55 posts
A histoforensic investigation into the “death” of an organic Argentine icon, and its terrifying, trademarked resurrection. Chapter 1: The Victim (The Organic, Street-Level Tango) Around the late 1980s and early 1990s, a “body” was discovered on the dance floors of Buenos Aires. The victim was the authentic, deeply organic social tango of the barrios. During […]
A histoforensic investigation into the “death” of an Argentine icon, as reported by internet sources. PRELIMINARY FINDINGS: The Tango that Died Around the 1960s, a “body” was discovered in the milongas of Buenos Aires [100]. It was the “Golden Age” of Tango, a smooth, intimate, highly stylized victim [107]. This tango was an archetype: a […]
This is a continuation of my previous thoughts on how we present tango in 2026. The initial text sparked an productive discussion on Facebook. Among the many voices, one specific comment from Matias prompted me to continue writing. Matias argued that the traditions of tango are exactly what brought tango here into 2026. They essentially […]
In an era that moves at a relentless pace, we find ourselves constantly overwhelmed by information overload and an endless cycle of bad news. We are navigating economic pressures, gentrified cities, and a digital landscape largely driven by outrage culture, superficial interactions, and global unrest. As a result, the modern world can often feel loud, […]
See also Email Privacy — A Plain-Language Guide: The Problem, the Promises, and What You Actually Get This is the second part of a plain-language guide to digital privacy. Part One covered email specifically — the problems, the promises, and what services like Proton Mail actually deliver. This part broadens the lens: if email has […]
Article was compiled by Perplexity. The Problem: Your Inbox Is Not a Private Letter Most people think of email like a sealed envelope — private, between sender and recipient, opened only when it arrives. The reality is more like a postcard that passes through dozens of post offices. Everyone who handles it can read it, […]
You may know that I have been running TMD for 17 years now, and every now and then I look at the data, and try to make some sense of what I see. What started as a 1.5h exercise with the TMD data, VS Code and Github Copilot, is evolving still. I am learning how […]
Marco posted a video blog this week[1] responding directly to a comment I’d left on one of his earlier posts.[2] I’d written that from the outside, he looked like he was also just selling “the real tango” — the same claim everyone makes. He pushed back: he’s not selling anything, he said. He’s sharing his experience […]
In October 2019, Facebook ran automated content moderation sweeps that removed thousands of community pages globally — and non-English-language communities got hit hardest. Researchers have since confirmed this in peer-reviewed studies: Facebook's 2019 classifiers were structurally unequal, with documented overtriage of Arabic, Amharic, and other non-Western language communities (Technology Science, 2025; Modern Languages Open, 2023). Pages across Europe and South […]
Nobody gets excited about open standards. They have names like “W3C Recommendation” and “RFC 7033.” They’re made by committees. They take years to finalize. And they’re the most powerful tools we have. The Magic Trick You Already Use Every Day Your phone can call any other phone in the world. Doesn’t matter if it’s an […]
Our tango communities were built on Facebook. Milongas get announced there, groups get managed there, new dancers find us there. It’s essential. Irreplaceable. Or so many of us think. In December 2025, The Guardian reported that more than 50 organisations — abortion access providers, queer groups, and reproductive health networks — had their accounts removed […]
A few weeks ago, a tango friend asked me: “So what’s this fediverse thing you keep going on about?” I started explaining protocols and servers and ActivityPub — and I could see him glazing over. So I stopped. And tried something different. “You use email, right?” “Obviously.” “You’re on Gmail. I’m on my own server. […]
Tagline: Stop Obsessing Over Gender Balance. Start Solving for Role Balance. https://gemini.google.com/share/54e15f8cdb12 1. The Elevator Pitch (30 Seconds) “We’ve all been to dance events where the gender ratio is perfectly 50/50, yet people are still sitting on the bench. Why? Because Gender Balance is not the same as Role Balance. The Party Balancer is an […]
“Same tango. Different masks.” A few days ago on Facebook (link). The following text is a summary of the discussion that followed. It’s by far from complete, but brings up perspectives that may be unexpected for the naive tango dancer. It doesn’t reflect my opinion or experience fully, but I had a laugh compiling the […]
This is a must-listen to episode for any tanguer* about our shared “ body technology” that we call tango. There are so many lines and sentences in there that should become postcards and advertisements for tango, globally. https://leadfollow.buzzsprout.com/1735834/episodes/17539917-what-makes-tango-so-compelling-sharna-fabiano-dan-istrate
“A conference about communities in tango? Can it get more niche than that? I just want to dance.” You probably thought that, when or if you heard about Tango Connects Berlin Conference (which happened for the second time already this year). Well, it happened. And it was great and amazing, and we learned so much, […]
WordPress Calendar Plugins (Oct 2025) Note: this is a deep research done by ChatGPT and should be taken as such. We evaluated leading WordPress calendar/event plugins against the requirements. Key candidates include The Events Calendar, Events Manager, Event Organiser, My Calendar, WP Event Manager, and EventPrime. Below we discuss each, citing their documentation on recurrence, […]
It is a chicke and egg problem: if there are no users and no content, new users won’t come. But if they don’t come, there is no users and content. So: do we need a way to create a big bang roll-out? Not necessarily. Others think alike, for a long time already: http://scripting.com/stories/2008/05/05/boostrappingADecentralized.html I always […]
