Notices by simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Apr-2025 07:46:54 JST 
simsa03
Trump is the largest Rorschach test ever invented. Everyone sees in him what he fears most. Are you people still not yet bored by your own fears and anxieties? Why are you turning the world into a chamber of creeps? What is this with you people that you crave so much for creeps? Don't you see how much you need Trump to provide you with this form of entertainment?
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Apr-2025 07:31:54 JST
simsa03
Everything is "fascism" nowadays. I'm so utterly bored by all the doomerism of those pretending to be sensitive and caring whereas in reality (and in effect) they only abuse the world in their own fashion, objectify the world, to make it a mining pit for their self-righteous screeching. Hey, lovely folks: You abhor "the rich" for exploiting the planet for their own materialistic gains? Look into the mirror: You're doing exactly the same, turning the world into a dumpster of garbage, the result of your outrage and "care".
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Apr-2025 07:19:23 JST
simsa03
Everything is "fascism" nowadays. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 13-Apr-2025 10:55:09 JST
simsa03
The interesting thing about our time is that it provides such ample opportunity for so many forms of doom and fear. 30 years ago people were fond of the manifold of strange, beautiful, and hilarious possibilites, today that is gone. And has been substituted by a rich palette of so many different possibilities of apocalypse. When was our world so incredibly rich of that so that we could choose *simultaneously* from so many convincing ways the world may go down the drain? The richness that lies in this myriad of awfulness is richness nonetheless: Climate, various wars, end of NATo, Russia's imperialism, end of liberal democracy, the rise of evangelical theocracy in the U.S., pandemics, worldwide finacial breakdown... Rarely have been things so rich in dark manifold. Poetic justice, it seems.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 13-Apr-2025 10:38:52 JST
simsa03
And I experience you not as bitter or resentful but, among all the other things, as angry about how the Regime destroys all that comes with care, decency, and beauty. Righteous anger. Which kind of proves my point. Not that I'm in the business of point-proving. But you're a nice illustration of what I have in mind here... keep that, your "community" (writ large and in absence of a better word) will need it. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 13-Apr-2025 10:31:05 JST
simsa03
Yes, I forgot "Heavy Metal", its copies still in a few folders on the shelves :-) -
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 21:45:51 JST 
tinydoctor
Fresh Scissor Dance: Start
A #scissordance is a #collage cut and pasted the old fashioned way, with scissors, glue, and a stack of old magazines. Finished last night.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 11-Apr-2025 22:39:18 JST
simsa03
Perhaps as after-thought:
I miss the magazines of the 90s and 2000s. I still carry my copies of "Whole Earth", "Utne", "Yes", "The Sun", "No Depression", "Kyoto Magazine" – although none of them were exactly mainstream or glossy magazine. Still I like to leaf through fashion magazines ("Harper's Bazaar" still my favourite) when I'm at the newsstand at the train station. And obviously I miss the times when magazines had various formats and ... well, the times then were more playful and ideas seemed to sparkle on every page.
What I resent is the mix of weepiness and entitlement (the latter bordering on arrogance) of people in whom I miss a sense of, well, gratitude for the luck they have had to live in magnificent times. Times when we were neither bothered about gadgets or the realities of war at the next border, where there was time and playfulness to try out ideas, to just indulge in the luxuury of playing with the arts and our daily self-expression as well as self-obsessions. Where we actually thought about the future as something better to achieve, and where the present – and that seems even more important – breathed the air of possibility. Where the idea of endless summer – not that I am personally into festivals and heat and people but you get what I mean – was not a threat that we're already runnig out of groundwater in spring, when we lived only slightly bothered by practical constraints and all the niches were plentiful.
The ecology of niches. The manifold of niches that seems to have shrunk considerably and now bestows a sense of drag and an not rich with scents but the stale fug of Victorian workhouses.
I've never been a real boomer, being too young for that, but even I enjoyed happy times. And what I miss in articles like the one in the post I now reply to is a lack of gratitude. Gratitude towards life, peers, possibilities, the exuberant fun everybody (or at least many) have had. Do you really think this could have been an endless summer? Did you really think that this merry-go.round would provide a retirement plan with which to retire safely and comfortably? How much privilege did you take for granted to think that was an eternal bliss?
Privileged we were, and I come think that privilege, when unacknowledged and appreciated with gratitude, will take away the splendour that comes with it. Privileged people are bitter and resentful because they lack gratitude. And offering gratitude is the first step to change ways of living and career paths.
In fact, it's the lack of gratitude that makes people like those interviewed in the article, wary and resentful, clinging to a better past while making those times all about them.
Don't grow some spine –and that didn't come out more clearly in my first post –, don't grow some spine, grow some gratitude.
And spine will grow from that.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 11-Apr-2025 05:42:08 JST
simsa03
It takes longer than forseen as the process is more complicated than expected. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 11-Apr-2025 01:53:02 JST
simsa03
Steven Kurutz, "The Gen X Career Meltdown" https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/28/style/gen-x-creative-work.html
Reading this piece and listening to his interview on Amanpour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i55CKDCm6dY I'm a bit baffled. What did you people expect?
«Typically, workers in their 40s and 50s are entering their peak earning years. But for many Gen-X creatives, compensation has remained flat or decreased, factoring in the rising cost of living. The usual rate for freelance journalists is 50 cents to $1 per word — the same as it was 25 years ago.»
