Unfortunately I may not be able to start any new video series for TROM anytime soon, due to the circumstances I am in. I have tried but it is kinda impossible.

Driving school madness.

For one I am too busy with the insane driving school – here in Spain it takes ages to do it and they are so draconian when it comes to these exams. You have to drive so perfect and the vast majority will fail the exam the first time. Funny part is NO ONE drives like that here or anywhere else in the world. And everyone knows that, but these people have jobs so they continue to teach you like this….as usual on this planet. Nothing surprising.

My instructor wants me to do more and more lessons, which means more time and money wasted. If she “thinks I am ready” for the exam, I will do it in July (next month). If not I’ll have to wait till September….and based on statistics I am more likely to fail it the first time. So I’ll probably have to wait a few more weeks after the first exam to try again.

This is so absurd it is hard to imagine how fucked up it is. If I knew I would have gone to Romania and get the driving license there in less than 2 months. Mind you I have started the driving school in Spain in December last year. Already some 7 months in…nuts!

I will make an article/video about the entire experience because there is a lot to learn from it. In a TROM-sense.

Summer madness

I live in a very small town that is 100% touristic. 3-4 months a year, from June/July to September tens of thousands of people come here and everything is a fucking mess. Noise, everything busy and kinda dirty, insanity. My family is working all day, they are stressed, they come and go, it is a terrible environment to be able to do anything creative. Add into the mix the extreme temperatures that are coming with the tourists, and it is really impossible to do anything like a video series.

For a video series I would have to first be motivated and have the space to “think” and come up with ideas. Write the scripts, fact check, etc.. Then to record – and when can I? I do not have the space/env to do that. And then to edit….Every summer is like that here, and every time I felt quite lethargic because of it.

Even while I write this article I have to put my headphones on with a white noise to be able to focus because I am sick to hear the noise coming from outside or inside the house. Every night I also put my speakers at maximum volume with an artificial thunderstorm, as loud as I can, to “cancel” the noise that comes from everyone getting up in the morning getting ready to work.

Else I could not sleep. I’ve been doing this for years now. Luckily it works. But this is not an environment that can allow me to do anything creative at all. I managed to do it somehow over the years but am too tired now….something needs to change, and it will!

Make money, buy a motorhome.

We will buy a small motorhome somewhere at the end of this year or beginning of the next. We want to live in it full time. One like the one in the photo.

But this puts a pressure on us to make more money now. Sasha is working a lot as a divemaster and I honestly do not do much. That makes me quite frustrated and depressed. I want to help in that regards but I was always terrible at making money. I can write books, make documentaries, and a lot of projects, but I am unable to make money.

I have tried with Webape.site but I cannot get any new “customer” who wants a website….

Unfortunately the donations I get from TROM are not enough at all to support my work. You know if the 200 for TROM campaign was successful and I knew we have enough money to survive, I could find a way to start a new video series for TROM and do more.

Unfortunately we are barely 40% funded. This is a constant struggle and a motivation killer for me after so many years of doing what am doing.

Motivation.

Speaking of getting support, it has become more and more difficult for me to keep myself motivated in this situation especially when you see that you can’t even get 200 people to support all of our projects with the bare minimum of contribution. It means whatever I do for TROM does not reach that many people. And that is true. So without a proper support how can I push it forward? Projects like TROM are quite impossible to survive in this society….

I’ve been active since 2007, that’s some 17 years. It is tough. But I am not giving up.

The best anyone can do now to help the project is to subscribe to our 200 for TROM campaign. 5 Euros a month, 200 people, make it sustainable. Unfortunately we need money else idk how I can work full time for TROM and keep this project relevant and alive.

Future?

I’ve said for months now that this year will be a bit insane for us. We need to move and do a lot of changes to our lives, make money, put up with a lot of stress and so forth.

The plan is this: suffer for the next few months and make money as much as we can. I have started to also sell some of our stuff that we do not need. And after the driving bullshit is done probably I’ll work some days in cleaning. I will also try to get myself motivated enough to perhaps write some articles for TROM since that can be easier than making videos. I just have to find some quiet place/time (say from 00:00 to 06:00 in the night when everyone is asleep) and write/do research. Maybe later I can transform them into videos.

I will also try to film some stuff with the tourism here and other things “incognito” to then later on make some videos about.

