Is Dan Held on here?

Can I rant about how frustrating it is to see him be unpleasant and pointlessly negative without another petty rebuke?

It made me a little upset knowing that there could be people reading his twoddle thinking, “oh maybe, I shouldn’t share or post.”

So if you are a journo, content creator, photographer, writer or vlogger … basically a coding illiterate builder, please ignore him.

You can do whatever you’re doing right now, you put bitcoin and Nostr on top, and boom you’re supporting a freedom movement.

Sure, you’ll attract the Dan Helds, but you’ll see more clearly through your camera, pen or microphone than Dan behind his keyboard.

You have my support. Get out there and do it! ⚡️ 🧡 💜

ChatGPT is still a highly under rated tool for learning. With plugins, visualize any topic damn near instantly at whatever level of knowledge you like.

Of course it will get things wrong, just like the thousands of forums I’ve traveled over the years to trouble shoot problems, but this does it instantly and for my specific request.

About two and a half years ago, while I was jumping country to country trying to escape lockdowns, I found myself in Sao Paolo, Brazil. For a long time, I’d had BJJ or some kind of martial art on my “list of things to do” but as we all know, life gets busy and unless you make the time, it shall be filled with other things.

I managed to do some classes back then, but left to Costa Rica b4 I could get into it seriously.

Fast forward and in August I joined a local Dojo, and convinced the master to allocate the classes from Sao Paolo to my record so that I could get my stripes faster (I’m travelling again soon and wanted to get some combat in beforehand).

In our dojo, you need two stripes on your white belt before you can actually roll. Each stripe is 30 classes of basic fundamentals, which takes about 6 - 8 weeks of regular attendance, unless you really come to extra classes. It took me about six weeks to get both stripes with the prior classes boost, and last night was my first roll.

Little did I know that Friday night classes, being the last of the week, were not the usual “intermediate” class. Instead it’s the one where all the advanced guys come to kick the shit out of each other one last time before the weekend. I walked into 2 x three-stripe blues, 2 x three stripe purples and a brown belt.

My teacher was kind enough to guide me on the first roll, and immediately, you realise that “this shit isn’t as easy as it looks”. You spend weeks learning basic moves with people in the fundamentals classes, but in those, nobody is fighting back. You can complete a move and practice it again and again. But here, in a combat scenario, the other person is moving and countering your moves.

You are literally wresting just to hold on and exerting yourself just to claim a position of dominance, and when you get it (the only reason of course in my case is he went easy on me for training purposes) you forget all the moves and thing you’re taught! I remember getting a side control and then thinking… “now what the fuck do I do?”

This is life. This is where you realise intelligence is not just in the brain, but is more importantly, in the body.

This is why I am fundamentally opposed to modern brain-in-a-vat theories and ideologies. These nerds view the body as just a meat suit, and they are so far from wrong it’s not funny. The body is as much a part of the “mind” as the brain is. One cannot exist without the other. You ignore the body at the expense of the mind.

Wrote a piece on this here: