Memeverse

I tend to be sensitive to stories which describe the few manipulating the many, from a nation to the world at large, for their own agenda. You may otherwise know them as “conspiracy theories”, but I tend to avoid contributing to the proliferation of that term because it is nowadays used merely as a means of discrediting whatever one has to say - truth or not, logical or not.

Ultimately I think I learned, by now, to be more vary of such theories and to be more critical initially, not just after further evaluation - so I don’t fall for it before I’ve actually given it a full analysis and thought. Or perhaps I just grew tired of it as I start believing more in my own personal power and the power of other individuals, to change the world - to spoil whatever plans whichever elite may have for it.

I am beginning to realize that what the masses should be most excited about is not so much the big New World Order scenarios or big political plots as much as their own personal self improvement and empowerment. It is interesting how many times I’ve seen a relation between theories of mass manipulation and simple personal disjointedness of a common western human today: disjointedness from their own very humanity. Since the majority of people apparently fail to find themselves they resort to playing one of the roles made for them by the society they are living in. This is conformism. They conform to the path set for them by the society because they do not know their own way!

I couldn’t hope to explain this as well as Brian Kim can, especially in his article titled “Why So Many People Are In Jobs They Hate”. Because they don’t yet even know what would be a job they love, let alone have the boldness to pursue it! Then they ultimately start to blame the system, the society, because indeed it is the paths society has made for them that they followed and became so unhappy. Intriguing question comes to my mind: Is it any wonder theories of conspiracies are so popular?

I would say that if there is a conspiracy going on, if we are being manipulated, the best way to oppose it might not be to go on the tedious process of ghost chasing, trying to find the truth in a pile of truths - all the movies and articles all claiming to know the truth about the world and its future. The best way to make sure that we are not being manipulated and led like sheep into the world of dystopia is to realize that there is more than a sheep within ourselves, to discover a human being in us and who exactly it is! Once we do we will be naturally able to rearrange our life as if we were born again, as if we were turned from one kind of being into another, much more powerful, one which can actually live to its full potential, one which can change the world, one which will not be manipulated, one which has its own path and will not conform.

Imagine if all people in the world found the real full blooded human in themselves! Oh I certainly believe whoever is plotting a conspiracy to make us slaves to their agenda will have their plans severely disturbed. When the majority of people are barely aware of who they are and hence naturally conformist, they are easy to manipulate. But when you have a nation, a world nation of people who are full blooded ambitious humans in touch with their self and on their fast tracks towards the goals they set out to achieve, many of which due to the ambitious evolutionary nature of a true human include changing the world at large good luck with manipulating them!

This is an incredible realization. There are so many various theories out there, so many wrongs in the world. And the knee jerk reaction to them tends to be emotional - anger, numbness, cynism, an undirected drive of an activist - and in most cases all of this is in vain. You can’t do much to change the reality of the world if you don’t yet know the reality of who you are. How can you use yourself to bring about change if you still didn’t learn who and what yourself is? It’s like trying to go into a car race without knowing how to use the gear changer, or like trying to fly a space ship without knowing how to turn the propulsion on. Sooner or later the space ship you are trying to fly will be caught by the gravity of something bigger - leading you down its own paths and you’ll barely even be aware of it until you hit an asteroid or something.

So the prospects of the world are frustrating. Heck, your own life is frustrating! How about changing it all? There is a solution. It is you! You just didn’t find YOU yet. I suggest you take a look at what Brian Kim has to say (check his articles on the left sidebar). It’s really helping me so I figure it might help you too!

I’m on my way.

Cheers

Wanna change the world? A good way to start would be to change yourself to the better first. There are a couple of great links on Digg.com right now that make a very nice pair to what I linked to before on this blog. To get to the point, here are the excellent general steps to making yourself and your life better and then as such helping make the world a better place - something a lot of people may, without perhaps realizing so yet, be aspiring to.

