Hostelmaxxing through Europe and spring thoughts

Post #1 trying to cull my subscriber number

One of the running jokes at my workplace from my colleagues is about how little vacations I seem to take.¹ We checked on our HR software and I took basically 2.5 weeks of vacation on my first year of work and accumulated a big stock of vacation days that just sits there untouched. Despite being a very strong free market lover this didn't come from my love of capitalism or exploitation, I genuinely love my job² and I am #blessed to not be working in a factory or a field like my father, and instead sitting my ass in front of a computer to solve increasingly complex puzzles, write long technical mails, drink coffee and read Hacker News. The other reason is less romantic: I am stuck in a dead place and there is a race going on between the time before I break and go full crazy, move to a city, and the time I need to accumulate experience to not get fucked by the current job market. All the current incentives are put in place for me to basically work as much as possible now.

Despite this, I felt like I am running out of steam from a combination of me hating my current personal life and classical winter depletion, so I decided to actually use some of those days. I looked at the May calendar and saw a hack: I get to spend only 4 days of paid vacation and get Workers' Day (1st of May) and Victory Day (8th of May) for free plus the weekends, so I blocked the first two weeks of May.

Minimum vacation days for maximum fun.

Watch and weep ye ameritards, the eurochad public holidays

Initially, as a normal single person, I reached out to friends around Europe to try to plan visits and see them. For a while it looked like it would come together, but one by one every plan in any country other than Italy fell through because of various reasons. What survived were a few anchors, friends in Milan and Padua I had not seen in a few years.

This led me a few weeks months back to ask what would be nice cities to visit around Central/Eastern Europe.

I got a lot of great answers I have kept for future trips, but at the end I filtered hard: many cities seemed better to be traveled either with a wife/gf or with a group of friends (Vienna, Budapest, deep Balkans). What remained was a route for solo traveling on the strict budget I set:

Milano → Padua → Trieste → Ljubljana → Graz → Brno → Prague

The rules I applied to myself were quite simple: choose only cheapish youth hostels to meet people (or very cheap Airbnbs which I would regret), take whatever is cheaper between a Flixbus or a train ticket, and use ChatGPT to summarize the tourism page of the city with stuff to visit when I was in the middle of the trip. I would regularly ignore what it recommended and just walked the city randomly though which is what my masculine spirit guided me towards. Clankers are best used and then promptly ignored.

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Milano

Milan was not really about tourism, I was there to visit a friend I have not seen in a few years, her bf would also be there so it would be a nice time to catch up with them and talk to the rather based guy. But Milan had things to show me before any of that.

A bit of context on the city: Milan was not founded by the Romans or the Italians. Around 590 BC, a Celtic tribe called the Insubres settled in the Po Valley and named the place Medhelanon, which seemingly in their barbarian language meant something like "settlement in the middle of the plain". The Romans took it in 222 BC, latinized the name to Mediolanum, and quickly realized they were sitting on something useful: a flat, fertile crossroads where roads from Gaul, Raetia and Illyricum all met. By 286 AD the emperor Diocletian had moved the capital of the Western Roman Empire here from Rome itself. It was in Mediolanum that Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313, the one that legalized Christianity across the empire. The city has been a commercial and industrial crossroads ever since. By the 12th century it was one of the largest cities in Europe off the back of its armour and wool trades, and after the Italian unification in the 1800s it became the engine of the country's industrial revolution: metal works, textiles, chemicals, Alfa Romeo and Lancia all came out of this city or its orbit. Today its metro area does about 20% of Italy's GDP. All of this from a Celtic settlement whose original selling point was being in the middle of a flat plain with some rivers. Sometimes geography is indeed destiny.

Anyways, first I tried to see if there was a cheaper way other than the 8€ one way bus from the airport to the city center but unlucky for me I arrived a day that the public transport wasn't really working, so it was either bus, Uber or god forbid taxi. I took the bus. And in the bus I saw a running gag that would keep coming back all across Italy, Egyptians. An Egyptian Baba who in very classical global south tone, had his phone ringer set to the maximum volume possible and who was for the 1h the route took, somehow always in conversation with someone. I think one was his son, the other was his wife and the funniest of all was probably a commerce dealing. Masr um-el dunya. There were also mediterraneans of all the other stripes being very loud which made me feel at home. The Celts called it the middle of the plain, and its still collecting everybody passing through.

