Notices tagged with talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 27-Oct-2025 08:17:14 JST 
simsa03
I’m not a collector of books. I’m not a Karl Lagerfeld who possessed 300,000 books spread across seven private homes. To me, books are necessary for reference, for work – if you can call it that much, as «work» is a word of dignity – for supporting a development of thought that may take years. Sometimes they come to me, sometimes I pick them up, feeling in my guts that I will need them one day – and then, eight or ten years later their time has come, I open them, and read. Sadly, the urgency I felt back then is no longer the urgency of today, and so what felt exciting back then may have taken on a certain patina, a breath of staleness. Still, the precognition and its redemption are the most wondrous part of it all. So what books serve me in opposition to what they may have served Lagerfeld, is not a fascination with all that is possible, existing, exciting, and marvellous. I don’t cultivate a cabinet of curiosities. Other than Lagerfeld, I’m not a man of the Baroque. (And I doubt anybody would call Lagerfeld a man of the Renaissance except perhaps he himself, but he was a conceited man, so his vote doesn’t count.) Books, and collections of books, are ballustrades that help keep one’s thoughts walking. Even when they pause, or quietly sit for years, when they finally pull themselves together again and start walking, slowly, hesitatingly at first, soon more self-assured and sturdy, the books are the handroll that keep especially the old thoughts, the long-carried ideas, walking. And through them me myself, and the specific ways this me perceives this world.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 27-Oct-2025 06:53:54 JST
simsa03
Sadly, I have no clue about physics, astrophysics in particular. But I keep returning to the odd riddle of the universe "expanding", of what was "before" the Big Bang, and how that even came about. After which the universe kept expanding. To me, the universe is not a vast extension in space but in time. The universe could be really a tiny thing, but what makes the "illusion" of extension is the expanse in time in varying degrees of which we sense the universe. That means that rather than space we sense time and its extension. And it means that given our current theories by which we are pretty good in detecting objects and events in the past, we currently lack theories by which to identify objects and events around us in the future. But again, the vastness of the universe consists in time, not space, and the latter's distances are temporal distances that say nothing about the "real" spatial expansion. Just sayin' and just playing with bubbles.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 27-Oct-2025 06:25:33 JST
simsa03
There was a time when the self was made up of the stuff one knew or what was common knowledge around. Barely will one have bothered with the possibilties of the unknown. Nowadays we seem far more to sense the vastness of what we know we don't know. That surely must have had an impact on the concept of self.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 19-Oct-2025 03:37:13 JST
simsa03
Don't take your traumatized voices for telepathy. (Both are real, but pretty much never distinguishable form each other.)
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 17-Sep-2025 02:37:17 JST
simsa03
Those endless wars, but the one in the Gaza Strip in particular, have rotten my mind. Not that I find my opinions on the Gaza war falsified — rejected by many, yes, but not falsified — but my problem is rather that with my opinions on the Gaza war I more or less directly landed in the camp of the extreme conservatives. What an unsavoury crowd of people. The kind of Ben Shapiro, Douglas Murray, Bari Weiss... It has been their recent unanimous lament and hysterical outcry over the death of Charlie Kirk, their fantasmagoria about wokeness, feminism, campus leftism, the alleged companionship with radical Islam, all in an sinister alliance to undermine and abolish "the West"... Boy, what freakshow is that? How can Zionism remain viable when it chooses, of all, the fundamentalist, in part evangelical right in the U.S. as coalition partners?
I don't like people like Shapiro, Murray, or, for that matter, Bari Weiss (although I'm fond of her interviews with Einat Wilf and Lucy Aharish), their cult-like attitudes of "moral clarity", "privileged access to reality", of "speaking the truth in plain words", of fearmongering and end-of-time-doomerism... It's the mirror image of their caricature of the "woke" campus Left, their intolerance, bigotry, and blindness for the suffering of anybody who is not in their camp.