• 1. (Re)discover who you are and what do you love to do: 1, 2
• 2. Simplify your life (become more efficient, clutter-free, crisp and clear in mind): The Four Laws of Simplicity
• 3. Help change the world: 20 ways to change the world

When faced with many wrongs in the world people sometimes say “what can I do” assuming the answer to be close to “nothing”. It may be liberating to learn that by just striving to improve yourself and your own life in a real way (not just things like “having more money”) you’re refitting yourself into a potential world-changer. Once your life is in order and you are happy with it, helping change a world is just a matter of deciding to do so - execution wont be too hard.

That said, who am I to give advice? Well I’m not.. I’m just picking up what others have said and connected the dots.. which are quite easy to connect. I convert it into a suggestion because it makes a lot of sense to me and I believe it may help others too. As you may have seen I am impulsive and sometimes probably too emotional, making some of my blog posts and attitudes often, although temporarily, negative. But.. I’m in a process. Nothing is fluid. All this can change to the better.

All things can be better, no matter how bad they may seem or be today.

I don’t want my last post (about what I see as a negative state of the OpenBSD community culture) to stand at the forefront of my blog too long, not so much because I regret writing it, since it was an expression of my current thoughts and emotions on that subject, but because these are after all the first days of the new year and I feel I shouldn’t squander them in negativity, no matter where it originated, but rather try and focus on seeing what was positive about 2007 and what good can be done in 2008.

It is not hard to often see a given community or humanity in general as screwing itself up in many major ways, but then again if I am to bask in all of that negativity myself I’ll probably one way or another end up being part of the problem - among the screwed or among the ones screwing up.

If nothing then it is because of my own sanity and happiness that I should keep searching for positives and no matter how down I sometimes feel I can’t deny the fact that I discovered and perhaps even helped create a lot of positive things so far, and have the potential to do more. The future is waiting on us to build it.

It is all part of the process of growing. My last post shown how sensitive I can be towards what some other people may see as a normal phenomenon in a diverse ecosystem of free people (flamewars). I have a hard time accepting such ugly wars as a normal constant and the fact that they bruise some of the people I admire while not validly reducing their credibility doesn’t help.  If they were to at least provide me with enough chewable evidence to change my admirations perhaps I would feel a bit differently, but that is always very hard to come by when most of what you’re seeing is an emotional rampage rather than a civil diplomatic discussion.

Kevin, a friend on a #libervis IRC channel further helped me realize that I can’t always rely on this vision of people agreeing or at least being civil and diplomatic all the time, that sometimes wars of words and emotion in this world are inevitable.. And it rather nicely tied in to a similar theme I’ve been learning as the 2007 was expiring, through the process of organizing and running Freedomware Gamefest 2007 for instance.

As always, I set it out as a loose thing where everyone can contribute and everyone’s opinion would be considered. The ideal is to come up with the organization and the rules that everyone would agree with, if not fully then at least enough to be satisfactory. Strictness is something I rarely employ, and I am realizing now that this is not always a good policy. I almost feel like a darn child coming out into the harsh world realizing that sometimes you just have to be tough, harsh and strict to accomplish something. This is one of the realizations I already set out to employ in some of my future projects, including the potential new Freedomware Gamefest later in the year.

But what was I thinking anyway? I know everything sooner or later comes down to a balance. Nothing extreme is good. Not extreme freedom and therefore sure not extreme diplomacy, if that would be the right way to characterize it. Restrictions have to be balanced with freedom. Loose has to be balanced with strict. Friendly has to be balanced with some unfriendliness. (But no I still don’t think this lets OBSD people off the hook, as I think they disrupt that balance). Just as all fundamentals end up closing a full circle into a paradox so do all opposites rightly meet at the balancing point. Perhaps the two are even the same thing. And it would appear that living in accordance to the picture portrayed by these paradoxes and these balancing points may in fact be the best and wisest way to live.

But it’s all easy to say. Application is the key, and that may be the thing we require most growing time to master.

So, I think these kinds of realizations, among others sprinkled around my blog is what largely sums up what I learned and developed throughout 2007 and which I will try to apply in 2008.

That said, just to be a bit more practical, there have been many incredible things happening in 2007 when I look back. And of course many of these experiences one way or another helped form the realizations and opinions I am expressing today. Libervis Network achieved financial sustainability. I was on my first Free Software/Free Culture conference, the iCommons Summit 2007 in Dubrovnik. At the same occasion I for the first time met a Libervisian in Real Life, my friend Taco Buitenhuis. Near the year end we even met again, second time in a year, right here in Zagreb! I moved to an apartment now living on my own. Consequently I finally have proper high speed internet connection, enabling me to discover the world of internet video, real time multiplayer gaming and anything else always-on connectivity is able to offer. This inspired me to revive the idea which led to the Freedomware Gamefest 2007.

Libervis.com seen a significant amount of incredible discussions. Nuxified.org seen its most profound re-design ever. I started a separate blog under my own domain name which I just love! I joined GNU/Linux Matters foundation. Libernod, my VPS server, finally got to be used and there are still at least a couple of domain names ready and waiting for corresponding projects to be started on them.

It seems as if the list could go on and on.. I might not be wrong to say that 2007 was, oddly enough, the most profound year for both me and Libervis Network as my main undertaking in a long time. One has to wonder, with these foundations, what wonders could we accomplish in 2008!

Well, here are some hints… I’ve received an email from a rather well known person in the FOSS world about a project that could make the news all over the software industry. I don’t want to reveal anything just yet. Nuxified.org will see more collaborations and alliances. Libervis.com will see the most significant revamp it has ever had! Libervis Network will see at least two new projects being launched (perhaps not as big as Nuxified.org or Libervis.com, but you never know - plenty of stuff breading in our incubators). I may start differentiating my occupation more and more.

Oh and besides this whole storm of exciting stuff I might as well end up fixing my social life and find someone special.

Well, that’s it for my “coming back on a positive track towards the future 362 days” post.

It’s interesting how significant the right search term on a search engine can be. I searched for “what do you love” and on the first page I found a number of simply excellent articles on this topic that really help me find what I am looking for. And I am looking for more enthusiasm about what I do.. so that I can do it better, because “to do something well you have to like it”. This is such a crucial thing to grasp and research on a way towards success in life and happiness in general.

And I am glad to share the links to articles I’ve found and read here:

• “How to do what you love?” by Paul Graham, whose articles I’ve read before and have to say he never ceases to make a great impression on me.
• “How to Do What You Love” by Susan Basalla May from Chronicle.com
• “How to Find What You Love to Do” by Brian Kim of BrianKim.net self improvement site. And this last one actually offers a practical self by step advice on how to find pretty much exactly what you love to do. Now since Paul Graham warns that most people don’t really find an answer to this so quickly, which makes some sense to me, I’ll take this with a grain of salt. However, the steps are quite constructive and I believe may be a great major step towards finding that golden answer.

An interesting thing about this is when I observe the state in which I currently am with how these writers tend to characterize the state in which most people commonly are. It appears that I am lucky enough to already be a step or two ahead than many people, but I don’t want to claim this as a statement of superiority or anything like that, but rather something I should probably be grateful about (mostly to my parents, their friends and also in some significant part to the Libervis Network community).

I already do a lot of what I at least think is quite close to what I love to do. By being essentially self-employed on the web I can allow myself great freedom of exploration. And Libervis Network is one that has been set up in such a way to allow for great variety in what projects I can do as part of it, because whichever the more clear answer to the question of “what I love doing most” will be it probably wont contradict the fundamental values for which Libervis Network stands for.

And that is just plain awesome!

However, I have to admit that while I may be some steps ahead in that sense, I am some steps behind in another, that being my social life. Working on the web and therefore on the computer, this wonderful window to the world and universe at large, I pretty much “forgot” or “neglected” to live in the real world with real people more than I really have to. I am actually increasingly aware of this though and will be attempting to change this situation though. Oh yes I also realize that I failed at fullfilling one, to this related, part of my 2007 new year’s resolution: to find a girlfriend. I guess, there’s always next year! 2008 Ftw!

