personal – Page 8

yes.no.yes.no.yes.no. ? !

By tio | December 14, 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

For the past several months I have fluctuated between excitement to do this or that, and total lack of any excitement. Happy and motivated, to then being depressed and demotivated. But I like to try and understand myself, so I always use me as the rat I am experimenting on.

I’ve been through such moments all of my life, and I don’t think it is unusual considering the work I’m doing: researching the ugly face of this world, and then (at times) finding the nice face of the world here and there. So my brain is like “Jeez the world sucks balls. Really bad. And is nothing we can do about it. We are doomed”. Then at times is like “Oh look, nice people and projects. How nice. Flowers and bunnies and all of that.”. And these get mixed in my brain at times. On top of that I always had to worry about money…will I have enough for the next months!?

But lately I am a lot more “yes.no.yes.no.yes.no”. Like a bunch of waves in a storm. Why?

At times I get excited about TROM II and discuss with the people around me about it, and ideas of how to make it more interesting and such, to then, in a few days time, to be like “bleah…I don’t like any of these ideas…I don’t want to make TROM II”. And it goes on and on for months, not making much progress with it. Again, why-why? I think I know why.

2000-2005

2000-2005

From mind to notebook

This trade-based, zombie-full, and retarded-graded society always stressed me out. But once I started to have a notebook (journal) - pen and paper - I got more relaxed. I could express myself. Write about the idiocracy. Felt good.

2005-2009

2005-2009

From notebook to blog

Then I decided to write digitally.

Back in 2005 or so, when I was starting my romanian blog, it felt like I came across a big pile of fresh air. It was me, my computer, usually late at night, writing about the stuff I wanted to write. I felt like I was alone on a planet, beaming my thoughts to other planets. Not many listeners, not many reactions. But I liked that. Because all I wanted was to say some stuff. That's all. After a few years it became a bit busier and I didn't like it that much. People voicing their opinions to your opinion, in your own home (your website) can become annoying. But hey, there is a lot to learn at times, from this minds from other planets.

My thoughts were no only mine, hidden in an old notebook in my room, they were out there for all to see. I retired my notebook.

2009-2012

2009-2012

From blog to documentary

After a few years I felt like I can express my thoughts better in english and in a video format. I was watching too much EN stuff, but I could not write very well, so it help that I could cut segments from videos and make some content that would mirror my thoughts. Like a DJ, I was remixing stuff. So I made TROM Documentary with videos from other documentaries, lectures or other videos, plus a badly written EN script (from a grammar perspective). I remade TROM with a proofread script a year later. I was happy, but not in the mood anymore to write on my romanian blog. I was leaving that behind. Didn't consider it relevant anymore, same way I stopped writing in my notebook once I started my blog.

I tried however to still write in romanian on that blog, but I realized it is not happening. Almost like being 15 trying to jerk off on 70s playboy magazines. I needed new adventures :)). It's not working!

2013-2018

2013-2018

From documentary to books

Making a 14h documentary was a great way of expressing my thoughts. But now I had even more thoughts. I wanted to do proper research, to source what I was writing about, to move from writing articles to writing books. To do "serious" work. And so I created a lot of books, very detailed, very important. A fuck-ton of work. Writing them, designing them. I got better at writing in EN. But not that great at speaking in EN since I could not practice with anyone. I was behind the screen, typing words. That's me.

In this time I tried to go back on the Memory Lane and make some videos based on the books I wrote. That documentary-lane...I tried a lot. A lot. We recorded, and recorded, and recorded. And we released 2-3 videos, and that's it. I felt again like that 15-year-old jerky. Not working anymore. Doesn't excite me anymore to make videos...I made a huge one, and I put a lot of work into it....now I was in the book-mood.

2018-present

2018-present

From books to in-action

Since 2005 I've been broadcasting my thoughts indirectly. But in 2018'sh I started to meet people who were very aware of my work. Meet them in person. We also started TROM-Cast. Us. Live. Speaking directly to each other, and to the other planets. My spoken EN got a lot better.

Until then I felt like a runner who trains for a competition. Year by year, accumulating knowledge and skills. 2019 was the year I could run. Be out there. Touch the other planets. Broadcast my thoughts directly.

Another important thing happened: my realization of "trade" and how it is a thing that influences everything, and how focusing on that is the best we can do. Understand. Destroy. Also, trade-free. Create trade-free goods/services to both help people in an honest manner, and to also inform people about this trade-monster. And so I created tools like TROMjaro, the Trade Free Directory and the website, and I re-labeled and re-purposed all of the other websites to be trade free: videoneat, my website, other people's websites...our tools were directed towards that vision. I wanted to showcase how we can do some work in this saner direction. No more "just talking", now it was doing. More directly. Yeah, small scale. but still...a lot considering my "powers".

For the past 2 years I loved working on TROMjaro and make it better and better and make a point with it within the open source community. And I got my voice heard a couple of times. I curate hundreds of trade-free apps for it, I added stuff to the trade-free directory, I removed the trackers from most of our websites. I started to get away from online trades as much as possible, as a matter of principle and also because it feels damn good and could inform people about why trade sucks, and trade-free goods/services are a lot better. A LOT.

No more books for me, it was all about doing something. Talking to others, challenging them and their values, be out there into the wild. That started to excite me.

But then I had this idea, partially influenced by the people around me, of making another TROM documentary and explain this new thing I discovered with “trade”. I agreed we need such a material on our website and out there on the webs. TROM documentary is still relevant, but talking about abundance, and scarcity, and rbe, and tvp and the like, doesn’t make sense for me anymore. I evolved past that. I changed my mind about many of those notions. We made a TROM-Cast all about that and it is part of the TROM documentary now, as a “review” of it, at the end of the documentary. But it is not enough. I would like to replace that documentary with a new (updated) one. Although that’s the rationale, and although sometimes I feel super excited about it, it does feel a bit forced…as if I force myself to go back to making videos instead of focusing on the “in action” part of my evolving life. I feel more motivated to invite experts on TROM-Cast and talk about the human behavior or other notions, to invite people from the Open Source communities, volunteers, those who want to change the society, and talk to them. Learn from them. Challenge them.

I think I am ready-enough to go and talk/debate with others about these ideas. I want to go fight now :D. Doing things like books or documentaries is an indirect fight for me. But I still would love to write more books. I want to definitely write a few more. One about science so that I learn what it is in detail, one about human behavior in great detail, one about “shapes” (you’ll see it is a fascinating topic and it affects everything: medicine, tech, behavior, etc.); and a few more. I’d like to write them on my own phase and in the meantime do more work on TROMjaro, Trade-Free Directory and the other tools we have, and definitely TROM-Cast.

I fell like that’s my new “era”, the in-action era. And I am kinda forcing myself to go back again to the “documentary” era. But I’ll give it a shot. We are trying to do a different kind of TROM documentary, more “in-action” with filming me, Sasha and Dima. We already started that so let’s see where it goes.

Thing is, my idea was to raise around 13k Euros for a year of work (1k a month to survive), and all of the 2021 to work on TROM II. I could have done that if I had the money. But since I only have raised around 2k then I had to rethink it completely. It will be a shorter one, but maybe more interesting and personal. More “catchy”.

So yah…let’s see how it goes…

The good part is to see myself evolving and trying new approaches to understand the world and explain it to others.

When I know what I want to do, it is a lot less of “yes.no.yes.no.yes.no.”. But when I try to force myself to do things I may not enjoy doing at that period of time, then I fluctuate a lot. It happened to me when I tried to write again on my romanian blog, when I tried to make videos out of my books, when I have to do this documentary it seems.

In any regard, I also have to enjoy life and the things I am creating, else it is pointless. I’d rather have a normal job and forget about this, if I end up in a pile of stress and regard TROM II or other projects as “work that I HAVE TO DO”.

I am so so happy with the stuff I’ve created so far and I will create more of it, and evolve to new kinds of projects and approaches. The flame of “doing something” is still burning inside my essence. That’s for sure!

The Beginner’s guide to Friendica

By tio | November 2, 2020 | Comments 5 comments

I wrote this blog recently about what the Fediverse is and why it is so awesome, together with how I created a monster to automate our Friendica TROM page and my personal account to post everywhere (Facebook, Twitter, TROM Live, my Live). Yesterday we had a really great TROMcast with the people behind Friendica and Mastodon, and Disroot.org. And I want to write a brief “beginner guide” to Friendica, because I love Friendica :). And the people behind the project are super friendly.

First of all, make an account to give it a try.

There are many “instances” so you can choose whichever. I personally recommend venera.social. It works great and the guy behind the project seems like a very nice human. Register and wait for approval. I know, it seems like a pain in the ass to wait for approval, but trust me on this. It is going to be a fast approval and they do that so that they keep these instances nice and clean. Your account will be approved 100%.

Tweak your account.

After you are approved simply go through your settings and set up stuff. It is a lot better than Facebook and easier to grasp and very clean. You can choose to block content based on language, words, you can choose who can see your posts and such. It is up to you how you set this up. Take it easy. No rush. You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to, and you can do any changes in time. It is your baby dear.

Start to follow people and organizations.

This is what you are there for. But how can you find them? Don’t be like a hungry bear that goes into a house and wants to eat everything it finds, and if it does not find much, it goes away. Be a nice, civilized, and sane bear and you’ll get to eat in that house very good food and not get fat. For starters you can follow us, people from TROM. Sasha, Shas, Aaron, me, Alexio and more importantly our TROM page. Then look through our contact list and add more people. Let it grow slowly and organically. In the contacts settings, you can search people based on interests (keywords). Let it grow slowly and I mean that. You may be used with Facebook and the crazy of influx of information that engulfs your entire life. This is a way for you to start as brand new and meet new people. It is like moving from New York (facebook) to a small nice village. You’ll see, life is better there ;).

The awesome part that keeps me personally there.

Friendica opens the doors to pretty much any Federated network. Say you find a Mastodon account in the wild. Copy the url to your Friendica search bar then simply follow them. Do the same for any other Federated network. Now you can interact with these people (send private messages, see their posts in your feed, comment to them, like, share, etc.).

Follow websites!

Yah! You can. Pretty much any website (since most have an RSS feed). Copy our videoneat.com url, or tromjaro.com, tiotrom.com, bigworldsmallsasha.com, trade-free.org/directory, or any other that you like, into the contacts page and just follow. You’ll get to see the posts in your feed whenever these websites post new stuff. How cool! You can also tweak the settings for each such website, individually. For example you can set up how frequently you get updates from them, if you want to get a notification when they post something new, or format how the posts should look like.

At times, if these websites support it, you can see their entire articles in you feed so no need to go to their websites. I recommend you select “fetch information and keywords” so you get to see their posts as a summary and link to the original article. And lastly, you can select to auo-reshare any of these websites’ posts on your profile if you wish. Or as your own posts.

Follow Twitter!

If you have a Twitter account, now is the time to never use twitter.com but use it through your Friendica. Go to Settings – Social Networks and click the Twitter tab. Connect to your Twitter (easy, a few seconds). Now you should choose “allow posting on twitter” and “import the remote timeline”. Why? Because now if you want to follow someone on Twitter, simply copy their twitter url, the entire thing, into the same contacts page and follow them. And you’ll see their posts in your timeline. Easy.

You can reply to these Twitter accounts from Friendica and interact with them from there. Super cool. I already follow a few Twitter accounts and works great.

Follow Facebook pages and more!

You cannot follow people/pages from Facebook in a “native” and interactive way, but there is a way you can do that when these are public. Go to our RSS-Bridge service here. Search for Facebook Bridge | Main Site. Now click “show more”. And add a Facebook page name that you want to follow as I showcase bellow. “username” is the page name.

Now click “Html”. You will be redirected to a new page where you can see the posts of that page as such.

Right click the Mrss and then Copy Link. That’s all. Now you have the RSS link of that Facebook page. Go to your contacts page and add it there. Then click “connect”. Same as adding any contacts or websites.

And that’s how you can follow Facebook pages or public profiles. Use that RSS-Bridge. You cannot comment/interact with these, but well…at least you can follow them. I suggested to Friendica-friendy developers to add the RSS-Bridge as an addon to Friendica, so that if you want to follow a user/page to be as easy as pasting the facebook URL into the “add new contact” form, and the rest is magic.

Follow the entire internet!

Follow Youtube, WordPress plugins updates, Wikipedia daily article or “did you know?”, VK pages, Vimeo, photos from Unsplash, you can even follow Twitter users and pages without an account or even follow hashtags….you can follow Telegram public groups, or when new stuff is added to the BitTorrent network (like say you want to know when a new episode from whatever documentary series you like, is available on torrents). Follow Sub-Reddits, or even PornHub; follow the latest releases on FDroid and sooo much more. I am telling you, this RSS-Bridge is amazing and you can use it as a proxy for connecting your Friendica to pretty much the entire internet.

So yah…slowly you can add up as much stuff to your friends/follows as you want. Create a stream of what you love from the entire Internet.

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and the like, thought people that they should be spoon fed. You wait for them to feed you, and that led to a world where what you consume is always what these platforms are feeding you. And they do that based on their own interests, not yours. And you end up being unable to control that spoon ->>

It takes a bit of time to move to a place like Friendica. But not as much as you might think. However, you have to get used to feed yourself. Grab that spoon. Choose your food. You will see that it makes a huge difference in the long term.

SEE YOU ON FRIENDICA!

Why I got married?

By tio | February 27, 2020 | Comments 5 comments

This is me, Sasha, and the mayor of a small Romanian town. He, through the power of himself, declared us “connected”. United. Glued. Forever sticky with each-other. I also wear a “camiseta” – that kind of shirt that you usually wear for special events. It is not mine and I don’t usually wear such things. Sasha is wearing a traditional romanian shirt. :))

I know, you may think yourself “What in the fuck…”. I do the same. But we did this because we had little to no choice. Not because we liked or wanted to. This is going to be a long post that summarizes some 9 months of my life. I need to take this off my chest. I also want to draw the attention to why this “marriage” ritual is more than a cute thing that people do. It is an abusive and mindless ritual.

How come I, the one who make fun of such rituals, got married?

I created TROM Documentary in 2011 to, among many things, poke fun at such rituals and to make people aware of such nonsensicalities. And now I’m part of them. But why? WHY? Well, there is a good reason why.

It started some 2 years ago (as far as I remember) when Sasha contacted me to help with TROM. She just discovered the project and really liked it. This was not unique since many people have contacted me to help with the project over the years. But Sasha started to help immediately and even created some discussion groups on FB and offline, where she would take each part of TROM Documentary, watch it with other people, and discuss it afterwards. She also made some Youtube videos with these discussions. Here. I thought that’s super interesting and I was super happy to see someone that’s so pro-active. We got in touch more and more over email and on Riot and I even participated to one or two of her online discussions. She was also helping with proofreading the TROM books and other materials. So, she was helping a lot and she was very interested in the project.

She had a website where she was posting about her very-interesing-life. I have to be honest here, I didn’t look at the website very much until later on since I was so busy with TROM. Basically she traveled all around the world for 10+ years, meeting all kinds of cultures in her way, and having a very different lifestyle than your normal Kathy. I traveled between my room, bathroom and kitchen for the past 10 years, but despite that we realized that our values (let’s call them TROM values 😛 ), were very much aligned, like Musk’s ‘penises’ when they descend.

After a few months, maybe more than a year actually, of staying in close contact and me realizing more and more that she is serious about not being a Kathy (sorry Kathy, nothing against you m’am, but the world is full of normal people), I asked to her to let me help rebuilding her website to highlight her lifestyle/ideas even better. To make something unique out of what she got there. I helped a few other people/projects in the past with their websites when I considered what they did as interesting. I like doing that. So it was nothing out of ordinary for me to propose that to her. It was really interesting to see Sasha writing about her unique exploration of Earth together with linking to relevant TROM info. Awesome photos, awesome stories. Smart writing. I really liked it. What she did with her blog was medicine done right. It was like when I was little and my mom used to put medicine in my soda drinks. A tasty way of getting healthier. Combine a “cool” lifestyle (that’s more than cool, it is interesting) with in-depth materials about our society, culture, tech, science. Sasha put the medicine out there in this easy-to-swallow-way. And I just wanted to make the “holder” (the cup) of her stuff, a bit more interesting.

Why Sasha was Aaron?

Side note: After swimming in these “activism” waters like TROM, TVP, TZM and the like for a bit, I noticed how many (MANY) people are in for the “making friends” of it. They want a connection. They want relationships. They want a community. Nothing against that, but to me that’s a bit puckey. If you are in search of a community on top of being interested in the project, then great. But if you make it more about the social aspects of it, then I hate you. I struggle like crazy to make these ideas (TROM ideas) easy to grasp and known, and if people join mostly to talk to others and find friends, then it is extremely disappointing for me. I failed. And I saw people that were in search of girlfriends and such, in these groups, more than they were interested in the projects. Girls (vagina-and-boobs-shaped humans) are a rarity in such groups. Thus, when they are present, I saw penis-and-no-boobs-shaped humans hitting on them. Perhaps because people in such groups are quite lonely, they would absolutely love to be in a relationship (feelings, sex, whatever) with another human that shares these “weird” values that very few share. Let’s be honest, finding a girlfriend (if that’s what you want) who is also interested in how this society works, is quite rare. Guys are more interested in such topics (statistically-observed-by-me and-others). So, in a way I get it, but it is uncomfortable to see such situations where people use such interesting projects like TVP, TZM, TROM and the like, to “hook-up” with others. I’m not saying they join for that reason, but that’s what I observed a bunch of times with several people.

