On surpassing time itself

    Lately I haven't had much time on my own. My imagination and my ability to conceptualize are numb lately, that makes me a little bit worried that I may turn the autopilot mode on more that I should. Stranger, friend, you should be sure that you are leading your live the way you want if you want to feel visible in this world. It's hard to feel visible isn't it? We are so, so little...

    Everything is so fragile and impermanent that we must be present at almost all times. We are not immortal, we are forgettable, all of us. In a few years who will remember us? Immortality (metaphorical speaking, of course) is an illusion. We as individuals are mortal, so mortal and fragile that everything seems to us scary and gigantic. But as a species, we can be immortal. Where will we be in a thousand years...? It is up to us to discover some more paths to our successors. Will we be good ancestors? Humanity as a species has the ability to reach several conscience, mind and emotional states that will allow us to ... I don't even know, my brain is tired (as I'm writing this at 3am, with a weak long of badly slept nights behind me)... I have all this images, separate words, concepts and sounds in my mind - all mixed together in a noisy amount of feelings and sensations- that I can't quite put to words right now (and sometimes not even in my best days).

    Today I read some essays from a webs-site/potential millennium institution called The Long Now, they've been working on a project called the 10, 000 year clock. The clocks are to be installed in several deserted locations (mainly mountains), with melodies (all different from each other) it marks the time at a long term distance...

"Serve the long view,
Reward patience
Mind mythic depth
Ally with competition
Take no sides
Leverage longevity"
But live in the now...



- Fawlin

Things about living with other human beings

Hello my friends,

    Today I bring you matters of the heart (-- again, I might say). When you love someone, a friend, a family member, a partner of any kind, you make compromises. When you love someone, you try your best to let the right message come across, you are honest with them and yourself. These are things I am loving to learn, these are things that never made more sense to me then now.
    I don't know what happened but I feel much more... connected. I now know how to observe others and myself, I now know when I need time on my own and when to reach out for company, and I also feel more able to understand loved one's emotions and feelings... Of course this is yet something to test in the day-to-day life, but I can now say I feel much more... like myself. It's a type of balance I do not want to loose and I am willing to do everything I can to not loose it.

    I'm still on vacation so I've been playing a lot of an anti-social game called Sims3 (yes--- I know, it's a silly time-consuming game... but it's entertaining), sleeping a lot and almost never leaving the house for days and days. But my body is ready, bring it on world ! Tie me up, smack me hard, toss me around, and I will just rise from self-pity all over again. I'm ready to love.

Much love, 

Fawlin

 

Designing for the entire human race

Hello Internet people,

    Lately I've been watching several TED talks. So, 2 days ago I watched this TED talk called "How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too)", by Margaret Gould Steward. This designer worked, along with a few others, in one of the last design changes on Facebook. The thing that got me was the simplicity needed to work with this giant websites: humanity-driven design. After talking about some of her project she said (about designing for Facebook and Google):

    "When you set a goal to design for the entire human race(...), at some point you run into the walls of the bubble you're living in. (...) we get a little miffed when we hit a dead cell zone because we can't use our phone to navigate to the next hipster coffee shop. (...) What if you had no access to public library? What if your country had no free press? What would this products start to mean to you? This is what Google, Youtube and Facebook look like to the most of the world. (...) If you want to design for the whole world, you have to design for where people are, and not where you are."

    This didn't quite resonate with me until yesterday. Yesterday I was posting my second post on my Portuguese Blog and I was sharing on the Facebook account linked to that Blog. This Facebook account is public so while I was on Facebook I noticed I had one friend request, and then another, and another. Yes, all three of my new potential online friends had an app called "Facebook to all phones". Soon I was talking to a guy  from Ghana, let's call him One. Now One, who was talking to me trough that app, wanted to know if I'm dating anyone... I don't know why that was one of the first questions he did, maybe it's hard to date in Ghana? I don't know, maybe. Of course I told him that I don't date over the Internet (because I don't).

    But the point I wanted to make was that this was the moment the TED talk resonated with me because I realized Margaret is right: we live in our little "rich" (compared to some) bubbles, troubled by this tiny problems of ours (like temporarily having a slow internet connection) when in that moment another person in a less richer country is struggling with little or no internet connection, no electricity, often not even reliable and easily reachable clean water, no decent free press, and probably not a lot of freedom to date or relate with people the way they maybe want to, ... We never think about this, don't we? I mean, there's nothing we can do, that I know. But I guess it gave me a little bit of perspective and I finally understood what scale design really is (designing for giant websites like Facebook, Google and Youtube). This kind of apps can very well be a free pass to information, free, unaltered information;  free, unsupervised, careless human interaction (however restricted by writing speech it may be); free entertainment content also.

EDIT1: I'm not saying everyone who uses the app "Facebook to all phones" is the same.  I don't mean that everyone who uses this app has little resources, of course !

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And this everything from me, for now :3 

Enjoy the rest of your day,

Fawlin