But it will be tricky. Among what motivates me to pursue the answer to this crucial question about myself is that I am finding the financial sustainability of Libervis Network (and hence myself) to still be quite shaky and unstable (all eggs in one basket sort of thing), but to just blindly go gold digging doesn’t seem to me like the best possible way. Among the best ways I am considering to differentiate my funding sources is to start new projects, and I don’t want to start projects which I will quickly lose enthusiasm about - hence the question: What do I really love to do? What will I succeed with the most?

Of course, another big motivation for this pursuit is the realization that I am, well, 23 years old and I can’t forever be just talking about how successful I will or should be in life and riding the waves I somehow created with Libervis so far (and then went struggling to keep myself motivated). I basically need a new wave, perhaps the most profound of all I managed to create so far! I need to rediscover myself again - before years pass by and I end up sitting alone in my room realizing that all this “exploration” I’ve done was actually just drifting… and that all what I’ve supposedly achieved was just luck (or momentary seizures of opportunities combined with crazy (perhaps even lazy) stubborness)..

So.. I will be taking some time soon to really complete the steps from the third article and think this stuff through. I will certainly blog about my discoveries.

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!

There were two driving forces behind my first serious online venture, Libervis.com. One was to do something good, for a good cause, to become part of a movement that makes a world a better place. The second was to eventually make some money doing this, hopefully some day enough to make a living off of it. Of course, the third motivating component is implied, that it is something I actually like doing and since it was work on a computer, on the internet, creating something new, it very well did fit the description of what I liked doing.

However, from day one it was a learning experience. Relative to where I am today I would say that in July 2004, when all this was just starting up, I was quite a newbie. I couldn’t even write english well. I didn’t even know all the ins and outs of the Free Software movement the site was all about. I sure as hell didn’t know about how exactly to make money off of it. I just knew it was by paid advertising. I didn’t even have a way to receive any money.
So for all intents and purposes it was a well intentioned hobby project with hope of at some point becoming a real business.

Today, I’m not sure if I can exactly describe it as a real business, all things considered, but I do cover my costs and the network is indeed capable of slow expansion. I’ve started two major sites and I have my own VPS server used as an incubator for any new potential projects. I also have a way to receive and send money online too, quite easily at that. We could say I’ve come a long way. Heck, I’ve even been to an international conference about the topic of my sites. I could only dream about something like that 3 years ago.

However, when I really think about it, for no particularly good reason I’ve been holding back on fullfilling that second objective behind starting out on the web - making money. Every time I thought about doing something on the web it had to involve the question “so how would this help that cause, Free Software, Free Culture, digital freedom and related concepts in general” etc. This ultimately limited the options I could see and limited my potential. In other words, from day one and all the way up to this point it was more about the cause and doing what I love to do than it was about making money while doing it too. Money.. it was a mere necessity, something that must be generated to be able to keep going.

But here is the thing. I will never be able to call myself a real entrepreneur if I get stuck in that kind of thinking forever. It doesn’t lead to real progress in financial terms. It leads to perpetual strive to make ends meet, just as in a real day job. And if I merely strive to make ends meet, in the rest of time working on the cause I’ll never have enough juice to accomplish those BIG dreams and ambitions, eventually falling into periods of lost motivation and depression… because the ambitious for the cause keep running out of cash necessary for their fulfillment.

The reality of the world is that you need the juice, you need the money to achieve ambitions. And money for making ends meet is not going to be enough for it. Instead of going around looking for sponsors to pay for prizes for the upcoming Freedomware Gamefest we are organizing, how about having enough money to pay for prizes myself? How about making Libervis.com a place that would REALLY make impact on the way people think about the world? How about myself becoming a gold sponsor of GNU/Linux Matters organization, a patron of the FSF, a monthly donor to many other causes I genuinely care about? I’ve seriously many times found myself in situations when I wanted to give quite a bit, but I was afraid because my margins just aren’t that secure. Sure I give $10 a month to FSF and make an occasional donation, but that’s something everyone with a day-to-day job can do. What if I want to do more?