Ok. So. I realized that I am quite an abnormal creature. Even compared to the people from such groups. I do not need a community, or a relationship. I am perfectly fine by myself. All of my life I lived alone basically. Relationships? A girlfriend? What are those? How do they smell? I tried them in high school for a bit, then in collage. I realized that they are over-hyped by our culture. Boring. And non-interesting to me. Both the community and relationships. Give me the sexiest girl in the world, make her my slave, but if we don’t share these TROM values then it cannot work. It is a no-brainer really, but something people might be very naive about when they only look at the wrapper of the package, instead of the “package” itself (values). So even in that scenario I’ll end up with a sex slave that might stress me out more than I stress her. In college I fancied about “relationships” a little bit and I remember a girl asking me to please stop poking jokes at her boi Jesus when we are together…..Yeah…..sure….If religion is bullshit, I’ll call that bullshit, like it is. So no thanks. I won’t ever be able to stay close to such normal creatures that are both shallow (know very little about the waters they swim into), and plain simply crazy (full of BS ideas and pseudoscience).

The idea here is that I am so curious about the world (what the fuck is happening) that I don’t give a fuck about anything else. Period. I don’t dream about a girlfriend, friends, a community, a horse, a sex slave, or a new car. If those will emerge somehow then great (no sex slave tho – humans need-be-respected-and-not-harmed), if not then I don’t care. So, with that being said, I was never in pursuit of anything but TROM-related-stuff for the past 10 or so years. I never joined any meetings anywhere (not even online, except let’s say 2 or so), and I never wanted to meet people in “real” life. Not even TROM people. I don’t know, but it was always uncomfortable for me. Just leave me alone. 😀

For the past 2-3 years I was a bit more lose in the sense that a few people said they want to visit me and I was like “eh….ok….will see”. Normally I won’t even reply to such messages. I realized that life is short and I spent more than 10 years alone in my room writing stuff and making videos. Why not try to taste from a different kind of lifestyle? And so Aaron ‘forced’ me to accept his invitation to visit me. 🙂 He came to visit me for 3 days, after we worked together for like 2 years online. He was the first TROM human I met. Then I thought, with him, to organize a TROM meeting in a few months time and invite some close-TROM-friends. So we did. I liked Aaron a lot. Such a great human.

Now, why was Sasha, Aaron?

Because I had no other interest in Sasha more than I had in Aaron or the other TROM people we invited in May. For me they were equally friends. TROM friends. No expectations like “Oh, let’s invite Sasha so maybe we get together and I finally have that girlfriend that I was dreaming all along.”. I had no such “visionary” projections about my future.

In any case, Sasha was one of those that were invited. She was happy. Very. And she came last out of all, arriving 1-2 days later in Spain, after hitchhiking from Russia. Crazy! This is when we all met her:

This is her and her backpack. Can you tell which one is which? Because I offered my help to carry that backpack up 1.448.566 stairs to the house where we would stay, and trust me I felt like carrying Sasha and her entire family all the way. I never in my life had to carry something as heavy as this backpack. This girl must be strong to carry that thing from Russia to Spain. Small but strong.

People came. We had fun for 3 weeks. Almost. I was kinda sick, peeing blood for like half the meeting. I thought that backpack bursted something inside me. In this meantime me and Sasha ended up together. Two planets from different solar systems, coalesced. How that happened? I don’t remember. I think one day I woke up and I was informed that me and Sasha were a “couple”. I was fine with that. It was quick. I was sick. I think I was taken advantage of. IDK. 🙂 – No, I am joking of course, we got really well together and it was unavoidable to coalesce. Gravity.

Before this meet-up several of us discussed about the possibility of moving together after the meeting was over. Only 3 of us (me, Sasha and Aaron) moved together right away. It took us 2 weeks to find an apartment in a town that’s 90% full of empty apartments for like 8 months a year. We were refused because we were not a family, we look too young, or we wouldn’t be able to prove that we have a steady income and such. It was an awful experience. We were lucky to find an apartment through my sister’s bosses that own a rental company.

Anyways, now me, Sasha, and Aaron moved together.

But it was the beginning of an end. Only 1 month after we moved together and the flowers were blooming in our young hearts, Sasha had to leave Spain. Why? Was she sick? A lesbian? Did Aaron and Sasha had a relationship behind my back? Did I start to snore too loud? Mnot. The thing is that in this society you can’t just live on Earth. When you are born here, then you can’t go there that easily, or at all. Imaginary borders are well maintained and supported by pillars of paper. They call them IDs, Passports, VISA (Vehement Inspection of the Soul and Ass), etc.. Sasha was born in one of the Earth’s ‘gardens’ called Russia. Then she hopped into USA. So she had 2 “nationalities”. But I was in Spain (Europe). She, russian-american, Me romanian-european. The truth is we were like oil and water in this society. We could not mix under its rules. The papers won’t allow for that. Sasha wrote a great blog about this Prison Earth we all are inmates of, so I highly suggest you go read that.

Sasha had to leave. USA? UK? No-way? She chose UK. Was closer to Spain and a friend of hers was beyond kind to let her stay there for free in her apartment. Just one month after we signed a 1-year contract for the apartment (rental), Sasha had to leave to UK and stay there for 3 months. The Europe prison says that someone from USA can only stay for 3 months in Europe and then leave Europe for 3 months in order to be able to come back for another 3. 3 is the number of the god europa, a bitch of the sea. UK is part of Europe (but not “properly”) – so Sasha was able to use that as a saving boat. Sasha leaving Spain was not as easy. I thought she was used to going places and sleeping in a tent :D, but the thought of leaving Spain so quickly and maybe having to go to US or somewhere else and work, put a toll on her and I saw her very sad. So sad I really got pissed at this society to the point of wanting to punch the society in the face. She was low on money so it was quite a bad situation. She was also in the middle of writing a book about her life and getting interrupted by these stupidities that our society is so proud of, is soul crushing. I “forced” her to create a fundraiser for her book and a Patreon (link). Fortunately a few kind people donated money. We were both kinda at the edge: financially, emotionally. Anyways, she left. She stayed there for 3 months. She didn’t have to work thanks to the donations she received and this friend of hers that was so nice. It was ok in the end.

The only positive part is that while she was there, we talked on the phone almost every night. I swear VISA made our relationship better. We got to be best friends and in no way we would accept this bullshit paperwork to split us apart in this idiocratic society. If this doesn’t sound like the start of a romantic movie, then I don’t know what. I call it Shrek 5: in the search of the lost queen.

The queen got back after 3 months and we had to quickly think of something to be able to stay together. This is a photo I took after we “recovered” her from the airport in Barcelona.

Now we were in Spain. Sasha could only stay for 3 months there. How can we fix this?

RIDDLE TIME:

We have 2 young (yes!) creatures on planet Earth. They are humans.

1. Sasha. Purple. She is labeled as russian-american.

Places she can go to (source 1, 2):

This bitch can go everywhere around the world you might say. The red and blue is where she actually can go and stay, the rest are places where she can stay somewhere between a month and three months on average. The grey is “bitch you need to ask first and we may refuse you, and if we accept you, you won’t stay for long.”

1. Tio. Blue. He is labeled as romanian.

Places he can go to (source 1)

Even this cunt can travel a lot with the romanian passport. But, except Europe, every other place on that map he can only visit for one to three months on average. The grey area is a no-no. Including USA and Russia, where the human number 1 can reside.

The following is an interactive map I really struggled to put together. Here is Planet Earth. The most gifted rock in the Universe. Purple and Blue want to be together. Live together on this rock. But how? I combined both of the above maps into one to showcase where Purple and Blue could stay together, because the above maps do no justice to the injustice. Those shades of green there may make people think that we could have lived together pretty much everywhere.

So. Let’s make it dark.

Where you see dark grey, those are the areas where we could have stayed (both of us) for a few days to up to 6 months maximum. That within a year, or less period of time. Simply put these dark grey areas are for tourists who go there to visit. On top of this, all of such dark grey places have their own rules (trades you have to respect) – so is not like you simply go there and all is fine. Or it’s not like it is so easy to access these places.

The black areas are areas where at least one of us can’t really go unless they get a VISA. And that’s usually difficult if not impossible to get for humans like us who do not have a job or money.

Blue is where blue can stay, but not purple (except for 3 months every 3 months). And purple is where purple can stay, but not blue (except if he gets a VISA for a period of time – months – which is difficult to get).

Now click on the map, on any tribe, to see where we could have stayed and how. The rules there. The conditions.

To my surprise there is ONE, 1, UNO, place where both of us could stay “forever” and ever and build our kingdom of TROM. That orange island there on top. The great island of Svalbard. It is the only place in the world where anyone can go. From anywhere. No VISA. No restrictions. Almost…What’s the catch?

Population somewhere over 2 thousand people. Few and in-between.
Very “wild” and cold. You need a proper jacket and a gun. And I mean it. It is required when you go out to either have a gun and know how to use it, or go with someone who has one and knows how to use it. Why? Polar bears. Fluffy and deadly.
It is expensive to go there. Flights alone are in the hundreds of euros.
It is difficult to get there. Likely you have to go through Norway (its mother land), so if you can’t access Norway then you can’t really access this place.
You can stay there if you can financially support yourself – being part of Norway you can be sure the life there is one of the most expensive in Europe.
You won’t have access to healthcare or other social systems unless (probably) if you pay for that which is (probably) super expensive.

In all, it is great to see that such a place exist, but in no way this would be an option for us. We would barely have the money to buy a ticket there. But then, unless we hunt polar bears with our bare hands, we could not make it. Here’s a cool video about the place:

Now, there are ways for you to go to most of the world’s tribes and live there. Like having a job there, or invest into a business, buy land or whatever. Meaning, if you have money you are able to go. But even then it is a bit complicated. We don’t have any jobs and are barely making a living so these are no options for us. We looked and looked and looked into ways of staying together on this planet and we could not find any that could work for both of us. Unless we decided to become 100% slaves and try to get a job – tho without a diploma (me) or a proper one (her), even that would have been nearly impossible.

What are our options then? Very few, if any. So, we decided to get “married”. This way the tribes seem to allow us to live in Europe at least. It is so ridiculous that a piece of paper that basically says “these two people are together” can be so important. If this isn’t Idiocracy then….. Needless to say that none of us ever gave a fuck about this marriage ritual. Most people on this Planet seem to be enslaved to this idea, even the most skeptical of them all are pray to it. Which is very weird to me. But if that’s the solution then fuck it. Let’s do the stupid ritual and have that paper that will allow the Purple inmate to live in Europe. Let’s try to see if Blue and Purple can live together.

RIDDLE TIME OVER. LET'S 'HACK' THE SOCIETY.

We were in Spain. Aaron left to Switzerland to work so that he can make some money to then be able to stop working for months (maybe even 1 year). Me and Sasha decided to try and get married in Spain. We had 3 months to solve this fuckery. We went to this special-building that deals with marriages. The woman gave us a list of what we need in order to get married in Spain. In short we needed:

A valid “ID” card. Like your face and some letters and numbers that prove you are real and you are owned by this or that tribe. We had those. Passports.
Another document to prove you were born. Somewhere. We had them. Tho Sasha had to ask her father to send them from Russia…
A document to prove where I live in Spain and where Sasha lived for the past 2 years (in the bloody world). I have such a document. Sasha does not since she traveled around the world. She didn’t have a “place” to stay for the past 10+ years. Except here and there, rentals or mostly staying at people’s places. But this was an issue. However perhaps we could have lied about it.
A document to prove that you are not married. I mean….what the fuck. Aren’t “authorities” suppose to know that. Why are they asking you for an ID card and all that when you get married, to then not know if some citizens are married or not. How come I have to prove it? Anyways, this was a paper we needed to take from our tribe’s embassies. Costly and for mine would have taken about 3 months to be “delivered”. Too long. Sasha could only stay for 3 months in Spain and she was already there for a few weeks already (time it took us to go here and there and ask around for what we need).
Another document to prove that you are ABLE to get married. Ha.ha.Ha.hA. ~~ha.~~ Lord Jizas. They are serious about this shit. But it is for real. There is such a document. I don’t know what that means but….well…haha. We probably could get this one too, though would have taken a while to get it from our tribes.

The really cunty thing about it was that Sasha needed to have documents for both of her nationalities. In Russian and English. From both tribes. That would have been really difficult and complicated. More than that, we were obliged to translate all of the documents for both of us (of course, since our species can’t even talk one universal language). Despite all that, we tried….but we realized that we can’t do it in a 3 months time-frame. We also noticed that when you submit the marriage papers in spain, you have to be interviewed….Maybe they would ask us what are our favorite colors or foods. I don’t know what these people are up to, but to me this all smells like Hitlerism. The entire situation. We were also in great difficulty regarding the Spanish language and its many dialects, because we struggled to both understand these motherfuckers and talk to them.

Spain was kinda impossible. Let’s try Romania.

Our last option was to go to Romania and get married there. I hated this. Oh man…I hated. Look….I hate Romania so much, and I hate it even more when I know the people there who are so religious and culturally smashed, that I feel like I am going back 4.667 years when I get there. Yes, there are interesting people there and it’s hard to judge a tribe just by looking at a few members, but from my experience it is a very backwards culture overall. And you won’t feel it that deeply if you don’t get to live there. I mean, it is the same environment that made me want to hang myself in highschool. I ran away from that environment. I don’t want to go back. Especially going there to “get married”. Let me tell you something, in Romania 3 things are extremely important in everyone’s life: cars, houses, and weddings. All sprinkled with pseudoscience (beliefs). If you have these 3, you are living the life. If one is missing, you might be a failure. A Romanian in their 20s wants a car and a wedding, and in their 30s a house and kids. In their 40s they are confused, and after 50s they argue with their TV, not even giving a damn that no one listens to them. In their 70s and they simply wait for the end of their life.

Side note: I don’t think romanians like having kids that much. It’s more like “I had to do it”. So I won’t list that as a “must” despite everyone having kids.:P

But weddings are a THING in romania. You think about them years in advance, even before meeting your soul-mate. My parents used to have something called “zestre” for me and my sister. These were “objects” (stuff), that was put aside for when we get married. Carpets, plates, forks and knives, bed sheets and maybe even house flip-flops and pajamas. They were stored in our old balcony. The 4th floor of the building. We were not allowed to touch them. They were new. They were waiting for us. Collecting dust. They were sold eventually, or used for us or for bribes….I think my parents realized we were not normal kids and we won’t get married anyways. How wrong were they, right!?

So once you find your soul-mate, after going through a few cunts and bitches and a few STDs, you finally realize that your soul-mate is like that Happy Meal toy: looks great on TV and on the Mec’s shelf, but once you start using it you realize it is of a very poor quality and boring as fuck. But hey….you are getting old and your parents keep on telling you to “find the one” and “keep ‘it'”. So you do. You talk to the one and plan for the “unification”. Must be in June-July, 2 years from now. It is warm and people might not be so busy with their jobs, so more people may come to your wedding. You see, in Romania weddings are not just a celebration, they are a business. You plan ahead what restaurant to rent, what nameless (but ‘famous’) band to hire, what food to serve (must be exotic and named in ways that you can’t pronounce). And compare all that with how many people you may invite (usually over 100) and how much money to ask them for the invite. Yes. In Romania when you are invited to a wedding, it is not free. They will tell you up-front how much it costs. Usually around 100 Euros per person. For a few hours of eating and drinking and listening to very loud and very awful music. But look, once you accept the invite, the ones getting married have an obligation to come to your wedding too. So it is an investment.

With the date settled, you hunting for the “stuff” you need (food, food, drinks and drinks, music and a restaurant), you need clothes. Expensive and disposable. Fuck the guy. The girl stuff is the expensive one by far. How much? A quick online search shows this:

On this website you see prices that average somewhere around 3 to 4.000 lei. “lei” means “lions” in Romanian language and it is also the official currency. So, how many lions equals one elephant? Well, 4.000 lions is around 1.000 Euros. Or, like my grandma used to say, almost twice the average salary in Romania. And look at this price range on the same website:

So the prices range from 400 Euros to 1.100 Euros. And people in Romania, despite living in one of the poorest tribes in Europe, keep buying these disposables. A wedding normally costs several thousand euros. But you can make the money back from the “guests”. 200 people paying 100 to 200 euros to come + the “gift” they each HAVE to give you, means that you are making the money back. The “gift” is another Romanian thing. At a wedding everyone is “obliged” to give a gift to the glued-ones. That means money usually. A few hundreds more. Some give them thousands.

Weddings in Romania are a very distasteful business. And they dare to make 2 of these. One is the official one where you sign the gluing paper that recognizes your relationship as “marriage”, and the religious one where they involve the creator of the universe. That’s the main one for which you need all of those preparations.

I am telling you that so you understand how hypnotized Romanians are with this weird and pucky ritual.

