votes

  16. Comment on Confess your food crimes in ~food

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    Do you use salted butter or...?

    Do you use salted butter or...?

  17. Comment on Are you tech-savvy enough? in ~tech

    crissequeira
    Link
    I have wasted countless hours of my short and fruitless life trying to explain to the very many tech-savvy people in my social circle why I choose to exclusively buy Apple hardware, “when there...

    I have wasted countless hours of my short and fruitless life trying to explain to the very many tech-savvy people in my social circle why I choose to exclusively buy Apple hardware, “when there are so much cheaper, open, and consumer-friendly alternatives” out there.

    Well, would you believe it? I literally just stumbled on a blog post from someone who somehow gets me.

    I do have several years under my belt tinkering with Windows and Linux. I liked the latter the most. Funny that I also had the same experience as the author did: my general knowledge grew considerably when I used it.

    I guess it comes with the territory. When the hardware and the software are a box full of Legos, and the manuals are hard to comprehend, then you need to make a greater effort to build them yourself, but you also have more freedom to arrange them to your liking.

    With Apple, the set is already built and tightly glued together. All you can do is play, and mostly only in the way that the set designer expected you to.

    The author also used an illustration around toying vs. tinkering:

    ...most people don’t care about that stuff. They may want to draw, write, design, communicate with others or play their games. For these people, computers are tools – not toys.

    And that’s what it has always boiled down to for me.

    If I had all the money and the time in the world, I would probably have an office with a desk where random PC hardware sits around that I would toy (tinker) on occasion with.

    When I need to Get Stuff Done™ though, I just don’t want to have to troubleshoot my tool though.

    And most of the time, I just want to Get Stuff Done™.

    11 votes

  19. Comment on Confess your food crimes in ~food

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    Not in my experience. I feel like I always ended up with less cereals in the bowl, and a less balanced ratio of milk to cereals, if I poured the milk first. If I filled the bowl with as many...

    Not in my experience. I feel like I always ended up with less cereals in the bowl, and a less balanced ratio of milk to cereals, if I poured the milk first. If I filled the bowl with as many cereals as I wanted to eat, then the amount of milk that I would add would always be just enough to equally soak each individual flake.

  20. Comment on Confess your food crimes in ~food

    crissequeira
    Link Parent
    Well, dang. That clearly dethrones my soba with the garlic sauce. Wow. 😂 I think I want to try that out. How do you usually prepare it?

    Well, dang. That clearly dethrones my soba with the garlic sauce. Wow. 😂 I think I want to try that out. How do you usually prepare it?

    1 vote