Category: Expat Stuff

“It’s Gonna Be Our Year!”

On 2026-01-01

In Daily Life, Expat Stuff, Grimbergen, The Algorithm

I don’t know who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to let me have so many green-tea-and-gins last night but they were a complete idiot.

Name probably rhymes with bug or rug or something similar.

Funnily, it wasn’t the gin that was the real problem. Had I mixed 2-3 shots of gin with a liter of water and drank that I’d probably feel pretty swell today. It was the couple of liters of green tea that kept me up to something like 03:00.

One year I’m just going to go to bed for New Year’s. Since Belgian parties are just getting started at midnight, it probably won’t be for a couple of years, mind.

It’s a gray day in Grimbergen which is just sort of saying, “It’s a day.” Kind of nice, though. Not too cold. Not too loud. Windy in a pleasant way. Noon but feels either earlier or later. A kind of liminal space.

I’m sitting here next to two open windows letting in 5C air and giving a thought to the standard thought that we all do on 1 Jan: resolutions. I swore off the whole thing a few years back, mostly, but sometimes they are fun. Sometimes they are hopeful.

Over on the Doug Alone, I talked about (mostly) leaving crowdfunding. That’s one of them. We’ll see how that goes.

A couple of other bigger ones in a more general sense of things (since crowdfunding is pretty much 100% tied into my solo roleplaying hobby) are (a) reducing gamification in my life and (b) generally increasing privacy awareness. And (a) is going to impact a lot of other potential resolutions.

“It’s Going to Be Our Year!”

Before I get to that, let me give you some insight into the core Doug experience. Last night, after getting the first green-tea-and-gin in myself, I started sending out pre-Happy-New-Year’s messages to a few friends and while the messages tended to be personalized, in very nearly all of them I joked about the phrase, “This is going to be our year!” Those who get my sense of humor appreciated I was both making fun of arbitrary goalposts and whispering the foulest curse of them all: hope.

It helps you have say it with a shaky voice like a person saying, “Maybe the cave troll isn’t home, we should go into the dark cave and find out.”

Joyfully nihilistic curses aside, maybe it will be. I don’t know. I just take things as they come, mostly.

(a) Reducing Gamification

This is frankly the biggest one for mental health and general well-being. I have no specific numbers (which feels like a pun) but the gamification of every single aspect of our life feels like it is increasing. Earn points for purchases. Day-week-month streaks in every app. Add five friends to earn a point. Allow GenAI to access your data? Well, we’ll do it anyhow but if you give it away you can get a badge to show off on your profile that no one will ever click.

I pay money to upgrade the “freemium” experience of Duolingo, Geoguessr, and NYTimes Games. All three are big about pushing daily plays and uses [“Please stay addicted to our services”]. Badges. Achievements. I “buy” (lease? not sure what the proper legal term would be) books on the Kindle and it sends me notifications about not letting my streak expire. When I started deleting social media, I was seeing it more, there. Stuff that has no business setting weekly/monthly/annual goals have started bundling it.

Back 20 projects on Crowdfundr.ai? You get platinum status. There are no benefits but still we love you like your parents never did. Spend $2000 on gachas? You get 1.25 points per $100 spent instead of just 1 point.

It’s an incessant noise. And the fact that so rarely do hitting any of these milestones unlock anything besides maybe meaningless in-game currency shows how effective it is to just offer up a hexagonal png to keep people reaching for a goal that only exists to increase company profits through addictive behavioral programing.

When I was first workshopping this resolution, I thought about flat out cutting out any app or system that had such systems baked in only I realized, relatively quickly, that I would more or less be able to not access the things I actually use.

Instead, the idea is to simply ignore the badges, achievements, streaks, and other stupid bullshit designed to increase addiction. If I didn’t read today, no more panic reading a chapter to keep my Kindle streak going. If I don’t feel like doing Duolingo, just let the streak die. In some cases, this will likely be tied into getting rid of some freemium upgrades. So it goes.

The irony of this is that it kind of negates the concept of resolutions. I do want to read more. Play more of my old favorite games. I want to solo play more. Take bigger risks. Lose weight. Work on fixing my ankle.

I will likely have to compromise to some degree. It can be hard to lose weight without tracking calories somewhat. It can be hard to budget better without a budget.

Just absolutely no apps to do the data for me.

