Notices by simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 23:19:46 JST 
simsa03
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
—Christopher Hitchens
(Hitchens' Razor) -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Sep-2025 23:40:23 JST
simsa03
With regard to the Genocide Resolution on Gaza ¹ by the "International Association of Genocide Scholars", this interview on I24news ² claims that only a minority of scholars (one quarter) had voted on it at all; that dissenting scholars were promised a "townhall" to voice their concerns but that this "townhall" never took place; and that even the authors of the resolution are unknown.
The claim of the Resolution (page 2) that the International Court of Justice found in three provisional measures in the case of South Africa vs. Israel that "it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide in its attack in Gaza" has already been dismissed in 2024 by Joan Donoghue, president of the ICJ at the time of the ruling.
She clarified that the statements of the court only meant that South Africa had a right to bring its case against Israel and that *if* the claims are *eventually* proven these then *may* fall under the United Nations’ Convention on Genocide. Until then, the Palestinians had 'plausible rights to protection from genocide' that may be at risk of being irreparably damaged. ³
Yuk! If "Genocide Scholars" come up with such charges (already disseminated by the BBC), they better work more professionally and less ideologically. But Israel has been smeared for many other atrocities, so one gets used to it.
¹ https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on-Gaza-FINAL.pdf
² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUv2FY9bOzE
³ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3g9g63jl17o -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Sep-2025 12:26:55 JST
simsa03
"A Man Who Aligned Japan with the Nazis" https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/3016102/
On Oshima Hiroshi (1886-1975), wartime ambassador of Japan to Germany and his efforts to form an alliance between Japan, Germany, and Italy ("Tripartite Pact") which pushed Japan to enter the war. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 29-Aug-2025 06:53:40 JST
simsa03
Watching "The Death of Stalin" (2017) with the immensely funny Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev and Simon Russell Beale as Lavrenti Beria. What a treat. Of course, I always have Putin in mind. May a comedy remove him from power, with a little help by Mozart. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 28-Aug-2025 11:12:15 JST
simsa03
What I dislike in modern video games is their explicitness and their directness. That not only creates stale game environments but also forces developers and audiences to emphasize graphics, visual effects, sensationalism, and with that: hardware requirements.
Modern games and their development lack an understanding of a lesson essential in good literature, song writing, and cinematography: That you leave room for the audience to add their share of imagination and "content" to complete an overall artistic sensation.
Compare the original Half-Life game of 1998 with its remake Black Mesa from 2020. The latter is a flashy thing without wonder, the former a graphically simple game (although technically a milestone of its time) but one still imbueing awe. Black Mesa is a stale game exactly because it lays so much emphasis on graphical details, colours, visual effects, "realism", whereas Half Life, exactly because of its clumsiness, still leaves so much to the player to add to the game experience.
The best example to illustrate the difference in both games is their respective treatment of the alien world Xen. In Black Mesa Xen is an awful nightmare straight from a drug experience gone wrong. The colours are dark and stark, fauna and flora harsh and perplexing. One cannot call this world, stuffed with so many things and light, beautiful.
Xen in Half Life, on the other hand, is a remarkably empty landscape. There are not many creatures or flora, few lighting effects. The world consists of astonishingly empty spaces that become mesmerizing and breathtaking not by their interiors but by the music and "sounddesign" that nudges the player to add his own imaginative content. The landscape in itself is boring but the experience touching.
It is exactly because Half-Life's Xen is so "incomplete" that it makes the player's addition of "content" necessary and a fullfilling experience. The player isn't consuming a cinematographic walking simulator but creates a mesmerizing experience of art via interaction with the game.
The same principle of artistic "ambiguity" or "incompleteness" is at work in the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky which are staged carefully with astonishing concentration on the details to realise and increase ambiguity and metaphors that are then left to the viewer to decipher. Similiar intentional "ambiguity" can be found in the films of Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders. They all allow for and demand the imaginative participation of the viewer to create an artistic depth which in return birthes meaning.
Compared to these, the usual Hollywood productions, mesmerizing by overstimulation, aim at something different. You get "wowed" and after the sitting you're no longer bothered. Everything is clear, literal, obvious. (And the outer reality is in order again.)
It is this difference that applies to game development as well, and why older games often feel far better than what today's game productions can offer. True, older games didn't have the technical means, and so they used the means at hand and relied on the gamer's imaginative input. But by the same token, modern games have in a sense become victim of today's technical means which constraint their possibilities as they no longer rely on the gamer's input. With that comes a certain direction in which today's games are produced and are mass-marketable accordingly.
All this is less intended as criticism of modern game development and more my take on why older games are often better, and why today's game designs often feel shallow, trite, not worth one's time.
The gamer has to add something to the game or it is neither a game nor an enjoyable experience.
#gaming #art #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 28-Aug-2025 08:36:50 JST
simsa03
Poverty makes life pretty difficult right now. The job and social welfare are not enough to pay for all expenses and medical bills. Cutting back on food is the option I follow the past months. Hopefully come November the worst will lie behind me. It's financially the hardest year in decades.