In October we have to plan and see what money we have. We will have to bring my parents to Romania in November, so we will drive their car from here with their stuff since they move back for good. They will retire. We will stay a little bit in Romania to try and solve some more paperwork bullshit if we can – imagine this: Sasha has a driving license from USA, but she is only allowed to drive in Spain for 6 months with it. After that she needs to change it into a Spanish driving license. Easy? NO! She would have to go through the same bullshit driving school and exam like I am now….imagine that shit! She already knows how to drive but she will be forced to do again the theoretical and practical exam and take “driving lessons”.

This world is such a load of nonsense it is not even funny anymore.

So we may try to see if we can exchange her driving license into a Romanian one, then exchange it for a Spanish one without doing the exam.

Hey Spain are you fucking mental?!

Anyway. We hope the madness will be over at the end of November. We will spend no more than a month in Romania (I hope). Then come back to Spain to buy a motorhome. Move into the motorhome and go fuckin away from the stupid parts of the world as much as we can.

We won’t have enough money to buy the motorhome + pay the monthly expenses…..so we will also make a campaign if anyone can help out considering all I am doing for TROM is free and the motorhome is a house for me as well, of course, so that’s a help for TROM basically. We will make the campaign towards the end of the year. We have the vast majority of the money we need to buy the motorhome already, but what do we do after we buy it when the only monthly support i get now is around 3-400 Euros?!

So it is going to be a bit rough for us to do the move.

The motorhome life.

Hopefully at the beginning of the next year we will be in our motorhome (TROMhome) and start a completely new life. We will make videos about our “adventures” and how it is to live in such a tiny mobile space with limited resources. Perhaps it is interesting for some. I want to put a big TROMhome logo on the motorhome, and to eventually go meet with interesting communities or projects and make videos about them.

In parallel I will keep our projects alive and relevant and I still hope to start a new video series whenever I can.

Ideally we would be able to travel and meet interesting projects and people and make videos about all of it, and also keep TROM relevant and alive and create new content. Meet our TROM friends, take them for a week or so with us, and try to live a very minimalistic life, enjoy it, and see where it goes.

Final thoughts.

I am terribly eager to make new content for TROM. I have a ton of ideas and notes. I feel quite depressed and frustrated to not be able to do that. But it is what it is. If it wasn’t such a struggle to live in this society, perhaps I’d be wrong about this society when I describe the awfulness of it through our TROM materials. That’s the paradox.

Maybe a miracle will happen and I would somehow start the video series soon, but I can’t see that to be very likely. It is a terrible situation to want for the time to pass by faster, considering that our life is so short, but that’s how I feel now: I want for these next months to be over! I want to see Sasha free and focusing on real important stuff not be trapped working 10-11 hours a day. I want us to not live in the same place anymore and be on our own. I want to start a video series that I can keep producing for the many years to come. I want us to keep on fighting but also have a relaxing life. And it is very doable!

This is a cake my family bought for my “birthday” recently haha. Me and Sasha, and TROMhome :). We will make this happen 😉

That’s all for now 🙂

This month a bunch of “trom” people visited us and we had such a wonderful time together.

We had an Amber party looking through the microscopes to 40 million years old creatures…

Something most people in this world probably consider as boring and “lame”. But if you understand the mind-blowing reality we live in, then you would understand why an amber party is a super fun and wonderful party :).

We also looked at the Moon through the telescope…

And we enjoyed the nature around, we had interesting discussions and a lot of fun.

I always hated to meet with “friends” because that usually meant lets get drunk or talk about boring shit, or brag about the stuff you have and all that. Or just eat and do nothing. Hated it. But now with these people I LOVE it. It feels natural and sane, and so much fun. And relaxing!

These are wonderful people who care about this world and have very interesting minds. And there are so many more like them. And I want to “harness” them all haha. We will organize a yearly event for sure and do more than just have a fun meetup. We will have fun but also do some important things for TROM and in general for pushing ahead with TROM-like ideas.

I am so happy that I have these creatures as my friends 🙂

This is the coolest thing on Earth! — https://videos.trom.tf/w/oQ9amzYkm8FgT6Jzum9yWA (recorded by me 10 minutes ago)

Amber! Or stuff that the trees leak, then insects get trapped inside, then somehow it becomes super hard and survives for millions of years. It becomes transparent (lots of it) and we can look inside and see these creatures that lived millions of years ago and they look the exact same as they did when they got trapped…. Can’t believe this “thing” exists on Earth!

My friend Agata game me a BAG full of amber. Her father was a scientist and amber was one of his main focus. He passed away and Agata gave a lot of his collection to museums but kept some.

Now it was the best time to buy a microscope! I spent only 50 euros on this one and it was well worth the money:

I spent ours tonight looking at every one of them and I can’t stop it haha.

