Goncharenko centre 2025-5-18: Travelling, hobbies

Post event notes: See farther down on this page.

Translation: auto translation of this page into Ukrainian

Travelling, hobbies (No prepared talk)

There was no prepared talk by me as this topic was dealt with before and I could tell a lot more than what I told in the earlier meeting about travelling, without any preparation from all my travels in various counties and within Ukraine. So I will go here directly to the post-event section in which I describe what we talked about, especially interesting points.

Post event notes

It is clear that many people don't look at the world like I do, in analysing everything. To me things jump out when travelling, in style of buildings, nature, behaviour of people (though I don't notice or rather become consciously aware of everything as that takes too much thinking, you can't analyse everything). But I tried to get people to describe what they didn't like and liked, and to compare countries, or cities. Some of the things that people didn't like was trash, such as in Bulgaria, as 1 person mentioned. This is what you see also in Ukraine though that is compared to NL, so in Bulgaria it seems to be worse. On my bike trips I usually take a few things that I find along the way and put them in trash or recycling containers when I come across them.

Someone asked about my hobbies. Well, computer games, psychological analysis in a deeper way than in psychology, making pictures of unusual bus stops and buildings, especially with mosaics. In computer games I like older games, not photorealistic where you kill people, but Doom II (1994) for example using recent wads (maps of areas with environment/buildings/enemies) that are very difficult/complex such as Okuplok (example: azuruish: Doom 2: Okuplok Slaughter Map, UV-MAX [TAS] in 2:47:52 ) and Chillax (here is an example of map 21, a TAS (Tool Assisted Speedrun): [TAS] Chillax Map 21 UV Max in 2:25:08.34 by Azuruish ). I like devising strategies and I like to try to play some maps mostly pacifist (not shoot unless absolutely necessary but let the monsters kill each other by getting them to in-fight). I also like rally racing games.

About tea, there were some issues: There was no electric kettle for some reason. But I had brought a 1 litre thermos bottle with tea with the taste Citrus love which was just enough. We got talking a bit about caffeine. I had mentioned before that this doesn't do anything for me on bicycle trips, it doesn't make me feel more invigorated or gets rid of being tired. One of the attendees mentioned that he used it to concentrate for programming and needed 3 cups of tea instead of a cup of coffee. For me help to concentrate is not needed, and caffeine just does nothing to aid that either. Being tired is in any case more a mental thing rather than actually being tired even on 180 km trip lasting all day or any other physical activity. See also the meeting of 2025-4-27. Further interesting was that one of the attendees felt the same as I about the feeling that tea gives :)

Some people consider making music a hobby, others making food. I asked the guy who liked to cook whether he then had no so much desire to eat the food? I have this when baking cookies, then I do not want to eat them. If someone else makes them then I will a lot, if I make them then I only try to see whether some are too brown, and at the start I will try the dough before baking to test if it is good in taste (especially that there is enough salt). He had no issues with that...