Anyways, fuck that. Back to us.

So, knowing how big of a deal this wedding stupidity is in Romania, I really didn’t want to go there. Of course we would not do those primitive and idiotic things, but we will be forced to do the “official” ceremony and since I am from a very small town where everyone’s hobby is to gossip about others, then people will find out that I am getting married and I’d have to put up with their primitiveness. But well, we had no choice. We had to do this, so we booked flights to Romania on the 30st of December. My parents were already in Romania (they migrate from Spain to there every winter since there’s nothing for them to work here in that period of time).

So. We are packing our bags and I am trying not to lose my mind because I feel like going to a shithole hell. I wanted to make a documentary about this ridiculous situation. I filmed some stuff and took some photos here and there, but overall I was very disturbed mentally to be able to focus on such things. Plus, I didn’t want to compromise our situation with this….

the adventure in romania

Bus from our small town in Spain, to a near by one. Wait 1h for another bus. From there to Barcelona. 4.5 hours drive. Traffic jam in Barcelona. The bus was ok. No one wears seatbelts except us and an old british couple that I saw. People think they are invincible in buses. Well, ok. We arrive at the airport and for me these places are one of the most polluted on Earth. Polluted with stupidity and abuse. You feel like a proper inmate there. You are a subordinate. You are scared not do do any “wrong” move or have an “improper” attitude. It is the human version of a livestock factory. Everyone there is so serious and the prices for food and drinks are 5 times higher than in that tribe. It is a rip-off. A scam. A prison. A place where you won’t find any humans. Seems like everyone is a robot. A mindless machine. Here and there you may see a heavily armed robot. As if these places are the battle ground of an invisible war. Not to mention how charlatans these airline companies are. We used WizzAir. This company is so awful that customers made a website called wizzairsucks.com. Buying a plane ticket feels like and endless stream of additional services. Feels like doing your taxes. Feels like a puzzle. Feels like crawling naked through a stream of mouse traps. You want insurance? A car to pick you up from the airport? Priority checking? A better seat? Chewing gum? A massage? A handjob? A subscription to stewardess porn? You name it, these fuckers are not an airline company, they are a service-selling company and you are their customer. That’s all. The “continue” (next) button on their website (while you fill in your information) is always hidden underneath a mountain of such “options” layered with a ton of colorful ads.

Then, they dare to tell us that you HAVE to buy a seat in order to continue. Despite not being mandatory they make it look like so. Just read the bellow message we were faced with:

I think this image says it all. Man, “capitalistic” morons may really enjoy this option-full society we live in. So wonderful. We had to “risk” it and not buy seats at the expense of checking in (whatever-the-fuck-that-means) only 48h before the flight. That was our punishment for getting 2 free seats….for the tickets we just bought. Imagine if bus tickets would be as fucked up as plane tickets. And after they check your face, your documents, face again, documents…be aware not to trigger the metal detector…strip yourself of your belongings and walk a shit ton through a maze of gates, shops, and scared people….you sit in a narrow seat for a few hours being greeted by mildly sexy flight attendants that only want to sell you more shit at 4 times the normal price. No thanks. I sucked your cock so much, I don’t need a salad and a perfume.

Anyways. Airlines are the top most charlatans of them all.

We are on our way. We land in Romania. There my parents wait for us with a relative with a car. It is 3am. 31st of December. The “New Year’s Eve” they call it. Me and Sasha give no fuck. We drive for 4 hours from Bucharest to “my Romanian little town”. The driver wears no seat belt. It is foggy, cold, dark, and the traffic/roads are awful like usually in Romania. The seat belt still makes little sense for the driver. My parents brought sandwiches and some traditional Romanian sweets for me and Sasha. Very nice. Very good. They are good people. I hear them talk about politics, jobs, normal stuff. I listen. I ignore. I want to arrive home. Sasha sleeps. She does that all the time when we travel :D. That’s good. For her :)). I can’t really sleep in a bus, plane, or car. I need to be there to see what’s happening. There bothers me. I can only sleep here, in my own place.

We arrive. Home is nice. Home is our apartment in Romania. My parents invested pretty much most of their money that they make here in Spain into that apartment (not a lot tho). It is a Romanian thing. You work abroad and build your nest home. They did a good job. The apartment is cozy, spacious, nice. Nothing exaggerated. Minimalist I’d say. And cozy as fuck :D. Basically my parents and my sister put money into that apartment. I didn’t really. I never had money for helping with this. I feel a bit bad but it is what it is.

We took a nap. We woke up in the evening. My parents “prepared” everything for this New Year’s Eve. Again, me and Sasha don’t care about such events, but ok…nice for them to do these. We went quickly to my grandma’s house where some relatives live (my grandparents died a few years ago). I saw Mike. He is the “hand” from TROM Documentary :D. When I created TROM he was there. He is my cousin and he was my only friend for many years. He got a bit trapped in this weird trade society for the past years so we didn’t stay in touch that much for these past years. I was happy to see him. We came back home. My parents had presents for us waiting underneath the Christmas tree. Sasha insisted we also buy some gifts (nothing expensive) for them from Spain. We exchanged gifts. It was nice. I was ok with these.

I invited Mike over. It was me, Sasha, Georgi (my sister), Mike, and my parents. We were eating something. Nice food. Nice everything. Then, around 00:00 my parents went into “waiting for the countdown” mode. Tun in to the TV. Open the champagne. I hear my father saying something about having money in the pocket so the New Year “sees” you with that and you will be lucky the entire year – you’ll have more money. All of this kinda smacked me into the face realizing that this is not my world. And I don’t want to be part of this. Till then it was ok, but then I kinda realized that these little moments, repeated many times over my lifetime, made me angry at this society and people in general. These “little” things that to me showcase how people don’t really care about what’s real. They hold onto all kinds of weird beliefs and simply record and stream them forward. Mechanisms for this consuming culture.

A week, no progress. Since slaves (unfortunately for them) work all year, they will get a break for a few days in this period of time. They call them holy-days. Nothing holy about them tho. So, we could not do anything in the first week when the slaves had a break.

the adventure in romania: the journey of papers

First, we go to this “official” place to ask exactly what we need for the marriage. A small room with old furniture. Two women there. Often they were eating. They were moderately nice. They said we need:

birth certificates for both of us (Sasha has to translate her Russian birth certificate into Romanian)
passports (Sasha has to translate her American passport into Romanian)
a medical paper (hm…yes…) – to showcase we are capable of marriage (ha-ha-ha)
a paper to prove that Sasha is not married
two declarations from Sasha that say the same thing that she is not married, she is alive, has a vagina, and will respect the Romanian laws

Proving that Sasha is Sasha

We need to go to Bucharest (4 hours away from Horezu – the town I’m from) to the American embassy to get that paper showing that Sasha is Sasha and she is not married. We read online that there is no such paper in the US…so what now? They say they will give us another one, like a declaration from Sasha about all of these. We hope it works. We go to Bucharest and stay there for 1 night in an airbnb so we can go in the morning at the embassy. We take an old bus and we get over-charded. But fuck it.

There, in Bucharest at the US embassy, a “beautiful” building guarded by a big Romanian dude with a big gun. He only let’s Sasha in and tells her to leave everything with me, outside, including her phone. Outside was very cold. I am waiting across the street, freezing. Sasha is inside – she had to raise her right hand and “swear” in front of authorities there that she is over 18 and not married and she agrees to marry with me. The funny thing is that Sasha’s name is Russian (Alexandra Davletshina Rashidovna) but her last “residency” was in Hawaii. So, imagine this, in Romania (an unknown tribe from Europe), a Russian citizen raises her hand in a US embassy and says: “Me, Alexandra Davletshina Rashidovn, from Kamehameha Haleiwa Hawaii, want to get married to this long-named-romanian-citizen.” Hilarious. And Jezus Christ of Nazareth, this world is primitive as fuck. It is scary. She stays there for about 1h, but she manages to get that holy paper.

We go back to Horezu with the paper. One of those women looks over it and says it is not good…we explain that’s the only thing the US can give to us. She “flips” the page of the document and there it is: a paragraph (a short one) basically saying “This declaration/paper is the only thing US can provide bla bla bla…” and that seemed to have done the trick. The woman accepts it as “true”. Magic!

Translating the papers

We talk to this dude in Horezu that has a tiny office in a very shady place. His business is to officially translate documents from ANY language. We should have tried him with a Swahili….My parents dealt with this one eventually, and managed to get the papers translated. Overall they were the ones doing most of the lifting with the paperwork. Huge thanks to them. So they go there, they pay, they translate the papers. They need to be both translated and “legalized”. Like someone has to translate them and someone else needs to put a stamp on them. Both cost. But we have them a few days later.

We don’t have AIDS

Next thing is to go to a private clinic, that ironically is across the street of the big governmental public hospital, to get tested for HIV. It costs less than 10 Euros for both of us. I have no clue what’s the deal with this test, but I am happy Sasha is clean haha. Or is she?

We go to this small room where mostly old people were waiting to either get some results form the tiny private clinic, or ask for tests. And it was a very sad sight. Here in Spain, with this healthcare system that’s free, you are assigned to a “general” doctor where you go to complain: my head hurts, I’m puking violet, I might have another penis, I am pregnant, etc.. This doctor is a “good-and-knowledgeable-friend” that can then advise you, treat you, or send you for tests or to specialists. It works. And you never talk about money because it is free. In that Romanian clinic it was the opposite. A young girl at the counter was advising these old people what blood tests to do based on a brief listening to their complaints in a sea of other people waiting in line, talking to each other. Two rooms there: one at the entrance where people were “ordering” their tests, and one clearly marked with a Jesus icon on top of the door, where the blood and urine were collected. I think that’s all they did, the two fluids of the universe: blood and pee. I remember one old lady saying that she feels pain here and there and everywhere and wants a “full” set of tests. And the young woman at the counter saying “yes, let’s do them “all””. And the old lady had to pay around 100 Euros only for the tests. That could easily be half of her pension. This is not healthcare. This is not science. This is witchcraft and a market. For one, there are no such thing as “all” tests, especially when it comes to blood or urine tests. There are tons of such tests, trying to detect a plethora of things. Never “one”. This is so ridiculous. And second, to charge people so much money for such tests, is inhumane. These are old and sick people, and companies take advantage of them. The Romanian healthcare system is a “free” one as far as I can tell, like in Spain, but since doctors are used to take bribes and overall Romania is a shithole, people prefer to go to the private clinics that may offer a better waiting room and better hopes for the clients. And third, blood and urine or any other tests mean NOTHING unless you have a system that will deal with the results. To fix the problem. “Oh, hi m’am, we did this blood tests and we are pretty sure you have cancer. Now, good luck with that ’cause we don’t deal with the treatment. We only tell you what’s wrong with you.”.

Anyway. We go there. We give them our blood. The results come the next day. Interestingly my father could go there to pick up the results…I mean, these are personal medical results how come they agree for someone else to come pick them up? We take the results (we don’t even know what are the results) and we go to my Romanian family doctor with them. We pay for all of these things. There, an old waiting room. Looks like USSR. Looks awful. Inside the cabinet there she is. The lady. The legend. The woman. The doctor. The She. A female general-practitioner in her 60s (probably), who recently had a stroke, staying in her doctor office listening to Rihanna and smoking. I swear! You don’t get a better Romanian experience than this.

I managed to take that photo. It is unbelievable that a doctor smokes in the office. There were kids in the waiting room….She looked at Sasha and said “Yeah I wanted to see her. She looks good. Congratulations!”. And we left with the medical papers from there. Great job, doc!

Declare again….

So, with the passports and birth certificates (translated), with the paper from the embassy, with the medical papers….all that was not enough. Now, we had to go to a special office where Sasha had to give 2 declarations. That she is she (again), and that she will respect the Romanian laws and she accepts marrying with me….For this they required us to “rent” a translator. A certified one. We go to a nearby town (1h away), in this little office to do the declarations. It takes them around 3 hours to do them because for one they didn’t understand why 2 and not 1, so they had to call the Horezu women and ask them. And second because one of these women’s kids (from that tiny office) was sick and she had to leave from time to time. In this time the translator came. She was young, around our age. Her English was not that great, but whatever. BUT….and I will apologize for saying this because this girl was very nice and calm, but she was a Piñata of bullshit. Piñata are these colorful “things” that people put all kinds of candies inside, and others (usually kids) have to smash them with a bat. IDK why, but whatever. This translator was full of conspiracy theories, horoscopes, after-life theories, nutritional advice, alternative medicine and so forth, that if you were to smack her with a bat, you’ll see the cream of the bullshit falling from inside her. The moment we met, she said she will read our “horoscope” and tell us about ourselves based on our date of birth. She talked non-stop about these fucked up things, about her life, about nothingness. For 2 hours. Me and Sasha felt abused. Raped mentally.

At one point I started to get into conspiracy theories too, thinking that someone plays a prank on me and tests me with this – like maybe they hired an actress to fuck with me (as if I’m that important for anyone to pull this prank on me…). But considering I am a “soldier” of the army of debunking bullshit (see TROM and all I do), having to face this Piñata was perhaps the most painful thing I had to observe since I didn’t want to comment much if at all about her BS because I didn’t want to upset her and maybe have no translator to help us with the paperwork. A compromise nearly impossible for me to accept. But I did….

Anyways it was only 10 Euros for her service, but I felt like losing 10 billion neurons at the same time. We get those 2 declarations, since those were the last we needed.

Passports, birth certificates, medical papers, embassy paper, declarations. Fuckin’ christ. Now that’s it. We go back to the original-office with all of the papers. They look through them. And look….check to see if these 2 humans can be glued officially together or not. See if the papers match the creatures. It is almost like scientists trying to describe the atom, not by looking at it and analyze the thing directly, but by looking at some papers that describe the atom and try deny the existence of the atom or some of its properties since the papers don’t agree with the reality. And that happened to us because they looked at the papers and faced a dilemma: Sasha’s name has 3 names :D. You know the last name and the second name or whatever. Family name, and your name. That weird combination we all have. So her name is A B C. Russia may recognize her family name as A and the B as her last name, where C is what you inherit from your father in terms of name. The US, does it differently, and Romania does it like US perhaps. So, all in all her Russian birth certificate was translated into Romanian as A B and her US passport was translated as A B C. So, those 2 didn’t match. Big-f-deal. But for them it was a big deal and they said they refuse to merge us together. We called the translator that translated the birth certificate and that woman clearly explained that she translated it correctly. So everything was legal. It was simply an issue with how tribes interpret one’s name. Sasha was physically there, and we had the original papers and their translations, but the papers didn’t match so Sasha didn’t exist basically. See? The atom is there, you just have to look at it and describe it. But that’s the opposite of how our society works. Our society looks at papers in order to define the reality.

It was a funny situation (if real, and I think it was real) where in Romania someone was wrongly declared as dead. Now the guy goes to authorities to complain about that, but since it was declared dead already, he was unable to make any complaint about it. I don’t remember what happened to the guy, but it you are declared dead then you are fucked since you basically cannot live in this imagined paper-based society humans built.

Anyways. We had to kinda bribe the translator to translate the birth certificate wrongly in order to match the passport. Another wait, another spending. My mom also had to bribe the women in that office to kind accept this situation as such…

FINALLY.

All of the paperwork was in our possession. We submit that. It is approved. On 31st of January the great merging will occur. I am asked how we want to split the goods, I say “m’am I only have a laptop on my name and she has hers; I think 50’50 is a good deal; we just keep our laptops”. 😀

We are a month in with this bullshit in Romania but at least we are close to be done with it. 31st of January is a week after we submit the papers. We are way more relaxed but the entire thing puts a toll on me (and on Sasha too of course), but I am close to having a mental breakdown.

The clash of values.

From the beginning, since we decided to do this bullshit marriage thing, I was very clear with everyone around me that we correctly label this nonsense as “bullshit”, so we don’t care about anything more than hacking this society in order to stay together. More to that, everyone who knew me (my relatives, family, ‘old friends’) should have known I don’t give a shit about such things. I poke fun at such things all the time actually. Despite all that, people who found out about the “event” (I never told anyone I think, but well…small city, bored people) started to congratulate us. Even my parents took it seriously and at one point I was asked if I need help to buy “rings”. Look, these people seem nice and that’s how they express themselves. They don’t grasp the fact that marriage is not only an invention (imagination), but an abuse. Me and Sasha were abused into this stupidity in order to let us stay together. Live on this planet together. And now we get these “congratulations” from people. Tell me, how can I react to that!? Because I felt a mix of feelings from extremely sad to furious. It is like in China you may only be able to stay together with a partner that has a social credit above 700, and you struggle to get your credit score above that in order to live together, while at the same time protesting about this abusive rule. Yet, your relatives congratulate you for achieving that above 700 social score. How does this sound? Because it is the same with the marriage. Where is the difference? We wouldn’t have done this stupidity ever if we were not without options.