Yes. And I work as a dishwasher getting € 13/hour pre-tax. I only get this by having joined the union. And by that I now get the same salary again that I got 24 years ago. So, what's the fuss? You knew what you were doing, what you signed up for.
«Aside from lost income, there is the emotional toll — feelings of grief and loss — experienced by those whose careers are short-circuited. Some may say that the Gen X-ers in publishing, music, advertising and entertainment were lucky to have such jobs at all, that they stayed too long at the party. But it’s hard to leave a vocation that provided fulfillment and a sense of identity. And it isn’t easy to reinvent yourself in your 50s, especially in industries that put a premium on youth culture.»
Yes, it's hard. Which is why everyone's grieving when pushed out on the dole or pushed into a field where all that is left are low-paying menial jobs for which such older folks then compete with younger ones. But, again, what did you expect? And do you expect pity now? Capitalism offered you a magnificent time, and now you complain about that very capitalism coming after you? Gee. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 07-Apr-2025 23:17:32 JST
simsa03
Laila Kearney & Seher Dareen, "US utilities grapple with Big Tech's massive power demands for data centers" https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-utilities-grapple-with-big-techs-massive-power-demands-data-centers-2025-04-07/
Demands have risen sharply, sometimes exceeding the total generation capacitiy of electric utilities. But for the utilities forcasts are difficult to make because
• data center customers have placed simultanous orders with different utilities in the same area
• the Trump tariffs make construction costs of new facilities unpredictable
• it is unclear how electricity consumptive AI is really going to get.
Thus building too little capacity may risk brownouts (not "blackouts" as the article states) while building too much may increase prices for consumers and housholds.
#peakrenewables #energy -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 07-Apr-2025 07:45:55 JST
simsa03
Ben Ansell, "Twilight of the Populists? Perhaps it's possible that, despite it all, we have reached peak populism" https://benansell.substack.com/p/twilight-of-the-populists
The first time I read someone who seems to concur with me that we (may) have reached #peakfascism. Nice. Still, there are differences.
For one, Ansell speaks of "peak populism" and I won't use that term as he only names the populism and authoritarianism from the right while ignoring the populism from the left.
And second, Ansell places the change his hunch tells him is in the air with the advent of Trump's "chaotic authoritarianism" which puts European rightwing and authoritarian parties in an uncomfortable bind of siding with Trump and with Putin – a no go for countries like Poland.
I do think we are in times of #peakfascism and that as Ansell suggests it is Trump who lately made the parties of the middle in Europe stronger. But at least in Europe this tendecy has started long before Trump
Anyway, unless we're blown asunder over the next months or years in one way or the other, we may look back at our present time at one of risks, turmoil, and struggle – like every profound change always is.
«Defeating populism in democracies requires an enemy. But it can’t be the populists themselves. That is their very fuel. Of course, they will say, the elites want to destroy us to protect the corrupt swamp. So populists alone won’t do the trick as an enemy.
Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy though. Well that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy. It becomes harder for populists to deflect, to dissimulate effectively. They become glued to the very thing they usually denounce - an outside, foreign force. And they cannot easily unstick themselves. The old lines lose their impact. The mainstream parties see a weakened populist opposition. And they go in for the kill.
That’s one story. Perhaps not the most likely. But over the past weeks it has become a possible narrative. And if there’s anything that the mainstream parties need, it’s a narrative. With good guys and bad guys.» -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 06-Apr-2025 06:22:51 JST
simsa03
Wonderful :-) -
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 06-Apr-2025 06:12:58 JST
tinydoctor
Pictures from the Hands Off protest march in Louisville, Kentucky, a thread: Best of Protest sign: "I'D CALL THEM CUNTS BUT THEY LACK DEPTH AND WARMTH." (I asked "May I take your photo" of all the people of whom I took face to face photos)
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 06-Apr-2025 03:32:42 JST
simsa03
To my comrades and siblings in arms who are out in the nation-wide protests against Trump in the U.S.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9W4hZSSx8 -
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JoeWo (joewo@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 13:55:16 JST 
JoeWo
You watched "The Hunger Games" and sided
with the resistance.
You watched "Star Wars" and sided with
the resistance.
You watched "The Matrix" and sided with
the resistance.
You watched "Divergent" and sided with
the resistance.
You watched "V for Vendetta" and sided with
the resistance.
When it's fiction you understand.
Yet you refuse to see it when it's the reality you're
living in.
Wild.
Needless to say, in none of these movies was the
richest man in the world part of the resistance. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 03-Apr-2025 12:27:00 JST
simsa03
Therapy: I don't believe in it. Or rather: I find it undignified. Therapy is an alliance between client and therapist against the patient. It's a schizophrenic setting from the start, a setting in which the patient will do anything, offer anything, to please both client and therapist. In fact, it's the attempt to switch sides, from being a patient to become the client, thereby re-establishing the strong and decisive ego. That is not healing, that is treachery and betrayal. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Apr-2025 22:26:05 JST
simsa03
What a relief :-) -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Apr-2025 13:51:01 JST
simsa03
Quick. Name something that is not "fascist" nowadays. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Apr-2025 13:46:11 JST
simsa03
Cory Booker did not do a filibuster as his speech was not in the context of the deliberation of a bill. Also, perhaps a bit more knowledge on "fascism" wouldn't hurt.
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