A bit more than a year ago, a couple weeks before Christmas an event popped up on my Facebook timeline. “Free Hugs in Budapest”, it said. Intrigued, I clicked on the “Interested” button, the universal bookmarking feature. I didn’t think much of it afterward, but a few days later a photographer friend visiting from Sweden contacted me and asked if I’m planning to attend. So we ended up going together, our cameras in hand, to take a few pictures; seemed like an interesting enough topic. I ended up bringing a wrong camera (hint: don’t bring your old mirrorless camera that has shitty autofocus for fast-moving subjects) but did get a few good shots.

Besides being a good subject for photography, the idea appealed to me: a bunch of people at one of Budapest’s busiest square, filled with tourists, giving out free hugs for an hour once a month on a Sunday afternoon. That’s all there is to it, really.

I was intrigued, so I went for the next two events as well—learning from my mistakes, I took my trusty DSLR—and took more pictures. After three times, though, I was itching to put down the camera, take the leap and start giving out free hugs myself. So I did.

Since then I’ve been to almost all the events and became one of the very few regular volunteers. I enjoy it a lot: I like giving hugs, but it’s not something you do too often in Hungary. And there is something pure and deeply satisfying in standing there for an hour, sign in your hand, waiting for strangers to walk up to you for a hug. It’s an opportunity to have a momentary connection with a lot of people and to—excuse the cheese—spread some love in the world. We only have one rule, one we take seriously: we offer the hugs, never force them on people. For me it’s like going to Church; I do that too, but this, this is also Church, a gathering of people for a common cause, to make the world just a little bit better.

The Free Hugs Campaign was started in 2004 by an Australian guy, though I’d bet he wasn’t the first one to do this since it’s hardly a unique idea. The phenomenon has spread all over the world ever since, and by far and large is an entirely grassroots movement, unaffiliated with organizations or religions.

In Budapest, we don’t even have a Facebook page or anything; it’s organized by one person who creates the event every month, invites everyone he can, and then it spreads organically. Sometimes we have as many as 20 volunteers giving out hugs; other times, only 4; it’s somewhat unpredictable. On occasion, people would walk by, and like the idea so much they’d spontaneously join in.

As I’ve written in the intro, the event is held at a touristy area of Budapest; by my estimations, about 85-90% of people we hug are not Hungarians. That can partly be explained by the location, but I myself attribute it to this country’s sometimes unwelcome, suspicious or cynical attitude towards these things. A surprising number of times people would walk by, and I heard them say some variation of “oh, yeah, they’re just gonna pickpocket you” in Hungarian.

I’m not saying this is for everyone. Some people simply don’t like hugs, are uncomfortable with physical touch, or worse, have past traumas connected to it. And it requires you to really put yourself out there, and be at least somewhat vulnerable.

But if you have one in your city, and this sounds intriguing to you, I highly encourage you to try it. It’s a good way to spend an hour on a Sunday afternoon.

I have an ambitious idea: I want to write a longform article, an oral history of an early Twitter client/community called Turulcsirip (wikipedia link with Google Translate).

The story starts simple enough: in early 2007, a Hungarian guy called Benedek Toth has written a Twitter client called Turulcsirip. But it wasn’t your average client as there were several things that made it special.

While I registered an account on Twitter sometime in 2007, I haven’t started tweeting until early 2008. I knew no-one, just followed a few internet-famous people and early adopters of the platform (remember Hugh MacLeod aka GapingVoid?). I tweeted about things people tweeted about in those days: random things, saying good morning, work stuff.

Only a few days later I tweeted out something about ExtJS and someone Hungarian guy replied to it. I was baffled. How? They didn’t even seem to be following me. And how did they find me anyway?

Turns out they were using Turulcsirip. I don’t know all the details, but through the API it watched all tweets and with some fairly basic NLP it found people tweeting in Hungarian and automatically pulled them into the system and displayed their tweets on a public timeline.

See, Turulcsirip had three views. One, you could see whatever your followers are tweeting, the basic view. But two, you had a slider where you could start to see your followers’ followers’ tweets mixed into your timeline. And it had a third view where you would see everyone on the platform, which mean pretty much every Hungarian tweeting back then. It was a great way to discover new people, and in 2008, that timeline wasn’t that busy, and if you found someone annoying or uninteresting, you could hide their tweets with a click or two. Turulcsirip even had a Firefox extension so you could have it in your sidebar, autoscrolling.

Through the app, I instantly became part of a community and in the next two years or so I made a lot of internet friends, many of whom became real-life friends. It was a great community, with barely any drama or politics (by today’s standards, anyway). We also had a lot of twitter meetups, hanging out in pubs with semi-strangers you only knew from the internet before. You could see the bubbles: Tech People Twitter, People Selling Infoproducts Twitter, Teen Twitter and so on, bubbles that didn’t really interact with each other. It was and still is fascinating.

There are so many stories, from meetups, through competitors to its eventual demise in 2012. Friendships, relationships and marriages started there. There was the time when, in order to make Twitter more popular in Hungary, three people held a contest to get either 2009 or the most followers by a certain date, a number that sounds downright amusing these days (the winner only got to 1299). I could go on.

And I want to go on: this is the extremely abridged version of the story. I have a mental list of about a dozen people to interview for this to happen, and I may even have the time for it. I’m not a journalist—though I used to be, a long time ago—but this is something I definitely want to write because I believe it’s such an important and unique part of the history of Early Twitter.

Stay tuned.

I have no idea what to write today but I will start, and I am sure words will come.

I have a couple of topics floating in my head for longer stories. One is obviously continuing my memoir about my time in Sweden but I’ve hit a snag there: I got to the part where I arrived in Sweden, and now there are a couple of months where I am unsure what I should write about. It’ll come, though.

I have another thing to write about: the story of Turulcsirip, an early Hungarian Twitter community that was quite unique at the time. Part of me wants to make a real article of it, an oral history: interview the guy who created it, the earliest users, and so on. But I’m not sure if that’s a good fit for this platform. I can tell this story from just my perspective, and that would give you a somewhat good image of it as well, so I might just do that.

I am not yet sure if I want to write mostly multi-part stories (that you have to plan at least somewhat in advance) or more one-off things. For some reason, the former sounds easier for me, because if I just sit down to write something, I draw a blank. But that’s something I want to improve as well.

Then again, I don’t want to write just for writing’s sake, only to have my streak, like I am doing right now. I want to write meaningful things, things people enjoy and find engaging. I feel like I have a lot of stories to tell; there is enough material. Now I just have to do the writing itself.

This whole post is just a shameless thing to get my streak, look, 300 words exactly.

I want to preface this that everything I write here may leave you scratching your head thinking “this is not unusual at all”. But it is for me.

I, like most people belong to different groups of friends, that function as bubbles. I have my online friends, my church friends, my friends from drawing class, my friends with whom I do free hugs every month and so on. And by far and large, these groups do not interact with each other at all, and that’s partly on me. For whatever reason that I still need to work out with a therapist, I (sub)consciously keep these groups separate.

I think that is at least partly because I behave in slightly different ways, show different parts of myself to these different groups. Again, this mostly normal, and a ton of people do this, but I also know people who, by far and large don’t do this, and furthermore they have no trouble whatsoever with their bubbles meeting – for them, they are not even bubbles.

Therefore a couple of years ago I decided to turn my birthday party into a social experiment: invite everyone from everywhere into one big party, and just see what happens. It was legitimately scary for me because, in that setting, I have to be myself, my real self, I can’t do much pretending.

I am happy I did that because it was a huge success. I had about a dozen people from 3 or 4 different groups, and it was great to see them get to know each other.

This Saturday I’m having a party again, with an even more diverse group. It’s still scary, but now it’s exciting as well. I’m cooking some Mexican food, because as cliche as it is, food brings people together.

