It’s early morning in Germany, and Alexander sits in his tidy home office — coffee cup within reach, laptop glowing with the faint light of unfinished work. The topic of today’s conversation is everyday life skills — those small, invisible habits that make the world run smoothly: cooking, cleaning, planning, or simply remembering to breathe…
Dear enthusiastic readers, Man, do I have a story for you. The Mayor aka Frank and Fruitloop aka Janita, that would be me, have decided to create an advent calendar for Brida members to do small tasks, all Christmassy. We decided to play around with AI, The Mayor used ChatGPT and I used Gemini. The…
I have learned a lot about myself in the last week. Let me start from the beginning. After a wonderful holiday in the Kruger National Park, I came home with a piece of my heart left behind. Visiting the bush has always been my favourite holiday and coming home and trying to fall back in…
It began like a caffeine rush.A British-American host, five faces in tiny squares, and the unmistakable hum of American networking energy — fast, efficient, transactional. Within minutes, the air was thick with talk of “pain points,” “elevator pitches,” and “value alignment.” It was business at the speed of caffeine, all polish and performance. I was…
On a sunny weekday morning between Alsace and northern Germany, two rectangles of light open on the screen. Frank smiles the way broadcasters do when they know a good story is coming; Ralf—cheerful, precise, already caffeinated—waves hello. The topic is everyday life skills, the sort we learn not from textbooks but from kitchens: how to…
Introducing Brida’s November Theme: “Skills” There’s a quiet moment that happens before every new skill begins.A pause between “I can’t” and “Maybe I could.”That’s where November begins. Across the Brida community, we’re opening the month with one deceptively simple word — Skills — but behind it lies a universe: the tools we build, the instincts…
The Weekly Slice | 31 October 2025 This week on The Pineapple, Europe stretched from the kitchen window to the Mediterranean horizon, then outwards through cables, clouds, and conversations that turned distance into insight. The theme across every story was perspective — how we see, how we learn, and how we care. We began in…
It was lunchtime for one of us, night for another, dawn for a third. The screen sliced the world into four gentle windows: Janita in South Africa hosting, Frank (“the Mayor”) in a quiet French village, Rosii in the noise and brightness of São Paulo, and Monica in Adelaide, where the day had already given…
There’s a particular electricity to conversations that begin with a laugh and end with a long, reflective sigh—the kind you’d overhear at a sunlit table where coffee cools and the world briefly makes sense. This week’s Peeling Potatoes lands exactly there: a final episode in a month-long exploration of “life,” recorded across continents by Frank…
Professor Bruce Lloyd invites ChatGPT and DeepSeek to read, reflect, and respond. Here’s a summary and critique of “Atlantic Corridor | Life: Borders, Beliefs, and the Beautiful Ordinary” (by Mayor, 30 October 2025): (ChatGPT) Summary The essay captures a reflective, cross-continental conversation between three participants—Ismar (Brazil), Ritesh (India), and the Mayor (France)—who meet virtually to discuss how geography,…