As I came to see, the public transport doesn't work even when it is a normal day because I can't remember ever taking a bus or tram on time, they come whenever the fuck they want. I should have known that in Italy even the buses are living la dolce vita. I tried asking an ancient lady with my broken Italian (Spanish + French mix) if it is common for the buses to never appear when the screen said they would and she just looked at me and said "Si". The metro ran flawlessly though, which is really the best argument for building metros anywhere: a train on a rail cannot be late.

That first day I just walked everywhere to explore the city and get a feel of the place, no itinerary, no plan, and it was amazing ngl. The architecture shifts block by block, mixing eras and styles, the weather was pleasant, and I ended up eating at what I discovered later to be a restaurant chain, Miscusi. One of the random things that happened to me here: while walking to meet the friends I unknowingly passed the Central Synagogue around midnight. There were 3 Italian soldiers stationed there.

I will have to mention this hopefully only once but everywhere I went in Italy there were beautiful women of all colours and stripes (and thicc brown ones). This is probably due to me living in backend-land where the only women I see are my mom, coworkers and my mates' gfs, so I felt like a peasant who lived all his life tilling land and then moved to a bustling city. When I mean beautiful I don't just mean the obvious (ooga booga), but truly beauty overall, the kind of feeling you get when you gaze at a building that stops you and you're just glad to exist on such an Earth. Living in the middle of nowhere for long enough makes you forget that this is what cities or even maidens are like, that beauty is just there in the texture of a place, unremarkable to everybody who lives in it. I can also enjoy this as one of the rare privileges of being a bachelor.

Another surprise on this trip was seeing a Dongfeng (not even BYD) car ad. I live a very ad-less life given I continually block ads online (except Youtubers I like) and don't watch TV so seeing a Chinese car ad in the wild kinda surprised me. The Chinese century is here /s

Later after dinner I had the classical Mediterranean moment of setting a time to meet my friend, and people coming basically 1h later at best. I seem to have been domesticated by the Northern European custom of setting a time and actually showing up because I forgot this culture difference and showed up on time. Speaking of cultural readjustment, one of my main worries during this trip was that of my social atrophism. Given I lead a very limited (euphemism for dead) life, and regularly delve in macro-autistic niche subjects with not that many social interactions outside specific weekends and coworkers, I feared a kind of social divergence, that by not regularly interacting with people I would develop weird ticks and habits that would make me less palatable to social interactions. But that was basically an irrational thought given that the social muscles came on again rather easily. The trick seems to be genuinely interested in people's lives and engaging with them as if you knew them forever. Imagine my normalcy, I didn't even bring up the doomed demographics of Italy even once.

I got to have fun and all of that shit there, and also meet true young Italians, a dying breed. First thought I had is that the Italian men are drippy af, their reputation seems to hold true and they take care of their appearance well enough. Second the job market seems bleak and it indeed underpays all the graduates. When I asked about future perspectives the answers were either uncertainty or stagnation. And this is Milano, North Italy which is a dynamic and prosperous area compared to the rest of the country. For a city that has been the economic engine of Italy since basically forever (the Duchy of Milan was bankrolling the Renaissance, the industrial triangle of Milan-Turin-Genoa drove the postwar economic miracle) the fact that its young graduates are staring at stagnation says something about the Italian economy as a whole that I don't think the GDP maps fully capture.

A fun fact about the soundscape of Milan: I heard either English, German, Italian and for some reason Egyptian Arabic. I know that Italy just like Spain has a lot of Marroquinos, and that they are better behaved than Moroccans in Spain (who act worse than animals in many cases, the bar is low) so I was surprised that the only Arabic dialect I heard is from vagabonding Egyptians. For info there are around 400k Moroccans but probably nearing ~700k if we count the kids and nationalized peoples.