You’re all invited as long as you can make it to Hungary by 7 pm this Saturday. :)

Ten years ago I was working at a translation agency, being very enthusiastic about my job. I just started having a social life again after high school, finding real-life friends and community on Early Twitter, thanks to a Twitter client that auto-aggregated Hungarian users and connected them. (That’s a story worth telling in itself, another time)

A lot has happened since then. I worked there for a few more years, then I moved to Sweden for four years and then moved back to Hungary. Somewhere in the middle of that, I went freelance, which overall turned out to be a huge success. I started taking care of my mental health, getting diagnosed and re-diagnosed, finding a psychiatrist, did almost six years of therapy. I traveled a lot; I’ve been to most European countries by now as well as two trips to the US, both because of I got to be part of XOXO, but I’ve visited other parts of the States as well. I did a small pivot in my career that so far worked out well. I lost two out of my four grandparents. Built and ran a small link-sharing community. Grown a lot personally and professionally. Discovered running, did that for a few years. Found and lost friends and communities.

Right now I’m in a pretty great place. I have well-paying clients and hopefully picking up more freelance work soon. I’m part of a great church, one that I was looking for all my life. I have good friends, some old, some new. I’ve started drawing a few months ago, and I enjoy it immensely. Yesterday, after years of procrastination, I finally found myself a personal trainer and will begin working with her next week. Although my sister is moving out of our place, a good friend is taking her place in the room next to mine. I’m having a birthday party on Saturday where I’ll cook for my friends. I feel at home where I am.

Here’s to an even better 40.

This post was inspired by the Motherboard article, The Rise and Demise of RSS.

It was early 2012 and Google Reader’s sharing function was taken from us, replaced with a useless, shitty “Share to Google+” button (Fuck you, Google). I’ve been using Reader since late 2006 and the sharing feature since it’s introduction; the notion that if I see something interesting on the internet I must share it with others was ingrained in me, forever.

It started with conversations with friends, and we discovered that Posterous (RIP) had a decent bookmarklet one could use to grab content for sharing. So a few of us started content-sharing blogs (or linkblogs, if you will). Not long after, a friend suggested an idea: why don’t we make our own content-sharing community? So we could use that for a back-end, all we need is a place where we aggregate all these blogs full of content.

The name of software that is used to aggregate RSS feeds is Planet. There were and still are many Planet sites, so I went looking for a suitable engine, but none of them were right until I stumbled upon the code behind planetrubyonrails.com (RIP), written in, wait for it, Rails. I was already familiar with Rails, so I forked it, upgraded it to the latest version of Ruby on Rails, made a couple of changes and a basic design and by then I already had ten people interested, mostly from the old community at Reader.

A cronjob crawled the people’s feeds, pulled the content into the database, stripped most of the formatting and then displayed it on the site, which itself had an RSS feed of course. And so, in early 2012, Sharewood (RIP) was born.

Over the next year or so our community has grown a bit. At the height of it, we had about 16 people. That may not sound like a lot, but a community is a community. People were sharing all kinds of interesting things, and I felt like I got back at least part of what we lost when Google neutered Reader.

The project was an opportunity for me as well to play with Rails; I ended up rewriting almost the entire codebase. I wrote a new RSS/Atom parser; tried to implement PuSH (PubSubHubBub); added support for user accounts, so people would be able to follow others and get a custom RSS feed. I added a few tweaks to the front-end as well, like j/k navigation.

In early 2013 Google announced that they’d shut down Reader and a flurry of new alternatives appeared. One of the most promising ones was Hivemined, one that would never be finished; the one I ended up switching to was NewsBlur which I still use to this day. It’s customizable, fast, has good support and UX. It also has built-in sharing and commenting support although it’s not used widely. I tried switching to it, but never really got hooked on it, and I never had a community around it.

I shut down Sharewood in 2014, having done only basic maintenance on it for a year by then, and I felt like it has run its course.

My itch to share things is still very much present; I maintain a Tumblr blog where I share things irregularly, mostly webcomics I like. I also retweet interesting and funny things a lot on Twitter. But I still don’t have a central place with a community like in the good old days, if you will.

I have no illusions; RSS will not make a comeback. Retweeting things and commenting on them or sharing things in private Slacks are as good as it gets right now.

The itch is still there.

Well, it’s day 5 of my streak, and I have no idea what to write about. But they say you just have to start and eventually something will come out of it, so that’s what I am doing now.

Thing is, I have a blog, although I have not blogged regularly for years now. The only time I did that was in early 2013 when I moved to Sweden from Hungary. For a while I did post daily because things were new and exciting, but eventually it just became regular life stuff, and I slowly stopped; other things became priority. Nevertheless, it was an important period in my life, and I’m glad I have written memories of it.