So yeah, seeing how people around us take this seriously was extremely frustrating because I also could not be a jerk and get angry when they congratulated us so I had to fake a sad “thanks” at the corner of my mouth. But I really felt like being trapped in a horror movie where people are not humans, they are robots with whom you cannot talk. With my parents it was a game of “let’s pretend you care and I don’t” that we kinda respected as much as possible until one morning, a few days before the gran’ event, when my mother asks me what I will wear for the event, and I said that I don’t care, these things are stupid and I simply left the conversation. My family got very upset at me for that, but I was simply at the edge of my sanity there. Like…I have to go through all of this bullshit with papers, with delaying my TROM projects, with spending money, with pretending to be part of the mindless norm, and all that, and now you want me to be a clown? Like, “Hey, at that abusive event, what are you gonna wear?”. A few tears and loud voices later inside the family, an unnecessary development, and we agree to please my parents and talk to them about what the clowns are going to wear. Again, my parents are nice people, and without them we would have had great difficulties solving this problem, but their values are not in line with ours. They didn’t fully understand why we are doing this. In any case, we agree to wear some “respectful” clothes to not trigger the zombies when we go there. I was wearing a t-shirt from my sister (it was a male-shirt that she had), and Sasha a “traditional” Romanian “thing” and my sister’s boots and jacket. We are pretty now. Everyone seems ok with us. Let’s play pretend.

THE DAY

A day before “the day” I had to pull myself together and try to control myself because I felt like I want to kill someone. I pushed myself away from society from age 15 or so. Rarely interacting with the normality. And now I get to interact with the most nonsensical of stupidities. I faked it a lot and I felt like I could not handle it anymore. Then, a day before the event I convinced myself that the world is not a tragedy. It is a comedy. These people are hilarious. They are retarded. Idiotic. But hilarious. Like, look at the fuckers….they want us to pretend as if we get “glued” by papers. By swearing. By writing with a pen on a piece of paper. By saying “yes”. Ha.ha.Ha. Let’s just take it as a comedy.

My parents bought cookies and flowers and champagne for the event. We are ready. Since we needed the translator again (the Pinata), she arrived in the morning and my mother dealt with her. They went for a coffee. The event is at 12PM. We get dressed. We need 2 “witnesses”. My parents are the ones for the job since it is only going to be us and my parents, and maybe Georgi (my sister) for the fun of it. We go there. Then, in about 5 minutes after we arrived, I see my mother’s sister coming there with flowers. Dressed-up. I’m dying. Yes, she in her own right is nice towards us, coming there for the event, but like I explained it is like we celebrate an abuse. They don’t get that. But I do. I’m like ok…the world is a comedy….just stay calm for 30 more minutes. That’s all…

We go inside the building and I hear this woman (my mother’s sister) saying that we should wait for the others. THE OTHERS? What the fuck. Apparently more relatives are coming. Including Mike. MIKE! Why? Out of everyone I didn’t expect Mike to come since he should understand this is a bullshit thing. I was having tears of anger inside my face about all of this. No one told us this is is going to happen. What a shit-show. A bunch of relatives arrived, they are 10 times more dressed up than me and Sasha, and of course they bring flowers and congratulate us. I feel like a clown in a prison. I feel humiliated by the society. Is the world a comedy? I’m struggling to laugh.

They are there. It is what it is. Fuck it. Let’s get done with it.

Now the mayor is coming…Jezus Christ…ok….

He comes there and the first thing he asks me is who are the Godfather and Godmather. I’m like….EH? Like…and I look around….I see Mike and Georgi and I signal them to come over. I don’t know what the fuck are Godmothers and Godfathers but that worked.

And it starts. We face the mayor. He faces us. He says that first we need to listen to some music….a “nicely dressed woman” pushes with fashion the play button of a very old music player (big, I think it still uses cassettes). Here’s a recording of that – I blurred it intentionally so you don’t see our sad faces while we are being executed.

We were very amused by that cringey moment. Then the music stops suddenly. And the procedure begins. The mayor reads some stuff from a piece of paper and declares us “husband and wife”. Wow. That’s it. We sign some papers. Everyone stares at us. They open a champagne and bring the cookies. It is a 10 minutes cringey moment (again), of people sipping champagne from plastic disposable glasses, and licking a cookie. At the same time congratulating us and taking some photos with us. We force a smile or two because all is done now so we are at least happy for that.

At one point the mayor asks Sasha what religion she is. My mother, being her, screams from the other side of the room “they are atheist”. A bit of a silence in the room…the mayor is surprised and proceeds by lecturing me that even the great Pascal said: “If there is a God and we pray then that’s good; but if there is a God and we don’t pray…isn’t that risky?”. I was about to punch him in the face with either my fist or an argument. Like…my friend….if there is a God and all he wants is for people to pray to him then that’s a PIMP, not a god. But I didn’t want to cause any problems for anyone. I wanted to get out of there as quick as possible. Look, I was never the one who will shut’up in such moments. I will bark some science there. Fuck the mayor or anyone. I don’t care. But this time I really didn’t want to fuck things up and create a brawl. I sucked society’s dick so far, I can suck it for a few more minutes. The conversation quickly melted away after he also bragged a bit about how great Romania and Romanian people are, and how intelligent and such.

Now we wanted to go home but these people that came there….like…what can I do with them? I felt bad for them. To see them so dressed up and coming there and now, 10 minutes later, send them home. But I didn’t invite anyone…so…For sure it took them more time to get ready than it did for me and Sasha. We went outside and we slowly moved away from them. Me, Sasha, Georgi, Mike and the Pinata went to a bar to eat something. The Pinata had to come to us from an 1h away town, so she was waiting for the bus. I thought let’s give her something to eat first. She was nice, again. But man she was crazy. She even said if she can stay 2 more days at our place now that she came to this city….eh…no. Sorry. But what the fuck….She likes hugging trees, picks up clues from the outside world to guide herself, is looking for her soulmate, can read horoscopes and can heal herself of viruses just through the power of her mind. So, no thanks. She seems to complicated for our taste.

We go home. Me and Sasha are so happy now that everything is over. What we don’t know is that it isn’t.

Next morning my parents throw a “party” for these other people who came to the ceremony and had to go back home in 10 minutes. For our relatives. At my grandma’s house. Just a barbecue to be honest, but still something I won’t ever like to be part of. I didn’t want to be a jerk so I went there with Sasha to say hi. A bunch of relatives there. They, of course, congratulated us even more intensively. One of them, who is also a chemistry teacher, gave us a present. A Jezus icon….

From shitting on these values to being sad and feeling sorry about that.

This entire experience made me super super sad the last days of this entire circus. I perhaps never felt so sad in my life. It was an extreme mix of primitive and crazy values (zombie people) + extreme kindness. I almost felt like crying at the thought of laughing at such a present and the human that gave it to me to see me doing that. Because their intentions are good and kind. I don’t want to shit on this. But at the same time I am annoyed to the extreme by all of these rituals that have nothing to do with reality. To see them celebrate our enslavement to this society. It was very tough for me mentally to get dragged through all of this. I got to feel closely how humans are, unfortunately, not humans. Yet at the same time not wanting to make fun of their values there and then. Just to accept that sadly this is the reality and try not to upset them. Imagine this human who say puts a bit of an effort and kindness and happiness into going out there to buy something for Dani. The human wraps the package nicely and is happy to go give Dani the present. Dani thanks the human. Then when the human is not around Dani opens the package. It is a religious icon. Dani laughs and says how stupid it is. Even throws the thing away. If the human would see this, would be soul crushing. Like a cliff of happiness (buying the present, giving the present), being crushed suddenly by such an attitude. That would suck. And I didn’t want to do that. So I chose not to make too much fun of this ridiculous situation we’ve been put into. At least not that much or there, so that I won’t hurt anyone. At times me and Sasha were laughing in my room about all of these situations we were forced into, and my parents would hear us and thought we laugh at them, especially since they don’t understand english. That made me feel very bad.

RIDDLE TIME OVER. ALMOST

Let’s see. In order for me and Sasha to be allowed to stay together we had to go through a shit ton of papers and offices and eventually get married. Pay money (over 1.000 euros in total), go this place, that place, ask for this and that. Swear in front of authorities. Play by their rules. Translate shit. Wait. Travel. Wait. Travel.

But. Now that the marriage is done, can Sasha live with me in Europe? In Spain? We read on the Europe’s official website the following:

“If you are married or in a registered partnership with an EU citizen that is living, working, studying or looking for a job in an EU country different from the one they come from, EU rules make it easier for you to join them there.” (source) Luckily I “live” in Spain….

Based on this, I understand that if Sasha wants to stay with me for more than 3 months she needs a residence card. Let’s see how to obtain it:

So basically we have to go to an Immigration Office or Police Station with a Form (EX-19) that we cannot find. The link there doesn’t work. The links from official Spanish gov websites do not work. We found it with the WayBack Machine….Anyway. That form + a valid passport + my Spanish residency card + proof of the family link. We had all of these documents already. Sasha is allowed to stay in Spain for 3 months in a period of 6 months. She already stayed in Spain for almost 3 months in the last 6 months period of time. From our calculations she could have come back to Spain for 9 more days till her VISA expires. We thought 9 days is enough to submit those papers, since once you submit them they will extend the VISA till they give her a residency card. So we thought in those 9 days when we go back we submit the papers and that’s it. Ok. Done. Booked plane tickets. Happy and relaxed that we go back to Spain.

We managed to take a van from this city to the airport directly. Nice. Ok ride. Great car. We had to wait in front of the police station for it (no bus station for this one). Weird but normal in Romania.

Before leaving Romania let me tell you a few random things about it. Of course based mainly on this small town we lived in.

stray dogs

I complained about this before. But it is worth complain again because it is such a weird sight to see these massive “wolfs” on the streets. It makes going for a walk a challenge because you never know when they’ll simply jump at you. Here are some videos from the little town we lived it (not taken by me):

This is a video I filmed from our balcony. These dogs want to eat cars. You can’t even drive properly. Just wait till the guy gets into the car and drives away.

everyone for themselves

In Spain, everywhere you go, it looks like Spain. The infrastructure. Roads. Buildings. Services. And so on. In Romania is the opposite. Even in that little town you’ll see 10 types of road signs, 20 types of garbage bins, 40 types of sidewalks, unlimited types of street lights, and so forth. Look at this street sign (I haven’t seen such a stupidity – like how are drivers suppose to read this one while they are driving?):

I think there is a business with garbage bins in that city because you either see none or a dozen of them packed in a tiny space. As an example only on this street to you will find “recyclable” bins. And it is a mockery because they are of a very poor quality and no one uses them properly. How can you have such garbage cans to recycle paper when it can rain in those things. Or glass. Or how do you empty them to recycle? I bet no one cares about them. It was just a business. It is so clear when they put a fuck ton on a tiny street. See the video:

Like look how in this very tiny park there are a ton of garbage bins. And don’t tell me they put them in order to keep the place clean because that’s ridiculous.

This is a random park in Spain of similar size. Look at how many garbage bins there are there:

One more. This is a newly built street by this new mayor. He is proud of it. Just a 200 meter street (sidewalk) that’s full of garbage bins every 2 meters or so.

Look at this house. A corner of it eats half of the sidewalk. Hilarious.

They put these cemented things on sidewalks where people would park their cars illegally. Haha. Apparently laws do not work. Now neither cars or people can go on these sidewalks. Brilliant.

You’ll see there 10 really old houses and then 2 palaces. The contrast between the rich and the poor is something you cannot miss. Also, I think 2 out of 5 houses are unfinished in Romania. It is incredible….

We also found a little kid…we were walking home from our “marriage party” when we saw a little kid (2 years old or so) across the street, about to go into the street. Confused. I didn’t think twice, I crossed the street and took the kid. Tried to ask him where the parents are so maybe he can point to somewhere. But no way, he was too confused. I felt so sorry for him. Interestingly he was in front of the police station and across the street from a busy gas station. Employees from the gas station saw the kid for several minutes but did nothing. That’s to show how these people don’t really care or they are simply not willing to interact with any situation that is outside their own shit. We took the kid straight inside the police station. The guys thanked us and tried to figure out what’s up with the kid. We left after a while. We have no idea what happened to the kid. Sorry for the little guy. I really hope his parents didn’t let him on purpose there in front of the police station to abandon him.

people are crazy

Look at this “sacred” place…you tell me sane people are living near by?

Here’s our boi Jesus taking care of ~~criminals~~ soldiers.

the air quality is as good as smoke

Look at this photo. That’s not fog. That’s smoke. People are burning everything they can and the entire town smells like smoke. It is awful. Even opening the window of our 4th floor apartment is a challenge.

the nature is a garbage bin

This is the closest nature to that town. It was a place we used to go when we were kids and despite being a garbage bin back there too, now it is 5 times worse. Dead animals, clothes, plastic, poop. Everything thrown there, amongst the sad trees that are wondering what kind of world this is.

people are lazy

Here in Spain it is normal for us to go for a 10km walk every other day. Using your legs is part of our routine. But in that town in Romania, people take their car to go to a supermarket that’s 500m away from their place. Not only that, these “kings” use home delivery for buying fast-food. They sit almost across the street from the fast food, yet they order food at home. Can’t even go and buy it. It is so funny. Here’s a real photo of them:

the parts we enjoyed

I loved the apartment. As I said it is very cozy. Warm inside. You need no slippers. Soft carpets :). Calm. Relaxed. My room is the smallest but it is fine. It has a window opening to the balcony where we often stayed. The view from the balcony is nice. You can see the sunset and Venus every night. My mother makes the best cookies I’ve ever eaten and my father would go out to buy something any time you need anything. Or simply he would go for you anywhere anytime. Go to this other 1h away town to get us some papers? No worries, he goes, no questions asked. My parents are very good people, and despite us seeing the world through different brains, we still have things in common and I enjoy my relationship with them. Mike and Georgi are really great friends and they were there. I loved when we watched some cool documentaries in the livingroom, all of us. Then discuss about them. Sasha even wrote a poem in the Romanian language and read it for all of us to hear at the New Year’s Eve. Hilarious as fuck and surprising as fuck. We laughed like nuts.

And look, you’ll find beautiful places in Romania for sure. And very kind people and all that. Yes, overall I think it is a not-very-good-to-live-place, and that’s unfortunate for people there. Human beings (call them romanians) are whatever the environment pushes them to be. I complain about them but I understand what makes them like that. And I dream to one day be the president of Romania and transform this shithole into a smart paradise and give it as an example to the world so we can change every tribe out there. And I mean it, I fantasize about such things :D. If there was a chance to change the world through politics, I’d give it a try. I would love to help every romanian. Make the healthcare system the best in the world so everyone has access the the greatest and most human healthcare. Transform the transportation entirely. Take care of the natural places Romania has. And a huge fuck more. Of course, we need to think globally as humans, not as romanians and such.

BACK TO US. BACK TO SPAIN.

We arrive in Spain. Finally. Dima and Mara, great TROM friends, wait for us with their car at the airport. Makes it much easier to get back home. We arrive. We are so happy to be back. Next day we go out. Green, sunny, blue sky, blue sea. Look at us, happily married. :)) (stupid joke)

I am happy to meet Dima and Mara. Happy to get that Microsoft Surface Table to test TROMjaro on it. Happy to be back. Oh yeah, “that” tablet. Sasha has a tablet that she didn’t use anymore. A Microsoft Surface Pro from 2013. She had it in Russia, no one using it. I told her to tell her father to send it here because I may use it. I realized it is a great tablet. Her father sent it to use at the beginning of November from Russia to Spain. Spain detained it for 3 months – a huge shitshow. We barely got it in February. Anyways, things looked good. We felt no rush to solve the papers bullshit.

Police station? Immigration Office? None?

Ok. We go to the police station (like the mighty Europe website recommended) with that form filled in and all the documents. They tell us we have to go to Girona (1h away) to the National Police. Ok. Next day we go there. They tell us, “no you have to go to the Immigration Office, on the other side of the town”. We are ok with that. 20 min walk. We arrive there. They don’t let us in. They tell us we need an appointment. They give us a paper with instructions. Ok. Fuck. We sit on a bench trying to navigate to that super long URL from that paper they gave us (use some fuckin’ URL shortenings motherfuckers, damn….). We fill in the form for an appointment to only be greeted with “Sorry, no more appointments available”. We try for half an hour. They close at 2pm and it’s almost 2pm. We go back to tell them that we can’t make an appointment. They said they know. It is difficult. Try more. Try in the morning at 9 or so. Ok. Fuck. Sasha only has 3-4 more days of VISA in Spain. Can we schedule in time?

The rush to save Sasha

The next 3 days we try to schedule every day. My mother also tries to do that for us. It is impossible. These fuckers let you fill in the form (which is not easy – select, write, pay attention, fill in the bloody robot captcha), and then they say “sorry no more appointments available”. I even recorded myself trying for almost 2 hours without stopping. This is a disgrace and a mockery. Like….should I try every single day to do this? Can’t they have a better system where I submit my request and they contact me when they can schedule an appointment for me? It is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen. We try to call them, to make a complaint, to….We don’t know what to do anymore.