One of the random things that happened to me here first, while walking to meet the friends I unknowingly passed the Central Synagogue around midnight. There were 3 Italian soldiers stationed there.

Another random event, my friend had to do something that basically took 4h more than normal so I had to kill some time and walked around the city aimlessly absorbing the beauty. By chance I found a group of 3 Moroccans, while walking to a Carrefour to cheapmax. We strook a conversation and I asked a bit about their context and stuff. They all seemed to come from the higher bourgeoisie groups of Casablanca and Rabat, and studied here in Europe (Germany/France). What was very interesting from the whole interaction was that they all studied in Europe, worked 4-5 years and they all either went or want to go back to Morocco because it is a more dynamic place for a young cadre/engineer. I will delve this in another place but Morocco seems to be enacting a smart policy if investment and reverse brain drain to attract the crème de la crème from its European diaspora, as they all wanted to convince me and abruptly stopped when they realized I was born here. This surprised them because I actually was able to speak up naturally Moroccan which reassures me on this front.

Another point they told me is that Morocco has changed in the last 10 years in very incredible ways, day and night they claimed. I remain doubtful but will have the opportunity to judge given I am going there in September this year and will write another travelogue from it.

After enjoying the many sights of Milan (and the modern high rises), and a small part of the night life I went to Padova.

Milan bustling nightlife, circa May 2026

Padova

First of all, the perfect fact that shows the difference between the idea people have of European countries and the reality is that trains in Italy run on time, and Mussolini has been dead for near a century. Yes, you heard it first here guys, they run on time and you know where they actually don't? Germany. This is such a running joke in Germany there is now a mocking website where you can bet on how late your train will be.

So I dumbly booked a ticket via Trainline and had a 7 minute change of trains. I realized it once aboard and was like fuck, I will have to spend 2h in a random city (Verona). You know what actually, the train not only arrived on time, but it arrived earlier. This is an experience you will never get with DB again, except if the train is 23 hours 55 minutes late.

Padova, or Patavium as the Romans called it, is one of those cities that is much older than it has any right to be. According to Virgil in the Aeneid, it was founded in 1183 BC by the Trojan hero Antenor, which if true would make it about 430 years older than Rome. The probabl real founders were the tribe of Veneti, an ancient people who settled the Po plain, and by Roman times Patavium had become one of the wealthiest cities in northern Italy off the back of its wool trade. The geographer Strabo wrote that under Augustus it rivaled any city in the north in wealth and in the number of its Roman knights. It is also the birthplace of the great Livy (Titus Livius), the historian whose 142-book History of Rome is basically the reason we know anything about early Rome at all (from which only 35 book survived, which is its own tragedy). Then in 1222 a group of students and professors walked out of the University of Bologna after a dispute and founded the University of Padua, which became one of the great universities of Europe. Galileo taught there for 18 years and called it the happiest period of his life and Copernicus also studied there. An interesting event is that in 1678, Elena Cornaro Piscopia became the first woman in history to receive a university degree, right here in Padova. The city punches well above its weight for something most people skip on the way to Venice.

And in person it does feel like that. Padova is a human size city and a pretty nice one. Different from the hustle and bustle of Milan and pleasant. You could visit it in basically a day if you are motivated. It seems big enough to be interesting to live as a normal person and small enough that it is not an oppressing metropolis. It has beautiful canals all over, and walking around feels more like living than touring.

While there I also passed some Jewish site (I swear by pure coincidence) and again saw soldiers guarding the place, just like in front of the Central Synagogue in Milan. This time I searched online because I didn’t want to keep meeting guys with guns during my travels. It appears that since 2008, Italy runs a military operation called Operazione Strade Sicure (Operation Safe Streets) where army personnel are deployed across 58 cities to guard around 1,000 sensitive sites. Synagogues, Jewish schools and community centers are among the permanent assignments. The operation started as a general anti-crime and public order measure but the Jewish protection component was ramped up after October 7th 2023.

If you go to Padova, one recommendation: Gelateria Portogallo on via Umberto I. Incredible ice cream, I had hazelnut and pistachio, a recommended and amazing combo by the roommate of my friend. Be advised that there is always a line but it goes fast and is well worth it. Also I got dripped up here with the help of a fashionable female friend (important info, it means taste) so now I am ready to meet the summer mozzas³.