(b) Increasing Privacy

Which brings us to the other major resolution. Find ways to increase my overall privacy. This one is harder to specify without sounding a bit like a conspiracy nut. Or, perhaps, it is easier to specify:

Stop giving private information to unlock upgrades,
Use more offline stuff and fewer things that require third party tracking,
Avoid using cloud-based systems more, especially now that so many cloud-based systems have decided that using them is akin to giving your personal documents to their AI systems,
Using my own storage back-up solutions, own media servers, own email servers, etc.
Using more encryption that isn’t designed to expose the data to the host,
etc

There are so many little ways this one will show up. It makes me think of something that Northerlion (the Twitch Streamer) said. He mentioned that getting cash from the ATM feels like a borderline criminal act because you get the cash and then no one really tracks how you spend it. The sense that if we just use the stuff we own, we are going dark.

After the move to Belgium, I have been watching more stuff streaming from my personal server and through physical media, partially because I would have to use VPN to watch my American-media-libraries despite paying a lot of real money to build them up and still being an American citizen.

And one of the aspects of this is that when I put in that DVD/Blu-Ray/CD then no one but myself really knows what I am watching or playing. If I play a CD a dozen times, it doesn’t get tracked and used to sell me something. I can watch a movie a dozen times and it is up to me to watch trailers to see what else I might like.

We’ve been so conditioned to accept The Algorithm(TM)’s “help” to fill every waking hour with media that we are giving up the ability to own these pieces of happiness. It is becoming increasingly obvious how much companies don’t want us to own our own media now that I kind of have to own it to enjoy the things I enjoy.

Just look at videogames. Now you buy a code in a physical case and you attach that code to your account and if that library every goes away, you bought a physical case in a store to temporarily lease a game.

Or movies where you buy a blu-ray and they want you to use the “free digital copy” code so they can keep better track of who has what. Some Blu-rays and DVDs have features that require you to access the internet to see fully.

“If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” is a lie. You are the customer, always, but also the product. It’s kind of up to us to set the line and we are currently losing and pretending its inevitable.

And that’s…madness.

Happy (American) Thanksgiving!

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-11-27

In Daily Life, Expat Stuff, Food

My thanksgiving lunch was a couple of slices of avocado toast and a tomato. I might splurge for an orange for desert but right now I’m fine.

In fact, my main “celebration” will be to walk down to the Apotheek in a couple of hours and get a flu shot and COVID booster.

I apologize in advance for the crankiness that will show up this afternoon.

That and I finished up the second session for my solo play of the Dwarven Hall campaign. I know, I know, you are impressed.

The actual “Thanksgiving Dinner” for us will be this Saturday or Sunday, depending on how things go. I am not sure about the precise menu, but I think I’ll aim to make a vegan roast (using gluten, tofu, and mushrooms), some vegan mac-and-cheese, and maybe a few other things. Dressing will be different this year because cornmeal is different, here. I might try and figure something out or just make some kind of bread-crumb type dish that fits a similar niche. And then….spinach? I don’t know. I think I will miss cranberry sauce the most.

It goes without saying but American-style Thanksgiving is not a thing here in Belgium. We have different feast days here. Presumably. Hmm, I will need to look that up.

I’m sure there are some expat clubs doing something and various expat families having their own thing. We have generally had our own relatively quiet version for years so the adjustment is relatively minor. I know for others such holidays are a much bigger deal.

What we do have is Black Friday. Sort of. According to some locals, it is more recent, but there have been a few “BLACK FRIDAY DEALS” cropping up in the scant shopping space I inhabit.

America’s biggest export will always be capitalist frenzy.

Speaking of…I might actually make an order from Amazon US to catch up on a few Blu-Ray and book releases from November.

Besides that, I am off to enjoy a few quiet minutes. Then get my double jabs.

Still Getting Used to Dark Mornings

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-20

In Belgium, Daily Life, Discoveries, Expat Stuff, Memories

I know it’s a common features of expat blogs, of which this tangentially one, to focus on “10 things which shocked me!” type content but while there have been two dozen stacks of things to which I have had to adjust, I am not sure if many are really “shocking.” There’s a few I might share because of humor and anthropological studies type reasons, but overall I am pretty boring in that regard. Stuff is kind of the same but definitely not the same the world over.

There is one thing of which I was previously aware intellectually but in everyday practice has taken a bit of adjustment: the later morning sunrises.

