Notices tagged with talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 03:18:29 JST 
simsa03
"S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl" will be the second game, I guess, that I'll purchase at full-price and not at some discount. And it's not that I like these tedious tinker-and-resources-gathering/crafting/managing games. If I want chores, I'll clean my bathroom.
But like 20 years ago with "Half-Life 2", I'm a tourist who loves to wade through absurdly overdone landscapes, with weather effects and atmospheres so ridiculously overblown that you wouldn't even on drugs encounter them in real life. I just love strolling around looking, watching, gazing.. until I get shot by some AI generated villain.
("Half-Life Alyx" is another gorgeous visual experience with so many details and consistent "world building". It's just wonderful wandering around there and studying the debris, the fauna, the extraterrestrial impacts on the Odesa-styled City 17...)
Sadly, today's progress in computing powers (both for the CPU as the graphics cards) invites the industry to either remake old titels (to "freshen" them up visually) or publish new titles primarily with the emphasis on graphics and visual effects. Otherwise these titles have become pretty boring (with regard to story telling, game mechanics, loot system and such).
Not to mention the absurd length of such games. Remember when games like "Half Life, "Half Life 2" and others took about four hours for a decent playthrough? Now you can waste up to 60 hours to get only through tzhe main story line and various side quests. Ridiculous. Who has that kind of free time any more?
Anyway. I'm looking forward to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl". Although to be released today, I'll give it two more months until the main bugs are fixed. And spend my time until then with "Tomb Raider" (the first game of the relaunch trilogy) which is still an amazingly consistent self-contained game; with "Half-Life: Alyx" (the PC mod version); and some others like "Far Cry 5" (very nice landscape), "Callisto Protocol" or "Dead Space", or the original "F.E.A.R." series
As an afterthought: I tried "Black Mesa" and "Black Mesa Blue Shift". Awful games. Look like Playmobil in overdrive. Shiny plastic surfaces, and the XEN world is such a terrible visualisation of somebody's bad mushroom trip... They overblew it on all accounts. Both games show in their "extraterrestrial" environment the deep influence "Dear Esther" seems to have had on game developing. But while the latter Indie game is a gem that too my knowledge first successfully used a "walking simulator" to engange the player in a trance like state (stunning graphics), the kids of the "Black Mesa" Remake teams took the visual ideas of "Dear Esther" and streched them all for the sake of mere bombast. Shock and Awe. (Never thought that Donald Rumsfeld would win even one battle.)
As a second afterthought and thereby returning to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl": There is a whole genre of games built around the concept of a "zone" of some unknown influence through which "stalkers" move carefully in order to garner riches and avoid "anomalies". These idea rest on two templates.
One is the 1971 sci fi novel "Roadside Picnic" by the Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 based his movie "Stalker" losely on that novel). Here the the topoi of the "zone" and the lone scout (called "stalker" after the Tarkovsky movie, I guess) were first introduced.
The other template has been the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 with its subsequent evacuation of the entire population due to radiation, the abandonment of the aerea, and the rewilding henceforth, with radiation givin the the rewilding its specific drift into the unexpected.
Both templates are ruminated again and again. And in their combination, the specifically otherworldly character of "Roadside Picnic", the strangeness of the aliens' visit and what it might mean what they left behind, is substituded with the survivalist theme of the nuclear power plant catastrophe of 1986. I'd love to see games in which the more miraculous aspect of "Roadside Picnic" plays a decisive role. Wonderment and fascination not because of sneaking skills and visual traumatisation of the player but because of the bafflement and wonder created by the story. A shock and awe not of Rumsfeldian liking.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 08:10:21 JST
simsa03
Always remember: The majority of US-ians wanted this. They wanted the Gaetz, Gabbaed, Rubio, Hegseth, Musk, Ramaswamy to be in charge. They wanted this fascism and they wanted this weird, old and dark America¹, this Kick-your-ass-America. They wanted minorities to suffer, migrants to bleed, thealth care to be abolished and abortion done again sophistically in the back alleys with cloathes hangers. They wanted tax cuts for the rich at the expense of infrasturcture investement for the lesser well-offs. So stop complaining. Stop raging. The US wanted this. And we'll be lucky if we can avert the nuclear bombs and their fall-out. Climate crisis? Fuck off! In the end, in four years time, when people turn up again from the dungeons to the daylight, they'll be happy they survived. "Look, it wasn't all that awful. Didn't he built great autobahns?" All who rage now will fall in line sooner or later. Because, why do you expect any different when Russia of today shows you clearly that you cannot stay apart, that you will be amalgamated with the regime? Until you agree, first hesitatingly, later strongly, and then beating up all others who still resist. You will become this regime because you will have forgotten how it is to be a human being. So you'll start roughing up the migrants, the refugees, the poor, or your students, in what some smartie-ass calls "lateral violence". It surely doesn't feel that way. When you become the regime, exerting pain onto other will show you how little you knew yourself, how little there was a chance that things might turn out differently, and how happy you are to act out your inner murderer. You will happily fall in line. Exactly because you think you are a "victim". Everyone is a victim, that's how tyrannies work. And the leader, he's not the butcher but the one who by acknowledging his own pain identifies it with that of the nation. So that the nation's healing and his very own become one and the same, his pain his looking glas by which he detects what it is that hurts the nation. And you want to stay apart? You wouldn't even recognize whether there was a place left to stay apart on. You will become the regime. And succumb with a sigh, of relief, of joy, of unity, of "family", of acknowledged pain. You will rejoice in your hate. And get out the vote for another term for this regime. Don't kid yourself. You who are the most opposed now will fall in line first. Because there is no difference between populace and regime. Nowhere.
