Nicholas Funari Voltani

now

25 min read

up:: index

“Most websites have a link that says ‘about’. It goes to a page that tells you something about the background of this person or business. For short, people just call it an ‘about page’.

Most websites have a link that says ‘contact’. It goes to a page that tells you how to contact this person or business. For short, people just call it a ‘contact page’.

So a website with a link that says ‘now’ goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a ‘now page’.” (Derek Sivers, in nownownow.com)

2025

March 2025

My Master’s degree begins this month! I’ve moved to Niterói on March 20th, and my classes begin on March 24th.

I also got back to Catalan, ever since I found a Marxist magazine in Catalan and have been having fun reading and understanding it — now I want to actually finish watching Plats Bruts! It’s a breath of fresh(er) air, since German isn’t really being the most exciting progress I’ve had recently… especially since some things happened in Germany…

Interesting content of the month:

February 2025

The anxiety of waiting for the Master’s scholarship, while barely receiving any notifications, is killing me. Also dealing with the stress of finding a minimally-humane place to move into.

I’ll also be applying for Santa Fe Institute’s 2025 Complexity Global School for Emerging Political Economies, taking place in Bogotá, Colombia. Let’s see how that goes…

Interesting content of the month:

January 2025

I’ve begun studying German — again! Hope this time it works! I have a lot of content now to immerse myself in it though, so hope it helps. I also have a clearer goal in mind: I have to reach B2 until my PhD, if I want to do it in Germany (they require B2), but I want/feel like I can reach it in 2025, with enough immersion and perseverance. I also plan on a Winterkurs in the beginning of 2026 (requires B1, which is more feasible). My progress will be somewhere linked to 091 MOC Deutsch.

I also intend on writing 50 posts in Substack until the end of the year. Let’s see how it goes…

Interesting content of the month:

2024

December 2024

Studying Economics to try bridging the gap of my knowledge when I begin my Master’s. I know there’ll be things that I will need to learn anyways, but it’s good to have less things on my plate.

Also, I finished reading Das Kapital I from cover to cover!! Great feeling! Doesn’t mean I understand it completely — it’s a book I’ll read and reread until I die —, but it does give me a more hollistic view of the book, and will help me with reading the others. It already helped me a lot with understanding when authors mention things from it.

Interesting content of the month:

November 2024

I was essentially busy due to studying Economics for next year’s entrance exam, until… I was accepted! I’ll begin my Master’s in Economics in 2025!!! At least something came out right this year.

Not much else going on, aside from studying, and rushing to finish reading Capital I until the end of the year. I stopped writing in Substack for a while, since there was no one reading it anyways. Why bother? I do have around 10 drafts to publish someday, though. Eventually.

Interesting content of the month (a month late):

October 2024

Interesting content of the month:

  • Why billionaires should be ILLEGAL - The Market Exit: Elucidating of the scale of how rich our billionaire overlords truly are, and nice to see some concrete ideas on how to think about limits to wealth. Of course it’s not a definitive answer, but it’s a neat start for this whole debate.
  • The Amazing Digital Circus: An instant classic. AMAZING animation, story, characters, humor! The Portuguese dub is also amazing, they’re really hitting the nail on these ones! You can really tell this series is made with passion and expertise on the craft (animation, sound design, modelling, storytelling, dialogue, etc).

September 2024

This entire month was dedicated towards the Master’s Degree entrance exam. The only chance that I do get in is if Economics students in Brazil are big time stupid3. Nevertheless, it was worth the effort anyways: it gave me clarity enough that I was on the right track, both on my career choice and on my studying methodology. There was plenty of things that I didn’t know in the test, which I left blank (since wrong answers “cancel out” correct answers, so there’s naturally a bit of Game Theory in this), but there were many things that I did answer, and some questions that I know I got right – things that, a month and a half ago, I had absolutely no clue about!

So throughout the rest of 2024 and the whole of 2025, I’ll be studying for 2026’s entrance exam for a Master’s in Economics unless I change my mind, as always, and I’ll double down on this Zettelkasten/Maps of Content style that I’ve adopted in this digital garden. It’s just fun, and it forces me to understand stuff more deeply, to connect things with each other, to create insights serendipitously.

Interesting content of the month:

  • Facts About Beavers (its two minutes long whatve you got to lose) - Sage the Bad Naturalist. God I love this woman!!! She can talk all about wet rocks and I’m ALL IN for it!!
  • Flux Review, Ep. 161… well it wasn’t the best one, but they mention en passant the very-interesting-idea of thermoclines of truth, which goddamnit if it isn’t completely pertinent! Really has to do with all my writing on São Paulo’s phony version of Wall Street (i.e. Faria Lima) – do check it out here, but it’s in Portuguese. Fazer o quê, né, gringo :/ –, in particular with the whole superficiality thing so prevalent in these spaces, and the sensation that “truth” is way too relative for a “Materialist“‘s taste… ok, I just mean for people who prefer to stress hypotheses over the cold counter of truth (ok, I really mean Historical Materialism, but not only), over dabbling over non-falsifiable claims much too prevalent in a supposedly “rational” place such as the corporate/business workspace.
  • A World Not Desperate to Explain Itself - Quest Marker: Holy shit, the ending of this video is beautiful.