"Cutting back on food" means eating merely twice a day and rationing supplies. Kind of externally imposed intermittend fastening... It has its advantages, though. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 28-Aug-2025 03:52:33 JST
simsa03
Robert Schmad, "Congress opens investigation into Wikipedia over foreign efforts to ‘manipulate’ information" https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/investigations/3783181/congress-opens-investigation-wikipedia-foreign-efforts-manipulate-information/
Emily Brooks, "Republicans investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias " https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5473331-wikipedia-bias-probe-republicans/
The letter by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to Wikimedia's CEO Maryana Iskander is here: https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/082725-letter-to-Wikimedia.pdf
Allegations are that organised (!) efforts by authors of Wikiedpia have been made to "push" pro-Palestinian and pro-Russian biases.
#Wikimedia #Wikipedia #antisemitism #Gaza #Ukraine #Russia -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Aug-2025 01:14:13 JST
simsa03
Realizing that I come from a dogmatic, quarrelsome, and, at times, spiteful family. That is sad to acknowledge but also revealing with regard to the role my brother and I played in this family. Trying to act harmonizingly when that was despised by the others and used as trigger to double down. It's a cold and unloving family. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 23:44:27 JST
simsa03
Jews are attacked in Germany, again! Fuck the Left, fuck the Palis, fuck all intentional and unintentional supporters of the Gaza-ISIS (aka Hamas). https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/9594ab6c9bf376a350bc0d762712c8d2b99676eae6cf498e72ba0b41403bc7a2/view -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 08:31:46 JST
simsa03
Expecting more from a liberal democracy vis-à-vis human rights than from an authoritarian state? Because the former is more kin to one's "family" of shared values than the latter? A slippery slope. Is Russia excluded, then? Or Turkey? Or neither, but Qatar? That's not morality but "convenience humanism" based on racism.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 18-Aug-2025 07:32:56 JST
simsa03
Only now did I learn that Herbert Rusche has passed away on December 22, 2024. He was a kind man. May peace be with him. -
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Aug-2025 11:19:59 JST 
tinydoctor
The Sappho fragment:
Δέδυκε μεν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐαδεσ, μέσαι δὲ
νύκτεσ πάρα δ᾽ ἔρχετ᾽ ὤρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδωThe moon set, and the Pleiades; midnight, time goes on, I lie alone. Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of meter.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Aug-2025 09:14:12 JST
tinydoctor
The bony knob on Sappho is called a Bouchard’s node. I wonder if I can get arthroplasty (a joint replacement). I'll end up a Struldbrugg if I live long enough. Dean Swift is laughing.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Aug-2025 08:57:18 JST
tinydoctor
Got fingers on my mind; At 67, I have arthritis in all my fingers. Sappho (right ring) is growing crooked with a little knob on the knuckle bone. Martin Luther (left index) has unlovely bumps called mucous cysts, caused by the arthritis, sprouting from the distal joint. I'm having surgery to have the cysts removed next Wednesday.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Aug-2025 08:44:30 JST
tinydoctor
Right Hand
Thumb: Erasmus; wears a turban, or a kepi.
Index Finger: Darwin; wears a red fireman's helmet, or an Indian
chief's headdress.
Middle Finger: Moses; wears a leather biker's cap, or a Shriner's hat.
Ring Finger: Sappho; a leopard skin pillbox, or a bowler hat.
Pinkie: Sisyphus; a football helmet or a yarmulke.Reading a little fragment of Sappho bumped the memory of my fingers, their names and hats, since Sappho is the name of my right ring finger.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Aug-2025 08:40:43 JST
tinydoctor
A long time ago, when I was on a five hammer #manic high, I named all
my fingers, and gave them hats.Left Hand
Thumb: Baelzebub; wears a papal tiara or a beaver hat.
Index Finger: Martin Luther; wears a Klansman's dunce cap, or a
sheriff's Stetson.
Middle Finger: Motown; wears a black beret or a white top hat.
Ring Finger: Shep; wears a pork pie hat, or a Dodgers' ball cap.
Pinkie: Aristotle; wears a crown of bay, or an old straw hat. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Aug-2025 11:33:10 JST
simsa03
I don't expect there being an afterlife or reincarnation or prugatory and judgement or whatever concept people may have that results in an outer-worldy sphere "where" the soul dwells after the person's death. That means that the only time I have to act morally, kindly, and in solidarity with others, is now, in this lifetime.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Aug-2025 11:09:32 JST
simsa03
Criticising Israel serves many as evidence and self-assurance that they're not anti-Semites: "Look, I can distinguish. And look how much I'm in sympathy with the Jews. That is what my critique proves as it aims solely at the government, the Zionists, the you-name-it, but not the Jews." In fact, their criticism of Israel is so harsh and shrill because not being anti-Semitic is the hallmark of being a progressive educated person.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Aug-2025 10:52:02 JST
simsa03
When the Muses kiss, i.e., when the angels touch you, do they have bad breath sometimes? And what kind of work results from that?
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten #angels -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Aug-2025 10:48:22 JST
simsa03
People think it's their personal grief to which the world is obligated to respond. In the way the world's state of affairs corresponds (and thus: responds) to their grief, both, grief and world, become each other's mirror of their respective goodness or badness. Children.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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