Sasha has 1 more VISA day of stay in Spain by our calculations and she gets terrified by the thought that if she will get caught she may be deported or Spain may refuse to let her in for a period of time (ban). Sasha traveled all around the world for the past 10 years and people love to read her stories. But one reason she did this was because she could not stay in one place for long. Now, she found a home and a prince :). So she really wanted to be able to stay here for a while. Of course I also wanted that. So the risk was quite big if she would break the law and maybe they will deny her the residence card or will get her into troubles. We’ve read on governmental websites and the european website a lot and they really say she needs a residence card and this residence card takes a while to be approved and they may dig into your past and stuff so we didn’t want to risk it with her overstaying her VISA. Sasha got so scared and sad she started to cry and she made me so fuckin’ sad and angry at this society. This human that does nothing wrong, to the contrary she does volunteer work, is so scared because of this fucked up society that all it does is to scare innocent people and never stop the “bad actors”. So, because she was so concerned about all of this, and I too was concerned and didn’t want for Sasha to be fucked by the situation, we decided to book flights back to Romania for the next day. 200 Euros. She could stay in Romania for 2 or so more months. We planned to go there then come back here when her VISA “renews” so we have more time to deal with the residence card. I even called Rafa (our good TROM friend from Spain) to ask him if he can help us figure out some legal stuff. He studied law. He is such a warm hearted guy. He is from Spain so we hoped he may know more. He looks over the information: if Sasha can stay, about VISA, about the situation itself. He calls friends that work in the justice department or study it. All that, for hours, a day before we had to leave. In the end he kinda says it should be fine for Sasha to stay even if her VISA expired but he cannot tell for sure. The more he looks into it the more confusing it seems. At first he thought that Sasha could stay without a problem since we are married, but after reading (like we did) online and official sources, nothing was clear anymore. Many thanks hermano! 🙂

The next day was about to be a complete rollercoaster of emotions and projections.

So, here’s the plan now: we pack our bags today and tomorrow we go to the townhall, police and even Girona to the immigration office to complain to them that we tried to make an appointment but we can’t and her VISA expires. All of that before the departure time of our plane in Barcelona. K. We pack. We try to sleep (barely). We wake up in the morning and are going to the townhall. On our way my family calls this woman that’s from Honduras to ask her how she dealt with the residency card for her kids since they were in a similar situation. The woman says it take months to make an appointment for the residency card (fuckin’ christ), and you basically have to try every day to get one. Inhumane! But she also says we should not worry since Sasha can stay here without a problem even without a residency card. They said they did that and many do that. However that’s not what we have read from official sources. We can’t take it for granted. But she says to go to this office in Girona and ask for a VISA extension.

We go.

We enter what seemed to be that office. They say “nah, it is that building across the street”. We realized it is the same immigration office we’ve been before to. Damn. But we go there and explain the situation to them. We are honest….like wtf people…we try to be as legal as possible but help us for fucks’sake. They send us to this police department. They listen to us and send us to another. Same building. Finally. Now we can talk. We explain the situation and the police officer asks for Sasha’s passport. We give it to him. He goes to check it. I am a bit concerned of what he might say.

FUCKIN SURPRISE.

The guy comes back and says: “yeah so if you are married with him, then you can stay in Spain without a problem, indefinitely”. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!? So all of this stress, the tickets bought, the tears, the scare….and now we find out she doesn’t even need a residence card to stay!? Just….WOW. But we are so happy that we don’t care anymore. We are over the moon! She only needs a residence card if she wants to work (which she might be forced to because we are broke) – so we need to continue to be slaves to their system of making an appointment for that residency card. I even recorded that guy with a hidden camera to make sure we have that on film in case this is going to cause us troubles. But I doubt. They checked. They were the authorities there. That’s it. Fuck it. Now we go back home to our cozy apartment in Spain.

We can finally be relaxed now that Sasha can stay here. Forever. Of course we lost a lot of money with all of this bullshit. And so much stress that I’m still recovering from it. It started in May last year, and barely now it is over. And we are the lucky ones. Sasha has 2 nationalities (so greater access to the world) and I am “european”. Imagine people from India, Iran, China and the like who want to be together with others from other tribes. Don’t be fooled by smart TVs, bendable screens, 5G internet and redidt memes. This world is a prison.

Until a year ago I was alone and life was more simple in many regards. It was me and my computer most of the time. I didn’t have to deal with authorities, paperwork, and so forth. It was mainly me and the online world. Now, I know more people. More than me. I like them. I like Sasha a lot and I would have done this for her even if we were not together. Without a doubt. She should be able to not run all the time from this society.

My life is better now with Sasha. We get along so well. Everything is great. We help each other when it comes to TROM stuff. We even learned to cook paella and fideoa. Traditional Spanish foods :)). We want to have a relaxed life here so we can focus on our work. Sasha on her personal book and helping with TROM stuff as much as she can, and me fully-TROM stuff.

For a simple request, “Me and Sasha to be able to live together on this planet Earth”, we had to go through a ton of stress, spend money, bend forward in front of authorities, get scared, move from one place to another, and so forth. It took us many months of struggle. And all, for a piece of paper that writes “Tio and Sasha are now glued together”. This, and only this, nothing else, allows us to live together in Europe (at least Spain and Romania from what we know now). If this doesn’t sound like an abuse to someone, then this someone is perfectly zombiffied by this society.

When people “congratulate” us, I hope they read this blog and understand that there is nothing to congratulate us about. They should be furious that Planet Earth is a prison. The fact that you didn’t get to feel it like we did, it makes no difference. It still is a prison and sooner or later you’ll feel it more or less. And the moment you stop getting angry about being fucked in the ass by the society, you will become its prostitute. A zombie. Someone who looks alive from outside, but it is dead inside. Yes, some celebrate marriages and enjoy them and feel no problem with these rituals. Good for you. But remember that they are used as a mean of fucking people in the ass in this world. They are, in the broader context, a perversity. A disgrace that is indirectly (and sometimes directly) forced upon humans. And most seem to just accept it and do it voluntarily. I never understood why anyone wants to get married. If you love someone, then being together should not be as fragile as a piece of paper.

The best/worst time of my life.

By tio | September 21, 2019 | Comments 38 comments

I feel a bit sick and I am peeing blood. Quite a lot of it. I also canceled TROM-Cast for today. So I thought let’s make this blog post and update you all about me. My life. And I.

Trying to compress half a year (or more) into a few words. Hard. But let’s do it. I tried to do this before, several times, but I didn’t have the time. Go.

So, a year ago Aaron who translates everything from TROM into german, came to visit me in Spain for 3 days. My first “meet-up” with a TROM human. It was great. We planned to make a bigger meeting in Spain so I decided around november last year to invite some 12 or so people who were close to the project, to come here in May. They got super excited and we rented a house for May 2019. A few could not come unfortunately. But the present heroes are: Dima, Mara, Sasha, Yoav, Aaron, Seb, Sofie, Rafa, Vicky, Cody.

This is me (haha) in my tiny room in Spain, back in 2011. Right after I got my first donation: 1.000 dollars in total, to buy a new computer and redo TROM.

I had to improvise and adapt to that little room. I had no chair and that thing I was staying on was very uncomfortable. The monitor was very far away from my face, and my astigmatism doesn’t clear things up ;). But it was good. I worked many hours every single day. 8 months in total. That’s me basically for the past 10 years or more. Alone. Me and my computer.

This is another, even smaller room, where I made TROM from a bunk bed. On my back looking at the ceiling where my monitor was in a constant terror of falling down. Poor thing.

This is from my room in college (rented apartment – no furniture, we had to find some). Plus, no washing machine. Don’t get fooled by the monitor, it was the only good thing about my system and was cheap actually. I still have that monitor btw. Since 2009 or so.

A big room it’s true. But fucked up chair, and computer, and everything else. Those football players on the wall are to cover the fucked up wall, and that bottle…is not ALCOHOL! 🙂 – it is water. I don’t drink alcohol. This is when I first conceived TROM, in that room.

I loved the computer world because it was a world that I could control and manipulate. I was a little god in a tiny universe. I realized that my god powers can extend if I switch from my romanian blog to making some videos into english. And so I made TROM.

Many years later, surviving through the calm world of being alone :), many times being told that I am too lonely, things changed 180 degrees. My loneliness allowed me to focus 100% on my godplan :). To me it was an advantage, though at times I felt a deep sadness inside. Don’t know why, maybe because this society is constantly reminding you that your life is not the “proper” life, and can get you at times. But from that perspective I was ok. Still stressed out because I was living among normal people who don’t care about this world at all: from atoms to money. For them this is “what it is”, and “that’s that”. For me, it is not. I am curious and furious. Curios about how the world works (whales and evolution, quarks and stars, and everything in between). And furious about this messed up trade-based society that fucks all of us up.

So we end up here:

People came in May. A bunch of them. I was very excited and a bit uncomfortable to be honest, since I am not used to be around people :D. The first 2 weeks or so we got to know each other better, had a ton of conversations, planned some stuff in regards to TROM and this trade-free idea, went to the beach, to the mountain, for long hikes, and so forth. ACTIVE. I struggled to make sense of it all. On one hand I absolutely loved it. I even jokingly said that if my life ends now, I am happy with how I lived it :D. Seeing these beautiful faces getting this idea of TROM that I thought I will forever incubate it alone (in my room), was the best thing/feeling in my life. To feel relaxed 100% around a bunch of people, for me, it means I’ve reached paradise haha. Because my entire life was everything but that. These people “got it”. They seemed curious and furious. Like me. On the other had I felt robbed of my time that I could have dedicated to work on my computer. I wasn’t god-in-the-computer, I was tio-in-a-group-of-people. I am used to my digital god powers and to be alone working on stuff, not with a bunch of people around. But if anything, it was the discomfort of moving from this to that. And nothing else. These people were fantastic.

Then, after a few days of intense activity, I felt sick. Like stomach sick. Mind you, I am used to long hikes and little sleep. I am fine with doing physical effort despite living inside a computer. I live in a very small town and it is normal for me to go for like a 10km walk a few days a week. But this time I did a lot of effort. I thought the food I eat made me feel stomach sick and the effort. Woke up the next day, went to to bathroom (like every creature with a bladder does), and because guys have this front-row seat when it comes to the miracle of peeing, I got to notice how instead of the yellowish stream that I am used to see every morning, I saw a dark red stream. And that wasn’t the beginning of a rainbow! No. That was blood. And boy I can tell you this is not a pretty sight. I immediately felt even sicker because I understood something is wrong with me. But I tried to lie to myself that maybe food can change the color of the pee in this dark reddish color. So I brushed this aside for a few hours because I was too distracted by those beautiful faces.

I continued to feel this sick feeling in my lower abdomen, and the second time I went to pee I saw the same kind of stream. That’s it. Fuck it. I am bleeding form inside. Of course I could not know (even remotely) what it could be: the effort? my bladder? kidneys? All? I told the guys about it and I rushed to the emergency room. There I provided a urine sample and they confirmed that I have a lot of blood in my urine. They asked me several questions and sent me home (told me to go to my doctor the next day). From that moment on everything changed for me. I simply could not enjoy the TROM meeting anymore because I was too concerned about the reason why I was bleeding and why so much blood. For sure, 100% sure, something “bad” happened inside my body. What followed was days going to the ER and appointments to doctors, and a struggle to try and enjoy the rest of the time I had with these people. We made that trade-free video, filmed some interviews, watched some weird things on the night sky through the telescope (like planets and stuff 🙂 ), and still had some fun. But I could not really enjoy it. At that point all I wanted was to sit down, relax, and be alone maybe. I could not join the guys for several hikes, and I love to do hikes, and that’s because what I realized was that when I was doing any kind of moderate effort, like carrying some heavy bags, going up the stairs sometimes, and so forth, made me pee blood visibly and feel stomach sick. If I then relaxed, I could see no blood. Exercise = blood. Not doing much = no blood.

It was very weird because it was so obvious. Like if I would do something of moderate intensity NOW, I would pee blood in the next 20 minutes. If I stayed in bed the next hour, no blood. I explained these symptoms to all of the doctors I’ve been to, but neither them or online searches could find this symptom anywhere.

The test that scared me

The general practitioner (the family doctor) then recommended me a test to check if there are melanoma cells in the urine. In other words, to test for cancer. The problem is that if that test comes back positive and they find cancerous cells, then you are pretty fucked. Blood in urine can mean cancer of the urinary tract. If it is bladder then your chances of surviving are super low. Like you’ll have at best 2-3 years of life. Kidney cancer is less dangerous and more treatable, but still, this test only finds aggressive forms of cancer so a positive result is a very bad news. The test was at the end of our meeting in May and it made me less and less engaged mentally with this entire thing. How unfortunate. Most of my life I’ve been alone and now that I finally found a bunch of amazing friends, I got into this health mess, being tested for cancer. From “the best time of my life” to “the worst time of my life” in just a few weeks. After 20 something days of staying here, everyone left except Sasha. I’ve previously talked to Sasha about the possibility of us moving together here in Spain, to rent something to split the costs. Other TROM people wanted to do that too, but Sasha was the only one to stay. Aaron also decided to move with us, but he would come later on in July.

The next days were stressful and crowded. I lived with Sasha in my little room in my parents’ house, while we were also searching for an apartment to move in. We could not find anything. In the meantime I decided to not wait for the cancer results and just go ask to the hospital for them. If I didn’t I would have have to wait a few more days. I went inside with Sasha and Georgi (my sister). We asked. They said the results were negative. Fuck yeah! I felt so good. Damn! Now everything seemed easier. I am cancer free! Or am I?

After a week or so we found an apartment through Georgi from the rental company she works for. This city is full of empty apartments but no one is interested to rent for long term, since it is not profitable. So thousands of apartments are not used most of the time. The apartment was great! 2 rooms, 1 for me and Sasha, 1 for Aaron. A nice livingroom. AC. Close to the beach. 150 Euros each for the rent (monthly).

But what about my health? Before continuing let me tell you that my parents, Georgi and Sasha helped me a ton this period of time. They came with me to the hospital, helped with whatever they could, and also kept me busy so to not stress too much about it all. Kudos to them!

Back to my health. It’s been a few weeks since it started. We investigated infections and trauma, cancer and other things. I started to pee less and less blood. Even when I was doing some effort, I didn’t pee blood anymore. I went to the doctor to continue the investigation. Before the cancer test and other tests (including abdominal ultrasounds), the doctor seemed pretty sure we will know what’s the cause, but the opposite became true. We had no idea. He said they didn’t find any cancerous cells but they found some “abnormal” cells in my urine, and that from here on he doesn’t know what to do so he sent me to an urologist. In a month time. I said ok. I started to feel better and no trace of blood in urine. The mega-TROM-trio was now living under the same roofs. The goofs.

My health investigation continues and becomes even more mysterious.

I went to the urologist. He asked a lot of questions. Told me that they found blood in all urine samples, so regardless if I see it or not, I am still bleeding. They also found proteins in the urine. That is a sign of a leakage from the kidneys. He sent me to 3 more tests. First is to repeat the abdominal ultrasound, second is to repeat the “cancer” one. Fuck! But, the more I’ve read about that test the more I realized is not 100% about cancer, is mostly about the analysis of the cells in the blood: cytology. So, not specific to cancer. For the first cytology test I had to provide an urine sample at the doctor’s office, that he put in 3 jars. Now I had to provide for 3 consecutive days. This one seemed to be more accurate which made me think that maybe they will find some cancers cells now, that they didn’t in the previous one. So it became stressful again.

The third test. A beauty! 🙂

The third test consists of a camera that they insert through the penis and into the bladder. Yeah. I immediately said no. I don’t want that. I’m not homo. And I left the doctor’s office. :)) No, of course I was ok with anything if we are trying to figure out my health problems. This test is kinda a definitive test to check for any problems from the tip of the penis to the bladder. If you have cancer, or a tumor, or lesions. That’s the test for you.

The ultrasound was fine. The cytology one I still don’t know the results…the camera one…all was clean and fine, which was the most welcomed news. First, let me tell you about how it went. Basically you go there, get Adam with them, then they use a syringe without a metal head to inject some anesthetic through the penis. That burns, ok?! Quite a lot. Very uncomfortable. In the next minutes the doctor comes with a long tube, quite thick if you ask me, and without asking what’s your favorite color, what movies you watch or what college you’ve been at, he inserts that mother-fucker-camera through the penis. We didn’t even get to know each other man. What’s wrong with you!? So now, they push it deeper inside you. It is like you get fucked in the penis, if you can imagine that. 😀 The worst part is when it goes by the prostate cause that’s a narrow space and I almost dropped a tear there. Once it is inside the bladder you simply feel a pressure but not pain, and you can watch on the monitor your insides. It takes a few minutes and then is over and your dignity remains in that office.

But I was super happy because, before this test, I knew that if I had cancer of the bladder then with this test we’ll find out for sure. So the great news was that I was clean. Very. Spotless.

Since around mid July to now (2 or so months) I didn’t experience any problems. I ran, hiked, walked, did all kinds of physical efforts and everything was fine. I became so relaxed after the camera test that I didn’t care much. I also had no dignity so that helped :). The “best time of my life” was for a reboot. Season 2. Some characters are back! New are coming. Some left the show. Sasha had to migrate to UK as a fugitive 😀 because her visa expired but she’ll get back in October for good. Seb and Sofie moved here! Wow. So cool. We made 2 desks for them. They live 10 minutes away from us. Extra-Spanish and chévere people Rafa and Vicky visited us, then the great Roma, then some other non-TROM friends. What is this!? Why are so many people coming over? 😀

In this Season 2 I also went to a kidney specialist. Talked a lot with them. They said they see 2 possible issues that I’ll mention later.