It was on February 7, 2024, when Israel's Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time declared the goal of "total victory" over Hamas. Man did my stomach knot. Because at least in my country that call for "total victory" pretty much sounds like "Endsieg", like "final" or "ultimate victory". How could he talk that way? And even if one does, is one willing to pay the price that comes with that?
The only way to gain a semblance of "total victory" over the Gaza-ISIS (aka Hamas) is not just to bomb the shit out of them (and with that out of the Gazans) but to take away "once and for all" their prime weapon: Taking hostages to force Israel's hand.
To take this weapon out of the hand of the Palestinians in general, Israel would have to show that it can no longer be blackmailed by hostage taking. And that means: Israel would need to accept to sacrifice all remaining hostages (now and in the future). Can Israel do that? Does it want to? Can it look itself into the mirror when it does that? But that would be the price to be paid for "total victory". (There are arguments in favour of this stance. Remember when the IDF soldier Gilad Schalit was released after five years in Hamas captivity in exchange for 1.000 Palestinian criminals, one of those released from Israeli prisons was Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attacks.)
But even Israel should decide to take that route, the Gaza-ISIS will have won. Because it will have accomplished to remake Israel into a beast. Israel cannot want that. So yes, Israel should keep fighting the Gaza-ISIS. But it should not have dreamt of "total victory".
These lines of reasoning don't seem to get acknowledged, or are shrug of, by the current coalition of Evangelicals, U.S. and British far right, and the various voices in the Israeli-Zionist Right, comprised mainly of Orthodox and national security advocates. Too much so is the hallucinated alliance of campus anti-Semites, woke climate movement, of feminists, LGBTQ, and the Islamic pro-Hamas movement out to undermine not merely Israel but the whole West.
One of the tragedies of the Middle East conflicts (there are several, not one) seems to me that both sides, Israeli and Palestinians, may hate the other for what the latter managed to achieve in brutalizing the former. Look what you made me do! And whereas the Palestinians build their national identity on the pride about their hatred of the Jews, the Jews rather look in shock and trauma, desperately clinging to anything resembling a rest of humaneness instead of bestiality. And the more they try, the more they get spit upon by a world gone mad.
Protracted disputes with an old pal from Identica times over the Middle East conflict(s) reminded me of that aspect. He insanely pro-Palestinian, me utterly pro-Israeli. In the end he blocked me and requested the Masodon staff to take down some of my posts for "genocide denial". He succeeded, and my various appeals have never even been replied to by the moderators. Anyway, his remarks haven't been futile. At last, when the Charlie Kirk murder showed how the Trump Right had found their martyr and was willing to utilize him and how the Zionist Right closed ranks in solidarity with them, I found a small crack to breathe. Not with that ilk!
It doesn't mean it extenuates my solidarity with Israel and the Jewish struggles. But with more sadness now than before, and less anger and hatred. And that is something I think this Identica pal has in part initiated. I thank him for that.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
#Israel #Gaza -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Sep-2025 10:27:46 JST
simsa03
Only when you forget can you come out anew. The feeling of standing on a road junction is not a sign of considering choices but one of being in the midst of the process in which choices have long been made, new directions already sensed, and the uncertainty prevalent whether it is a stll dream or already a reality just not yet embraced.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Aug-2025 06:11:06 JST 
tinydoctor
It's not datafication, it's datafictionication. AI is datadeification. Datatheodicy. Live by your own fiction. Don't be a datadog, don't eat that vomit, eat your own vomit. Bite people yourself, don't let AI do it for you.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 11-Aug-2025 09:43:29 JST
simsa03
The main lesson learnt from my cataract operations and receiving new glasses: Don't use your eyes. Rely on smell, touch, hearing, on sensing warmth, cold, energy and its densities. But don't use the eyes. Don't trust them. What their artificiality shows you only leads to despair.
And this is a major shift in my life, already at a late stage, already in its autumn. I have always been a visually oriented person, I think in images, remember in mimages, look, watch, and of course: read. That all is going to be gone.
