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I’ve been living in Portugal for the last 3 years or so. I genuinely like the country and, as a good citizen, I started to learn the language. From scratch.

While difficult, I’m lucky since Romanian, my native language, is also a Romance language and the grammar is really similar.

But the diminutives, OMG, the diminutives!!!

Portuguese people already speak really fast and it’s difficult to understand the words they speak, but they use SO MANY diminutives that I sometimes just stop making any effort to understand what they are saying.

I recently went with my car to get it serviced and, at some point, the guy asked for my “chavizinho” and I was confused as hell. “Chave” is “key”, so I thought I kinda got it, but I genuinely wasn’t sure that was what he wanted.

I’d love to have a dictionary that has both original word and the diminutive attached. You know, just to be there :)

Here’s a funny video (in Portuguese, with some English explanations) to understand how it happens.

Watch the video on Facebook

The source of the video: these guys.

P.S.: just to get an idea of how fast Portuguese people speak and how much they “eat” vowels, this is how the word “Portugal” sounds to me when they say it: “prtgal”.

image source

I woke up at 5:30am today. I usually wake up at 7:30-8, so this was weird.

Then I remember we just changed to Summer Time. While one hour shouldn’t make a difference, it kinda messed my sleep.

Apparently it’s quite common, as seen below. I genuinely wish we would make the change to just one time (Winter time, if possible) sooner rather than later.

Most noticeably, Daylight Saving can throw off sleep cycles. Your circadian rhythm is your body’s natural 24-hour cycle. A disruption in this rhythm, like Daylight Saving, is typically environmental, not genetic. Therefore, individuals can easily adjust behaviors that may cause issues, such as a poor sleep schedule. The rule of thumb is that for each hour of time change, it takes a day to adjust. So, if you get seven to eight hours of sleep and go to bed a little early the night before, you should wake feeling refreshed. However, if you already lack sleep and perhaps consume some caffeine or alcohol the night before, you might wake feeling sleep-deprived. Time to reset your internal clock!

From here: How Daylight Saving Affects Your Life | Northwestern Medicine.

I need to stop myself from using some sites too much, so I looked for a solution that didn’t involve using another app.

Once thing to keep in mind if using the solution below: it worked initially, but when I edited the file again it didn’t work anymore. I restarted my laptop and it worked, but I’m sure there’s another way you can force hosts to reload.

1. In the command line, type in “sudo nano /etc/hosts”.
2. When asked, type your admin password.
3. In the screen that will appear, you’ll see the host database for your computer.
4. Using your down arrow, go to the bottom, right under where it says, “127.0.0.1 localhost”.
5. Type in “127.0.0.1 hit ‘tab’, then enter facebook.com”.
6. On a new line, type in “127.0.0.1” hit ‘tab’, then enter www.facebook.com”; this is for extra measure.
7. Now, hold down Control + “O”. This will save the changes to the host database.
8. Hit “Return” and then Control + “X” to exit the screen.
9. Remove the existing cache by typing in “sudo dscacheutil -flushcache” in the command line, this refreshes the existing cache on the host database.

From here: How To Block Websites on Your Mac Using Terminal – Mason Sklut.

I rarely play on PC. I have a Mac, first of all, and most of the PC games on Steam or GOG don’t work on Mac, but I also enjoy playing on PlayStation more, for various reasons.

Since hearing about Disco Elysium, I always wanted to play it. And now, that it is available for PlayStation, I’m just gonna do that. The price (in the US store) is $39.99, with a 10% discount for PS+ users.

It’s a really interesting detective story RPG and it’s worth looking at it, if you enjoy this kind of games (and, apparently, if you enjoyed Planetscape: Torment at some point in your life).

Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

Disco Elysium is a role-playing video game developed and published by ZA/UM. The game takes place in a large city still recovering from a war decades prior to the game’s start, with players taking the role of an amnesic detective who has been charged with solving a murder mystery. During the investigation, he comes to recall events about his own past as well as current forces trying to affect the city. Inspired by Infinity Engine–era role-playing games, particularly Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium was written and designed by Karelian-Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz. It features a distinctive watercolor art style, and music by the band British Sea Power. […]

Disco Elysium is a non-traditional role-playing game featuring no combat. Instead, events are resolved through skill checks and dialog trees via a system of 24 skills that represent different aspects of the protagonist, such as his perception and pain threshold. In addition, a system called the Thought Cabinet represents his other ideologies and personality traits, with players having the ability to freely support or suppress them. The game is based on a tabletop role-playing game setting that Kurvitz had previously created, with him forming ZA/UM in 2016 to work on the game. Disco Elysium was well received by critics, with it being named as a game of the year by several publications along with numerous other awards for its narrative and art. A television series adaptation was announced in 2020.

Image from here

Andreessen-Horowitz is, without a doubt, an interesting take on the investment fund paradigm. I have a friend that really wants them to invest in his startup just because of the power network that they created around their startups and founders.

But they are, in my opinion, a really strong media and research company. I feel a lot of the value they provide is through media appearances of their GPs and not only and these reports they provide. I mean, the best book on what it means to build a startup is written by Ben Horowitz: The Hard Thing about Hard Things.

The last report I’ve seen is their report on marketplaces that you can see here. If you are interested in marketplaces, as a founder or an investor, you need to read this.

The past year has been a gut-punch for many marketplace categories. Ticketing marketplaces found their businesses drastically diminished when events were cancelled around the world. As schools were shuttered and many businesses enacted work-from-home policies, childcare marketplaces scrambled to adopt new safety precautions and stay afloat. Even the #1 marketplace last year, Airbnb, grappled with shutdowns, cancellations, and refunds.

As 2020 drew to a close, however, many marketplaces proved to be extraordinarily resilient—a testament to the flexibility of the model. In a year when in-person interactions were heavily restricted and unemployment went through the roof, marketplaces allowed people to access the products and services they needed and, in many cases, monetize their own talents, services, and resources. From food and alcohol delivery to games, online education to outdoor getaways, marketplaces like Instacart, Valve, Outschool, and Hipcamp helped us weather a difficult year.

From here: The a16z Marketplace 100: 2021.

I feel that LinkedIn wants to be an “elevated” Facebook, while focusing more on resources for professionals rather than on their network. I mean, it doesn’t do anything to help me understand my network better and building “creator tools” doesn’t really move them forward towards that in any way.

Clubhouse’s list of competitors is growing. LinkedIn has now confirmed it’s also testing a social audio experience in its app which would allow creators on its network to connect with their community. Unlike the Clubhouse rivals being built by Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn believes its audio networking feature will be differentiated because it will be connected with users’ professional identity, not just a social profile. In addition, the company has already built out a platform that serves the creator community, which today has access to tools like Stories, LinkedIn Live video broadcasting, newsletters and more.

And just today, LinkedIn formalized some of its efforts in this area with the launch of a new “Creator” mode that lets anyone set their profile as one that can be followed for updates, like Stories and LinkedIn Live videos, for example.

From here: LinkedIn confirms it’s working on a Clubhouse rival, too | TechCrunch.

Patreon just announced they raised a new round of investment at at $4B valuation ($155M in the round). If you’re asking yourself why, here are some interesting numbers about the creator economy and about freelancers.

The growth of freelancing worldwide is staggering. In the US alone, freelancers make up 35% or 55 million workers who collectively earned $1 trillion in 2016. That number is predicted to reach 43% by 2020 with some analysts citing that figure at 80% of the global workforce by 2030.

This is from here (sorry for the Medium link).

And here’s what Patreon were saying in March 2020:

A large number of creators are launching on Patreon. More than 30,000 creators launched in the first 3 weeks of March 2020 alone, and these new creators are acquiring patrons faster than usual.