¹ Alluding to Greil Marcus.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 08:39:02 JST
simsa03
This thread https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1854030304677073233.html made its way around and everybody freaked out. Calm done, it's pretty much nonsense, born out of the author projecting his fears rather than displaying his understanding.
True, my belief in #peakfascism, utterly justified in early summer, has been smashed by the state elections in Germany and the various elections now in the U.S. I had hoped otherwise and it didn't turn out. Yet.
But that doesn't mean that the nonsense displayed in this thread (esp. posts # 11-17, 20-25) should be taken as reliable prediction or even profound insights instead. It's not based on an informed understanding of facts, but based on fear. Which is, as one doesn't need to learn anything for that, easier to act out and act upon.
Calling T and Musk "the worst men in the United States" [#11] and conveniently ignoring Peter Thiel, Miriam Adelson, Mitch McConnell, some of the Supreme Court justices, etc., is just silly.
Anyway, NATO will not cease to exist [#12] (although perhaps shrink); most of Gazans will not be killed [as claimed in #13] (although Israel will, in my opinion, annex the West Bank and leave Gaza to international administration); the EU will not shrink in size [#14] (no arguments given for the preposterous claim it would); a "new axis of evil" [#15] (rather: its enlargement) especially with the "new members" mentioned is so utter and uninformed nonsense that I don't even know where to start debunking that claim. Suffice perhaps that most of these new members are too poor and weak to pose as a threat.
With regard to the horror porn the author sketches of the U.S. turned end-Weimar Republic [# 20-25] with all the screeching of martial law and police murder rates sykrocketting due to police activities, stock market crashes, and all, seriously, man, on what does the author base such fever dreams? Esp. when most of the stuff he is in the prerogatives of the individual states and not the federal government.
Where I think the author is partly right is that nuclear weapons will get proliferated to more states. The author mentions Saudi Arabia, the Emirate of Dubai, and Egypt [#16] but ignores, e.g., the aspirations of Turkey. He also ignores that the UK and France think about sharing their nuclear weaponry with the European countries and even Germany thinking about acquiring nuclear deterrence, and all not for the authors beloved reason, i.e., T playing with witholding the U.S. nuclear shield, but for the other main reason, i.e., the imperialism of Russia and Putin. Which, of course, the author fails to mention; as he fails to mentio the other imperialism in China and Xi. (With that the author lands in the lala-land of conspiracy theories which all fail because they neglect or ignore the complexities they are supposed to explain.)
The author is likewise partly right, in my opinion, that there will be a "new axis of evil". [#15] But definitely not the one he thinks of. (Venezuela, El Salvador, and Israel are in this new axis, but Iran is not? Seriously?)
What emerges with T's second term of office, in my opinion, is an emerging and balancing alliance of oligarchic families, crime networks, states turned to mafia organisations,¹ greedy autocrats, influential billionairs, surveillance capitalists, etc., trying to run states like corporations, transgressing state boundaries and replacing international treaties with oligarchic accords and influence spheres. Their main goal is wealth, sweetened with power. In order for them to get rich and their activities unrestricted, they will use the means and institutions of national states to advance their aspirations. If Ukraine stands in their way, they will obliterate it. If not, they will find a more cost-efficient way around. One that is better for "business". (Imagine a Russian movie gangster's heavy English.)