It's too strenuous to use my eyes and tackle with the impressions they provide. My eyes physically hurt when I watch a scenery. So, in this later stage of life, I need to turn away from seeing and turn to my other senses.
And that means far less time at the screen, far less time with books and papers, and far more time with radio, sound, smell, touch. I have no idea what that will turn me into. But I sure no longer want to see. I'm so done with vision.
And that means that, in this later stage of life, I'll have to tackle another issue: Always weak on memory (but quick in intelligence and creativity), I now have to turn to memorize, to keep in mind, to train my ability to memorize and remember. Not exactly Ad Herenium-style though.
And that is the rather interesting outcome of these butchered operations and these efforts that, to save my vision, took it from me.
Which, in another sense, is kind of funny. I always feared to become blind (beside my other two favourite ailments). And now I seem to have become more or less blind -- although I can still see. Never thought about that possibility. But I got what I feared. So, be grateful.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 05-Jul-2025 09:05:06 JST
tinydoctor
We kiss an angel with each breath we exhale. It doesn't matter if you "believe" in angels (I don't).
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Jul-2025 06:46:09 JST
simsa03
When people tell me that one should not degrade and objectify people. True. But you cannot objectify and degrade people who haven't objectified and degraded themselves in the first place. By equating combatants and civilians, e.g., like the Russians do, like Hamas, like Iran does. They already degraded themselves and made themselves a tool of their perverted sense of metaphysical grandeur and spiritual meaning. I cannot objectify and degrade such people as much as they already did to themselves. In fact, they are proud of being capable of that. So, no. I cannot objectify or degrade someone who hasn't already objectified and degraded himself first. Still, and that is equally true, there is the duty of not objectifying others, of not degrading them. But this connection between both acts, that usually slips people's attention. From here stems all the pain: What the enemy succeeded in turning you into.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 25-Jun-2025 00:15:18 JST
simsa03
First they underestimated Hitler, then Putin, now Trump. The gobshites (mostly on the left) always make the same mistake of ridiculing the strongman and then rub their eyes in bewilderment. For Christ's sake: You need to be a very smart mobster to build and keep your criminial real estate empire and become the U.S. president twice.
But more to the point: It's not Trump's defeats and losses but his achievements that should get people on high alert. First strongmen are very successful. Then comes the downfall which is all the more catastrophic. It's the downfall that counts, not the interim period.
#democracy #systems
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 20-Jun-2025 06:04:39 JST
simsa03
When terrorist regimes kill civilians, their death is deemed deplorable, but what did one expect from the regime? When a democratic state kills civilians, though, even unintentionally, it's the breakdown of civilisation and of International Law. Why this double standard? Why shrug off the civilians' death in one case but wring the hands in the other, solely depending on the moral status of the perpetrator? To the victims, their status is irrelevant. Not so to some intellectuals, it seems. And therein lies a peculiar form of racism.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 08:29:49 JST
tinydoctor
A reminder (to myself if no one else): Be the doom you want to see in the scroll.
#doomscroll #doomscrolling #bethedoomyouwanttoseeinthescroll #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 30-May-2025 03:47:39 JST
simsa03
Thinking about how authoritarianism and totalitarianism create something that may be called "totalitarian time": a sphere marked by timelessness, a limbo that is at the same time created by terror as it maintans and upholds terror.
The concept of circular time that is at the heart of religious worlds, e.g., the sacral year in Christianity that by (re-)enacting central events of the bible at specific times of the year (re-)create and thus keep maintaining a sacral oikos in the first place, one that lifts the world into a realm of out-of-timeness and infuses the natural world with meaning – it seems to me to that totalitartian societies have some parallels.
"Totailtarian time" as a man-made salvation, not just determining man but at the same time forming world, creating human destinity and confirming the world's purpose. Eliade and Arendt combined, so to speak. With a dose of mass psychology and the provision of meaning that too is a hallmark of violence.
Could be a spin-off of my old dissertation project in epistemology.
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