Yesterday

I went with Seb and Sofie to build a desk for them. We scavenged through the garbage bins for pieces of wood :D. People put stuff near garbage bins that are quite good. So we found stuff. We built a desk. (photos are from when we’ve built Seb’s desk a few days before)

In this entire time I kinda felt sick. Stomach sick. I realized my pee is dark and it looked like blood. It was for sure blood. Again! Fuck! I then realized that 2 days before we went to a big hike and I did a ton of effort…perhaps the story repeats! Fuck. I said I’ll take it easy.

Today

Last night I worked a lot on TROM and at around 5-6am I started to feel some stomach discomfort. Nothing unusual. Went to sleep. Woke up. I still felt that discomfort. Went to the bathroom and peed. Rainbow? no. Fanta? no. Cola? yes. It was blood. Quite a lot. Confirmed. It is happening again. The entire day I kinda peed blood, without even doing any effort. So that was odd. I also felt uncomfortable and sick. I got concerned a bit to be honest because it confirms that something is happening for sure, and it didn’t just go away. Something is wrong with me. But what?

Let’s pretend to be doctors. Let’s analyze.

I am peeing blood. It seems like I do that all the time, but it is microscopic. At times I pee a lot of blood (macroscopic). Losing a lot of blood it is a concerning sign because it means that something inside you doesn’t work properly. So we need to find the source.

I also pee proteins. Like M&M’s, Twix, or Mars. 🙂 Which means the kidneys are losing proteins. It is a leakage somewhere. We know that for sure. Except these it seems everything is ok with me. Based on these, the issue is for sure coming from the urinary tract. Kidneys, the tubes that go to the bladder, the bladder itself and the rest. It cannot come from anywhere else. We isolated it. Let’s catch it!

Now: we did 2 full abdominal ultrasounds, a ton of pee tests to test for infections, cancerous cells, and a lot more. Blood test and some physical tests. The camera test too (Remember? I don’t!). Based on all of that my assumption is that the lower part of the urinary tract is ok. No bladder or prostate issue or anything in between. Which is great! I am confident that’s the case. So we are left with the upper part of the urinary tract to investigate. The tubes from the bladder to kidneys, and the kidneys.

The kidneys.

These evil twins that have a problem with the censorship (filtering). They let some stuff out, and not other stuff. Mine got hacked and their algorithm seem not to work anymore.

The kidney specialist said we are now investigating 2 things:

1. a genetic defect that makes the tubes inside kidneys be very thin so they leak proteins and blood into the urine
2. an autoimmune disease that deposits certain molecules in the kidneys and make them fail over time – that’s what I understood

The first is a no problemos! You can live with that for the rest of your life and experience no problems. But it might be the other. A progressive disease is…well….progressive…so it gets worse over time. I barely found some info about these issues. They seem to be very rare. So, the first “option” doesn’t seem to produce visible bleeding, so I am thinking it must be the second. So the second might be split into 2 kind of diseases as I’ve read here. But mainly it is this one and it seems like I fit the description pretty well.

To summarize: it is a disease of the immune system. Your immune system fucks your kidneys up. If it is an aggressive form there are a variety of diseases that are occasionally associated and discovered while doing the investigations for this disease, like cancer or heart failure. But seems to be rare. So the disease can be moderate or aggressive. It can (and probably will) lead to kidney failure though it takes many years for that to happen. There are very few people suffering from this disease so not many studies went into it unfortunately. There are no treatments, only ways to maybe slow it down and manage it. In the end you may need a kidney transplant and in some cases, even after the transplant the immune system will do the same shitty things to the new kidneys. Jerk! Though I suppose that also takes “years in the making”.

Why I fit the disease:

I experience visible hematuria from time to time and microscopic hematuria always (it seems)
I am leaking proteins in the urine. Hematuria and Protenuria are almost the “proof” that you have the above disease – in other words people with the above disease experience these 2 together almost all the time
This disease seems to be diagnosed when you are in late 20s early 30s. I am right in there :).
I’ve read that at times physical effort leads to visible hematuria, and if that’s the case I fit 100%
If the disease also affects other organs then it may solve a mystery: over the years I’ve had multiple symptoms without explanation (like abdominal pains, tingling sensation in the body, flue like symptoms, and more – see here).

Why I don’t fit the disease:

This thing started when I did a massive amount of effort in May. Then it was 100% connected to the effort I was doing. I can’t find anything specific in regards to this. Except these 2 days, I didn’t bleed “out of the blue”, and even these 2 days I am pretty sure it was because of that big ass hike. Great one btw. I loved it. We found a cave and went swimming through it. It was small. But cool.
I don’t have any other symptoms except the above ones.
Whenever I have this issue I also have stomach discomfort – lower discomfort – and a kinda’need to go numero dos. It is so obvious that I kinda know when I’ll bleed or not. Tho’ kidney problems can create such symptoms.

So. It is a good possibility that I do have this disease. In November I’ll have to provide more pee samples, like collect pee for an entire day in a big jar :D, to test for any issues with my immune system. And then they will take a tissue sample from my kidneys. We are getting close to solve this mystery! I am curious as fuck!

In 2 days I have another appointment with the urologist. I don’t think is much to do there if you ask me, but I may be surprised in an unpleasant way. He’ll probably tell me about the cytology test results, but even if they find some “cancerous” cells, they are from kidneys probably. Hope not. But the most likely disease is the immune one. And if that’s the case then I’ll deal with it! In the worst case scenario I may need a kidney or two for transplant in a few years (or a lot more years) time. And I am already bombarded with offers from these nice TROM people haha. If I have too many offers, I’ll sell some and pay for our servers haha.

I am now sitting in my comfy gaming chair, writing this blog in Collabora from TROMCloud 🙂 thanks to me, Alexio, and Stoic. I have a lot of news to tell you about ;). My health issues will probably continue for the next months or years and I’ll update this post when I find something new. So probably I just have to get used to it.

This November I want to plan for the next TROM meetup for the next year. We want this to be a yearly thing. I want to do cool stuff, and I’m already doing a bunch of. My life changed so much these past months, for better or for worse, but mostly for better. I am surrounded by the most awesome people. Thanks to them, and their kindness, I am able to cope with these in a decent way ;). Else I would be alone and stressed.

And if you want to donate a kidney, just in case I need one, calm the fuck down! There are some other people on the list so behave yourself! 🙂

To be continued….

update: 28.09.19 - giving birth to a meteor (almost)

After I wrote this blog post I decided to use this cool new app from the healthcare system here in spain. They really have a cool app where you can chat with a doctor, call them, get health tips based on where you live, etc.. So I said “Hi” on their chat. “You know, I’m peeing blood for the past days” I continued. I explained my symptoms and lucky they spoke english so they decided to call me. They suggested it is better for me to go to the emergency room because peeing blood may mean there are blood clots forming and you may not be able to pee. That was a selling point for me. Imagine going to pee and not being able to. Or it stops mid-way. I really don’t want that cause then they have to somehow “fix” that. So, I went to the emergency room. I felt ok. They did a few tests: physical, blood + urine. Said all seems fine but yeah I still pee blood and they are gonna’ rush with that kidney test so I don’t have to wait 2 more months. They said I could do it the next week. Again, a selling point for me. I was happy. I could not participate to tromcast but I was watching it live from the hospital :):

I could only watch for some 30 min. I liked it. These guys are great :).

So now I was heading home and I had a slight lower abdominal discomfort. While on my way home, in the car, the discomfort got more and more uncomfortable. Went to my parents’ place to eat and yeah, I could tell, it was a bit uncomfortable but not unbearable. Got back to my place at around 10pm. The guys were done with the cast and I decided to meet them and go for a little walk. Me, Georgi, Seb & Sofie, and Aaron. The chosen ones. After some 20 min or walking my lower abdominal pain got more painful and localized. Left side. Back. Radiating to the front. But I thought I went to the emergency already and they saw nothing wrong so that gave me the confidence that nothing could kill me now :D. On our way back the pain got so intense that I could not walk very well. I had to take 2-3 breaks, sit down, then continue. I thought I’ll go home and stay in bed, get some sleep because the previous night I didn’t sleep much, and will be fine. WRONG! VERY WRONG!

Came home and tried to go to sleep early, like at 12am (yeah, that’s early for me!). The pain was growing in intensity and I simply could not fall asleep. I was sweating like a pig and it was a very bizarre night overall: super tired, a lot in pain – sleeping for like 5 min then waking up for 1h, then again falling asleep for 4 min and so forth. What’s a dream? What’s reality? Why isn’t this mother-fuckin-pain going away? I started to get worried. I said that I’ll go to the bathroom and if I still pee blood then I’ll call the ambulance. And it was indeed a very bloody pee. 6am and I texted Georgi that I’ll call the ambulance so they know (she and my parents). Called 112 and through an English translator I managed to summon an ambulance. I went to the hospital again. This time in pain. Georgi came with me.

There the pain got so intense that they gave me an injection straight away. Haven’t had those in like 15 years since I was in school – the injection, not the type. Butt injection. 🙂 It was very nice! 🙁 The pain went away so that was fantastic. They did an ultrasound and there we go. Finally we see something. My left kidney was ‘inflated’ and there was a meteor in there. Do you know that meteors, those “shooting stars” are only the size of a grain of sand? That’s interesting because they produce so much light when they enter the atmosphere. But anyways, I had one there – self-made, earth-like. I knew that I had these (not-cool-people call them “kidney stones”), and I suspected this was the reason I am peeing blood, but the doctors seemed to dismiss this “theory”. After the confirmation of the inflammation and the meteor, hell broke lose on me. Apparently pissing one of these (meaning getting it out of the kidney in a natural way) is one of the worst pains a human can experience. I’ve read that online. I’ve felt it in the hospital. There I am while I was dying:

It may not look like, but I was dying. The pain is so intense that if someone would give me 1 million euros to walk 100 meters in the next 20 minutes, I would have lost that million. The pain was in my lower left side of the abdomen, radiating to the front. Imagine a huge knife stabbing you in the back while at the same time twisting itself around. I had to call the nurses twice to give me more drugs. Last drug was so nice I felt dizzie and happy at the same time. And no pain. But my friends, that pain was intense. Never experienced that in my life. I’d do 5-penis cameras tests instead of one night like this.

The pain was managed with painkillers and I went for another ultrasound. Surprise! No meteor 2 hours later. Apparently it went out of my kidney. Yes! We had some answers. From where the pain was coming, from where I was bleeding. Or was it?

After all of that, some 7-8 hours in the hospital, I came back home and they recommended me some pills like Paracetamol to manage the pain. I took one pill at 3pm. I didn’t pee blood that visibly anymore. But at around 10pm I had a massive pain in my middle lower abdomen (front this time). I had to stay in bed for 1h and after I took another Paracetamol it went away. The hospital also messaged me to come by next day to check my kidneys, just in case.

I went to sleep at 12am and slept till 8am. Slept very good. No pain. Great!

Today, at the time of writing this section (hence the date in the section-title), I went again. I already know the drill: get naked, spread your legs, and start whistling. Oh wait that’s for something else :D. So yeah, I go there, again blood sample, urine sample, physical tests. All seemed fine except, again, I have microscopic blood in the urine. They could not tell me if this is a kidney-meteor related issue or it was since May, but they are now doing more tests just to make sure all is ok with me. So my next tests are: 24h pee collection to test for that autoimmune disease (I have to provide the sample next week and have a schedule with the specialist on 7th of november); a CT (radiology) scan with a contrast substance – this is a detailed scan of the kidney (and not only) where they inject a substance in your bloodstream and then scan your abdomen – this one can detect obstructions, but also tumors and other diseases; plus I also have an appointment with the urologist. Damn, many! Never ending 😀 – but is fine because we get to investigate all of it in detail. If the reason for my bleeding and symptoms is this meteorite (or a few of) then that’s no worry at all, but perhaps the doctors want to make sure that is nothing more serous than that.

Now I have no pain but I am concerned the pain may come back, though perhaps now that I almost gave birth to that meteor, is not gonna’ hurt as much. It may take weeks for the meteor to “go through the atmosphere” of your body, but unless it blocks something in its way, it should not be painful or as painful. I have 2 types of pills at my disposal if so. Let’s see. So far I am happy that the theory of the meteor is now a reality and it is perhaps what caused me so many problems for the past months. But it may not be the entire story. We shall see.

To be continued….

update: 02.10.19 - the meteor strikes again

Last night I wend for a walk with Georgi and I started to (again) feel the damn pain. I barely reached home. Stayed in bed, hoping it will go away. I was confident that now I had some painkillers at my disposal. I could take 1 every 8h. I took one at 10pm and the pain was kinda gone. But it came back in like 2 hours. A 5-6 pain. More to the front left side of my lower abdomen. No way for me to sleep with that pain. Around 2am it become a 6-7 and at times an 8. It was growing in intensity. I could only take the next painkiller in like 5 hours. Too late. Messaged Georgi and we decided to go to ER again. It is 40 minutes away. Good decision! We reached ER and I was in serious pain. The doctors recognized me already. They gave me a painkiller directly through my veins and the pain went away. So good!

My arms look a bit like those of a drug addict haha, because of so many needles that poked me over the past weeks. We had to stay there some 10 hours or so. A lot. Very tired. Managed to take like a 30 min nap in that hospital bed. Basically it is likely that the meteor travels from my kidney to the bladder and in its way there produces more damage, thus the pain. It may happen again….maybe even today. But the good news is that this is 99% likely the cause. I mean, it is the cause of my past weeks symptoms. Probably the past months symptoms but we still need to do more tests for that. The good news is that today they basically didn’t find blood in my urine – first time in the past months. This makes me think that the meteor was the one irritating my kidneys and making me pee blood since May. That’d be a perfect scenario ;).

Now I can take painkillers every 4h so that helps me a lot: mentally and physically. I will only take them if I have pain. So far I am ok. The doctor said the meteor may take another 5-6 days to leave the atmosphere and land in the Toilet ocean. We shall see ;).

Something else now. These past years and especially past months, I had to go to the hospital many times. The last week was a lot of that for me. In ER they “transported” me with a wheelchair (just in case) – cause at times I was on painkillers or on perfusion. They would take me to do an ecography for example, and they would put me in a short line of patients waiting for that. I only shared these rows with super old people who were very crippled. I was also, many times (or all the time), the only “young” patient in the ER. I saw this guy once, with swollen legs, you could see the veins and some dark patches on his skin. Very old. Could not walk. Coughing slowly, almost not willing to cough anymore. He was my neighbor waiting in line. I had these weird feelings about my life….I realize that I am super young still and I should use my body more. Maybe to go places, travel, hike, see stuff, meet stuff, experience stuff. Because one day, I’ll end up like my in-line neighbor. And I won’t be able to use my body. This is a sad feeling, but there is no escape from that. Yes, I find a lot of value in my online life/work, and yes I also go for short hikes and go out daily…I really like my life when I’m not sick. But I’m also thinking that my body will cripple and I will miss it at one point. To be able to walk, run, play, and just feel tired and that’s all, is an amazing feeling. The older you get the more problems you’ll have with your joints, muscles, other health issues, etc..

As much as I praise the Spanish state healthcare system, I don’t want to experience it very often. I want to just live and enjoy life. Take it in.

Life is like an ice cream. If you don’t lick it, it will melt 🙂

Luckily I am still healthy despite all of this. Maybe there’s only the meteor. Maybe I even have an autoimmune disease that won’t affect my life that hugely. regardless, I am still healthy. And young. I only experienced 31 Summers on Earth :). Maybe, like I talked to the most-traveling-traveler Sasha a few times, I may take a slight break from my online life at one point and just buy a motorhome and go travel for a bit. Just some nature, no thoughts about the fucked up society. To see how it is. We shall see ;).

To be continued…

update: 14.10.19 - probably I'm fine 😉

I had a CT scan of my abdomen (kidneys and gallbladder and all in-between). All great. Except a few more kidney stones (very small ones), everything is fine. They will “wash” away with water. DRINK WATER! And I’m already doin’ it! I used to drink Coca-Cola all of my life. Not anymore. Now I wash my insides with water.

Today I went to the urologist and only stayed there for like 2 minutes because everything was fine he said. I only have to do 1 more test and have 1 more visit with the kidney expert. But everything is perfect at the moment. Yellow pee. No pain. Let’s do stuff! 🙂

update: 07.11.19 - I'm fine

So, after all of this scare I can finally say I am FINE. I went today to the kidney specialist. After liters of urine samples and blood, CT scan, ultrasounds, penis-camera, and so forth, we have some kinda definitive answers: the meteorite fucked me for the past months. It fucked my kidneys to the point of degrading the function of my left kidney a bit. Even this last test (the 24 hours urine collection) showed that my left kidney is still not 100% functional, but close to that. Very likely it will recover. They still found a little bit of blood in urine but they said these can be normal after getting hit by that meteor so hard. Will do another such test in March to make sure all is 100% fine. So, ALL GOOD PEOPLE. Fuck me man, this was a scary experience. But kudos to this healthcare system here that took care of me, kinda trade-free. 😉

I won’t say this is the best time of my life since I’ve gone though all of these, but I am definitely gonna make it the best time of my life from now on. It will always be the best time of my life, till is not ;).