I HAVE to start the video series that I keep on talking about! We need not only to inform people about our global issues (cough trade!) but also inspire people to look at the important stuff. To know that the natural world is billions of times more fascinating and complex than any bullshit they are mesmerized to buy due to the aggressive marketing campaigns that happen everywhere.

We need to make this consumption craze obsolete. And reality (science/nature) is by far the best substitute. Often free, mindblowing, and more importantly real!

I wish i would start to make the video series now! But mentally can’t. I need to adjust my enthusiasm and think about money/trade, at least partially. I will do it tho!

Anyway, amber deserves a video. Amber is fabulous. So precious, but not in terms of money, in terms of real value: to see how the past was. To learn about the tiny creatures and other things. To, in the end, know more about who we are.

#amber nature #microscope #insects

amber

A trade-free video hosting platform for science/technology/nature videos in the English language. You do not have to trade your currency, data, attention, freedom or anything else, in order to use it.

^{videos.trom.tf}

Do not forget that the internet, youtube, netflix, cars and supermarkets, lightbulbs and modern medicine, do not make our society “civilized”. These are a result of often enslaved humans producing “stuff” in a trade-based society. Technologically we, as a society, are quite advanced, but morally we are primitive.

Despite all of this technological progress humans are still forcing ALL of their billions of members to trade in order to survive, despite being able to feed, house, and take care of everyone on Earth. This means we are still primitive and have no greater goals such as exploration, the advancement of technology and science, understanding where we came from and where we are heading… All that humans do is trade, day in, day out.

Slaves and slave owners. Simple minds. Robots.

If you take away the electrification, internet, the gadgets, the hot water and the mass produced products – stuff – you are left with the “naked” humans who all they want is to acquire more, get “married”, work, have kids, drink, and cheer up for their tribe.

It is the environment who creates these behaviors so if we do not change the “mental” environment, nothing will happen. We do not need new tech, new science, new materials. We need new lives for the individuals of this species. Lives that are relaxed and taken care of. Scientific, globally oriented, and to live in a non competitive environment.

So the UN or other institutions, if they ever want to solve any global issues, they need to first propose that we should take care of people and create a decent life for them. All of them, not just the very poor. We are all trapped in this trade-prison. You can’t expect for a different society to emerge when all humans do is to slave away and compete with each other. Dog eats dog world.

Happy 1st of May to all of the slaves who got a day off. What a disgrace of a society.

#may #fistofmay #worker #capitalism #money #1may

No surprise that Alexei Navalny died….unfortunately the situation in this world is not like a movie, where the bad guys are defeated. It seems to me like we’ve built a society that encourages villains and give little chances to anyone who wants to do anything in a more just way in this society.

Navalny had a huge following and was able to pierce with his campaign through the thick and foggy blanket of propaganda that the Russian government is so good and persistent at. And Navalny may not have been a saint or may not have changed much in Russia, who knows considering the level of corruption that infected all governments around the world, but for sure he was attacked, silenced, and eventually killed (directly or indirectly through a lot of abuse).

Many journalists have been imprisoned or even killed, and now we can see these publicly and so clearly. It is naive to think that pretty much anyone who challenges Putin drops dead or in prison, and this has nothing to do with Putin. But probably these wannabe dictators do not even mind to cover anything anymore.

We are noticing the modern public beheading of those who challenge the status quo. But these modern dictators do not have yet the courage to admit that they did it. They only make it very obvious that they did.

Russia seems to have become an authoritarian regime, the old school one. And this is increasingly concerning. Silencing the protesters, killing the political opponents, and infecting the media with terrible propaganda.

“make no mistake” (to quote the chief of USA), the other tribes are flavors of the same medicine. USA, EU, and the rest, are abusive in their own way, and have killed, and still killing, many innocent people. Russia is just worse. So don’t let the degree of “doing bad things” take away form the fact that the other tribes are also abusive. USA may not kill the political opponents, but it is damn good at giving no chance to any radical change in the good direction of their tribe.

Anyway…. it is a sad and scary world. Humans, what a deplorable species.

I am making the documentary about Navalny freely available on our Peertube https://videos.trom.tf/w/b17jsjV11KhxvvnfMusaEy and will be featured on the homepage. See how obvious it is that the guy was targeted and almost killed not long ago. Terrible.

Are we ever going to be an “intelligent human species”, floating in space on a marvelous ball of wonders that we can take care of? Exploring the in and outs of it? Or are we going to continue as tribalistic and primitive creatures, exploiting and killing?….