As an aside, I also met the Italian (bombshell of a woman) roommate of the friend I was staying with and the poor girl was truly exploited by Italian “capitalism”. We bonded over the fact of our boring young adult lives and the fact we both speak Spanish (she was a white Brazilian). Aside from looking like a real top model, speaking multiple languages and many other impressive feats, she basically gets paid 1800€ in total for dealing with Excels 8h a day (plus 1h30 of commute). This is not enough to cover the rent+car+food even in a middling city and we discussed how shitty adult life after graduation (metro, boulot, dodo) is, how she got her vacations rejected 1 week before by her bitch boss (also a woman) and on top the situation of the apartment which had black mold in many places but the landlord basically did nothing because what are the tenants gonna do, move elsewhere more expensive? This tied back to what the young Milaneses told me about stagnation. The PIGS countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) never truly recovered from 2008. During the sovereign debt crisis, youth unemployment in Greece and Spain tripled to nearly 28% and 26%, and Italy and Portugal weren't far behind. The GDP per capita of all four economies is still below or barely at pre-crisis levels almost two decades later. The traditional model where you could afford to wait for a decent job while living with your parents broke when the parents themselves lost their income. What replaced it was a generation that either eats the L, accepts 1800€ with moldy walls and rejected vacation days as the normal state of being an adult, or packs up and moves to Northern Europe where the salaries are double but the weather and life is half. Every young Southern European I met on this trip was somewhere on that spectrum, calculating whether the tradeoff was worth it. The positive news for the PIGS is that even the Northern countries now seem to be stagnating so their brain drain will stop at some point, but not good news for the EU overall.

In this part of the trip I basically spent most of the time 1 to 1 with my friend, talking about all the woes with her many, many lovers (did I mention she is very beautiful), drama about life and talking about our social group (a lesser form of gossip). I know people see it as some gay thing to talk about people because big brains talk about ideas but you can just look at it as an oral history and honor economic status of your current social group, giving you useful inputs to later use when judging the value and making choice relative to people. Or you can just call it gay and keep building walls with the women of your life, your choice.

I got to assist to a #real class in the Uni of Padua which was cool, because it reminded me how much I like not being in studies anymore. It also reminded me how good it is to have female friends who are basically little sisters you bully into making good choices with men feels like, bullying her into being less toxic and choosing the actual good men. Afterwards I flexed a bit on the roommate by cooking Shakshuka, all men should know how to cook because one should not let serious stuff like food in the hands of women.

Trieste

The train to Trieste is worth taking for the arrival alone. The line from Padova runs east across the flat Veneto plain for a while, which has nothing special, and then as you approach Trieste the landscape changes completely. The track starts climbing along the edge of the Karst plateau and suddenly you are up on a hillside with the Adriatic opening up below you, and for the last stretch before the train descends into the city you get this wide panoramic view of the sea from above, the Gulf of Trieste laid out with the city clinging to a narrow strip between the water and the mountains. It is one of those train arrivals where you understand why people used to write poems about travelling by rail. I was too enthralled and I forgot to take pictures but it is basically the mountains in this picture.

Because I grew up in a dry, hot, yellow and waterless land, I have always been attracted to green, waterful and mountainous areas. Trieste is an amazing heaven for me because you have the beach, mountains and a city all in one. It was a rainy day so it was a worse but it still was an amazing place to see.

I met some random Germans and we spent the night on a bar together, talking about classical shit and how hard is to find a job (again running theme amongst young people).

But even in the rain, even on a grey day, the combination of the sea, the limestone hills and the city itself was enough to make me want to come back in summer. Trieste is the kind of place where you show up for a quick stop and then start fantasizing about living there. The main square was under construction but it still looked amazing and the sea is nice. I would have probably loved it more if I visited for longer, with a wife and during the summer but this city is now my second favorite in the world after Tbilissi.

