I'm a Chemical Engineer from the University of Brasília, Brazil, but I overall have a very low opinion of formal education. That said, I have interest in many academic subjects, even though they probably don't have many applications in things with which I (or most engineers) deal with, such as vector calculus and its applications in fluid theory and transport phenomena (heat and mass transfer).
I've developed interest in coding initially through the least "practical" way possible. In the 2000s, the internet was a proto-anarchy where one could express himself however he wanted and finally find people who shared their most peculiar interests. In the last decade, however, that started to slowly change, with the growth of social media such as Facebook. While back in the day the internet put together people precisely because they explored their individualities, but not it gets people together because of the exact opposite, they repress their individualities as much as they can and repeat the same jargons, the same opinions (as long as they are politically correct), and their individual interests end up lower in the priority list. It's notably easy to notice that in my country, Brazil, where back in the day, when the most used social media website was the... particular Orkut, where people organized themselves in small communities to discuss their interests. Everything was way more "diverse" than now with Facebook being so popular. That's also true for Twitter, where people famously crafted their own thought bubbles. This is a social phenomenon, but not necessarily natural to people's behavior. These social media websites' algorythms catalyze this process, and I can give the example of my deceased Facebook account, which in 2019 got to be banned for 150 days, because of five different 30-day bans, frequently because of jokes or "forbidden words" with no serious connotation.
My biggest hobby since I was 12 or 13 (in 2010 or 2011) is to listen to and search about music. When I was 14, not only studying in school but also in extra classes to pass in an exam for the Military School of Brasília, I already had enough domain over English to reproduce many, many times uncountable Bob Dylan songs, which fascinated me firstly because of their complex rhymes (and I believe Richard Thomas, the Harvard literature professor, would understand, given what he said in Why Bob Dylan Matters about "Fourth Time Around"), especially in his famous album Blood on the Tracks.
I've already mentioned that I have a very low opinion in regards to formal education, and that's only grown with time. Throughout my entire high school period, the most memorable moments were almost always non-academic, involving sports, or by having learned Calculus 1 (only one variable, come on) in the first year. I thank some teachers for their excellent classes (in special, the math teachers, the physics teachers, one of the visual arts ones and one of the music ones, who opened the gates for me for the world of the avant-garde. To be fair, most of their names I don't remember), but I don't believe that such good content is made for such a decadent institutio such as the school. Very little of what I learned inside classrooms was actually useful in real life in absolutely any manner. At least in Brazil it's common to make an argument against my thoughts with clichés such as "school is for you to be conscious!", and other vague terms, but none of that puts money in anybody's pockets nor food on anybody's table.
Although I've focused on "practical" issues, I thanked some of my art teachers because I believe such things feed the soul. I've got infinite respect for genuine artists and all their individual complexity, and I'm thankful for being friends with such excellent artists from Brazil (such as Kthrnnss, Kenji Okagawa and Carolina Verde). It's possible to go back to what I talked about before about individuality and the internet, which explored that which gave life to people in the 2000s. I believe these individual interests and in the ultimate stance the individual soul is fed by things such as art.
Also in high school, I first watched Seinfeld, when I was 14 or 15, and it became an obsession. I usually say Seinfeld is a sort of Bible of living in a society (yup, I know the meme), and that makes the show never exactly get old, even though it's from the 90s, because it explores small social gaps, in which we live without rules of common sense to tell us what to do, and such gaps will never cease to exist. It would be pointless to try to convince anyone to watch it, but the most important in this story is that I was introduced to the world of stand-up comedy. From Jerry Seinfeld's universally acceptable observations, I eventually went to Louis CK, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr. I consider genuine comedians (and in this I don't consider "comedians" who think of making jokes basing themselves on what they expect from the public) the most important figures in a civilization, always pointing at uncomfortable truths.
By the way, I sometimes stream on Odysee. You can find me here.
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This website was made originally for me to "have a little piece of land" online, where it's me who controls what can be made or not, 100%, instead of an algorythm with arbitrary or frequently unfair rules. I admire any figure who has their own platform so that they don't have to submit to mainstream thought, to herd mentality, and that attracted me to many internet figures which I even would mention as influences, such as Pewdiepie and Piero Scaruffi. For me, it's not a political issue, it's a humanitarian issue, and the biggest proof of that is that I have friends in absolutely all the political spectrym, from one extreme to the other (or from the center to infinity in all directions in a complex plane). I genuinely believe that if you always submit to social pressure, you'll never have individuality and will end up being a mere side character in someone else's show.