Around 2013 I got myself a pocket-sized Moleskine, and I started writing down whatever came to my mind, journaling, more or less. I had that notebook with me religiously, in my right pocket, next to my wallet and in the next year and a half, I filled several of them. My favorite was the Evernote edition, which is not sold anymore. It gave you three months of Evernote premium but more importantly, it had nice, light, dot-grid pages which quickly became my favorite.

I kept writing in my notebooks until the start of 2015 when I went digital and started writing all the things down in Evernote. Now, Evernote is by no means a perfect app: it’s bloated, slow and clumsy in many ways. And yet to this day, I have found no suitable replacement for it. It’s one of those softwares that my brain got hardwired to (like OSX, or Lightroom). Plus it’s available for every platform ever.

I usually make a note a day with the title being the current date. I make a lot of ad-hoc todo lists which is as close as I get to being organized with my todos, being tried at least a half dozen apps by now and never being able to stick to one.

(I still carry a paper notebook with me everywhere, an A5 dotted Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal that I use for regular notebook purposes because BuJoing turned out to be Not My Thing™, but they make good notebooks. I mostly use it to take notes when I’m at my therapist.)

In the last few weeks, I’m trying a new experiment with the todos, which is moving to a weekly format, so I have one Note with the todos for Week 51, one for Week 52 and so on. In each note, I have each day and a “Later” section, and I try to add as many things as possible because it gives me a sense of achievement and it’s nice to look back on days when I thought I got nothing done.

P.S. Thinking in weeks is a very Swedish thing to do. In Sweden, everyone knows what week it is, and they frequently refer to them as in “I’m doing this on week X” or “I’ll be on vacation between week Y and Z.” If my memory serves me right, one of the most popular apps in the Swedish App Store for a long time was called “Week Calendar” until Apple added the option to display week numbers in Calendar. It drove me crazy for a long time, but I have to admit that it makes sense because it’s a good unit of time. I’ve been told the Germans do the same.

Newsletters are the new blogs, they say, and I hope not because I hate getting email. And yet there is ~content~ in newsletters, good content, so here’s a few that I subscribe to and like.

• Charged - I guess this one needs no introduction to this community ;)
• The week that was - Ian Kennedy’s once-a-week newsletter with usually ten links to interesting, unusual stories from all over the world. Anything from someone winning a vacation to Winnipeg, Canada to punishing a San Francisco developer’s illegal demolition by forcing the guy to rebuild the exact replica of the building. [archives]
• Jenny Shen’s newsletter - I met Jenny (and recorded a podcast with her!) at XOXO 2018. She writes about design, her life, being a PoC in technology and everything in-between.
• Laura Olin - Another XOXO alum, sending out interesting things from all over the internet once a week. She has an interesting perspective on things. She also has a list of job opportunities in the media at the end of every newsletter. [archives]
• Nicole Knows - This is The Toast alum Nicole Cliffe’s newsletter, do yourself a favor and follow her on twitter immediately as well. It’s a mix of fun and weird Reddit threads and skincare. [archives]
• NextDraft - A daily newsletter from Dave Pell, managing editor of the Internet. A mix of US politics and interesting random things. [archives]
• Things That Have Caught My Attention - by Dan Hon. An irregular newsletter with Dan’s thoughts on a variety of issues, and the occasional weird fiction. It’s long, but it’s worth reading. [archives]
• The Shatner Chatner - By The Toast (and XOXO) alum Daniel Mallory Ortberg. A mix of fiction and just plain weird but fun stuff. [archives]
• The Web Is OK - By Aaron Gilmore, XOXO alum, coming in your inbox once a few with a few interesting stories from the web. [archives]
• Leah Finnegan’s newsletter - Leah, from The Outline writes mostly personal essays, and they are all pretty great. Check out her latest one about Envy. [archives]
• Jenn Schiffer’s newsletter - Last but not least, Jenn Schiffer’s newsletter never disappoints. Hard to put it in a box. It’s wacky, and it’s fun. [archives]

What are yours?

I started 2018 with wanting to try Android after not using it for like five years; I had a Nexus S with Android 4 point something back in 2013 before jumping on to the iPhone bandwagon. So I got myself a cheap Moto G5 Plus just to play around with it, and to my surprise, I promptly fell in love with the whole thing.

Android has come a long way, and in many ways, it’s a better fit for me than iOS. I like the (relative) openness of it, the way it handles notifications, the ability to turn off animations (I hate UI animations with a passion), the customizability in general, better integration with Google and so on. The G5 Plus shipped with 7.0 Nougat, with the promise of an Oreo upgrade coming in late 2017, which arrived at the end of 2018 and made an otherwise fast phone somewhat slow. It ships with a vanilla version of Android, with a few enhancements from Motorola that are actually useful: a few gestures (for example, shake twice for flashlight) and a really good implementation of an active display (you can preview and even dismiss notifications from it very quickly). Oh and it had a great battery life.

The phone did have one major flaw: the camera sucks. It’s… passable at best, but even with the best daylight conditions, pictures simple look off at best, because of Motorola applying some extremely aggressive sharpening. Low-light performance? What low-light performance?

So I replaced it with a Pixel 2 which, at the time had the best camera on the market (it still is one of the best ones) and it was pretty great, except the GPS in it was pretty shitty, and I was used to using my phones for running. After it spending literally months in repair – which is hard in a country where you can only buy grey market imports; mine is from Canada –, going back and forth and getting nowhere, I just got fed up with the whole thing and sold it. Only later I learned that many of the high-end phones lately come with shitty GPSes and if you wanna go running, you better buy yourself a running watch.

In any case, I decided to jump back to iOS and got myself an iPhone X, about two months before the fall keynote. I figured I’d replace it with the new model when it comes out but the XS is a ridiculously incremental upgrade and I have no desire whatsoever to spend money upgrading. Maybe next fall.

The X also has a good camera, and the optical 2x zoom should be mandatory on phones; its portrait mode is, in my experience, ever-so-slightly better than the Pixel 2’s (its low light performance, on the other hand, is miles behind). I shot a series of portraits with it on XOXO 2018, and I was pretty satisfied with the results.

I do miss Android, but I came to appreciate the big screen in a relatively small package – I can still more or less use the X with one hand – as well as the build quality. iOS 12 was a very welcome update as well with a few small things (faster animations! less waiting!).

And there are certain things that, even in 2018 are just better in my experience on an iPhone; small things, like the smoothness of the touchscreen and the handle of touch in general, or having a working implementation of auto-brightness that not even the Pixel 2 can get right.

Overall I am pretty happy with the X, and I will stick with it for the foreseeable future, even though I recently got myself a Pixel 2 again because I needed an ARCore-capable phone for AR game development.

The moral of the story is that I have disposable income and I was bored. I am tempted to say that none of this stuff really matters but I spend a fair amount of time on my phone every day so… it kinda does for me.

I was planning to possibly dive into the YearCompass, I even put it on my todo list to print it out and take it with me to my favorite coffee shop, but I forgot to look at my todo list. Ah, the joys of ADHD. They do have a PDF that you can do electronically, but it’s not a great user experience.

I binged on the first season Condor yesterday, and I have to say it was a pretty fun spy thriller. I’m looking forward to Season 2.

Before that, I watched the first season of Impulse, which is, uh, I guess inspired by one of my favorite Sci-fi books, but they only took the fundamental concept of the book and made into a pretty good teen drama, with this season focusing primarily on sexual assault and its effects.

I got a kick out of the first season of Succession which is cut from the “despicable rich people prestige TV” genre (see also: Billions). Pretty much everyone in it terrible in their own different entertaining ways, with no real heroes and yet you find yourself rooting for people.

Do yourself a simple favor and check out A Simple Favor (sorry) if you haven’t seen it in the theaters: it was one of the most fun movies I saw in 2018. I hesitate to say anything about it as it is one of those movies that is best enjoyed going in knowing nothing about it; even stating its genre is a possible spoiler in my book, so you’re just gonna have to trust me on that one.

Oh, and the Big Fat Quiz of The Year 2018 is out, which is an annual TV event of mostly British comedians being funny while pretending to play a quiz. It has two-thirds of The IT Crowd and also Michelle Wolf, among others.

Onwards to 2019!