Ljubljana

In one of the hostels I met a German guy and after a few discussions he basically said "I don't know how people traveled before Flixbus⁴". No truer sentence has ever been said because I have basically scored 10€ tickets from Trieste to Ljubljana and 30€ for Graz-Brno. Yes, the people might be smelly or weird but this is what you pay for, cheap stuff in exchange and sometimes you can avoid sleep altogether by taking a midnight-6am Flixbus to where you wanna go.

The 10€ bus from Trieste drops you far from the center of the city that. But when you get to the center you realize it is like every other city on this trip because it turns out to be absurdly old and Romanpilled. They set up a colony here called Emona around 14 AD, on the left bank of the Ljubljanica river, right at the natural passage between the Alps and the Dinaric mountains. It was a proper Roman town with paved streets, sewers, central heating and a port, sitting on the route that connected the Italian peninsula to the Danube basin. Attila destroyed it in 452 and then the place went dark for about seven centuries until Slavic settlers rebuilt it and it started appearing in records as Laibach around 1144. During that time the Slovenes developed their own literary traditions, an earthquake leveled most of the city in 1895, and then the architect Jože Plečnik basically rebuilt Ljubljana in the interwar period and gave it the look it has today. I visited all the classics, the Triple Bridge, the central market, the National Library, the river embankments. UNESCO recognized his work as World Heritage. After World War II it became the capital of the Slovenian republic within Yugoslavia, and in 1991, after a ten-day “war” which was more of a formality, Slovenia declared independence and Ljubljana became a proper national capital.

What you actually experience as a visitor is a city that feels like a miniature Prague minus the tourist hordes. There is a castle on a hill, a river with nice bridges, old town on both sides and the whole thing is small enough that you can walk everywhere in 20 minutes. The Ljubljanica river cuts through the center and people sit along it drinking and eating at every hour. It has that specific Central European quality where everything is clean and well-maintained but not in a sterile way, more like people actually give a shit about their city. Slovenia in general gave me the impression of a country that is quietly competent: small, well-organized, with a population of about 2 million people who seem to have figured out how to run a functional state without making a lot of noise about it. I naïvely thought this was a result of the bazillion euros invested in the place but their competency goes back to Papa Tito’s time where they seem to have had a higher GDP/capita than the other republics inside Yugoslavia. Still the bazillions helped.

I quickly found a Börek place and kept eating them as much as possible. Cheese and Potatoes Burek for the win. Something I also realised is that it is the first city I have ever been to where I don’t remember seeing a single woman with a hijab, and this is rather shocking because I guessed there would be a lot of Bosnians in here, but the small number of tourists and traditional post-2004 EU lack of migration seems to shield them. But I saw a ton of Indians, so the EU is already starting to do that thing of theirs.

There will be Indians everywhere

Something surprising is how many German brands I found, I remember seeing a DM and Rossman which are German brands, even a Billa which is an Austrian one.

I also tried to find the bridge where Zizek did his famous video to make a simil, because an Indian who larps as a Wisconsinite Russian on here called Drunk Wisconsin said that I speak like him (slander). But alas I could not find it, so no “where women get raped and they like it” from me.

I met a few foreigners and we had some fun hanging out, and also a guy from Manx, yeah the Isle of Manx. Good bloke, still owes me around 20€ tho. If for some cosmic reason you are here on Substack and see this, don’t give the money back instead take a yearly subscription to Kaiser which comes about to the same.

Graz

I was only for 12-14h, it seems like an amazing city to live in. That is all I got from that city. Mini-Germany with a strong accent and the letter ch that I can actually pronounce.

Brünn (also called Brno for some weird reason)

This is the first city east of the Iron Curtain I have ever been in my life (East Berlin doesn't count). So I was pretty excited to see what I would find. You know what I found after walking 1 minute? A Kurdish restaurant. I was talking to a friend and this was literally our exchange:

And indeed, kurds have no land yet they are everywhere. By the way when I say second tier city I mean not the capital but the major second city, which is actually a good heuristic for judging countries: if the second city works well, the country probably works well.