Then I need to do more!

So I’ve decided to cut myself loose here. It’s time that I take a step further. The only way I can make Libervis Network truly grow is to secure the largest possible funds for it, the largest possible margins from which to invest, just as it is the only way I can finally fix up my own nerdy life too.

It’s time to balance things out. If I don’t do this I’ll never give enough attention to the financial side of the story enough to guarantee that it all just doesn’t crash on me one day, like the recent changes in Google ranking systems implied these days.What happened there is just a well sent reminded that financials are not just something you get lucky with, just some links you put on a site and forget about them until it’s time to renew, working on the real projects and cause in the mean time. It’s just not the way it can secure the future. I need to start paying more attention to that other side of the story.

Therefore I will split up my time and efforts in two parts. First one will be dedicated to work on maintaining and growing existing sites, working on new projects like Freedomware Gamefest or the Libervis 2008 revision and also starting new sites as part of the initiative of promoting digital freedom. The second part will be dedicated to working on ways to generate substantial revenues including starting web sites about things not necessarily related to digital freedom as long as they don’t go against it. That second part is going to be about making absolutely sure that the funds keep flowing in, that not all my eggs are in one basket, that I some day become capable of becoming the big sponsor of the future in which digital freedom won over digital dystopia.

And I WILL make it happen!

People say money corrupts. Indeed, but when you don’t care so much about money as much about doing things you love and contributing to things you care about, then money is merely like energy needed for you to do these things. This obviously doesn’t mean that we should keep this energy low so that people don’t mistake us for “greedy bastards”. That’s just stupid.

I say this. Do as much as you can to make as much money as possible as long as you follow the following rules:

1.  Do not oppress or contribute to oppression of freedom. Don’t make money on expense of somebody’s rights.
2. Do not buy into too much luxury. Re-invest money into projects that will either generate more money without breaking any of these rules or invest into a class of projects for positive world change.
3. Do not disrespect those who you serve, EVER! The whole way of making money is by serving somebody, not exploiting somebody. NEVER EVER fall into a trap of considering your customers, your site visitors as just an automatic money making wheel. They are sacred! Their wishes are LAW! If they keep saying you have too many ads on your site, you MUST comply and scale it down. If they say something may not be exactly ethical or that you made too much of a compromise, LISTEN and CHANGE things (or don’t even get yourself in a situation in which people would have to warn you’re doing something as bad).
4. Seek fulfillment in larger issues, not piles of money that can buy anything. A better future (for me personally an ongoing vision is “Star Trek” future), something that will capture imagination and passion so much that you’ll never care about money anything but something you can invest into making that future happen.

And that’s a way I hope to become financially successful without becoming a greedy bastard.

Thank you

Danijel

Yet again I’m trying to fix my sleeping schedule and make my day more fulfilling and motivating. This morning marks a second little victory in a row. In fact, as a matter of chance, I rose from bed exactly at the same minute as yesterday!

Anyway, unexpectedly, despite raining most of the night (I couldn’t tell really, I actually SLEPT most of the night) it is a sunny albeit cold morning. And near our sun bathed balcony there is a pigeon who has a home here for quite a while now. I thought I’ll take a picture and finally upload it. It’s a cute pigeon. Looks like he’s a bit cold too as his feathers are kind of puffed, maybe he’s trying to heat himself.. or herself.

Anyway, the new plan of life of a day is to start it with something that will motivate me. In addition to sun and a cute bird, if music doesn’t do it I plan on watching an episode of Star Trek after breakfast and then embarking on to the main missions of the day, the Libervis web related routines and other things I put in my TODO list, mostly related to the upcoming game fest.

So, good morning to ya’all Europeans! I hope you slept well.

Relativity of truth.

