Author's Notes

A collection of brief notes that are constantly being stuffed inside this living book.

• 02 Apr, 2026 A.N. | Surto de leve

  Não dá nem pra surtar valendo nessa vida pós-moderna. Nem o braço do meu monitor tá se aguentando, qualquer digitação mais furiosa faz essa porcaria oscilar e eu fico tonta olhando pra tela sacudindo de leve.

  Disgraça.

• 20 Mar, 2026 A.N. | O futuro mudou

  O futuro não é mais como era antigamente. Tá bem mais assustador olhar pra frente. Não dá pra saber onde se vai pisar daqui a três passos. E talvez nem dê pra chegar lá, talvez eu nem tenha mais sapato pra isso.

• 15 Mar, 2026 A.N. | Carpe Jugulum: If I thought there was some god

  If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, who watched ’em like a father and cared for ’em like a mother…well, you wouldn’t catch me sayin’ things like ‘there are two sides to every question’ and ‘we must respect other people’s beliefs.’ You wouldn’t find me just being gen’rally nice in the hope that it’d all turn out right in the end, not if that flame was burning in me like an unforgivin’ sword. And I did say burnin’, Mister Oats, ’cos that’s what it’d be. You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just…is just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors.”She relaxed slightly, and went on in a quieter voice: “Anyway, that’s what I’d be, if I really believed. And I don’t think that’s fashionable right now, ’cos it seems that if you sees evil now you have to wring your hands and say ‘oh deary me, we must debate this.’ That my two penn’orth, Mister Oats. You be happy to let things lie. Don’t chase faith, ’cos you’ll never catch it.” She added, almost as an aside, “But, perhaps, you can live faithfully.”

  Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett

• 11 Mar, 2026 A.N. | Inner peace, outer turmoil

  I honestly don't know how to keep living anymore. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not gonna kms or anything, that thought doesn't even cross my mind but... there's truly nothing in my brain. There's no will to keep doing stuff in me. I have no idea where to go from here. It's been what, two, maybe three years? Three years since I stopped functioning. Started taking antidepressants, got diagnosed with ADHD, learned how much of my life, my self and my experiences were/are shaped by it and learned how some things are out of my control and learned to accept my shortcomings and I just... stopped.

  Granted, I also stopped therapy bc can't afford that anymore, but I also don't know how much it was helping me at the time. I don't think I've ever found the therapist for me, you know. It's something costly and random, so very difficult to find. When the meds took away my panic and the understanding of ADHD replaced self-hate with clarity, a switch was turned off inside me. I can't work on anything anymore, I'm always behind schedule, always procrastinating it, nothing makes me just sit down and do the fucking work.

  It took me all this paralysis time (three years!) to put all of this into words, in a way that I could understand, let alone others understand. I wish I could tell my clients to lie to me about deadlines and importance/urgency of tasks. I wish the whole entire world could lie to me, maybe then I would be able to function. Idk.

  But I found this post on r/ADHDmeme and it truly is exactly what I'm feeling. Reading the responses was also sad -- nobody knows a way out of this. I just know I don't want to do anything ever.

• 05 Mar, 2026 A.N. | A Hat Full of Sky: Wishes, wishes, wishes

  

  Wishes, wishes, wishes, thought Tiffany, distracted, fumbling in her pockets for the bits to make a shamble. It’s not evil. It gives us what we think we want! And what do people ask for? More wishes! You couldn’t say: A monster got into my head and made me do it. She’d wished the money was hers. The hiver just took her at her thought. You couldn’t say: Yes, but I’d never have really taken it! The hiver used what it found – the little secret wishes, the desires, the moments of rage, all the things that real humans knew how to ignore! It didn’t let you ignore them!

  A Hat Full of Sky, Terry Pratchett

• 01 Mar, 2026 A.N. | Carpe Jugulum: This was a test

  This was a test. Everything was a test. Everything was a competition. Life put them in front of you every day. You watched yourself all the time. You had to make choices. You never got told which ones were right. Oh, some of the priests said you got given marks afterward, but what was the point of that?

  Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett.

• 24 Feb, 2026 A.N. | Carpe Jugulum: Nanny Ogg's hidden talent

  

  One of Nanny Ogg's hidden talents was knowing when to say nothing. It left a hole in the conversation the other person felt obliged to fill.

  Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett.

