Furamo

stories about this and that

I haven’t written a blog post for a while, it seems. So I’m just gonna break the silence with a story from my life.

Stroopwafels taste like ultra sweet cardboard, but strangely they are one of the most calorie dense items that you can buy from a grocery store. I’m not sure if even pure gasoline would have more calories per cubic inch than Stroopwafels. Today all I’ve eaten are two of those bad boys and they have kept me going for over 10 hours.

I like to have Stroopwafels sometimes, because they are such an easy way to deal with your calorie needs. No need to prepare anything, just swallow a few of these zero nutrition calorie bars and your blood sugar will be high enough for anything for hours on end.

The alternative to Stroopwafels is the struggle of deciding what to eat three times a day, for the rest of your life. Deciding what to have, buying it, preparing it, eating it, doing the dishes.

I have a contract with a cleaning lady who thoroughly cleans up my place every month. But if I am ever gonna be wealthier, I will hire a personal chef in addition to the cleaning lady. So I don’t have to decide what to eat on my own. Then maybe I can say goodbye to Stroopwafels. But until that day, the Stroopers will continue to be real troopers.

I have seen a couple of comics recently where the author got the idea for it from ChatGPT. It seemed interesting so I figured I’d check if the AI has a good idea for a blog post I could write.

I asked for a few suggestions.

The first one was to write about my cat being more popular on Instagram than I am myself. Well, I neither use Instagram nor have a cat around so I dismissed that one.

The second one was to write about my toddler creating chaos and grabbing everyone’s attention during my zoom meetings. Well, I don’t have a toddler around so I dismissed that one too.

The third suggestion was to write about the National Wear Your Pajamas Day. That one seemed the most interesting out of the bunch. I googled about it – there are multiple Wear Your Pajamas Days a year – April 6 is the National Pajama Day and April 16th is the Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day.

It turns out there is an insane number of random holidays each day of the year, most of which probably go uncelebrated.

In the end I appreciated ChatGPT-s advice. I didn’t use any of its ideas for a whole post, but it drew my attention to all these wonderful weird holidays. So I’m now sharing them with you too – check and see what holiday it is while you are reading this and it might help bring joy to your life.

Disclaimer:
This post was written by a human

I have a note where I’ve written down a few ideas for blog posts. One of them is to draw a comic strip. I tried to do it for the current post. But the result was so atrocious that I decided against unleashing it on the Internet.

I have nearly zero experience drawing. But it is one of those skills I would like to acquire. I have watched a bunch of tutorial videos about it, but watching them won’t make me draw any better. Actually drawing, regularly, would though. The secret to learning how to draw (or many other skills) is just to practice a lot, so that your brain acquires new neuron connections which allow you to coordinate your imagination, eyes and hands in a better way.

These neuron connection pathways allow you to perform complicated tasks, if trained correctly. But they also determine your personality and your whole life. It is possible to retrain them, update the way your brain works, but it takes time and effort – regardless if you want to change some personality traits or learn how draw.

I’m having a hard time approaching the whole drawing thing. I’m setting myself really high expectations – I want to immediately be good at it, but the results are not so good. That’s probably a pretty common problem for people. If not immediately good at it – just give up.

15 years ago Furamo was my own personal fully featured Facebook clone. I spent hundreds of hours adding all kinds of useless features to it. And then there was nothing here for a while. Now that I’m writing more blog posts again, it’s also time to continue the overdevelopment of the site’s features.

Proudly presenting – videos as the cover picture (the blogging engine WordPress doesn’t support that out of the box)

Also, I looked at some statistics and it seems like the only people visiting my site are the bots trying to hack into the admin panel and the bots sending spam comments. So I don’t even have to delete the posts I’m too ashamed of as I’ve been doing so far. Because nobody gonna see them anyway. It’s nice, makes me feel more relaxed and removes anxieties and societal pressure to censor myself.

Humans are super selfish and most things in the world are driven by capitalism – things happen to make rich people richer. But there still are some nice people and companies. Who do things for the benefit of others, not themselves.

When I visited the grocery store today, I got a huge surprise at the self service checkout. The checkout machine had a newly, comically enlarged user interface element. Those checkout machines have a checkbox to check in case you do not want a receipt. So far, the checkbox had been small as fuck and I always had to push the screen six times with my fat finger to get it checked. But now that checkbox is so big you can hit it on the first try. Amazing progress and improvement indeed.