It may be perceived as something that makes standing for something difficult, unless what we stand for accepts the continuity of change, including change of perceptions of reality and truth and including even the very values we stand for. Paradoxical it may be, but our values can be ones that accept change of its own when at the same time as it obeys itself, it may disobey itself. But it would appear sooner or later everything in the universe concludes a full circle into a paradox.

As we explore the change and consider incorporating it into our own growth, do consider the fact that we have to have a ground to stand on from which to view. Values we hold right now, despite the fact that they may be soon afterwards changed, should still be respected as such. In essence we have to keep a balance between the current perception of the truth and the one being discovered, at all times!

And when we master that skill we will truly be living on the frontier of our own universe.

The default reaction to the notion of elitism seems to be negative because it implies an arrogant and self-centered position that doesn’t bode well in a society of people all hungry for attention, love and appreciation. Say to someone that you are better than him and he will probably frown at you and leave with quite a bad impression of you. It has also often been said that elitism is an impediment to the mass adoption of GNU/Linux.

But my friend Kevin let me in on a different way of looking at it, which is quite interesting. It goes below the surface, beyond the initial conceptions of “elitist behavior”. If you say to someone that you are better then him you are likely expressing what you really feel about yourself. You believe in something and live accordingly therefore believing that you are in the right. Upon seeing someone who breaks the norms you established for yourself the instinct is to frown upon it and consider it “worse”, unless you are incidentally impressed by it enough to actually modify your views and ways. Therefore saying to someone that you are better than him would likely imply a true feeling.

So what does absolve this from being a sin? It’s the fact that this feeling is subjective, and therefore an expression of it has nothing to do with others, except that others may be on a receiving end of it. It comes down to whether others would get offended by this and the reasons for which they should be offended.

Well, apparently, most people are offended by such a statement. Whether this is justified really depends on a few variables. Are they oppressed by it in any way? Should they feel oppressed? Someone believing to be better does not necessarily deprive other’s freedom to believe the same about themselves. So the answer would probably be no. Does it hurt their self esteem? Well, if it does then maybe they didn’t have enough self esteem to begin with. It can be argued that those who don’t have enough self esteem shouldn’t be further discouraged from it, but that may merely be put under the category of “being nice”, not “being right”.

Interestingly, that is exactly what the whole argument would probably lead to, despite the logic that may suggest that “elitism” is not necessarily wrong and unethical, the current social norms simply reject it as an undesirable social phenomenon favoring the logic of “being nice” instead. Perhaps we live in a society of people who are all to a point insecure about themselves. Perhaps humans need constant reassurance from others to keep going and building their self esteem. It would make sense to assume that every human needs to receive just above as much reassurance as discouragement in order to build a healthy self appreciation.

So if the current social norms are so adverse towards even an expression of higher self appreciation maybe it is a symptom of major self-esteem deprivation. It could explain a few things in addition to the adverseness towards elitism, such as the tendency to worship someone or something, to follow the crowd even when the direction you are going is deprivation of basic rights and freedoms.

Thought of it this way, maybe the real enemy aren’t the small honest elitists we often frown upon, but the big ones we chose to follow - the ones who may have abused their leadership skills and their knowledge of how to manipulate society’s weaknesses to their best ends.

And here is an interesting question. If everyone was an elitist, would everyone be more or less happy, more or less free and more or less empowered and successful?

That said, we have to get back to the reality we are living in. We can believe all we want about ourselves, but as long as open expression of our self appreciation breeds animosity we’ll unlikely achieve the goals we are striving for. Who would help us? Who would join us? We have to be user-friendly to succeed in a world so deprived of friendliness that its lack becomes a highly sought for commodity.

This does smell of manipulation of human weaknesses for the cause of your own goals though, so that much should at least give us pause for appreciation of those who just dare to be who they are and who they believe they are regardless of who they offend by it and what others think of them.