Brno is the capital of Moravia, the eastern half of Czechia, and it has been a major city since the Middle Ages when it was one of the centers of the Margraviate (say that 10 times) of Moravia under the Habsburgs (yes, them again, they owned everything on this trip). The Germans called it Brünn and it had a large German-speaking population until 1945, when the Beneš decrees expelled basically all ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia. After that it was a socialist industrial city behind the Iron Curtain for four decades, which is why when you grow up in the West you have this mental image of post-2004 EU countries as commieblock greyzones. This image is wrong. From everything I have seen Czechia is just another properly managed CentralEastern⁵ European country. Brno is very clean, very beautiful to walk around, and basically seems exactly like Graz: a good city to live in. The overall cheapness of stuff compared to where I live was noticeable. Czech flags were visible everywhere, which I liked.

Some things that surprised me: the lack of traffic lights at many zebra crossings, and how well the whole place functions. Here I met with renowned Emmanuel Todd fan Kaiser Bauch who confirmed my suspicions that all anons that write good quality content are actually handsome chads IRL. Very kind person and good man. I also met many amazing and cool people who are probably reading this and shall remain nameless, but who speak very good Spanish and French. Coincidentally when I was arriving he posted a mini-introduction to Czech society.

Life in the Most Godless Country on Earth

Another funny thing is my pick of the Airbnb. The room was actually ok and convenient for what the listing promised, what surprised me was that I think there was an Indian at about the same time and also the smell was quite strong in a weird way (the jury is still out if the Indian is related to this). Given I was outside all day except for sleeping this was not a big issue but I will remember that if I go with a future wife⁶ she will pick because I always pick the worst possible places (story for another day).

A parallel thought I had is how cooked Southern and Western Europe seem to be and how much of a slap is gonna feel in a few years where the well managed Eastern European countries will surpass Western ones in terms of not only PPP/capita but also safety, cleanliness of cities, affordability etc. It will not be shocking in a few years to see young Italians or Spaniards move to Czechia in search of a better future. Coincidentally while writing this post Kaiser posted about this:

In the West's Shadow

Kofola is also pretty good, it tastes like coke with a clove taste/aftertaste.

Praha

I was tired. It was the end of the trip and I was honestly just waiting to pass time and get home. I visited at peak tourist time and it was really full, tourists everywhere, the kind of density where you stop seeing the city and start seeing the backs of other people's heads. I went to the city center to see it and it was a certified European old town center with cool things to do, but I had neither the time nor the energy to do them justice. Prague would have been amazing to visit if I had more of both, but I had neither, and the real objective of this trip was to go to smaller places, which I succeeded at :)

Nice Prague pic

Prague will be judged properly on a future Prague-Budapest-Vienna trip. It deserves that.

As a conclusion to the hostelmaxxing, have some pidgeons in Ljubljana fighting for a piece of Burek that fell.

Spring thoughts

Addiction to notes and why do I do this

Around a month two months ago I was at a train station writing an answer to someone on Substack, probably on some chud (demographics, race, IQ, genderslop) related topic when I stopped for a moment, looked around and saw the sun setting down on a pink sky and I thought to myself wtf I am doing with my life. I was basically scrolling on the same phone, on the same gate as I was 2 years ago with little change basically. The only difference is the time I feel I have wasted and a woman who vanished from my life.

I wrote this note as a way to force myself to not come back to Substack as I wanted to leave for some time ideally for many months but after 10 days I realized that besides having a Substack addiction (to be cured someday) I was also not doing anything better with my time and that the reasons were structural. Instead I was doing what, scrolling Youtube Shorts or getting fed scantily clothed women, shiia memes and whacky seals via IG reels, and even let’s take the n+1 step, if I had gotten rid of this shit now what, nirvana? Life would be good, or I would just see be doing the same thing day in and day out without any true direction or view.

This was not an issue one could solve with a social media detox, cold showers and whatever productivity slop is promoting right now, in a certain way the issues were deeper and solving the root would eventually make the visible problems either less salient or delete them at all. So I silently relented and came back to Substack to share my slightly useful autism and numerous unprompted opinions.