The COVID pandemic forced some processes to happen earlier than initially thought: it’s obvious that freelancers/creators are on their way to become the main part of workforce earlier than 2030.

I feel that we’ll see a lot of new tools targeting this growing part of the workforce, even more than what we see now.

Image from Canva

I was reading something on BBC.com today and I got lost in two articles on fame and pressures of fame.

One is about Lana del Rey and her issues with social media and keeping private as much as possible:

Interestingly, though, Daly suggests that Del Rey might care less about her own mystique than she did in the past. “I think she was probably more enigmatic at the start of her career when there were all these questions about who she was and where she came from,” she says. Now that she has proven her artistic worth, she has less need for the protective shield that enigma can provide. “To achieve true Prince-like levels of mystery, I think she’d have to be much more removed from the internet and the press than she is at the moment,” Daly adds. She calls what we’re seeing now with Del Rey “a slow dismantling of mystique in real-time”. Whatever happens next, it will be interesting to see how the next generation of stars present themselves. With mystique becoming even tougher to preserve than in the past, it’s hard to blame any artist who decides it’s just not worth the effort anymore.

I’ve also read this article about Dolly Parton. I’ve been fascinated by her public persona for a while and this article actually puts everything together. It’s worth reading both of them.

You can learn a lot about Parton from how she has navigated the Trump era. These past four years, celebrities have found it hard to duck the question, “Which side are you on?” Taylor Swift, like Parton, has a typical Nashville aversion to controversy but she was labelled everything from a coward to a closet white supremacist for her neutral stance until she finally came out as a Democrat in 2018. Parton, however, remains publicly apolitical at a time when it would seem impossible to be apolitical. Even when her 9 to 5 co-stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin were savaging Trump right next to her on the stage at the 2017 Emmy Awards, Parton changed the subject with a trusty boob joke. When the topic came up on Dolly Parton’s America, she flatly shut it down: “I don’t do politics. I have too many fans on both sides of the fence.”

The easy explanation is that she puts business before principle, but for Parton those two instincts aren’t in opposition. She is by nature a bridge-builder and unifier, with a talent for smoothing troubled waters.

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Here are the links to the articles, again:

1. Lana Del Rey and the struggle to be mysterious in pop
2. How Dolly Parton became the world’s best-loved celebrity

An interesting article on the power of fans. As well as some interesting points of view on NFTs.

It’s easy to see how this plays out going forward: Swift probably doesn’t even have to remake another album; she has demonstrated the willingness and capability to remake her old records, and her fans will do the rest. It will behoove Shamrock Capital, the current owner of Swift’s masters, to buy-out Braun’s share of future upside and make a deal with Swift, because Swift, granted the power to go direct to fans and make her case, can in fact “change history, facts, and re-frame any story [she] want[s] to fit with any narrative [she] wish[es].”

What is notable about Swift’s tactics is that they are the opposite of what she urged in that 2014 op-ed. Instead of treasuring “Fearless”, Swift devalued it; instead of asking for what her masters are worth, Swift is simply taking them. Patel was right that while art may be important, on the Internet it’s not rare; what he missed is how that makes Swift more powerful than ever.

From here: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift – Stratechery by Ben Thompson.

I always wanted to write. I’ve never been actually good at it, but I always wanted to write.

When I was a kid, I would write short stories for school. But when one of my classmates wrote an enthralling story about the Second World War I wanted to be part of the process and I tried to continue what he wrote. And it was bad. And it’s not the adult in me saying it now. I knew THEN it was bad.

Today I found this:

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

From here, via this BBC article about the best books of 2021 until now (April).

And I’m thinking one of the (many) issues I can’t write as good as I’d like is that I’m too much in my head. I process my thoughts and feelings in my head and when I express them they’re (most of the time) fully formed. And trying to write how i got to the final idea feels futile and inconsequential.

Oh, well…