Financial greed does not need to be the sole motivation; finding meaning and purpose beyond, esp. when combined with a reason to fight and exert power, is a second one. Putin is a good example. Greedy like hell he still invests heaviliy in historical romaticism. Money doesn't provide meaning and purpose. Neither power. Meaning comes from somewhere else. Virility too.
But all that does not mean that "fascism" (in lack of a better word) is now on the loose. It means that many oligarchic endeavours will turn out not to work or to work better when not combined with violence, when climate crisis is taken seriously, etc. That is: The rising and increasing worldwide oligarchic interconnectedness that results in reshaping whole national states into mafia organistation (with the president or leader as the Capo dei capi of such a mafia organisation) is far more likely than "the end of the world" as the author of the thread knows it.
And if that outcome or development is the more likely scenario, than the instabilities that we will confront is less so in the civic spheres of societies than it is in the hierarchies of such crime syndicates posing as states themselves.
What most people ignore when looking at such mafia systems is that they are intrinsically volatile and insecure to all of their members. Violence, paranoia, alliances, mistrust, and constant power struggles make not for the stability of such entities but for the violent character of these. And as one can see in the history of Russia of the past 30 years: Leave the mafia organsation and the Capo unchallenged, and life can be pretty normal for the burgeois peasant.
That does not mean that I prefer such a life. But it means that I think the author of thread misplaces the area where violence will occur. The end is still far away. From that arises hope and obligation.
¹ This is not about a state being infiltrated by some mafia activities – and thus in part being harmed and in another capable to fight back – but a state that is turned completely into a mafia organisation: a criminal enterprise that uses the resources and legal perogatives of a national state in the service of the criminal entity. Or put differently: a mafia organisation that poses as a national state.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 00:28:38 JST 
tinydoctor
@f4grx @molly0xfff Another thing my mother used to say: Shoulda woulda coulda never did nothin’. I wish her ghost spoke that in my ear more much more often. I know, that’s a should woulda coulda. Thanks Mom. My fierce mom. My ferocious mom.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 03:59:24 JST
simsa03
One of things I find baffling about the various conflicts that collectively make up what is called the Middle East conflicti is the Palestinians' insistence on the "right of return" of all "refugees". From the fact that several hundred thousand Arabs were displaced in the wars of 1948 and 1967, they not only claim a status of refugee for the displaced and their descendants but a "right to return" of both to "their ancestral homeland".
But if, somehow, being displaced creates a status of refugee, and if, somehow, this title is automatically handed down to the descendants of those originally displaced, and if the status of refugee, somehow, creates a "right to return", if all these premisses hold true, then why cannot Jews claim exactly the same for themselves? Many Jews were expelled after 70 CE and continuously later on from what since the 1920s has been called Palestine; their descendants are in that very sense "refugees", and so they likewise have a "right to return" to their "ancestral homeland". That is: If Palestinians can claim indigeneity and from that a right to the land, then so can the Jews.
So if Palestinians want a "right to return", they'll have to accept the presence of all Jews in the *same* land for the same very reasons.
And contrary, if Palestinians hdo not have a "right to return", if one's ancestors' indigeneity does not create a legitimate title over the land, then the Jews don't need to bother whether they have such a title legitimately or not. It suffices that in 1947 the U.N. General Assembly accepted the partition plan of the land for both people (Res. 181 (II)) which the Jews accepted and the Palestinians of their own choice rejected.
To say the Jews are "colonizers" is thus utter nonsense – unless one can give convincing criteria for how many generations must have passed until one's ancestors' indigeneity does not (or: no longer) establish a valid claim to the land by the descendants.
Good luck with that.