We have a brand new TROMnews website – https://tromnews.com/

By @Tio

The plugin that we’ve used for TROMnews for the past many years stopped working so we had to find a new one. When that happened I was sure I will have to let go of this website, simply because I need to focus on other things, especially personal stuff. If I were to get at least half the financial support that we need for TROM, then I could focus on these projects more.

But anyway, after talking to Sasha I realized that the website is indeed important, despite the fact that I am sure not many are using it. We will talk more about that. But first:

TROMnews is more work than you may think.

The idea is to pull news/videos/photos/etc from many online sources and coalesce them all into a website that makes sense. But choosing the sources, finding and RSS feed for them, and all that, is not as easy. Plus, some do not have an RSS feed so I have to use other services to create it on the fly. Also, the way I pull the RSS feeds is not arbitrary. For example I cannot grab all of the videos from a Youtube channel since that would include the absolutely retarded “shorts”, so I have to tell the RSS to only pull the videos that are at least 2 minutes long. And so forth….

I ended up with over 200 sources: from websites to Youtube, from subReddits to playlists. I want to make sure we pull a featured image for each (or most posts), and to not overwhelm everyone with whatever I pull. Like I choose to pull from the subReddit “Sky Porn” only the images that have over X amount of votes. This way we make sure that add only a few a week, but the good ones. The amount of X in this case depends from subReddit to subReddit – I test these to see what’s the best value.

Now you get 200 feeds that each can pull several items every hour or so. A server may struggle with so much stuff. And so the old plugin disabled many feeds daily, and I had to reactivate them to make them update…one by one, manually.

On top of all of this, I had filters for many of these feeds as to what posts can pull or exclude, based on keywords. Just to make it more relevant.

I use TROMnews daily, and so are a few friends. But I bet no one else uses it.

I want to stay in touch with what is happening in the world, but not the world of politics (the nonsense world), I want to know about science, tech, and the natural world mostly. I can so that via an RSS reader on my local machine, but my goal with TROMnews was always to provide a tool for others to stay informed and sane.

I started this project exactly 10 years ago. Because I feared that if people are idiots and feed their brains with bullshit then we have 0 chances to ever change anything in this world. Humans live inside of their brains, and if what’s inside is bullshit, then they are bullshitters and we live in different worlds altogether, despite being on the same planet, inside the same reality. How can we build the future together?

If some think that gods made them, others that money is real, or that climate change is an invention, then we are fucked. And such a website makes it easy to keep your brain sane.

For me no other website is enough to use it as my news source. From BBC to PBS, or Scientific American, and so forth, they are plagued by politics and promotional articles. It is a mess.

Anyway, I spent many years trying to find the best sources, and subcategories on some good news websites that were still relevant, and I wanted them all in one place. This is why I use TROMnews. It is my main, and many times only, source of brain-food.

10 years ago when I released it I had some big hopes for it, because people were still able to choose stuff for themselves. Like they were intentionally visiting websites. Nowadays the vast majority of people are on maximum 5 platforms (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, or Instagram). And they are all fed whatever these companies want.

A vomit of ads and retarded content. And people stay, and eat. Scroll through an endless stream of whatever they are fed with.

Sick.

So I know that I cannot make people use TROMnews. And I do not care anymore. I and a few friends use it. Plus it is a very interesting website. That’s enough for me.

The new website needs more work, but it is a bit more “interesting” in my view.

Before the website was simply displaying the same kind of cards for all categories and that’s all. A bit boring. Even I was not that motivated to read the news – too many of the same cards, too many news. Now the homepage looks like a news website, highlighting every category.

We even have a Recommended Documentary section that automatically pulls from VideoNeat. 🙂

Every page is a bit more unique to emphasize whatever category is showcasing. Here’s a cool photo I just found on TROMnews:

Freaking spider! 🙂 – that’s what I love about TROMnews – it is a bundle of interesting stuff, ranging from important news, to wonderful photos or super interesting videos. It is my place, and I am not giving up on it :P.

The advantage now is that I can have a lot more control over the individual items. I can probably add a proper search and even allow others to subscribe to our own feed. So that you can subscribe to our TROMnews NEWS. How cool….

I still need to add the Dark mode and tweak it for mobile screens, but also monitor it to make sure it all works well. I came across a bunch of issues with the auto-updating of sources so let’s see if it is able to keep up with updating from over 200 rss feeds.

I also lack the ability to filter the feeds based on keywords, but I can live with that… What I’d like is the ability to showcase from where an item is. Like who posted this or that, as it was before. I can only do that if I buy the pro-bro version… So if I get enough financial support for TROM I will make TROMnews a bit better.