This is based on ChatGPT DeepResearch (2025-08-04) August 2025 – WordPress Plugin & Theme Development with Copilot GitHub Copilot’s latest agentic features can transform your WordPress development workflow. By combining Copilot’s autonomous Agent Mode and interactive Chat Mode across VS Code and GitHub, developers can offload routine tasks, generate code, and even have Copilot propose […]
The Vision (2025+) Facebook is no longer the only place to learn who’s dancing where tonight. With the open web (not the closed ad-owned social platforms) you can publish once and have your milongas appear: Below is an updated guide that shows the full journey from publisher ? aggregator ? regional calendar ? dancer. 1 […]
Here is the result of a DeepResearch task with the free version of Gemini using the prompt “Create a list with all websites that deal with tango Argentinian, and offer some insight into the culture, experience, or psychology of the dance. I am not looking for teachers or events.”. Argentine Tango: A Cultural, Experiential, and […]
I didn’t know the man.Never saw his face nor knew his name.Beautiful woman in a close embrace,And suddenly only silence and everyone’s eyes. Most of us didn’t know the guy.Everyone gave all the help they could.And five minutes felt like an hour.The milonguero fighting for his life. We all knew the man.Milonguero, traveling for connection.Finding […]
This is part two of my response to Filip’s questions. Apps & Fediverse Oh, what a bummer this is: there are no super polished native mobile apps for most of Fediverse’s platforms and services. Why? Because creating and maintaining mobile apps is expensive, and most of these fediverse services are made by volunteers. Except, for […]
Here is the result of a DeepResearch task with the free version of Gemini about “all existing podcasts for tango”. A Comprehensive List of Podcasts Exploring Argentine Tango Argentine tango, a dance and musical genre steeped in history and cultural significance, has garnered a global following. For enthusiasts and those curious to learn more, podcasts […]
Filip from Brnosaires reached out with some questions. Here’s my long answer: Great questions! I will answer 1, 2 and 3 below. Why ActivityPub over Nostr and Matrix? When I was researching options, the protocol was never in focus. It was the core use cases for tango: Events, Connections, Groups, Sharing, Photos. Additionally, we only […]
What we will need to understand is: a non-Facebook place will not be like Facebook. It may look like it, or similar, but it won’t be that. This means. We will lose some things, and need to change some behavior and customs.
So, you have taken the first step into a friendica server? And you log in, and then what? Here are the first three steps you should take: Step 1: New Members Section After the first log-in, it will ask you for a profile picture. You can do that now, or later. If you skip, you […]
One of the key ideas of a federated and connected Tangoverse is that we can re-use existing web sites and content, and bring that into the social networking apps. The common ways to do that are 1) RSS feeds, 2) ActivityPub extensions and 3) custom code. This post is just about including RSS feeds. RSS […]
I am currently digging deeper into fediverse applications for the tangoverse as described before. It was a great occasion to reset my virtual server and configure it using yunohost, which allows for much more easy management and operations, I hope, than my old setup. Currently in the test bed are the social network apps Friendica, […]
One of the big advantages of Fediverse is that many different services can interact with each other. That doesn’t mean that you can log in and use every server with the same identity, but you can follow and comment on most things you might see in a Fediverse stream in some way. Also, every service […]
It’s 2025 already, and the world is expected to change dramatically (?) this year. I am expecting more #enshittification of Facebook due to the current situation in the USA (trend towards less regulation, and more extreme populism and online sharing of hate-speech and fake news, plus AI-generated content, …). Twitter — now X — has […]
In the last few months, I have been working with different AI tools, from ChatGPT, to Claude, Copilot and Perplexity. Each has their own advantages, but they also have enough disadvantages — and they are all subscription-based, and you don’t really want to subscribe to them all at the same time. Of course, there’s also […]
Wonderful news! Finally, the “Event Bridge for ActivityPub” has been released as a WordPress plugin. It allows for enabling the event post type created by many of the Events plugins for WordPress to be accessed via the ActivityPub feed of a page. I have just installed it on RNT – Rhein-Neckar-Tango, which hosts the event […]
The following is a summary of a thread on facebook with >100 comments. It aims it create a summary of the various perspectives and was created using AI. Introduction Tango, a dance rich in tradition and passion, is undergoing a significant transformation. The trend of dancing a single tanda (a sequence of dances) with a […]
The previous entry “The experience of flow in dance” was written by AI. How? It uses an algorithm that helps the AI bootstrap the writing process by asking itself questions, and then using these questions for web research, outlining, and writing. Quite fascinating. Application Link: storm · Streamlit (stanford.edu) Here is a screenshot of the […]
Please note: the article below was fully written by AI, without human interaction. It is written using an application called STORM based on current research by a group of smart scientists at Stanford (paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14207) Download: Flow, a psychological state coined by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, represents a condition of deep absorption and engagement in […]
A lot has been written about “arrogance” or “snobbery” in tango, especially felt by newcomers into tango scenes or travellers. “Why don’t they dance with me”? Read this: My primary hypothesis goes back to the notion of *trust* in tango, which is an absolute must when you intimately engage with a stranger in each others’ […]
Part 5 of a series. How to use Midjourney to create tango visuals.