That was taken at something like 07:08 this morning [2025-10-20]. My phone camera slightly lightened it. The sky was more true black at that angle though the light pollution of Brussels was pushing through a bit to the south.

I think you should at least get the idea. Squint a little while looking at it.

I appreciate this is a reality for millions of people and not really a big deal. It is fairly new to me, though.

I grew up in southern [aka Lower] Alabama in the United States. For most of my life, there was a rough idea of sunrise and sunset being similar throughout the year (there’s a four hour swing but Daylight Savings Time imbalances this to the evening side). 7am was pretty definitely post-dawn. 4pm was pre-Dusk. It got fuzzier after that.

Up until my 30s, all of my travel was across the American Southeast region. Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. Probably in that order, though maybe more LA than GA. I think the furthest north I had ever been was Norfolk, VA. The furthest west was near-ish New Orleans, LA.

Occasionally I would read books like Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and it would talk about the sunlight fading at 11pm [aka, 23:00 in here terms] and I would be confused. I was aware of stuff like the so-called “midnight sun” but it took me a long time to really appreciate the difference. Even when I traveled to places like Boston, it never quite stuck.

My trip to Scotland, near Glasgow, in 2018 was probably the first time where I had that all important realization of proper first-hand experience. Around midsummer, the days were delightfully long which was probably terrible for jet lag but it was nice having a practicum.

It was similar to student-era me figuring out that integrating a curve = acceleration & area under curve = total distance traveled by an accelerating body. The kind of thing I could rationalize but actually using the math to predict real life objects and extrapolating that into new formulae was a big deal for me in my astrophysics days. Or when I began to work out multidimensional math and how frames of reference could be shifted and calculated in high school.

All that said, moving from a place with something like an 4-hour swing to a place with an 8-hour swing has been kind of neat. The ultimate practicum. I’m sure I’ll be fussy around mid-winter but we’ll see.

Visiting the Museum of Illusions

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-11

In Belgium, Brussels, Discoveries, Expat Stuff, Photos, Places

I’m going to be absolutely real: I suck as a tourist.

In this context, I am not a tourist right now but I am a currently a long-term visitor in a strange land — and I feel like Belgium counts as a strange, if delightful, land — who at least generally should be engaging in a bit in the culture.

Which I totally do. I talk to magpies and crows and hang out with cats while just enjoying nature and some old streets.

I finally decided to correct my first statement with a visit to Brussels’ Museum of Illusions with Barbara and Kaz. It is a smaller collection of full-sized illusions, mirror tricks, and puzzles. Kind of place you could spend an hour or two. It is quite nice and absolutely surrounded by all kinds of shops and destinations if you wanted to make a day of it.

If nothing else, take these two points to heart:

It is well worth a visit and has some cool trinkets in its gift shop.
My photo skills inside sucked more normal so I do not have a lot of photos to show it off, alas.

The Museum at a Glance

Once you get up the escalator/elevator there is a bit of confusion about where to go because it is a highly visual place. You come up about 1/3 the way into the exhibits. My natural tendency to curve right almost lead me to enter into the place without paying. Barbara had been there before — as had Kaz, who was joining us very slightly later — and helped point out the desk to pay for entry. I would have spotted it eventually, no doubt. It is not hidden, just also not super obvious compared to some of the kooky fun on display.

Once paid — €17.50 for adults, €14.50 for children of Barbara’s age — you then have the option to get a lock and key to put your stuff into a locker, which nice, and the guy behind the counter double checked that we did not have balance issues — I am a fall risk, after all — or epilepsy — I am just light sensitive enough that one of the attractions (The Vortex) was pushing it for me.

There a few dozen features. They are numbered but the precise count escapes my memory. Maybe half of those are fairly quick images or wall-mounted illusions. The kind of thing where one line looks longer than another. They did a good job of curating some of the more interesting ones and several have been redesigned to have some interactive elements.

Then there are several larger, more interactive pieces. The aforementioned Vortex is the larger carnival classic of walking through a dark, swirling tunnel of lights. That was my one mistake. I should probably have skipped it.

Besides that you have rooms with angled floors and carefully designed wallpaper so that a person on one side looks a lot larger than the other or looks like they are leaning.

My favorites tended to be the pair of rooms playing with lights and the handful of exhibits based on mirrors. The above image show the top of my head is a fun little item where angled mirrors allow you to see yourself and the room from multiple angles. That’s a single photo showing more or less every angle of myself.