Ironically, it is the very Palestinian claims of indigeneity, displacement, and inherited refugee status that all the more confer validity to the Jewish claims on the Judea and Samaria Area.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 26-Oct-2024 13:44:00 JST
simsa03
Culture seems to be Man's attempt to prevent his imagery to populate and overtake his world. It is suppression, indeed, but not in the Freudian sense of Eros (neither Eros nor Thanatos that is) but of imagery.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 26-Oct-2024 13:30:26 JST
simsa03
The more times goes by the more "Until the End of the World", the motion picture by Wim Wenders from 1991, turns out to be an accurate prediction about the "Anthropocene": the merger of world and man-made experience until there is no place left for experiences not brought about by man himself. And when all the world there is is made up by man, it grows stale and bland, and loses all appeal for engagement, attention, and care.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 24-Oct-2024 08:02:36 JST
simsa03
I'm baffled about #AI doomerism. AI will make us into slaves, will decide our future...? To me this sounds like a distraction from the fact that in capitalism I am already a slave, with no options, no freedom, where bureaucratically ordered and implemented practical constraints serve the upholding of judicial peace and guarantee of ownership. Perhaps it's only affluent people who now start to tremble about the prospects of #AI, people who in capitalism always enjoyed the illusion of agency, an illusion covered by a magically influx of prosperity and luxury. I never joined these comforts (and I wonder if I ever had the chance or opportunity to do so) and so I don't believe in agency and some divine right of ownership and the exercise of practical constraints onto others. But that's just me, and I am not fearing AI. Because for 500 years we already lived in a world that is AI, only embodied in different forms than semiconductors and globalised data transfer.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 13:31:39 JST
tinydoctor
"Most moral action, including moral violence, springs from immediate emotion. Morals are what happen when you don’t stop to think. See Hamlet. Since the Internet greases a million pigs of thoughtless emotion reaction per second, it is a vast Grand Guignol of moral action. Moralists, like trolls, have no scruples. After all, morals are what people acquire when they lack the mental capital to afford an imagination." #selfquote 2015 #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten #thoughtballoon
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 12-Oct-2024 07:31:38 JST
simsa03
In raising children (or accompanying their education), I find one rule of thumb helpful:
The child's bad and awful traits stem from its parents, its good and wonderful ones come from the child itself and its daimon.
This rule helps to keep you fairer and more just in your task to accompany the soul into this world.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Oct-2024 12:57:48 JST
simsa03
I enjoy my corroding. Strange. (Tooth problems, eye problems, joint issues, forgetfullness, etc.)
And I catch myself more and more thinking how I won't live to see the outcome of this or that... And it's diffiult not to jump to the stance or sentiment that *because* I won't see the outcome I don't need to care.
A "coming of age", in a very different sense of the word.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Oct-2024 12:50:47 JST
simsa03
The older I get the more I understand that it is my obligation as old person not to understand the young people. Not just to not intrude pn their privacy, their subjectivity, their inner spaces, but to not understand. To keep them safe from the past that is still present by living within me, so that they can have the future that is beyond my grasp (and should be so). "Understanding" is an awful thing, and it can, at times, be tantamount to pollution and sacrilege.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 10:07:13 JST
simsa03
There is sardonic laughter, derisive laughter, desperate laughter... and then there is the bureaucratic laughter. It is the most cruel of all.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 23-Sep-2024 23:52:57 JST
simsa03
The appeal of authoritarian governments and fascist movements or regimes is not only that they allow for the acting out of people's hatred but that they recommend themselves to be at fault for everything. Guilt and responsibility can thus easily be passed on to them. This is how dictatorships can live on in people even long after the regime is gone. Which makes the regime, the authoritarian and fascist attitude, a latent, dormant proclivity, to reawaken even decades later.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 23-Sep-2024 23:33:13 JST
simsa03
"Dunkeldeutschland" ist weniger ein geographischer als ein psychologisch-sozialer Begriff. Er findet halt primär (noch) im Osten Deutschlands Anwendung. Weil sie da die Diktatur so gerne haben, die einen in Ruhe ließ und für alles zuständig war, sogar fürs Schuld sein.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 13:03:08 JST
simsa03
To elaborate a bit on the above.
There are those who insist on staying the same, and feel it important to stay what they always were. And there are those who can just leave things behind, including and in especially themselves. To the former, their τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι needs to stay same, an εἶδος, whereas with the latter their τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι is less an εἶδος but κίνησις, if at all.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 12:23:31 JST
simsa03
Three simple things:
Those who work make mistakes.
Perfection is a form of hatred.
Love is not an emotion but a decision.
Had I known them earlier, they would have spared me a lot.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 12:20:36 JST
simsa03
I learnt to value friendship more than romance or relationship. But I don't know when that started. Feels like forever, and no, it was not a shyness or reluctance to engage. There are simply different things appearing in friendship and in romance, and I find those appearing (and building) friendship more interesting, and more touching, than those that come to light in romance.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 12:15:56 JST
simsa03
Looking through the characters of novels, movies, songs, theatre, etc., there seems to be a constant duality: The good guys, the persons who become or are "forces for good", are usually those who are willing to undergo changes by the fates (and furies), "the task at hand", the "journey" and its passages, etc. On the other hand, the persons who turn out to be "forces of evil", the bad guys, are most often those who refuse to be changed, who resist, and make a way of appearing as a certain personality from their resistance and opposition. Sticking to one's goals and principles can thus lead astray, as flitting about may indeed be the strongest sign of health, moral development, and responsibility.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Sep-2024 07:12:13 JST
tinydoctor
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