In this post I won’t be explaining why I think communism is right, or expound on in-depth theory about historical necessity or what have you. Here I’m just going to explain what my personal reasons are for joining and participating in my local party - being the Workers’ Party of Belgium or the PVDA-PTB (Partij van de Arbeid van België - Parti du Travail de Belgique).

The recent war in Ukraine has shocked the (Western) world and will probably, together with the (still ongoing) pandemic, be a moment of a great change in historical direction. A lot is being said, a lot of discourse generated and in typical jingoist fashion a lot of nuance is being lost. In this post I’d like to write out some of my own thoughts on this topic.

My yearly retrospective on the books I read, general impressions they left on me (if any of note). This post will go over the fiction works I’ve read and what I think about it in a line or two.

My yearly retrospective on the books I read, general impressions they left on me (if any of note). This post will go over the non-fiction works I’ve read and what I think about it in a line or two.

The nillies has been the decade of social media. From initial novelty to the digital equivalent of low-yield nuclear ICBM’s. The analogy is maybe a bit over dramatic, but it’s potential as a weapon has been demonstrated already. During these ten years, it has taken root almost everywhere on the globe. When older people started accepting it - and youngsters subsequently started to reject it in rebellion - was when it went from new frontier to established, settled fact.

I, too, was smitten by it all, rapidly accepting it as part of my (then fresh) university life. But with growing awareness, both from myself as from society at large, about these social networks, their workings, consequences and ideology, came a desire, not to return to an earlier internet, but for a different way to do social networking. In this blogpost I’ll try to explain my personal vision as a non-technical layman on what such a network would look like, where we can find existing inspiration and what pitfalls I think are to be avoided.

I was originally planning on doing the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian express this winter, but due to the ongoing pandemic that plan fell through. To console myself I decided to redirect the money planned for this into a new pc build. This will be the first time actually building one myself from scratch.

2020 was a good year, at least in terms of books read. And I don’t think that the global pandemic had that much to do with it. I’ve read over 50 books, which is probably a record (it is at least since 2016 when I started to keep a list of the books I read). But I haven’t written many reviews. In this blogpost I’ll revisit the fiction works I’ve read, chronologically, and write a line or two about it.

2020 was a good year, at least in terms of books read. And I don’t think that the global pandemic had that much to do with it. I’ve read over 50 books, which is probably a record (it is at least since 2016 when I started to keep a list of the books I read). But I haven’t written many reviews. In this blogpost I’ll go over the non-fiction works that I’ve read, chronologically, and write some of my thoughts about them.

The coming year I want to give a monthly donation¹ to projects, creators² and organizations that I think are worthwhile, changing the recipient every month. I do this because supporting multiple projects continuously is difficult. The costs quickly adds up so that it’s difficult to give support to the wide range of the deserving.

And since I’m a dork who’s enamoured with the French Revolution, I’m using the French Republican calendar for this. This has the added benefit that it starts in September, thus the end of the month coincides more or less with the beginning of this experiment.

Knowing the problems of corporate social media, and Facebook in particular, is one thing, but the practical process of leaving it is a whole other topic in itself. That’s what I’l try to expand upon here. Or in other words: what’s the actual plan? I’ll make a guess at the costs and benefits of leaving Facebook and I’ll look into some constructive steps I (and others too of course!) can take to transition to a post-Facebook lifestyle.