Chewing more than I can swallow

By tio | January 22, 2019 | Comments 1 comment

When I was in highschool I LOVED movies. Loved them! So much so that I would watch at least 2-3 a day, almost with no exception. 100 days means 200-300 movies, 360 days means around 1k movies. Several years means thousands of movies…. I was so passionate that I made websites where I would recommend and review movies, I burned thousands of CDs with movies as well, and overall I knew pretty much every english movie out there.

I somehow get into this craze with things that I really love and I want them all. NOW! 😀 – I had a huge list of movies back then and I would randomly pick 2-3 every day to watch, just because I wanted to see ALL movies that exist haha.

Today I changed the “things” and not the approach. For the past 10 or so years I shifted from movies to documentaries. I watched thousands of documentaries in the same “style”. I simply cannot help it. I like it so much! I really want to know everything about the world and documentaries are a great way of getting your head filled with good stuff. And I do the same now for podcasts, free and open source software, news, educational videos, and who knows what else. Every day I am digesting these “things”: In the morning, when I eat I watch TROM curated videos; throughout the day I read pretty much all TROM Curated news, when I design books or do more mechanical work I listen to podcasts, and many times I watch one or two documentaries before going to bed. I also squeeze in my obsession with FOSS and I search for new apps and Linux “tricks”.

Because of these obsessions of mine I created tools where I share with everyone all of these “things”: TROM Curated Videos, TROM Curated News, TROM Curated Podcasts, VideoNeat, and soon there will be a page about TROM-jaro (the Linux operating system I customized) where I will add FOSS apps and stuff like that, and there will also be other such tools like MusikWave (music streaming website I made).

To “maintain” these “things” I pretty much have to dedicate hours every day to find them and curated them and post them on those online “directories”. Not easy! When I find a good documentary I have to add it to VideoNeat in a way that anyone has access to it, if you know what I mean. Find a podcast and I have to listen to several of their episodes before I decide if it is good enough to add to our curated podcasts. FOSS? Needs to be tested for several days, maybe weeks, before I can recommend. News sources or youtube channels? The same, they need to be “watched” over a period of time to make sure their content is ok.

On top of this craze I have to do lots of other stuff, and let me enumerate some:

Write in-depth TROM books. This needs research, writing and rewriting, design, promote, make memes, post on tromsite, archive links, etc. Some books took me 1 eyar to finish.
Review books – same process as above.
Maintain 4 websites: tromsite.com, tiotrom.com, videoneat.com, musikwave.com – they need constant maintenance. For example recently videoneat.com was “hacked” by automated bots that were posting spam comments on the website – so I spent several days fixing it (super difficult). Same happened to musikwave and tiotrom. I need to update plugins, keep an eye to see if all websites work well, fix bugs, etc.
Build TROM-jaro: this amazing operating system needs testing and testing and it takes a while to do that. Still not fully released because I am looking at fixing some stuff. To give you an example it had a bug where if you closed the laptop lid and open it again (so the laptop would go into suspend mode) the desktop (at times) was messed up. I had to ask for help from Manjaro’s forum and we had to test different themes and settings until we kinda figure out where the issue was. I also report bugs for applications to developers and keep track of that – and I do report a lot!
I have to reply to emails and messages. Trust me it is not easy to do this. Some emails and messages require you to be focused and provide a good answer. Even though no more than 15-20 people contact me weekly, it is still difficult to engage with them all.
I have to deal with our new thing, TROM-Cast. Had to learn to use OBS Studio so that the streams work and look great and are functional, have to find news for the week to discuss them in the cast, and deal with a lot more.
Manage social networks: make memes, post them, reply to comments. Again, unless you manage several social network pages you may not understand that this is very time consuming.
Deal with finances and backups for the projects
and more…

For example these days Philip contacted me that he wants to make TROM books as epub and printed copies and that requires a lot of focus from myself tu simply quantify what he wants to do, then I am talking to Dima about our upcoming TROM-Cast and also about his Entertainment book that we still review, Rafa translated a huge TROM book that I had to add to tromsite + the TBF search engine that I had to re-build for the spanish language, Aaron is translating some of the blog posts from here and he told me 2 videos are not working from one blog post so I had to replace those, I was talking to Ziad about some tromsite bugs and/or features and I had to test some stuff, Cody needed me for accessing DTube where he wants to move TROM videos – needs the login and some stuff not working there so I have to check, I am checking new podcasts and made a new podcasts page on tromsite, I had to change the backpage for each trom ebook and re-upload them to tromsite, I had to engage in conversations about several bugs I reported for several foss apps, I had to fix something important with VideoNeat that took me days to do, added new sources to our curated search engine, and I am sure there are other things but I cannot remember. Mind you, this is stuff I had to do for the past several days, not even one week. And it can get super confusing for me if I talk with someone about epub versions of TROM ebooks, with another about a TROM bug, with another about updating some TROM ebooks, with another about something else, and doing other things at the same time. At times I lose my focus completely 😀

Maybe I want to do more things that I humanly can….like take TROM-Jaro…this operating system, although is simply a customized Manjaro, can be one single full-time job with fixing bugs, adding new features, making a website for it and tutorials, finding new foss apps, etc.. Or writing TROM books…that takes a huge amount of times. Or curate stuff.

But I simply cannot stop. And I do not want to do things at 50% I want to do them at 96-100%. Like I do not want to make a meh operating system, I want to make a WOW operating system. No simple curated news, but AWESOME curated news. No nice book, but AMAZING book. At least in my view.

BUT, I am not complaining- It is super difficult, it is true, and at times I get confused and I hate it, but generally I LOVE it because I do not want to be bored and have no ideas about what I want to do or no one to contact me about these projects. That would be a complete disaster. But if you don’t see me writing TROM books so often is because I have to deal with a lot of other relevant stuff on a daily basis. And also there are several people who help TROM project a lot so that I don’t have to do all of the lifting!

And now I am writing this blog post…damn! 😀

TROM Google Account back!? WTF!

By tio | October 15, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

As you may know Google deleted my entire TROM Google account in May this year without a warning. Everything I had: gmail, picasa photos, google drive, API, everything … except for my Youtube account, that was there but I could not access anymore. So it was weird as fuck. Contacted them and they said they cannot help me out. Checked several times on a special Google page to get the confirmation that my account was deleted and it was indeed deleted (confirmed by Google). I even created another Google account to post our TROM Series there since I could not access the old channel. For the past months I checked the account several times and it was the same – inaccessible. I did that because it felt weird that they deleted everything yet my Youtube was still up and running, so I hoped to at least see a message from Google with an explanation – I thought that it may take them a bit of time to let you know the exact reason of why they deleted my account.

Last night I tried to sign in with the old credentials and it fucking worked. Just like that. WHAT!? Every Google service was back again – all of my files on Google Drive intact, gmail, picasa photos, everything. What is even weirder is that I had that gmail address set up to forward emails to my personal email address and it never did that, UNTIL I logged in last night and started to forward emails out of a sudden. In a way it looked like my login activated my account again or something like that. I have 1.3k unread emails (imagine that), and even though most could be spam, I still lost some important stuff because of this circus. I also realized that I was paying for my “deleted” Google drive for the past months when I could not access it … I deleted that account now.

This is beyond weird. I searched through all of the unread emails to see if Google sent me a cookie or a bottle of wine in apology for the stupid mistake they made, but none what so ever. All I can tell is this: Google deleted my entire account without telling me a thing about it. Then I checked and it was confirmed by Google that it was deleted and only if I made an appeal to court (or some legal shit like that) I “may” get it restored. I, of course, did none of that and forgot about it. They continued to charge me for the Google Drive however. Yesterday I tried to log in and it worked – my account was back again. No notice from Google about that. So they kinda deleted my account for 3+ months without telling me, and then brought it back from the dead (again without telling me).

But I lost my “faith” in Google entirely regardless if they restored it – although who knows, maybe in a week I can’t access it anymore. I am glad that this entire thing with Google happened so that I can learn a lesson: never trust any company with your data (digital stuff). This experience made me back up everything locally and use more and more the offline Linux apps available. I will post TROM Series on the Youtube channel again, here https://www.youtube.com/user/TROMdocumentary/ but I won’t make a big fuss about that. Whoever watches there, good for them, but I will only promote tromsite.com for everything we do. I can control tromsite.com entirely and you can bet that you’ll find all of the TROM stuff there. But I can’t guarantee you’ll find TROM stuff on Youtube or anywhere else.

So, Google re-enabled TROM account, and I give little fucks about that. Fuck off Google :P. Don’t need you bro.

It is unfortunate that we can’t share TROM videos properly with people – if Google doesn’t close our account, then it for sure will eat us alive because of copyright, so it will make our TROM Videos on Youtube unavailable in certain parts of the world. Either way, it is a reason not to care to use Google anymore. This goes to show that these companies own you. They can do whatever they want and whenever they want to.

Thank you Linux community for allowing me to give the middle finger to all of these idiot companies. Most of what I use is open source and free.

You, the one reading this, maybe should learn something from this and avoid giving your digital stuff to companies, no matter how sweat their offer seems. But more than likely you won’t properly get this (like I did), and only after going through what I went through (rebuilding VideoNeat and all of the hassle that followed the disabling of the account) you’ll learn.

Why Jacque is not dead

By tio | May 20, 2017 | Comments 14 comments

Since I found out about Jacque and TVP I knew in the back of my head that this day will come. I will be around to hear that Jacque has died. That day has come and although not a surprising news considering Jacque’s age, it still gave me chills.

Just a little background: I found out about Jacque and TVP around 2006 or so (I think it was the Future by Design documentary) and my first reaction was (I remember so clearly): “Wow this old dude is exactly like me.” The way he talked, the things he talked about, everything was so “like me”. That’s how I felt. But then I forgot about him or TVP. I rediscovered him in Zeitgeist Addendum a few years later and then I went through some intense watching/listening/reading about him and TVP. Without exaggeration, I felt at that time that he was the only human in the world that I could look up to. I never had any “role models” or appreciated people really, but I always looked at ideas. Well, with Jacque it was a bit different because he seemed so sharp and giving no fucks about the establishment or what people think. I came across other people criticizing the world we live in but they never went far enough and that was so frustrating to me. Jacque did that. He ripped apart the monetary system and human values. I loved him. He was, in a way, confirming my worldviews.

This is an article I made in 2010 on my personal blog about him – http://www.teoretic.com/?p=12250 (it is in Romanian) – and I mentioned his work many times on my blog.

He inspired me to make TROM Documentary because he was all about the solutions and I loved that aspect. A huge part of TROM Documentary is based on his work and revolves around videos/audios with him. I was dreaming at that time to meet him and talk to him. I wasn’t fanatic at all about this, but I would have loved to meet him and talk to him.

Later on, after making TROM, I ended up collaborating with TVP and talking indirectly to him through my articles for TVPMagazine that he read/reviewed. I didn’t change my views about Jacque, only my enthusiasm after I grew up (mentally) and realized that the world is bigger than any man, and that there are many hard working people with brilliant ideas out there. And so I questioned Jacque’s views, something I wasn’t able to do before because the enthusiasm blinded me. Interestingly even after looking with a critical eye on Jacque, I still find his work and views on the world valid and important. I may slightly disagree with him here and there (maybe), but I think that what he created is wonderful. It is a very simply explained worldview that anyone can understand.

You see there are many people who have similar (in a way) ideas about the future, but Jacque managed to showcase this vision through his designs. This, I think, was what made TVP popular because people could imagine how such a world might look like. Plus his style of delivering the message – he had the charm/charisma. He knew how to deliver the message. Perhaps that will be missed the most.

But I said: “Why Jacque is not dead”. Well, interestingly enough this was the title of a google document that I made 2 years ago whilst still managing TVPM, because I knew this day would come and I thought I would make an article for TVPM about this.

I never made that article of course, but now that this moment came and I no longer collaborate with TVP, I’ll make a shorter version of that article here, on my blog. The name of the article was to point out something people may be missing.

Let me explain briefly:

One summer day when I was about 12 I’ve noticed something that made my skin crawl. I noticed that I was laughing exactly like a “cool kid” that came to our town for the holidays. This may seem like a nothing thing to you but to me it was super creepy to realize that I copied that frickin’ laughing style without noticing. Then this kinda obsessed me to pay attention to, about copying other people’s behavior, and I paid special attention to it. I’ve noticed it about others, I’ve noticed it about me. I’ve noticed others copying me as well. It wasn’t only about facial expressions and stuff like that though, but also about ideas and ways of thinking. Later on in my life, after being Jacqued’ some years ago, I noticed how I involuntarily copied some of his ideas and talking ‘ticks’ or ways of expression when I was explaining/writing to/for others about the world, monetary system, human values. A part of Jacque was part of me. Like a tiny ghost breathing from inside me. This is not an exaggeration if you think that what we are is a combination of ideas, and similar ideas (worldviews) in different brains make us more like one brain. If Jacque’s brain was 90% about explaining why the monetary system is the fault of most problems, and how a worldwide society based on abundance can solve that, then if at least half of your brain is about and dedicated to that, then you are part Jacque Fresco and Fresco is part you. And this is not a Jacque’s measure, this works both ways. Jacque copied information from others too, so a bit of others lived through Jacque as well.

Something mind blowing to realize about humans is that they are carriers of ideas. I have digital photos and videos since 2003 on my hard drive right now. They moved from one hard drive to another – big hard drives, solid state hard drives, flash drives, cds and dvds – but they are still the same. What moved was information. The hard drives and cds/dvds are all gone. The information remained. Humans, for sure, are more than just hard drives and dvds: they have feelings and relationships, aspirations, goals, hobbies, that are uniquely theirs. But when it comes to ideas – like for example ideas that Jacque had – then they indeed are like those photos and videos that I moved from one hard drive to another.

Therefore as cheesy as this may sound, Jacque is not entirely dead. He lives through me, you, and so many others out there. The question is how much of the info you copied on your hard drive from him, and how motivated are you to make others copy it on their hard drives?

But then understand that this is bigger than one man, or a bunch of. If indeed you pretend to understand how the world works and what we can do to change it, then you’ll install a firewall on your system and review the stuff you copy on your hard drive (change, remove, improve). Jacque or any other out there cannot hold on information like a CD. Their info changes as well. The information in any of our heads changes all the time. But if you want to truly be immortal make sure the info that you have in your brain is as valuable as to make others copy it further and to be resilient in front of firewalls and big edits (change, remove, improve) over time. Einstein’s ideas are such ideas that remained with us until now. They were valid and strong. Firewalls and edits made little impact on his ideas of relativity. Whatever percentage of his science work was Einstein’s brain, that copied to many of people’s brains and is still carried on. I am a bit of Einstein, others are a lot more. I may be a bit more of a Jacque Fresco, but these two people are bits of others as well. And so we all are a soup of others, a mix that is mutating almost like a creature without a physical form.

If Jacque was a robust piece of data, then Jacque will live for a long time. Good and verifiable ideas can stand up time.

I never wanted a photo with Jacque or a signed book, or anything like that, because I realized that if I want something from him then I can just copy it to my brain. Fortunately, there is no copyright issue in that (at least for now). It is free, so go ahead and pirate this shit like crazy! 🙂 Jacque was not an athlete, singer, Hollywood star and so on to want to take a photo with him like a proof of meeting him or whatever, he was not about the ‘looks’, he was about ideas, so if you ever wanted to meet him, then listen to him, and copy him in your brain.

And if you don’t make this about Jacque, but about ideas, then these ideas can be immortal. If you mingle these ideas in original ways in your brain and then they spread to other brains, then part of you will live a lot longer than your body. You are ideas, and ideas will live longer than you. 🙂

So if you want to live for hundreds or thousands of years, or more, grow your brain, copy ideas, mix them in your head, think, develop original ideas, spread them to others.

New website, hurdles writing books, plans for the future, and more

By tio | May 14, 2017 | Comments 4 comments

NEW WEBSITE:

My old website was based on a very old template that made the website unstable and unsecured. So much so that it was hacked several times in the past few months. Nothing that big of a deal since it was hacked by automated bots looking for flaws in the code of WordPress themes and from there on accessed Wordpress posts and were able to change the content. So I was seeing certain posts deleted and the title and content were like “hacked by…”. But since WP has a backup for all articles I was able to quickly and easily revert back all articles. So I had to take the time these days to update my website. Now is all brand new, secure, and more interesting. It is mainly my personal place where I can share stuff I do and think, without being dependent on websites like Facebook to do so. People do not realize how FB for example eats their lives, their creations, their time. Why would I post the stuff I make, my thoughts, on a website that’s owned by a company that cares mostly (if not entirely) to make money and therefore changes its rules of how it operates more often and weirder than quantum particles change states. I don’t want to rely on sharing my thoughts and creations on a website that can say: “Tio, friend, you are not allowed to post these things!”. I don’t need the daddy facebook to tell me what I’m allowed to think and create. FB banned my account 2 times so far because I posted content that IT, the God-FB, found offensive. So from now on I’ll post on my blog then share on FB because unfortunately most people are on FB…I’ll try to make this automated so when I post on my blog it goes on FB, because I don’t use FBb at all, I manage all my FB accounts and pages via HootSuite.