August 2024

I’m basically hyperfocusing on studying Economics. I loved learning more about Macroeconomics, it was super fun and elucidating. Microeconomics was, ironically, not so fun; it seemed like too much of a stretch. (It got better though!)

Interesting content of the month:

  • I no longer aspire to have a career. - Katherout. Great video summarizing reasons of discontentment over a lifetime’s worth of toiling away at alienating jobs.
  • Letting Go Of God - Julia Sweeney. Simply amazing monologue of Julia Sweeney on her history of reconciling herself with religion and God – or rather, of her, ahem, letting go of God. Incredibly funny, and incredibly profound. While I was watching it, I literally thought “God, this is why the Internet is such a blessing: so that I can experience this incredible piece of art!“. I still have to write about some of my very own bouts with God and religiousness/spirituality. Someday.

July 2024

I’m currently talking with my most-likely-soon-to-be Master’s advisor on Complex Systems, and so I’m reading his thesis on Kuramoto Models on Complex Systems. I have plenty of ideas for papers/research… although not that many seem to have something to do with his thesis, yet. I’m also updating the MOC 040 MOC Complex Systems.

…Yeah, that didn’t last long. In a dramatic, but not too unexpected, turn of events, I’ve finally decided to chase a Political Economy Master’s Degree! If I’m to study Marx and Hegel for real, instead of taking a mathematical detour then getting back to it afterwards, it’s best for me to just get going towards it. I also finally conceded to getting to learn Economics for real, and it’s being fun! I just have to learn Macroeconomics, Microeconomics and Brazilian Economics (and review Statistics, and brush up on Calculus problems) to attempt the ANPEC exam, in one and a half month. Here we go… (Se quiser checar como estou indo, 060 MOC Economia.)

I also presented Black Sheep (from the Scott Pilgrim movie), on the drums, at my music school’s recital, on July 15th (Exchangeagram post). Modesty aside, I’ve made an insane amount of progress in these last 2 months, that are basically all the time that I’ve played drums at all (disregarding the 2 months that I’ve had classes in January/February, since I didn’t practice at home at all). I was super nervous of getting something wrong and getting stuck in front of everyone… but, at the end, my performance was the most lively – aside from the school’s founder, who sang I Will Always Love You, from Whitney Houston… yeah, can’t compete with that! On to the next one soon.

Interesting content of the month:

  • PMG Responds to the Games Industry Layoffs - YouTube: starting off with a great radicalized speech in the Games industry. A terrific quote from Quintin Smith, the journalist from People Make Games who speaks in this video:

    ”… if you’re only ever one bad acquisition away from being laid off, one bad CEO away from having your life changed dramatically in a moment, then you’re in a class struggle.” (timestamp)

    This is true even for people outside the Games industry: you can work as hard as you want in your job and have all the praise from your higher-ups; if all it takes is one arbitrary decision to throw you into economic jeopardy, unable to pay for your basic needs, then you ARE working class (or a very stupid bourgeois, but even they can overcome these things quickly).

  • Nomos of the Earth - Original Instructions (Woodbine): simply beautiful writing on “practical behavior” to deal with creating a better future, in a revolutionary fashion. Maybe I’ll translate it to Portuguese soon, it deserves to be read by more people.

June 2024

My plan for this month was to refactor a lot of my notes in my Obsidian (and, ergo, Digital Garden), starting from my Marxism notes. I’m (re)reading through “Das Kapital I” (in Portuguese, of course) and refining/changing old notes and creating new ones where necessary. In the end, more things took the forefront, and this was postponed (again).

I also had a course on Freelance Translation, which was great! I began subtitling videos from the Complexity Explorer, which is something VERY humbling for me!! Becoming a member of the Santa Fe Institute is an impossible dream for me, a mere lowly Third-World-Country peasant; how dare I dream such heretical reasonless dreams? Regardless, be they futile or foreshadowing, through dreams and illusions my days drudge on. If someone from SFI would allow me to participate in one of their programs, you know, that’d be super neat… as if doing voluntary work (especially as a lowly foreigner etc etc) amounts to being worthy of any pity in America, as if! Well, worth a shot.

