Cleo

Hungry? Order the sach. You'll get grilled sausage, pork, chicken, eggplant, carrots, onions, mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes in a sizzling stone pot. At a Serbian restaurant in Bulgaria. #foodstr

I lived in Mexico for a while, and my housemates were two young escapees from Venezuela. They had to leave to build their businesses; there was no other option. They were so traumatized by their experiences in Caracas that they were jumpy, nervous when a stranger approached, struggling to believe that it was safe to sit at a streetside cafe ... The shootouts and street battles back home were live streamed into my living room. A leftist acquaintance, a professor who loved Comandante Marcos and every other trendy symbol, lectured them about how Chavismo supposedly brought literacy and equality to Venezuela. The guy was Mexican but was no different from the liberals I had left in the US. They believed every fairy tale that helped them feel morally superior. They supposedly knew what was best for people they would never meet and who lived lives they could never imagine. View quoted note →

Today is Yordanovden / Epiphany. Hundreds of people gathered at the Maritsa River in Plovdiv for prayers and the annual ritual: A cross is thrown into the cold river, and hearty young men try to find it. The cross was found, so the party began.

Good morning! It's time to go outside and play. Your toys are waiting for you in the playground, along with all the other kids' toys. This is hard for a foreigner to believe, but here is photographic proof. It's like this all the time. #Bulgaria

Goodbye, Vimeo! I'm delighted that I can keep you "safe" by putting my scandalous videos about folk dancing on nostr.build instead.

Replace Facebook with RSS: Do your local organizations make announcements only on Facebook? You can probably turn their pages into RSS feeds so you don't miss things you care about. What you need: - The URL of their FB page (must be public) - An RSS creation service -- FetchRSS works - An RSS reader Usual process: - Paste the FB page's URL into the feed creator - Copy the feed URL that results - Paste that into your feed reader This has been working well for me, using FetchRSS and Feedly. When I click an item in the Feedly feed, I see the full Facebook post while not logged in to Facebook. One hitch: The free version of FetchRSS requires you to be logged in to Facebook if you want to create more than one FB feed. You can either find another service or pay FetchRSS $4.95/month for up to 25 feeds and no FB login. I've lived in two countries that heavily depend on Facebook. In my current city, cultural events, volunteer activities, warnings about street or water repairs, and most other announcements are published on Facebook, not on public websites and often not in news media. This is stupid, of course, but (so far?) we have ways to work around it.

I've been tromping around my city, collecting addresses for OpenStreetMap. Sometimes it's hard to find the number on the door. And now you can share the fun! Can you find the address in each photo? First, an easy one. Subtle and eerie: Hint: The entrance is A, but the address isn't 15.

Some people say that leaving is immature. You're supposed to stay and fight. But walking away can radically change your life. Example: I left a bad work situation and started a business. It made me location independent, so I left my country for more interesting and challenging places. When my field became irrational and cancel-happy, I left it by selling the business. Now I live where I want, do what I want, speak 2.18 languages, and never have to look at LinkedIn :). View quoted note →