Ignore the health warnings, the sage advice, the calorie counters, the sleep addicts: Every great bar is a breath of paradise, and the best ones know, in their gleaming surfaces, what Proust meant when he said that the true paradises are the paradises we have lost.
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I’ve had this as a draft for a couple of weeks, but considering certain recent events, I feel we could all use some good vibes right about now…
One of the best movies I’ve ever seen. There was simply so much heart in this film, and I feel like everyone absolutely should see it at some point!
“It’s a fairly simple plot but Matt Ross’ debut film is so dense with metaphor that you can read it on any of a number of levels.”
[Source]
Really grateful that I got to collaborate on this article with Remotive, the community of remote workers that I’ve been a part of for many months, now!
This article is all about how remote workers disconnect or recharge their batteries when working remotely. Some great insights from 9 different people, myself included.
My answer:
I’m lucky enough to be a remote freelancer living in the South of France (insert cliche of the sun, the beach, and a colourful cocktail!) So there are a lot of perks that come with that. In addition, I’m living in the center of a medium-sized city: another perk that directly leads to my happy lifestyle of being able to walk around the city with my computer in my bag and working from a cafe a few times a week.How to Disconnect:
My way of disconnecting is simple: whenever I feel like I need to take a break from work, I make a note of the advancement of the project I’m on, and leave with my keys, wallet and phone. Sometimes, it’s a short break to grab a coffee and come back, sometimes it’ll be meeting with a friend or running a couple of errands.
Even a small break helps me reorganise my thoughts, plan ahead on the next client work to be done, or simply helps me to take a breather from a busy day.
These days, despite the heavy load of work to wrap up before the end of the year, it’s rare that I spend my entire day indoor. And if and when I do, my Fitbit is always there to shame me into talking a walk during the day or after my work is done.
Recharge:
When it comes to recharging, nothing is obviously as efficient as taking a proper vacation. To each his own: some of us want to spend time with friends, or discover a new city and culture. And some of us prefer to be outdoors, or in remote places where they can completely disconnect from their day-to-day lives.
But even if a vacation is not available for a few more weeks or months, I find working in a different environnement (or even better, a different city to be very beneficial.)
For me, it’s usually a week-long break in Paris where I’m going to catch up with friends during my off-time, but also work in cafes and coworking spaces during the week. I’ve actually met some members of the Remotive community like this, IRL / AFK after months of chatting online.
I guess in conclusion, I’d add that we are an incredibly fortunate bunch, at the forefront of “the future of work”: we’re location independent, employees and freelancers and can work at any hour of the day and from anywhere. It doesn’t get any better than that.
And while it’s great to set some sort of routine, it’s also worth trying something new with the free schedule that you now possess.
Read the entire article: [≠]
[soundcloud url="api.soundcloud.com/tracks/29…" params=“auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=“100%” height=“450” iframe=“true” /]
The third instalment of my “Love & Beats” series.
This one is much longer, clocking in at 1:56:03, and filled with music that inspires me, ranging from chill downtempo, all the way to loud bass-heavy trap and future beats.
[mixcloud www.mixcloud.com/tibz/love… width=100% height=400]
Along with a few (predominantly) American friends ranging from minorities to women, the first few days post-US election have been terrifying. From early reports of hate-crimes rising in the US to personal friends being insulted, there’s a lot of sad news coming from across the Atlantic.
Here’s my good friend Ashley:
In the days after the American election, I was threatened online again, a very chipper man on the internet threatening to rape me while telling someone else to grab my pussy. I didn't cry then. I shook with impotent rage, but tears never came. Not for that incident, anyway.I don’t tell these stories for pity. When I told them before, shared them after they happened, it wasn’t for pity. It was to let all the white people I know, the large, mostly conservative family that I have that see me only on Facebook, and the many conservative people in my rural Ohio hometown, it was for them to see. I told those stories so they would KNOW that something was happening to me too- a boring ass white girl that they supposedly care about. Someone relatively high on the totem pole.
Another incident you might have heard, this time from Manik (remember Manik, from my podcast?)
This was so outrageous it made it to a collection about the hate crimes committed on Day one:
Stay safe out there!
Two weeks, I hosted my good friend Marisa, from California! Brace yourselves for Adventures across the French Riviera! youtube.com/watch
From my good friend Andrew, who also happens to be amongst the smartest men in the room, on a regular basis:
Make no mistake, this will have a profound impact on our future and our history. The deep, sinking anxiety that I've felt over the last 24 hours is something I never want to feel again, but it's merited. This is a key moment.The feeling has nothing to do with liberal vs conservative. It has everything to do with right vs wrong. I can’t support what he stands for - racism, sexism, division - and I won’t. That’s a binary thing. This is not policy, it never has been. It’s person.
I’m sad that we’re so divided. There’s a real issue deep within the country that allowed him to rise, not unlike what we’ve seen in the history books. It’s on all of us to fix this, in whatever way we can. And that needs to start now. We can’t let the progress that generations before us worked so hard for, fought for, died for - vanish.
This morning I woke up compelled to public service and politics, and I hope you did too.
If you need motivation, look at the photo below. Look at the race of the crowd. I’m fortunate, I’m a straight white male. Imagine how it feels to wake up this morning as a minority, a woman, a homosexual. The battle against hate starts now, again. I’m not a democrat and I’m not a republican. This is not party lines.
By Maajid Nawaz, whom I’ve seen give a talk at TEDx Brighton:
Only a new commitment to the universality of human rights and human dignity can lift us out of this current quagmire. But that will require foot soldiers of peace who preach what we have in common rather than how we are different; what we have gained, rather than what we have lost; and what we seek to achieve rather than what we have failed to accomplish.