• 15 Feb, 2026 A.N. | Open Web Fun

  I've been having so much fun on the open web... Tinkering with my blog and my listography, reading blog posts by fellow netizens, just discovering things by going down resource lists and neighborhood rabbit holes and webrings... It's ridiculous how miserable social media makes us. And now every time I hear someone saying how they "hate the internet", I feel the urge to whisper: oh honey, it's not the internet that you hate, it's social media.

  The internet is awesome.

• 01 Feb, 2026 A.N. | A little bearblog housekeeping

  Today I got around to updating a few links and chapters/notes around this living, ever-changing digital book. All cat pics are now properly tagged as /cats, and I've updated the Bear Blog tweaks master list with the link to its updated version on Start.me. And I've finally, finally listed all the tags on the Index page.

  I've also added Blog of the Day on the Before You Go section. If you know of any other blog directories I'm missing, please let me know via my Guestbook or email!

  Other than that, I still need to finish up the Portuguese navigation pages and, well, get back to actually writing in Portuguese. lol I wanna try a post in Portuguese once a month, see if I can get back into it. English is cool to keep my distance from real life and also to get across to more people, but...

  I miss writing in pt.

  I've also recently included a last.fm widget to my Currently sidebar. I've literally created a last.fm account just so I could have this, so I was really glad to see it worked pretty well! I wish there was one for video games too. I've heard you can use Google-Sheets-to-JSON to serve as an update tab but idk if I'm up for that.

• 03 Jan, 2026 A.N. | I wanna do something that impresses you

  Today I had a fight with my partner. We don't fight constantly, but when we do, it's always about the same things. Today we had one of these never-ending disagreements we always get into and... he said something that I'm not sure how I should respond to.

  I don't wanna air his business to the internet, so I'll just say that he has had a very, very bad deal in life ever since he was born. Living is pretty rough for him, and therefore he feels he's "behind" in life. I guess most of us millennials do feel similarly, but to him this is so much more intense and bigger.

  And today, in the middle of our arguing, he said: "I wanna do something that impresses you."

  I'm not sure what that means exactly. I don't think he even knows, and despite it sounding sweet (maybe? Man, I don't even know @_@), I'm not sure it's the best frame of mind... or if I care for "impressive feats" from him? I don't know, guys. What's impressive for him might not be for me and vice-versa.

  What am I supposed to do with this? We've been together for an entire decade now and he's never said anything like that to me before. I'm not sure how to take it.

  Kicking off 2026 with a bang, I guess.

• 18 Nov, 2025 A.N. | I live

  Apparently it's been 1 week and five days since my last post. Weirdly, it feels like forever ago. A lot of things happened these past few days. A lot of work trips, conferences, social activities and many, many more. I miss blogging and updating my Listography almost daily, but I've been too drained to even think about it... Hope to get back to it soon though.

  I've updated the bare minimum on my Listo just to remember the feeling and to let people know that I do, indeed, live.

• 05 Nov, 2025 A.N. | Making a "good" decision can be exhausting

  You have to think about so much stuff. You have to consider if you're being gullible, lied to, manipulated. You have to consider your right to privacy, your yearning to do some good even if it's small in the grand scheme of things.

  I've been looking into the Ecosia and Ekoru search engines (and, by extension, the Ecosia browser) to see if it's actually a good alternative to my current internet set up (firefox/opera/duckduckgo/yandex) and... I've already spent one good hour with that. The brain is frying weighing privacy x environmentalism, if this conundrum even makes any sense (should I just keep supporting local environmental actions?) and good lord, we do really live in a dystopia.

  Which reminds me of the casual Last of Us landscape I see around my city. First world dystopian fiction really is just third world realities with a pinch of sci-fi, isn't it.

  Well, back to work now.

• 27 Sep, 2025 A.N. | Back from the Amazon

  Absolutely knackered. But happy. I can say that I saw the Black Sea and the Black River in the same lifetime. Which is crazy. But true.

  Still can't believe it, even though it happened to me.

  It's the dry season in the Amazon, which means the river level was way low and it's harder to access the riverside communities. I saw the most beautiful sights and the most heartbreaking ones. Protect the Amazon, guys.

  I'm still wrapping my head on routine back home and unpacking. There's a lot of stuff that needs doing. Laundry. Rescheduling classes with my students. There's other two events coming up and at least one other work trip.

  I'm scared about the future... because it gives me hope.

• 02 Sep, 2025 A.N. | I love personal websites

  I love visiting personal websites. It's been a good replacement for doom scrolling: web perusing. It inspires me and it makes me smile at all the little things people do. Cat stickers scattered around the webpage? You got it. Whimsical Paint-like digital art? Sure. A woodland book? Of course.