There’s an “infinite room” where you can throw your own rave party with hundreds of yourselves. An upside down room where you can your best “clinging to the ceiling.” A hatch that looks like an infinite spot into darkness where you can take “falling” photos.

Then there are a trio of large scale puzzles. A pair of several kaleidoscopes that make for some trippy pictures. A forced perspective chair.

In general, the place is pretty heavy with photo opportunities and your enjoyment will be based on (a) how many fun photos and videos you want take; and (b) how carefully you pay attention to the balance-or-epilepsy warnings. Those wanting a more hands-on variation of learning about light and optics tricks can get some good learning done.

The staff and the other attendees were all perfectly chill and it was a heavily positive experience. It is not necessarily a regular outing type of place but I imagine we’ll go back a few times while in the country.

A Day in the Life: #17659

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-04

In Coding, Daily Life, Expat Stuff, Food, Home Care, Music, Music Video

Woke up at 6am to get ready for my morning workout and spent a few minutes, as I do every morning, resting in bed to give my joints time to “calm down.” The arthritis/inflammation-meets-disability tends to be worse after prolonged activity and when I first wake up. I’m sure there’s math to explain the latter. Just know that most of my mornings start with a “Daddy, Chill!” moment between me and my aches.

While resting up for that ten- to twenty-minutes that it takes for my body to realize it is indeed ok to get out of bed, I heard a noise that sounded like someone showering which caught me off guard because I was pretty sure I was the only one awake. Then a few seconds later the wind hit and it turned out that Grimbergen was getting a LOT of wind and rain. It was kind of fun getting up in the pre-sunrise darkness and just watching the rain slam into the side of the house.

Pictured above is my cat, Turkey, pondering why the outside was so blustery. Taken in the moments right before sunrise [the light outside is mostly the streetlights but you can see the sky starting to lighten]. It’s a bit blurry because it was taken in fair darkness and it’s hard to get a photo of a cat while your phone is doing night-photo mode.

At some point I need to find my Nikon and try taking some more proper photos. Not just of weather but also like, you know, heavily macroed shots of rusty nails and stuff.

A Return to “A Day in the Life”

Holy crap, it has been a while since I have used that post title template. In fact, I had to dig through the back-end a bit to find out the previous “Day in the Life” was #14194. That’s over 3000 days ago. Also finding it made me a bit sad. It dealt with a fair amount of negativity. 2016 was a hell of a year. Blogs are truly a double-headed beast.

Just to clarify, in case you are wondering, the Day in the Life posts show the number of days I have been alive, not the number of posts I have made. I used Google to calculate it this time but somewhere in my stacks of files is a Python script I made when I would post these “just stuff I did today” type posts on the old Dickens of a Blog. I should find that. Marvel at how my code used to look. Good marvel? Bad marvel? I don’t know.

#!/usr/bin/python
import datetime
YEAR = 1977
MONTH = 05
DAY = 30

d = "%Y/%m/&d"
today = datetime.date.today()
birth = datetime.date(YEAR, MONTH, DAY)
daysinlife = today - birth
print daysinlife.days

You know, frankly, that’s not too bad. It is clearly Python 2 era. And from the time period where I tended to purposefully over-write code so it was easier for me to chunk and fix later. I’m not even sure what one of those lines is doing in this context. It’s like I copy and pasted it from some other function and just changed the bits I need to change. Let’s show some confidence and fix that up, slightly:

import datetime
print((datetime.date.today() - datetime.date(1977, 5, 30)).days+1)

Voila.

Despite being a person who has been sharing stuff online since the late 90s, and having multiple blogs of which only three have been named “Dickens of a Blog,” it is still a bit odd for me to just share my personal stuff without some major context to sort it through. And possibly that’s because when I get personal I tend to get a bit self-incriminating and self-deprecating. I become that stranger on the bus that starts complaining about his ex-wife and his brother’s dog and stuff his boss said. I mean, maybe not that bad but you get the idea.

At any rate, the “Day in the Life” series was a way for me to have a few dips into those waters on the occasional basis without dealing solely with myself as the main topic. It’s nice to have them back in principle whether or not I use “the brand” all that often. Like most Days in the Life, it is less about a day and more about a bunch of random stuff that has accumulated.

