Welcome

My name is Luís, I'm a Brazilian living in Europe who is passionate about things, things that shaped who I am today and directed some of my life decisions. Two of those inspired me to create this blog, technology and politics, as a mean to share my passions and form new connections. Further, a small discourse over how they became important to me.

Finishing high school brought the "what's next" anxiety. What do I think that I want to do for the next 40 or 50 years of my life? I took my time to decide and tried game design, musical production, worked in a farm, until finally settled in computer science. My mind was blowing with all the possibilities in the field, I liked to code and was part of a competitive programming team; learning networks was so nice that I ended up halfway to a Cisco certification; operational systems became a powerful tool instead of an interface and I ended up assembling a physical cluster with 5 machines using Debian. I found something with the potential to never get bored!

I was still in college when political tensions started to emerge, a coup removed the elected president to put her vice, Michel Temer, as the executive leader. Up to this point, my political stance was non-existent, I didn't think about politics beyond what was being discussed on the TV nor talked about it with my friends, I just had to choose on whom to vote for during elections every two years.

Temer mandate started with austerity measures deeply affecting the college that I was studying. As education cuts happened, it made me start thinking about politics not only on election years, but also how political actions have the power to change the surrounding reality, affecting the lives of many.

A series of political events occurred after my graduation, it felt like when you are at the beach and a wave knocks you down, when you finally find the base to stand up again and start cleaning the salt from your face another wave comes, knocking you down again. A country-wide truck drivers strike that interrupted supply lines of fuel and food for more than a week; then the elections where Bolsonaro won, marked with violence, fake news and lawfare; the third wave we all know, COVID, marked with government neglect, fake news and a supposed experiment to reach the "herd immunity" in a major city.

My political compass started to shift to the "left" during this turmoil. I didn't have any political stance, but Bolsonaro was too rotund in his affirmations, openly praising the military dictatorship that we had and with a violent speech against opponents. The progressists started to affect me more, they did a joint effort against Bolsonaro and carried more empathy in their actions. During covid, while one group was trying to feed the vulnerable population, the other was trying to attack a priest for feeding the homeless people.

One marvelous day, an awesome YouTube channel reached me, Tempero Drag (Drag Seasoning), where a drag queen called Rita von Hunty teaches about politics and sociology. Through her videos about Marxism and other channels recommended by the algorithm I started to read more about other revolutionary movements, from there up to now I still dive deep into political studies to understand the world around me.

This is the essence of Ember Red, my passion for computer science and technology with the revolutionary will to change the world. I hope that my passions translated into text can affect you in a good way, welcome!