Oh, when I was searching for a replacement WordPress plugin for TROMnews I came across many RSS Aggregators. And all, without exception form my findings, are geared towards making more money. Of course…. Who is using them like I do, to pull science/tech/interesting news for all to see? No ads, no bs…

But I was aware of this, it was always the case. People use these plugins to pull stuff from other websites into their own, to then inject ads and make money. In turn destroying the internet, which has become a garbage bin made of vomited and re-vomited content. And now it is getting easier:

The same plugin that I use, has a “pro” version that can integrate these “chat bots” to not only import the full content form other websites, but automatically rewrite it so that search engines cannot detect it as being a duplicate.

Welcome to the Internet 3.0. The complete fuckery, a tsunami on nonsense.

TROMnews is a little spot of sane stuff. I hope some people appreciate it.

#tromlive

Even I forget that I released a massive documentary some months ago…and that I worked so hard on that. I honestly forget about that quite often and deep down I feel a bit frustrated and sad that I do not do more. But maybe I just forget that I have put so much effort into that and perhaps that drained me of energy. Of course I am crazy busy with the driving license now and am doing other things in the background for TROM, but I need to remind myself that I’ve done a lot to scream, and I will do more, but I cannot be always like a machine that never stops. So I need some more time to get myself back on track and create new things, scream more and in different ways, and so forth.

I am trying, but the world in which we live is like a bullet-train of nonstop things happening. Most of them are idiotic and ugly. So most people are trapped in this race. Myself included many times. That’s why I forget about the documentary.

Wars, disasters, debates, problems, noise. Too much noise. And not much progress into any saner direction.

I ponder sometimes if I should stop trying, and live a quiet and simple life and not give a shit. I don’t know…it is hard to imagine that “me”. I started my “online activism” back in 2007 or so. That’s a scary 17 years ago. And the world has only gotten worse. So why continue I ask myself….

Maybe I just need to recharge myself this year and change my personal life quite a bit. To then have some new energy and motivation to do more, and newer. But also different.

It is also really difficult to try and manage all of these projects and the stuff that I do, with 20% of what I need financially in this trade world…if at least I had enough support to keep me afloat, I could have the confidence of doing more, and doing other things too in this direction.

For now I will be busy with the retarded driving test for the next 1-2 weeks. Then if I manage to pass the exam, it should be easier. I will have to wait a few months for the practical test (driving) but I am quite sure I can take that one. So let’s see how I organize myself and the TROM projects for the next months. I will post updates on my Friendica if course.

#romstuff

Video:

In this video Adam Conover argues that people cannot leave Twitter because everyone is there and Mastodon is hard to use. He thinks that the best is to transform Twitter into a nationalized, gov-owned public good platform.

Well…

He may be right that people are not going to leave Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and the like since “everyone is there”. Which, let’s be honest, is an indirect way of saying that humans are mindless sheep who will go to the popular party regardless if they are fucked in the ass all day. So let’s not brush this aside. Humans are mindless idiots, at least most of them. And busy for that matter. That should scare the shit out of us and to make us try to find a solution for that, not a solution for Twitter and the like.

Second, Mastodon is not the fucking “fediverse”. The fediverse is a big network made up of many different platforms. It is like calling the mail, GMAIL. As if it is only Gmail. Also, if Mastodon is hard to use, and for that matter other platforms like Friendica and so forth, then humans must be true idiots because it takes you a minute to understand how these work. They are as “complicated” as Twitter, Facebook and the like. The people who think that using Linux or a federated platform is “hard”, are those that need any little excuse to not change their habits. When people start to use new platforms like Zoom, TikTok and the like, they put up with whatever new interfaces they have to navigate, just to use them because “these apps are trendy and everyone uses them”.

Lastly, a gov owned social network is not like a gov owned educational network like PBS….PBS produces specific content that it controls. A social network is made up of the content that people produce….if the gov would control that, it would be censored like hell. Terrible idea!

The solution is decentralization. Else you have a giant company or gov that decides what we are allowed to post. Therefore, small instances of locally-moderated groups of people, that create a giant network. Welcome to the Fediverse.

Now let’s continue to educate people about it rather than dreaming about the gov taking over a multi-billion dollar ad-based company and making it usable and free for all of us.

#tromstuff

It’s no secret that Elon Musk has absolutely tanked Twitter, so why haven’t we all left? Despite the site becoming an apocalyptic hellscape, there’s a surpri…

^YouTube