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In Praise of Public Libraries

For the past few years, I've been reading books a lot more. I found that if I keep a decent sized backlog of books that seem interesting and are varied enough, I feel like reading more often. But that's an expensive hobby to keep. So besides buying, I've also been borrowing from friends, exchanging and pirating books.

Now, some particular books I want to read are hard to get. Sometimes they are no longer for sale, or don't work well on eReaders. Niche ones like art books, which can get quite expensive too. Then I remembered to search to see if my local library had its catalog online, and of course it has. So I got a library card for the first time in my life, and now I'm borrowing 3-4 books per month. For some of those books, I'm the first person taking them home. So in a small part, I'm also preventing those particular books of being decommissioned in the future.

So here's my praise for public libraries. Great for keeping your book budget lower, and getting access to hard-to-find or out-of-sale books. Plus, one of the few remaining places where you can spend time indoors without having to buy anything.

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Personal Blogs

My Internet life started when blogs were at their peak. Now not so much. But I never stop enjoying following personal blogs, or maintaining mine. I still check my RSS feed reader every day.

To spread the word, here's the list of friends I follow:

Alcides Fonseca

Ana "meia de leite"

António Lima

Bruno Pedro

David Francisco

David Gomes

Fred Oliveira

Fred Rocha

Gonçalo Valério

Humberto Alves

Maria Margarida

Rafaela Ferro

Ricardo Lafuente

Winnie Lim

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I had my first experience organizing an art exhibition. I invited, together with Coimbr'a Pedal, the artist Xavier Almeida to exhibit on a bike repair shop in downtown Coimbra. It's part of the convergent event of Coimbra's Art Bienal.

The full description:

An exhibition focusing on one of the objects of study of the artist Xavier Almeida; the use of the bicycle as a socio-political enabler and transformer. Not as a "romanticisation" of the bicycle, but as an exercise in implosive revolutionary symbolism in the organisation of cities, as well as its capacity for "decapitalisation" and anti-hygienisation of bodies and urban space. The exhibition is spread across various media, such as comics, video, sound and installation. Xavier Almeida (Ovar, Portugal, 1980) lives and works in Lisbon. Transdisciplinary artist, focusing on installation, painting, comics, publishing, sound, performance and social architecture. Founder of the Estrela Decadente collective, with which he mainly produces fanzines, concerts and actions. Xavier Almeida's work is linked to the underground and counter-culture side of cities, collaboration with spaces of resistance and an anti-form aesthetic as capitalist and classist dissolution.

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It begins with a simple, profound realisation — to quit capitalism, we have to liberate ourselves from its entrenched mindset, beyond economic reform; it demands a fundamental shift in how we perceive success, value community, and envision our role in the future of humanity.

How to quit capitalism by Joan Westenberg

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These were my thoughts about how cities affect your lifestyle for today. They change you. It takes a while for the lifestyle changes to occur. It didn't take Yerevan too long to do it and essentially kill a lot of good habits I had from my hometown. However, I'm happy to share that it seems the Netherlands is swiftly acting to undo the damage, reverse the course, and reintroduce the positive lifestyle aspects I once enjoyed, much like they did with the bikes.

Reclaiming Urban Spaces: The Critical Link Between City Design and Lifestyle by fperson

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This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty? Is it simply … the feeling of being home?

An app can be a home-cooked meal by Robin Sloan

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Books read in 2023

All the books I read in 2023, with a ⭐️ next to my favourites. You can also check my lists for 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Fiction

Red Star - Alexander Bogdanov Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson Ghostwritten - David Mitchell ⭐️ Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler ⭐️ Utopia - Thomas More & Ursula K. Le Guin Make Room! Make Room! - Harry Harrison The Terraformers - Annalee Newitz The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood Radicalized - Cory Doctorow Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Non-fiction

Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies - Leslie Kern Uses of Disorder - Richard Sennett Radical Cities - Justin McGuirkn ⭐️ Moods of Future Joys - Alastair Humphreys Microadventures - Alastair Humphreys The Autonomous City - Alex Vasudevan ⭐️ Mindful Thoughts for Cyclists - Nick Moore Mismatch - Kat Holmes La anarquía explicada a los niños - José Antonio Emmanuel Company of One - Paul Jarvis Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Anarchy - Simon Read Something Should Be Done - Peter Good Ur-Fascism - Umberto Eco ⭐️ Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook - Mark Bray Bicycle Diaries - David Byrne Journey to Portugal - José Saramago Art for UBI - Institute of Radical Imagination La trinchera doméstica - Cristina Barrial Anarchy Works - Peter Gelderloos The Utopia of Rules - David Graeber FIRE - Dama de Ouros The Beach Machine - Kyklàda Machines Will Make Better Choices Than Humans - Douglas Coupland Off the Map - Alastair Bonnet Pirate Enlightenment - David Graeber

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In the past 4 years, I've been experimenting with analogue photography, with a Canon T70 and a Canon Prima Zoom Shot. Here is a random selection of the results.

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You see, this cultural phenomenon of speed and growth at all costs is displayed in every startup, they all look the same, it’s like fast food: it looks good, its taste it’s consistent but then you feel horrible afterwards.