EDIT: Shortly after posting this I realized that my code was still wrong. The way I am wording it would need to include a zero-day. As in, on the date of my birth I would be considering that “Day 1”. I could either set the day to the day before my birth or add 1. I added in a cheeky “+”. That means the title of this is off by a day, but eh. So it goes…

Warning: this one might get a bit over-long as I get back into the balance.

Pommelien Thijs’s Gedoe

Pommelien Thijs’s Gedoe — note, link is in Dutch/Nederlands — came out yesterday so I got to listen to that for a bit. Then more this morning while doing my workout. I really enjoy it.

When we first moved to the Flemish-Brabant/Brussels region, I was trying to absorb some language by listening to local news and such. Thijs kept coming up right as I was breaking into the point of following the slightest bit along. Looking up her music videos, I came across “Ongewoon” [in the context of the song, the line is “Alles voelt zo ongewoon” which is “Everything feels so unusual” but possibly “peculiar” or “strange” or “unfamiliar”…the feeling you get when some preconceived emotions are actually out of whack with expectations] and “Het Midden” [“the middle”] (below):

I enjoyed both of those and other stuff I could find. I’m not a pop-head but still, it was an album I wanted to pick up as I return to getting more physical media, again. I pre-ordered it and ordered her first and got them both in the mail.

The issue at first was how to listen to them. Neither my desktop or laptop have optical disk drives. This means I had to a) get out my external drive that was a still in its box from the move, b) get a voltage converter that we bought early on but have not used yet, c) hook a into b and then plug that into a computer. Then tweak/fix the files I ripped. Being me, I then zipped and cataloged the files and moved them into two different backups.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a proper review of an album so I am thinking about using that as a guinea pig of such. Maybe. Maybe not.

Barbara’s Assembly

Barbara’s P3 class had their first assembly at her school, yesterday. She spent a fair amount of her own time building up wings using old construction paper and Amazon boxes:

This was all for about half a minute when she was on a stage pretending to be a bird of the Amazon while her class talked about education around the world and how environment impacts education opportunities.

NOTE: I have a photo B wearing her wings but I asked her if she was ok with me sharing and she said no. Since one of the reasons I pulled out of social media because of a personal disagreement with parents oversharing elements of their children’s lives to the wide public, I respect her decision. She was ok with me sharing the wings, though.

Between her planning and construction of a costume largely on her own; her sense of stage direction; and her (at one point) helping another student to remember his lines during the show: she’s a natural stage manager. At eight, she better at handling the chaos of stagecraft than I ever was.

Finally, an American-Style Peanut Butter!

There is actually very little American food that I miss over here with the slight exceptions of Back Home™ has a better selection of types of beans and, via mail order, an overall better selection of TVP (textured vegetable proteins) shapes/sizes. There are plenty of beans here and some variations of soy product [and cheaper soya drink/milk and tofu], but it required some adjustment.

Still, I’ve had a few sad moments where I miss American style peanut butter (or pindakaas [peanut cheese] in Nederlands). Yesterday, swinging by the Carrefour in Vilvoorde, I found this beauty:

I have not been this excited about 2g of added sugars per serving for a minute. I mean, compared to some American foods, this peanut butter is still relatively a healthy food. And, most importantly, it tastes amazing.

I’m not throwing any shade at the availability of plant-based Nutella or the decent selection of other nut butters including some quite decent Belgische pindakaas. It just, good salty-sweet peanut butter hits different.

“Breaking” and Fixing a Garage Door

One aspect of the move that cannot be overstated is how much the large beats are sometimes easy to adapt towards since a lot of support tends to exist to learning the language, replacing electronics, etc but the small beats can practically haunt you as you learn what some minor device or some local custom means. Learning how to say, “Pardon, waar is het toilet?,” can take less time than figuring out how to ask what a small symbol might mean on food packaging when everyone around you thinks of such things as derived from universal common sense. Even somewhat universal symbols can shift slightly enough to imply different things. This is well, good, and expected. Language is a product of the people using it. It just sometimes catches you out.

One way you adjust, which is to say one way that I adjust, is just occasionally pushing a button or pulling a string to see what happens. Buy the product. Tap the card.

This morning, post-workout, I realized our garage had a pull cord and so I went, “Hmm, ik kan aan dit koord trekken.” And then a loud pop answered my call as the cord turned out to be a release to detach the door from the mechanism.