  I constantly have a bunch of tabs open with personal web spaces I want to keep exploring further. Unlike algorithmic feeds, this side of the internet really is an adventure you got to explore (and earn) by yourself.

• 17 Jul, 2025 A.N. | Everything is great

  My post-COVID brain is working just great, I love it. Working is easy and fun and it brings joy. My body is healthy and free of aches and pains. World politics is a space of reasonable, level-minded individuals. The weather is fine, nothing to worry about. Big Tech is here to help humanity thrive; profit is not the focus. Homelessness is a thing of the past in my country and almost everywhere else; there are no mangy stray dogs or cats in sight. I can bike around without fearing for my life. At night, I'm not afraid of men.

  It's fine. I'm fine. Everything is great.

• 01 Apr, 2025 A. N. | Not Myself

  I've been making a real effort to write down difficult emotions. To untangle this ball of feelings into strings of sentences. Verbalize hurt.

  So here we go.

  I still can't believe what happened in my life. I mean, I know it happened, I know it was real... But I can't believe they happened to me. I remember my first week after Trauma 1 happened. I realized I was super odd, not-myself at my internship job. I remember apologizing to my coworkers. I remember saying "sorry, this isn't really me". It's been almost twenty years since then... And I still feel like I'm not "me". I just realized that. I keep thinking "I miss being myself" and I never understood what that really meant until now. I miss it because I'm not myself anymore, and I guess... I guess I'll never be. I'm something else and I don't recognize myself. I don't like what I am.

  I miss being myself.

• 15 Feb, 2025 A.N. | people's little art on the internet

  Sometimes I get this feeling in my chest when I'm looking at people's art on the internet, like I'm about to burst. But it's not big names or artists or anything like that that make me feel this, although I do appreciate their work as well. But not in this case. It's the art of people who are not artists who do it for me. People who are just doing it for fun, or maybe just hobbyists, sharing their little things that look amateur and loved and gorgeous. I feel like I want to reach across the screen and hug them. There's so much whimsy there, and there's so much power in whimsy. Gosh, I love people on the internet sometimes.

• 12 Feb, 2025 A.N. | bearbloggin'

  Paying for a pro account on bearblog makes me want to use all 10 available blog spots and just go crazy with it. I mean, I don't even have enough stuff to write in one singular blog, but that doesn't hinder my crazy ass imagination. Somebody stop me. I must be stopped.

  Halp

• 10 Feb, 2025 A.N. | tabletop gaming session

  Today I had a couple friends over to play tabletop games. The night before, of course, I almost called off the whole thing. I love my friends, but I'm exhausted. My social battery has gotten worse with the years. However, I choked out that impulse and they came over. I had a stress migraine halfway through it, had to take my meds, but I'm still glad I didn't cancel. My pregnant friend came over and I hadn't seen her since, well, she got pregnant. The only problem with having girlfriends is that after they have kids they kind of disappear, which is totally understandable I guess. I still miss them though, so I gotta enjoy her while I can.

• 08 Feb, 2025 A.N. | tumblr is that you??

  opened up tumblr yesterday and actually looked at it without xkit or anything and... well, kinda disappointed with the whole thing. but I did have some fun applying a new theme to my blog there. Apparently the last time I did anything with it I was 31 (according to my bio there). I'm 36 now. Five years isn't a lot, but it sure as hell feels like I'm someone different. What a pandemic and a Bolsonazi presidency doesn't do to your braincells amirite

• 06 Feb, 2025 A.N. | avoiding purchases

  I've been purposely avoiding certain yt videos that I'd normally watch: videos about games, desk setups, keyboards, retro gadgets, home decor & renovation. Anything that remotely smells like it could make me want to buy stuff gets tossed out the recommended list. Which basically leaves me with only drag race and the sims content to watch... I think I really need to branch out to non-purchasable entertainment. I wonder what that would look like. (art requires supplies)

• 05 Feb, 2025 A.N. | fuck up

  It's unclear when I changed from the-put-together sister to the utter fuck-up. Like, I didn't even see it happen. Who allowed this. Was it me? Am I the drama? I don't think I'm the drama.

• 03 Feb, 2025 A.N. | aaaa

  I'm so excited with the updates on the blog, specially the status page/blog posts. Finally somewhere to dump text without having to rely on full blown posts or 141 characters from status.café.