Anyways, here are the videos that I’ve subtitled this month through Amara(my babies!):

Interesting content of the month:

  • Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers (Maggie Appleton): an interesting analogy between “barefoot doctors” and software developers, and how we need more developers apt to create solutions for less general, more specific problems
  • When to Design for Emergence (Kasey Klimes): a very interesting take on designing for things/products/systems which are, so to say, “free from its creators’ clutches”
    • I wrote a bit about it in Design for Emergence etc. There’s a lot that revolutionaries MUST learn from this idea – hell, even the whole marxist idea that “we can’t predict how revolutions will turn out” is predicated on this idea: if it were known from the start, then there’d be little free will in its doing; it must be done in situ, so to say, it must come from its own material terms and hands and conditions and culture, etc. And for changes to take root, the ground must be fertile for it to stay put, or else things will go back to how they were: comfortably uncomfortable.
  • Art Won’t Save Us from Capitalism - Lily Alexandre: a TERRIFIC video essay on the role of art within capitalism, and how it does – and doesn’t – “change the world” effectively. GREAT meta-analysis as well. Some great further references from the video:
    • The Case Against Art? - Mitch Speed
    • Pedagogia do Oprimido, do Paulo Freire… as should be! It’s becoming harrowing for me to be Brazilian and having never read (one of the) most worldly-recognized Brazilian writer(s), who’s cited by so many foreigners who didn’t even read it in Freire’s mother tongue, which is my own…

    • “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” (Toni Cade Bambara, apud Alexandre)

Oh, and I got hyperfocused in Mario Superstar Baseball videos from Dinger City on YouTube, thanks to this video. Didn’t like Dinger City at first, but it grew on me overtime. I also got addicted to Blinkman’s Stardew Valley series.

Also also, it seems I’ve found my Master’s degree advisor. Let’s see how it goes!

May 2024

I enrolled in the ICTP – SAIFR » Workshop on Dynamical Processes on Complex Networks in São Paulo. It was fascinating, and illuminated that I truly want to pursue some research in Complex Systems – the more interdisciplinary, the merrier! Even if I end up not doing research on it (as seems to be the harsh truth…), I do believe it is a paradigm revolution just in its infancy still.

Speaking of research, I’m searching (again) for an advisor for my Master’s degree. It’s like banging my head against the wall, thankfully metaphorically: all professors seem to be full to the brim with ill-paid, nowhere-else-to-go-anyways post-graduates, and so there’s no room and/or no scholarships available for me. Oh Joy of Joys!

I’m also hyperfocusing on Drums at the moment: I’ll be performing Black Sheep (from the Scott Pilgrim movie) at the school I’m having lessons in, in July. Kinda challenging and fast, but doable, and extremely fun to play – especially this part!

Interesting content of the month:

  • Meatball Wiki: MeatballWiki: Very interesting example of a collaborative wiki. It’s based on what they call Barn Raising, which is their way of turning the usually anonymous (and, thus, “detached”) way of collaborating on the Internet into a more personal and social matter. They do it by allowing for users to attach their opinions on the Wiki’s posts right at the post’s end, and by only keeping users that share their names explicitly.
  • Maggie Appleton’s Digital Garden: the most beautiful website I’ve had the pleasure to witness, in my entire life probably.

April 2024

On April 1st, I officially left my job in an Agro Insurance company which sucked out my soul with a metaphorical straw.

I went back to my parents’ house in the “countryside” of São Paulo, to have a break from São Paulo’s urban pandemonium. I essentially took time to decompress and focus on my particular interests, in particular writing and putting up my Digital Garden with Quartz.

I also got my Autism diagnosis, which was already expected but, now, official; I posted an essay/manifesto/rant about it on Medium. Speaking of Medium, I also posted some poems, quasi-post-festum, for this year’s Escapril.
[250306: Just adding in that I’ve posted my Autism essay/manifesto/rant on Substack, where I’ve been writing for almost a year already.]

I began (again) my drums lessons (I began in January 2024, but stopped due to moving).

March 2024

Just running around to deliver everything that was within my responsabilities in my job before officially quitting.

February 2024

HUGE meltdown, which made it crystal clear that I should quit my job. Not much else, just in a soul-crushing job, away from friends, etc.

January 2024

Huge letdowns from my Marxist comrades! Let’s all sit down and read Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging, by Jodi Dean, why don’t we!? 😍😍

2023

Essentially a dead year, suffocated by my job. I attempted a Social Sciences course in the beginning of the year, but working a job and enrolling a course designed for young, non-working individuals… it was short-lived, and not worth my burning-out.

The one gasp for air that I had was in November, when I attended the ICTP – SAIFR » School on Mathematical Modeling and Governance in São Paulo, which was phenomenal! The most interesting papers related to the speakers’ research were:

Footnotes

  1. Not without its fair share of imperialism’s influence, of course. ↩

  2. 011 MOC Capital, 011a MOC Capital I. Hope it tells you on what side of the spectrum I am. Speaking of spectrum, shameless plug: “But I don’t even look autistic!“. ↩

  3. 250603: Looking in retrospect: yes, they are, apparently. ↩

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