Part 4 of a series. How to use Stable Diffusion via NightCafe to create tango visuals.
Part 3 of a series. How to use DALL-E via ChatGPT to create tango visuals.
Part 2 of a series. How to use DALL-E via Bing to create tango visuals.
Over the last weeks, I have played with different Ai models to generate pictures of tango dancers. Sometimes with good results, sometimes with not-so-good results. In general, there are two main areas of problems with the images: Cliche and Hands.
From the box of things organizers need to deal with, in case you wanted some insights about guest list management. Scenario A “Single leader signs up for a marathon, and gets in – of course. A few days later, he sends an email – sorry guys, I forgot to mention who my partner is”. Scenario […]
A few more thoughts for project TangoVerse: As detailed in What makes Facebook so useful?, one key feature for an alternative to Facebook for the tango community are events, both from the organizing and marketing side, but also from the participating side, especially for events that attract traveling dancers. I think local milongas are often […]
Today, I found out about a new project that wants to bring events management through WordPress into the Fediverse (@blog). Which, if it works, would be amazing, especially because there are so many great event plugins for WordPress already… for example, RNT – Rhein-Neckar-Tango uses the excellent The Event Calendar plugin. The team is collaborating […]
One of the blog posts that I personally am still searching for is the last post of the series “The tango matrix”, where the author spills secrets of “what really is happening at the milonga, and once you know that, you can never go back”. The series was written by Dave Donatiu (can’t find a […]
Admit it: if you are a tango dancer, you have tried it. And failed to create something interesting. Usually there are issues with everything that makes tango interesting: the embrace (position, heads, arms, hands), the expressions, the pose. The AI reproduces stereotypes mostly, and doesn’t understand hands and basic dance anatomy. However, with some seed […]
Previously (Preventing memory loss for tango blogs) I shared how I wanted to get old tango blogs to be archived on archive.org so we don’t lose the stories and ideas from our collective memory. A reader commented that she also has one of the blogs on my list, and would like some individual posts be […]
Once upon a time there was this great tango blog, but… I can’t find it anymore. It has been abandoned by its owner, and the content is lost forever. Wait, don’t we have https://archive.org for cases like this? Yes, and no. Content is not automatically archived. Someone needs to start the archival process. Let’s make […]
Here’s an idea for making my home tango community better. I have provided the regional calendar since 2007, and it contains a calendar of milongas, workshops, and some lessons, a list of announcements, and everything together not just as a portal website, but also as a regular weekly newsletter that gives an update on what […]
The tango network has been using Facebook for more than a decade, and many are using Facebook predominantly for their tango life, which doesn’t just include the dance as an activity, but also a great way to make friends, participate in community, or travel. Tango has been proven over and over again that it becomes […]
Last weekend this question came up at a milonga: If we move away from Facebook, how will that work? Certainly there would be a phase where we will need to be on Facebook still, while building the alternative? Of course, and it won’t be easy. Especially because we don’t yet really know if people (“everyone”) […]
Here are the current test setups for the “An alternative to facebook?” that I have set up:
A few years ago (2015-ish) I started a Facebook group called “An Alternative to Facebook for the Tango Community“. It was meant to attract interested community members to explore what is out there and to contain ideas and evaluations of possible options. Facebook back then was quite good and still had graph search, and wasn’t […]