I also added a live chat on my site, so if people want to get in touch with me quicker they can do that via the chat. If it gets too spammy for me I’ll close it or limit it somehow. Let’s see how it goes. – the chat didn’t work properly so I closed it for now.

Anyways, from now on I’ll post here new videos I make with my drone, other kinds of videos, my thoughts on various topics, photos I make, and stuff like that. It’s my place, my home, and you are all invited in 🙂

HURDLES WRITING BOOKS:

In February last year I started to write the TROM book on language. Prior to that it took me around 1-2 months to finish up a lecture on language that was the start of researching for this series. Now is May 2017 and it’s been 1 year and around 3 months since I am working on this book. Frustrating, amazing, what!?, interesting, wtf!, and so forth. In essence, I worked on this series for more than a year and I still haven’t finished it since I still have to write the last part of it (part 5) that can also take at least 1 month to finish up. This can be frustrating for people to know that a project like TROM may release a full book, on a particular subject, every year and a half (so long!), but this is not the entire story. You see in this 1 year and some months I’ve been through a lot of changes and struggles. I broke up from TVP and had to move everything to TROM, basically rebuilding tromsite.com. I had health problems that made me unable to work for about 3 months. I started TROM Video Series that took lots of time to kickstart and then I helped with it along the way and I am still doing that. I also had several issues with my laptop: some keyboard keys stopped working and that makes writing super difficult; 8gb out of my 12gb RAM memory got toasted and I had to buy new ones and wait for them to arrive before doing any work; I had to rebuild my personal website, work on two other websites to make some more money because TROM money is lower and lower; and overall I was busy with transitioning to TROM from TVPM and dealing with some medical issues (going to hospital, feeling sick, etc.); I also worked on two other big articles and prepared them for when I’ll be able to focus on them 100%.

But there is a more important reason: this book is a monster and the subject is super complex. I think that you can’t choose any other subject that’s more difficult than language. People don’t see how much stuff I read/watch and write that I have to ditch later on when I find out it is irrelevant and I followed a misleading path that I now have to ditch entirely. They see the end result. They also don’t see me designing these books (improving images quality, making some images, testing multiple designs, editing videos for these books, and lots more). Basically, it is a TONNE of work.

I am also battling with motivation. Here’s why: if you look at any creative stuff happening online (blogs, vlogs, people writing articles or making interesting videos, or making games and stuff like that) you’ll see that most of these people, if they are somewhat successful (attract views and support), have a peak of creativity in the first 1-3 years (or less) where they push like crazy and work like nuts. After that they usually experience a deep fall and they produce less stuff, less often. Look at any blogger you followed or youtube channel – in the beginning they were making stuff like nuts, lots of articles, lots of videos, then they started to release rarer and rarer. That’s understandable because you are going to burn yourself out in the first years if you approach things like this. I’ve seen this happening with everyone I followed online. But there are two important things: first is that IF these people attract a big following and support (financial for example) in those first crazy years then they can ‘retire’ a bit afterward, doing less stuff yet still having the support from their followers, and the reach. Things get easier for these folks because of their huge following and support gained in the first years. They may release 1 video a month or 1 article a month or rarer, yet still have a lot of financial support and reach because of the ‘nuts’ past where they worked like crazy to reach this point. These are the people who succeed. The second scenario is when you push like crazy in the first years YET you don’t reach many people, therefore less support, and since you burned yourself out you can’t keep yourself afloat anymore. You produce less stuff and therefore you reach even fewer people, meaning less support (motivational support or financial support), so you may feel like you do stuff for nothing (has no value) + since you don’t have enough financial support you can’t keep on doing what you’ve been doing. Those are the people who push like the rest, yet they don’t succeed.

What happened to me: in 2010 I started working for one full year alone to make TROM documentary. Each day, no breaks, lots of stress, so much work. Prior to this I also had a blog where I was writing (lots of work) + a funny video series that I made for about 3 years (another “lots of work”). None brought me any financial support. Then in 2011 I worked again to remake TROM – same hurdles, same daily work. So around 2 years of daily intense work that followed 3-4 years of quite hard work (but not daily). Next 1-2 year(s) I worked less but still worked on helping TVP with some stuff and kickstarting their TVPMagazine project + creating VideoNeat. It wasn’t a daily work, but still quite a lot. The support thus far was almost 0 in terms of money, so it was not sustainable, but in terms of views it was somewhat increasing. I got the reach, I didn’t get the support. So overall 4-5 years of hard work with a good reach but almost no financial support. Then “boom” – we’ve got financial support for TVPMagazine to work one year, then to work another year (almost two years). But in this time I kinda burned myself. I was a bit burned because of the work before this, but now I felt a bit more forced to produce stuff since people were donating money for this work. I worked 3-4 years like nuts for TVPM. Each day, 10-12 hours, writing tonnes of articles and about very hard-to-write-about-subjects. I built TVPM website and quizzes and lots other tools, tried to help TVP with lots of other stuff like re-organizing their video/audio materials, rebuilding their website several times, managing their social networks, and more. I was unstoppable. I worked so much that I felt like burning out the few people who worked alongside me. But because I finally had my own life due to the financial support we’ve got: so now I could pay a rent, be able to buy food for myself, and so on, I felt super motivated to push myself so much. I knew that I worked a tonne in the past without any financial support, so now that I had a financial support it motivated me so much to keep the work going because I was able to be financially independent and focus 100% on what I loved doing. But I was getting so little financial support that if I needed medicine or some clothes I could go bankrupt. It was at the limit and it was not growing. So that started to sink in more and more, and I started to realize that I need more financial support to be able to keep my work flowing. Then the TVP breakup followed and the stress that accumulated to me over time + the burnout, and that lead to a huge drop in my motivation or ability to keep that kind of work going.

Since the breakup from TVP the views and financial support substantially got lower. So low I had to move with my parents because I could not afford to live on my own. My own place, my own life, that I hardly managed to make for myself by working so hard vanished in one month. With my health issues that I struggled for months, and this situation with TVP, I felt super difficult to motivate myself again to push it hard like before.

For example because of stress and hard work (little sleep, not eating well or too much, and so on) I developed a skin rash on my face that now made me so sensitive to stress (dermatitis). If before I could handle stress like a champion :), now I can’t anymore. If I get stressed a bit (not able to release more stuff or do new projects, and so on) my face turns red and itchy and painful and there is no treatment out there to cure this. So the only way to not get myself ‘hurt’ is to not stress myself. This sucks but it is also kinda forcing me to stress less. To understand what stresses me out: I feel like I found a mind blowing way to explain why the world sucks and how to fix it, so I want to scream that. I want for people to know this. It is almost like you found out you are in a computer simulation, and you know that for sure, and of course you want to tell everyone about it. That’s my feeling. Money does not stress or motivate me, they are only a mean that allows me to continue my work. If I get little financial support it stresses me because it makes my life suck and not be able to focus much or better on the “screaming” part.

So right now the financial support is dropping with each month, the reach is dropping with each month, I get a bit stressed because I want to write about so many other things but because I have to think of ways to make some money I can’t focus much on that. One thing people who do not write stuff do not understand is “the peace of mind”. I can write articles like these in a few hours, but TROM books are a different monster – I have to be really calm and relaxed to be able to write about subjects like language, evolution, monetary system, and such. I am telling you this thing is super difficult. Try it for yourself. Write about something like “instinct” or “human behavior” and try to make it as scientific as possible (with good and reliable sources) and explain it in detail. You’ll realize how super difficult it is.

But the difference between me (TROM) and a blogger or a vlogger or most of the internet “creativeness” is that I don’t do TROM because it is my ‘passion’, ‘hobby’, or is ‘cool’ or can bring me money. Not at all. I do it because it has a super important importance. It is about that “living in a computer simulation” kind of feeling. I feel like I need to do this. I just can’t live without doing this. That’s how important this project is in my view.

Therefore recently I had to struggle to motivate myself to finish up the book on language because of the drop in reach and financial support + the complex subject I am writing about. Although I am so motivated to keep on “TROMing” (to quote a friend 🙂 ), it surely is demotivating seeing how unstable the situation is with TROM from a financial perspective. It surely worries me that with so little money I’ll have to take some radical decisions or else I just can’t make a life on this planet for myself.

Someone seeing me struggling with this said these days: “I suggest you just finish up the language book the way you can and move to something else” – because this someone heard me saying that I want to move to other subjects as well, but I said: “I’m not writing this stuff for the sake of writing something. If I can’t provide some super important information through what I’m doing I prefer not doing it at all. I am not going to just write something and finish up the language book. I am going to finish it up in a way that is super relevant and makes a lot of sense. If that takes 4 months then that’s how it will be. Else makes no sense.” – quite a long quote :)).

The point is: TROM is losing reach, is losing financial support. IT also is about super complex subjects that take a tonne of time to write about so that makes people less interested in it (nowadays people want stuff to pour out like a heavy rain – breakthroughs, BreakingNews, breakdance!?) :). So TROM is more likely to go further down in reach and support, and that in turns will make me (us) less able to produce important stuff. Sucks! BUT!

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE:

I am lucky that I live in a very small, quiet, and awesome town and area in the North of Spain. Here’s me on the beach struggling with some breakdance moves :)):

Here I am in a city that’s on a rock. So awesome, can’t believe the landscape (I’ll post a video from the drone on my website soon):

Me on top of a castle that’s on top of a mountain near where I live:

And it is super important that I live in such a place because it costs me nothing to live my life here. Meaning that when I go out it costs me zero money to go to the beach, to the mountain, with the bike, for a walk, and so on. It only costs me money for the car’s fuel, but that’s all. Of course it costs the rent, food, stuff like that, what I meant is that it does not cost me money to go out and in such places that I love. So I get a serious dose of relaxedness because of where I live. When I go out, I go out. Never had FB or Twitter or WhatsApp, or anything like that on my phone. Only a handful of people can contact me and I get no notifications from apps or messages. No one can bother me while I’m out, so I am away from all the stress :).

This is super important for me!

It is true that I can’t afford to eat out (maybe 3-4 times a year I can); it is true that I can’t buy pretty much anything except food, some clothes from time to time, and basic stuff; it is true I have no money to travel anywhere. But fortunately, I don’t need to because of the area I live in. There are so many nature landscapes here that are unbelievable. I like this kind of calm life.

This allows me to compensate for the lack of TROM support. With the money I get from TROM right now, I would not be able to afford to work on it if I were to live in other parts of the world where you need to pay even for going from point A to point B. Any city bigger than 10,000 people would kill me financially and mentally because where would I go to relax? To a bar? Between the concrete jungle?

So because I don’t need much money for now, then I can still make it with what I get from TROM. But is not sustainable for sure since I have to be financially dependent even in this area. This is not good at all. Also, I don’t want you to think that TROM causes me stress. Mainly it is an issue with the money and reach. Money to allow me to continue to do this important work (in my view), and reach is just a bit upsetting because we need people to be aware of such information and I’ve been doing all I can to reach more people (made books, videos, quizzes, a curated news and videos system, and lots more). I am also a bit stressed whilst working on super complex subjects like Language because it is super hard to understand and write about them, and it stresses me out when I can’t work that much as I would like to, or when I can’t figure something out about that subject. This stress is a good stress though because it is my battle with understanding the complex world we live in ;).

Ok. So. I am now done with most issues I had in the past including my health (all good now, feeling great). And so I’ll be able to try and push again this project and my plan is to focus on video, on TROM Series. We make long videos, some longer than documentaries, and I want to release more and quicker. We will push TROM Series and our youtube channel, and TROM ebooks will have to relax so that I can focus on making them super great but do not rush with them. TROM Series more and quicker, TROM ebooks less and more detailed (like we did so far). I may also work on weekends some ‘part-time’ jobs this summer so that’ll affect how much time I can dedicate for TROM, but if I focus on videos primarily then that is many times easier to make than books. So that won’t be an issue. I can basically make these videos if I say: “I’ll start in 3 hours and work 4 hours on them”. Something I can’t say about TROM books – I can only work on the books when I am really into that. Can’t force it.

I’ve been pushing like crazy for about 5-6 years, and that’s way longer than I’ve seen most people push with their projects, so perhaps there is something special about what I’m pushing for. But videos reach more people and the feedback we get for them is great. I also love making videos and love working with Sebastian to make them. Great guy. But we need to support my and Sebastian’s work or else how can we spend time on this?

I’ve learned though to accept the situation that TROM is largely unknown and the only reason this upsets me is that I want for people to know about the subjects we talk about: how trade is the source of most issues today, what solutions there are to overcome this, and so forth. If I were to see others more popular out there pushing this worldview then I’ll be super happy and not ‘upset’ about TROM’s reach. Hell yeah I would contact them and offer to team up with them. TVP and TZM may seem to be doing just that but in my view they are not. They focus on money money money as the source of problems too much, and they are kinda non-cooperative from my experience + kinda sprinkled with pseudoscience (maybe not from them necessarily, but from many of their supporters). So I just can’t see an organization/movement to point out that trade creates most of today’s issues and how to seriously think about relevant ways to tackle that.

I know blogs that get 13,000 dollars a month on Patreon and their websites look hacked, their subjects very opinionated. If I had that money I would help at least 4 people and we would do tonnes of projects. Here’s a brief on what I would love doing (just in my mind right now):

make a weekly video show with the best news of the week; news based on our TROM news, not BS news and exaggerated ones that you see on social networks.
take great articles from the web and transform them into videos; there are amazing articles written by people that would end up as amazing videos; this could lead us to all kinds of interesting collaborations with groups of people that we can’t reach with TROM ever.
create a search engine that can search everything that’s free and open source online: 3D models for 3D printers, videos, images, songs, even free places where you can crash for a night or find free food; a free search engine 🙂
I would also like to buy some stuff like a better laptop for myself because my laptop is old and not working too well; I would love to have a big monitor and a great keyboard so I can design/write better and more comfortable for me.
and lots more stuff + I would financially help others that work in the same direction

Here’s the thing: I am not obsessed with making stuff for TROM for the sake of doing that.I do this because there are so many important subjects to talk about. I have a list of 92 possible future subjects – figure that out :D. And at least 3-4 articles/books in the making on top of the last part of language that I am working on right now. Plus I want to work on a fictional book about how a future saner trade-free society might look like. So I have a tonne of ideas and I will try to start working on them. Will see how the money thing will work out and what I can afford to spend my time on.

And just so those who donate/donated know: I’ll never in my life forget that there are people like you out there who helped me out for so long. There are people who donated over the years hundreds or thousands of euros – that’s just hard to process considering they could have done any other thing with that money.

Oh and btw, I will try to make more “my perspective” videos and “4 things that amaze me” posts. I wish I had more arms and heads because I want to do so much.

TROM Dissected after 6 years

By tio | March 11, 2017 | Comments 30 comments

This dissection will be brief but important. Since I made TROM (started in 2010 and finished in 2011) I learned a ton about the world and some of the stuff I learned made me realized that I was ‘wrong’ in certain parts from TROM Documentary. Mind you I wrote several books since then on topics related to TROM and for the books my research on the topcis was much much more detailed. So it was quite normal to find out small parts of TROM with which I would disagree.

Here are the things that I got wrong in TROM or I kinda disagree with now:

…

Facebook Ban

By tio | December 15, 2016 | Comments 11 comments

Short story short: I published the documentary “The Raw Ones” from VideoNeat to Facebook with this message “Surprisingly educational documentary. I think nowadays you will rarely find such documentaries that are to the point and scientific.” – the documentary is about how sick this world is in regards to the naked human body – it is educational, it is from 1965, and it is banned on Facebook.

I posted it on my personal account, TROM and VN pages. Then bam! Facebook blocks me saying that I didn’t respect their terms and conditions…they logged me out from their messenger for 2 of my accounts, both of which were admins for TROM and VN, yet the other account of mine did not post a thing on FB and never did, it is a personal account to keep in touch with my family. I can’t post on FB for at least 24h, and TROM page is deleted/unpublished and I can only hope they will bring it back.They also blocked another admin of TROM page, even if he did nothing at all.

So Facebook got scared of some tits basically, or something like that because of the documentary’s poster, and went bananas and blocked me everywhere. I didn’t like FB at all, ever, but now it’s just beyond Hitler-like. I will incorporate more about this in a TROM future book (hopefully really soon) to explain why this situation with entities like FB or YTB or Twitter and such are very very scary.

It’s a very sick world, and what an irony….posting a documentary about how this society is so ‘scared’ when it comes to the naked human body to then be blocked by the largest ‘social’ network in the world on the reason that I posted nudity….

Mad, mad world.

I’ll update here if there are any other updates but I am thinking of completely giving up FB.

UPDATE: we are back on FB, but my attitude towards FB will change from now on and I will try not to post messages on FB directly but on my blog and then post a link to FBso people check my blog if they want to read these posts. I can’t rely on the primitiveness and stupidity of Facebook anymore.