So the conclusion would be that neither being right “in your face” nor being nice are wrong and unethical, but in a world we are in we have to employ both depending on what we wish to achieve. If you have no friends, and think you’re better than all friends you would ever have, perhaps continuing the current strategy isn’t the best course of action. If you are elitist and yet have friends who are attracted exactly to this bluntness and utter honesty, then keep going, I suppose.

I for one, personally, feel (and especially after pondering this topic) that my self esteem isn’t quite big, definitely not big enough to provide much fuel for any elitism. I rely a lot to opinions of others, especially friends and people I admire and appreciate the most. Even a signal that would imply that something is wrong has me a bit worried.

Yet I think I have grown more blunt in recent times, but I’m not sure if it’s for right reasons. I guess.. life is a constant process of rediscovering who you are and evolving or devolving on that basis.

A thought I just had is about setting a new framework for developing future projects - let them all break some rules! What is needed first is to find a rule that could be broken in the meanest sense possible and then start a project online that will shamelessly break it in everybody’s face!

The rules, to be more specific, are not necessarily laws here, but rather those stupid social norms that often develop among people. I think a lot of them may be just stupid. There are such norms pretty much wherever you turn, in every community of any kind about any topic or profession. From web building to marketing to software development to various facets of culture… there are some norms to break.

What fuels this kind of thinking is pretty much a mixture of dissatisfaction with what I’ve done so far, a bit of anger about unmet expectations and a bit of rebellion towards.. the world.. who care what. Sometimes I feel it all sucks so I might as well plot a way to, one by one, ATTACK those freaking suckages.

And what better way to do it, maybe, than to go break some rules SHAMELESSLY and IN YOUR FACE, but in a domain of my own, where people can either join me or decline and remain in their precious status quo. We move along. They stay and lose. Haha!

There’s a meme for you.

Cheers

Let me get one thing straight. I’m nothing really special, nothing too admirable. As much as my starting of Libervis.com and Libervis Network can be attributed to ambition and enthusiasm for something it may be attributed to laziness and desire to avoid a harsher and less fulfilling, less enjoyable, way of life. Yes, in a way, starting Libervis.com was about taking the easy road.. and it somehow always ends up being portrayed as the high road.

I gotta give it to people who work eight hours a day five days of the week, living the routine. They are at least disciplined and they usually have a way better social and love life than I do. What’s there to miss? Ah right, the independence, the freedom of pursuit. Indeed, but obviously such things come with a price, and I think I already started paying mine.

But on to the issue at hand.. how hard is it to be the news? This is something that I have, thanks to discussions I’ve had with my friend Taco (tbuitenh) realized to be perhaps the fundamental principle behind something like Libervis Network, something that promotes freedom and participatory culture. What else is it to be free and involved than to be the news yourself rather than just its consumer, to be the one who makes waves instead of merely riding them.

Regardless of this fundamental idea having so much in common with what we promote on Libervis, most of the time we simply discuss what’s going on, sharing our thoughts and helping each other formulate opinions, or helping each other just run software that is based on this freedom that we promote. In other news we aren’t “the news” very often.

And there comes the latest project on Nuxified.org, this Freedomware Gamefest 2007. It is actually something that is making news, something that we can submit to the news publications as real *news*, not just a commentary, a review or a tutorial. And it really started to feel like that in the last couple of days. I’ve actually been asked to notify of new press releases. That doesn’t happen often.

However, at the same time I feel slightly insecure. Perhaps, I’m thinking, I underestimated the size of this project, the requirements of experience with the gaming world and organization of tournaments etc. I find myself, at the same time, struggling with the ongoing lack of motivation (a chronic problem, on some level), an incomplete social life (which may be part of the cause of the former) AND the organization of an event of the kind I never done before… Does anyone still think I’m the right person for the job?

Time will show, but in any case, I’m just a guy trying to keep himself together (actually just find ways to improve things on a personal level), and incidentally a little network of sites and organization of a sort of ambitious project that might become an annual event. Woohoo. What a ride.

Being the news, it’s sometimes a thrill, but it’s a challenge too.

“Thank you very much Mr. Obvious.”