Let that sink in: this post was written by a Muslim on an Israeli site – gives you an idea of the gravity of the situation!
Adding Maajid’s talk from back when I first discovered him!
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.
Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted.
Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.
The fact that the linked post’s title is about both Elon Musk and Basic Income is likely a big clickbait.
In an interview with CNBC on Friday, Musk said that he believes the solution to taking care of human workers who are displaced by robots and software is creating a (presumably government-backed) universal basic income for all.
I’ve been posting about this every now and then, mostly on Facebook to discuss it with my private circle of friends, but it looks like it’s really time to get our governments to experiment with this.
And Josh nailed it, by the way:
“If all you can do is shout "they took our jobs!" then you probably think universal basic income is a communist plot to take over the country by paying migrants to move here.”
That’s not what this is about. It’s about resource redistribution in a not-so-distant world where the majority of labour (whether physical, digital, and just about anything in between)is accomplished by automated machines.
Also: make sure to check out this collection of articles, curated by Josh!
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Hey everyone!
It’s been nearly a week since my last edition of the Incoming Transmission Series. I was actually overdue to write about my latest news and projects, as well as finishing to upload my blogging archive, but I got swamped with work1 so I thought I’d send you a quick one from the plane, until you get more news.
I’m writing this on the plane, on my way Up North.2
I’ll be spending the next two weeks across both sides of the family and 10 days living & working in Paris in between. In all honesty I could use this time and change of pace.
The past few weeks and months have been pretty eventful to say the least. Between a fading relationship, slowly ending after 3.2 years, and big plans for the next 12 months, it looks like the end of the year is going to be busy.
I’ll be gone away from home until the 13th of November. Then, I’ll have four weeks to move from the lovely flat I’ve lived in since last year in October and back to my parents' house.
I’ve always dreaded moving back to my parents' place. As a working millennial, even a couple of weeks there feel like I’ve failed along the way, somehow.3 But this is an integral part of my big 2017 master plan, and doing so will save me about 4000€ in about 3-4 months. Money well saved: just you wait and see.
We’ll be traveling between mid-December to early January across South-East Asia4 (I’m incredibly grateful to be able to take this trip back to the roots, and with the family.)5
After this Winter break, I’ll be back to work in January, with later another work-and-play trip to London in February, just around my birthday. In late March I’ll be attending a business event on behalf of a client, in Switzerland. A first for me. I told you it’d be a busy one.
But perhaps more exciting is what is going to come from April onwards, something to be discussed in the coming months.
My name is Eliott, I'm 25. I used to live in Paris, working as a consultant for a marketing agency (...)
I've decided to do something else with this life, and create a new one for myself. A better life.
Eliott (aka Vegipirate) is a really good friend. In fact, we go back to our late secondary school years (‘Collège’ in French.)
Today, I wanted to share my friend Eliott’s story.
It all started when, after 2 years working in a marketing agency in Paris, Eliott started to feel uneasy, with the need to get out of the capital. He decided that he’d set up shop as a freelancer, and move back to the South of France, here, where we both belong.
When you grow up on the French Riviera and you move away, it’s really hard to be away from the warm sun, from the sea, and living inside a packed city. It’s been my experience too, after stints in Paris and over in the UK — “you can take the man out of the South, but you can’t take The South out of the man.”
For the first couple of months, he decided to take a couple of trips throughout Europe, first on holidays, and later, as a digital nomad working from youth hostels, beaches and coffeehouses in between Norway, the Czech Republic, Malta, Portugal, Italy, and Bulgaria amonst many others…
When you’re in your mid-twenties, with no debt, no family, and no rent to pay, it’s easier to afford those trips. And when all you need to work is a laptop and an internet connection, you’d be a fool not to take the chance and travel the world.
Aside from his day to day life, Eliott started aching for a different lifestyle. He had always enjoyed the outdoors, nature, birds & whales, and had recently decided to follow a vegan diet. However, living in a country such as France where meat is an inherant part of the culture, it was a bit difficult to figure out what to eat, and how to cook it.
This lead him to create Vegipirate, a blog that would let him write about his travels, newly-found state of mind, but also about his recipes and discoveries in the world of vegan-friendly food.
In the meantime, he felt like he needed to take a break from the digital world, something that I experience once a year in smaller doses, when I try and take a digital cleanse of sort, getting off the grid for a couple of days or weeks.
But for him, it was time to try something new. And since mid-septembre, Eliott has been in Australia, where he’s going to live, travel, and work on a one-year “Working Holiday” visa. And here’s how his adventures begin: the rest can be found over on his website! — French is required. Otherwise, you may have to use Google Translate.
[via [Sur la route] De Melbourne à Byron Bay – Part. 1 — Vegipirate]
Creative professionals are generally told not to work without a paycheck. But can strategically offering your services for free actually catapult your career?
As always in the world of freelancing, career development, or even “growth hacks”, there are numerous advices you can read about online. However, spend enough time on these different articles, and you’re very likely to start reading the opposite theories.
Personally, I strive to have a close personal relationship with my clients: if I feel that this relationship is likely to go well, I’m definitely up to sacrifice a short term financial gain over a reliable connection.
When you’re a sole trader, like yours truly, your reputation is all you’ve got. It’s all about the long term and your reputation as a working professional.
[via “No free work” is the wrong advice for creative people — Quartz]
Back to a more casual week, working across my flat and local coffeehouses.
[youtube=youtube.com/watch
So… about Yesterday’s huge attack and DNS problem…
“It’s remarkable that virtually an entire company’s product line has just been turned into a botnet that is now attacking the United States”
Virtual Insanity
Reanimating characters from TV shows
[youtube=youtube.com/watch
[via prosthetic knowledge — Virtual Immortality: Reanimating characters from…]