Me coming back

Everything that will go after needs a little bit of explanation via what is (or rather what was) my motivation to start writing online in general for non-technical subjects. The first artifact that could be considered an article of mine was penned 1st of January 2021 and because I was a more open-source fag back then I was a committed adherent of POSSE so thankfully the website doesn’t exist or is not findable anymore.

Between then and my first Substack post there were maybe 4 or 5, but there was an important one I wrote pre-AI for the motivations. Those were mainly: to sort my ideas out in public with a feedback loop of commenters in order to check out my biases, write the useful part of my experiences so that similar minded people can find some use from them and leave a corpus of thought to my descendants which is something I wish I had growing up from my father, my grandparents or else.

So the Asmium is the spiritual brother to my technical blog and the one that serves the purpose of my other autistic obsessions (egregores, sociology, demography, immigration and Islam) blog and the personal diary of the sliver of things I have the balls to share in public. This rest is gonna be the second part in an effort to cull subscribers.

Wake up, wake up

I have had a few coincidental things happen on a very close timeline. First the “wtf moment”, and related to that after acting like a fag⁷ after reading one of Drunk Wisconsins posts I mopped about my tasteless life where a certified Unc Elliot Friedland on a crusade to bully young men into marrying dropped this gem.⁸

This actually made me thing for a bit that yes, while I actually want to have a wife I am acting in a very fatalist Muslim way of “praying for it and waiting when it falls from the sky” instead of an active working towards it and convincing God into granting me the luck I need to meet someone.

The third moment was my performance review. I had been on a very negative mindset for basically the last 6 12 18 months (the whole life of this blog basically) and having an external POV on the place where I spend the most time aside from my house was nice. It seems that I am well liked by both higher management, all of my coworkers and the manager himself. He also dropped a passing adjective that while all the work is good, my attitude to it is rather passive and that switching to a more active style is the only negative comment he could find on the performance.

The trifecta of these events, and the trip’s experiences made me see that the alarm is always going off but that I have learnt to mute it. I have been having this alarm ever since I moved to this place and kept snoozing it every few months to be dealt later until at some point I stopped hearing it. Being honest I think this has been an alarm I effectively snoozed ever since I was 18 of sorts where I basically excused my bitterly developed personal life for a series of education and then job goals. In the meanwhile I had a small window where this wasn’t the case and I speedran through all my social goals of: getting rid of my shyness, going to talk to women, bootstrapping a network of friends from scratch and getting a girlfriend which I managed to do in basically 1 year.

During that year or time of my life I was much more active, not in the sense of moving, but what most of this website calls aGeNtIc, going and taking what’s yours and keep doing stuff. But the rather abrupt moving to a socially dead area killed a lot of the momentum I built and led me to a path where I am much more passive, hating my life and with some thinking also probably part of what killed the last relationship.

So the conclusion I have is I have to wake up and get active, you can just do things and all of that.

Ethnic National stats where ?

I started this project now around a year ago basically, working on it some free weekends and with more and less active bursts of energy as a hobby before I started writing. The objective initially was to have a pipeline ETL that is reproducible in Python to extract the % of ethnicities of each country. But because I could not do it to the level I wanted with official data, I then started adding ways to proxy it and the project slowly suffered from scope creep, first by expanding to the 1962 stats, then by OCR and correcting and extracting data from the 1921 (and by proxy 1891), 1936 and 1954 about immigration and demography and then using the death file to build a model that can fit with parameters the evolution of European migration and their impact in population, then a model that build the Maghrebi and Black one.

As for the advance I stopped for Ramadan and then timidly picked it up since then. I wanted to initially prepare it for January, but then I discovered a law so I changed some stuff and then the scope creep happened (as well as writing picked up some steam). Having learnt my lessons I won’t promise anything around this but when it is ready, it will the best and most complete national stats of France online because I am using far more proxies, extracting the best studies (thanks AI) about this from the TeO/TeO2 and will also release an ethnicity-name classificator which I will share with the guy from https://mafrance.app/en who has data of quality I don’t find quite good.

The objective is also that it is reproducible with sources (and ideally a single SQLite/DuckDB database) so other people can exploit it to either be racist or anti-racist. Ideally with good enough data that the government is not allowed to collect, people will be able to more correctly claim what % of France is Maghrebi (people think it is 30% when it is closer to 7-11%).