The founder of Teenage Engineering opens up to his creative space

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Non-coercive marketing places full authority and trust in people. It creates the conditions under which they can make empowered decisions for themselves, and do so in their own time. It doesn't seek to persuade, manipulate, or pester people into a decision that's already been made for them. It merely opens new doors, tells the truth about what's behind those doors, then surrenders the outcome, trusting that the right people will step through when they're ready. In that way, non-coercive marketing is a leap of faith, rooted in the idea that if you stop trying to control people, and encourage them to be their own authority, you can build positive sum relationships that lead to organic and mutually-enriching transactions. This relational shift is also at the heart of how we begin healing the emotional wounds lying beneath humanity's many problems.

Non-Coercive Marketing: A Primer by Rob Hardy

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Once we realise that the new is nothing new, it will appear that the task at hand is much less daunting than we thought.

How to keep up with tech and not get left behind by Alif Ibrahim

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These kinds of traits may appear dumb-but-innocuous early on, but if only it stopped there. In the past few years, these personalities have added extreme and harmful views to their online persona, further exacerbating the damage they do to junior engineers that mistakenly look up to them.

Keeping Android and Kotlin Healthy in a Post-Twitter World by Zac Sweers

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Books read in 2022

All the books I read in 2022, with a ⭐️ next to my favourites. You can also check my lists for 2020 and 2021.

Fiction

We - Yevgeny Zamyatin ⭐ The Last of the Masters - Philip K. Dick The Carpet Makers - Andreas Eschbach ⭐ Death's End - Liu Cixin The Ark Sakura - Kobo Abe His Master's Voice - Stanislaw Lem The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis - José Saramago Seeing - José Saramago La Diagonale Alekhine - Arthur Larrue The Man Who Planted Trees - Jean Giono The Castle - Franz Kafka The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin ⭐️ The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem

Non-fiction

Blockchain Chicken Farm - Xiaowei Wang ⭐ On Anarchism - Noam Chomsky A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide - Cyd Harrell The Anarchist Handbook - Michael Malice Nea Kavala, Nea Kavala - Frederico Martinho The DisCO Elements Selected Writings - Mikhail Bakunin Bobby Fischer goes to War - David Edmonds & John Eidinow Play Winning Chess - Yasser Seirawan Kraftwerk - Uwe Schütte On Tennis - David Foster Wallace Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher Judgment of Paris - George M. Taber Voices from the Valley - Moira Weigel & Ben Tarnoff Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? - Linda Nochlin Soft City - David Sim The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto Che Guevara Rebel Ideas - Matthew Syed Wine and War - Don Kladstrup Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman ⭐ The One-Straw Revolution - Masanobu Fukuoka Movement - Thalia Verkade ⭐ The Permaculture City - Toby Hemenway The Race Against the Stasi - Herbie Sykes The 99% Invisible City - Kurt Kohlstedt & Roman Mars The Captive Mind - Czesław Miłosz Consider the Oyster - M. F. K. Fisher The Kronstadt Uprising - Ida Mett Post-scarcity Anarchism - Murray Bookchin

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New app made by us at Bloco.

Curated by a team of independent app creators, Cabinet gives you a selection of great Android apps.

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Books read in 2021

Keeping up with 2020, here are all the books I read in 2021, with a ⭐️ next to my favourites.

Fiction

Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick Seven Japanese Tales - Jun'ichirō Tanizaki South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov The Futurological Congress - Stanislaw Lem ⭐️ Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino The Plague - Albert Camus Ghosts - César Aira ⭐️ Night on the Milky Way Train - Miyazawa Kenji Dubliners - James Joyce Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott ⭐️ Ice - Anna Kavan Definitely Maybe - Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky

Non-fiction

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell ⭐️ Playing to the Gallery - Grayson Perry On the Map - Simon Garfield 33 Artists in 3 Acts - Sarah Thornton Arte - Alexandre Melo The Little Book of Common Sense Investing - John C. Bogle A Mind at Play - Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman If You Can - William J. Bernstein Disability Visibility - Alice Wong

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Books read in 2020

Here's the full list of books I've read in 2020, with a small note of which were my favourites.

Fiction

The Snows of Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin ⭐️ The Book of Disquiet (pocket) - Fernando Pessoa Neuromancer - William Gibson The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald How Much Land Does a Man Need? - Leo Tolstoy The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells ⭐️ I, Robot - Isaac Asimov The Rest of the Robots - Isaac Asimov The Three Electroknights - Stanisław Lem Brave New World - Aldous Huxley Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig Não Pai - Daniel Blaufuks ⭐️ White Nights - Fyodor Dostoyevsky Animal Farm - George Orwell Hornblower and the Hotspur - C. S. Forester As Intermitências da Morte - José Saramago Anathem - Neal Stephenson ⭐️ Viagens na Minha Terra - Almeida Garrett The Penultimate Truth - Philip K. Dick The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu Limonov - Emmanuel Carrère The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin

Non-Fiction

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson A Poor Collector's Guide to Buying Great Art - Erling Kagge Pricing Design - Dan Mall Fame - Andy Warhol Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell 24-Hour Wine Expert - Jancis Robinson No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference - Greta Thunberg The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels Portugal - Miguel Torga As Though I Had Wings - Chet Baker Let My People Go Surfing - Yvon Chouinard