Qutb my dear

I have read his infamous book Milestones and put some notes to it but this project also suffered from scope creep. Initially it was gonna be a review but then it expanded into a more complete history of people answering this question; “why did Islamic civilization fall so behind ?” of which Qutb is but the latest iteration in a long line of modern thinkers who sought to answer this. In the meanwhile I also stumbled onto a personal catnip which is the political organization of the early Caliphate and why did the ulema class just become rubber stampers for whoever secular leader cucked them, be it the later Caliphs, the Ottoman sultans, the Alawite dynasty or many many more. And why is it only in the modern times that Qutb has been able to mount an offensive and invert the natural order Islamic order by putting the ulema/imams (vanguard of the faithful) on top of the political organizations and the secular rulers below them ?

All very fascinating answers that required me to read a bit more than usual on many topics so scope creep, to which recent events at my work left me with much much less time to seriously delve into them.

And because these projects became too serious I basically procastinated them for some time but I am coming back to them and reorganizing better my life. So hopefully less notes in the evening and more working seriously on essays.

Women

During the trip I realized I actually glowed up and that I am not as ugly as my internal image is and that I can hold a conversation with a pretty woman without being cringe. Both of these are a kind of milestone (ba dum tss Qutb) for the classical brown nerd archetype growing up. I have came a very long way and this pushed me to maybe write a half-guide, half-essay on how to unfuck your head and experiences from the other side, if women have the gall publish sex-diaries on here I should not be shy about posting such slop content either.

But I also remembered I am a fucking dog and that going ooga-booga is in complete opposition to scholarly pursuits. For most of my life I never understood yet was always fascinated by sufi mystics and christian monks for their whole being apart from the world and seclusion to think about subjects deeply. Now I understand it is a very useful social technology because if a pair of tits is in view distance I seem to lose 40 IQ points unless I talk about the supreme subjects, demography and history of the world.

I have also become much more whitepilled and hopeful given there are so many beautiful women in the world, and I just need to caputre one which is orders of magnitude easier than programming in Assembly and I managed to do it. Also I seem to have unlocked a rare skill people seem to call “theory of mind” when I was a kid, I like to see it as “activating an emulation layer in your software to run a stripped down kernel of other people’s spirit”, which men for some weird reason never seem to use when it comes to finding a potential partner. If you want to find someone with characteristics X, Y and Z, try to think like that person and reverse engineer what characteristics that person would want.

I have forgotten this tidbit of knowledge so I am again applying it in my life, which means going to the gym and becoming more active/agentic in life.

Also, Instagram is demons bombarding your sol with women far more attractive than I will ever get and who are scantily clothed. Yet like a quail in a SEA Youtube Short video I keep falling for it because I am a retarded dog. Will fix it at some point by making a custom PWA that blocks shorts on iOS. Will eventually use Claude for that because I can’t leave the app given I have a lot of people I use it with as a sort of Whatsapp.

AMA

Anyone interested?

Future

I am growing too fast for my taste, I have been trying to find ways to slow growth while increasing engagement from people and I have coalesced on posting about Islam. People seem to not be attracted to this subject so I will be posting more of it. I am trying here to optimize for feedback and fun not numbers, I also am trying to not get to 1k because I promised an article about thicc women which is gonna probably tank how I want people to see me. I wanted to post some serious stuff a bit before.

So the second part is raw and unedited to make some of you dislike me and unsub. If you like in general ofc stay subbed but if you followed me for the chuddish immigration takes I recommend you to leave as that is as based as I am ever gonna be :)

1. And how regularly my Gitlab pipelines break

2. For reasons explained in the second part of the post

3. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mozza

4. Apparently founded in 2009, incredible

5. This part has a few jokes poking fun at my 10 Czech subscribers

6. Probabiblity slowly converging to 0 as each days passes

7. For the hate speech inspectors, being a faggot and homosexual are different things. One is a spiritual state of being and the other one is a anormal, as in what not the majority does, sexuality.

8. And lost his patience btw