A dump of some quotes I've accumulated over the past months, and some observations I've had this month.
John the Baptist, born at midsummer, has picked up some of the symbolic ambience of the spirit of the waning year, which is why he dies by the sword in the autumn in an underground dungeon and his head goes on a platter. Jesus, born at midwinter, correspondingly carries some of the ambience of the spirit of the waxing year, which is why he is pierced by a spear while suspended above the earth in the spring, and a cup or chalice plays such an essential role in the rituals commemorating him as well as the legends that clustered around him.
From https://www.ecosophia.net/intermezzo-the-ring-and-the-grail-i/
Not someone I know, but someone who was referred to in a tweet, who in a lucid dream was caught by a group of cloaked figures who proceeded to sacrifice her on an altar and steal her ability to go lucid in her dreams. I wonder if this is what happens to children when they go to school, all their curiosity and love for life stolen by them by a vampiric establishment.
Some comments about NGE I've seen around and which I wanted to save. First one is about Shinji's rejection throughout his life:
Shinji was rejected his whole life, he wanted love and affect from his father, but it was denied, he wanted Misato to accept him, yet she still had trouble with him, he wanted Asuka to help him in the coffee scene, and he was thrown and insulted at. He hated the world because all he wanted was to be accepted, he chokes Asuka not because he hates her, but because she represents the rejection of everyone around Shinji, but Asuka realized how Shinji felt during the third impact as she was technically fused with everyone including Shinji, she finally understands that the only thing he craves has been denied to him for so long, and for the first time, she shows affection to him.
Second one about Asuka's desire to be an adult:
For me "One More Finale: I Need You" is the Greatest Finale in cinema. Throughout the entire series, we see Asuka's desire to become an adult. In episode 22, we get why she wants to be an adult. Because she hated that little girl for every time she went to her mother, who didn't show her care and love. (It's a nice detail how the angel disguised as little Asuka and asked "Do you love me?")
Asuka wanted to be independent and not let anyone get close to her or show affection because if she let them get close, they would have a chance to hurt her. For people who are constantly trying to struggle with their problems on their own, constantly trying to stay strong and not wanting to be an emotional burden on anyone, this can be very relatable. But the irony is you can't be independent or strong. (Evangelion Ost: Infantile Dependence, Adult Dependency). Because people are weak and dependent on each other, they can be needy and disgusting. Arael shows her that she still hasn't changed much from that little girl, that she is still weak and needs people. Shows her childish steps towards Kaji, her addiction to Eva, and her attempts to get Shinji's attention. That's why she hates Shinji and herself. Shinji is weak and needy just like her.
At the end, she sees that little girl on the beach once again. Instead of attacking him or hating herself again. She chooses to show affection to the boy who is waiting for love and care. Finally, Asuka accepts herself and understands Shinji. It's a great end about self-love and accepting reality. Yes people are weak and sometimes do disgusting things. Sometimes we get hurt and make mistakes. Asuka comes back as she accepts this truth, choosing to continue no matter "How Disgusting" it is because this is the only place he/she can be happy.
Similarly, a comment about American psycho:
I think the big thing that strikes me about American Psycho is that Patrick has no real control over his own life. Despite being one of the most privileged people in America, he is invisible. He struggles to stand out among his wealthy peers, who all look and act the same way. The book spends a large amount of its word count describing every person's clothing and appearance, but they're still indistinguishable from each other. This is why he confesses his crime and desperately wants to get into Dorsia; people will actually see him and remember who he was.
I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase 'There's no such thing as a free lunch'. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is 'The only free cheese is in the mousetrap' - which is so much better.
Which can be a limiting view because there are good things which are genuinely free, but they are not material, they are consciously experienced qualities. It would be absurd to say that relaxing is a limited and expensive thing, or that love is, or beauty is, or freedom is.
(Do not take this seriously ... or should you?)
The teletubbies are an example of a piece of media so reflexively dismissed as childish and thus stupid, that no one pays attention to its ability to subconsciously program people into techno-friendly views.
What are the teletubbies? Anyone with a sane view of human faces and expressions would immediately tell you that they are unbelievably creepy, yet they are portrayed as cheerful and "cute". This is one of the many ways that young children are programmed to tolerate the uncanny nightmare that the developments of human-like technology and AI-generated images would produce down the line.
As their name suggests then, their body is integrated with a TV, a not so subtle indication of the transhumanist views of the producers, who implicitly tell us that replacing one's guts—the source of instinctive discernment—with a television is not just fine but can also be "cute".
The teletubbies do not do anything, certainly nothing meaningful or difficult. This is the future that our elites want us to believe in: not a meaningful engagement with reality and its inevitable hardships but also some beautiful moments of peace and togetherness, no, simply the abolition of work and the rather bored sense of idleness which results from it.
There is no wild nature either, merely Astroturfed greenery here to suggest nature and hide the nightmareish world that they inhabit, a simulacrum of the nature from which real cultures emerge and take part in, but which here is nowhere to be found. The teletubbies are all the same, they do not work, do not eat, do not dance or engage in art or any ritual, or tell stories or even simply have conversations. They just are. Not the being of conscious people who are content to simply exist and delight in the present moment, rather they do nothing because they have nothing whatsoever to do or attend to, they are eternally stuck in a totally barren environment, a rather common vision of Hell in fact.
The sun baby is here both as a stand-in for the intended audience to identify with, in usual postmodern fashion of the audience and the spectacle fusing into one thing, but also here as a primal symbol for aliveness, to reassure the spectator that this world is in any way natural and alive, which again is a mere illusion.
On a more formal level, the sun could be a suggestion that this world could run purely on solar energy, and has managed to progress to a point where fossil fuels and nuclear energy, with their obvious drawbacks, have been obsoleted. Needless to say that this is a fantasy, but one which again appeals to the utopia of our times: a workless, "natural" heaven where we put technology to our uses to do everything for us, and which has no drawback because it runs on "clean", renewable energy.
Speaking of putting technology to our use, our characters are frequently accompanied with a sentient vacuum cleaner, whole role is to pickup the trash left behind. The implicit message being that the various externalities created by technology, such as trash and pollution, can be fully taken into account by technology itself, and even turned into some cute things, such as how the vacuum cleaner can suck up spilled food and turn it into cutesy pink bubbles in one of the episodes.
As mentioned previously, the temporality of the teletubbies is, much like our postmodern nightmare, a frozen eternal present, one in which nothing meaningful or surprising really happens, everything runs smoothly and no one has to really do anything.
A blissful, safe and predictable heaven on Earth. What a beautiful vision given to us by the transhumanist writers. No worries, no problems, all we have to do is to put our faith in the Sun-God of technology, and our workless, green and cheerful utopia will be reality. Fear not my children, for the future is already here, safe, painless and cute.
Twitter is schizoid—all in the scattered and disembodied mind—and also prone to inducing a form of low-grade insanity because of all the diverging views you get in your feed which do not amount to any wisdom.
This is because firstly, the divergence doesn't resolve to any meaningful direction, it's just disagreements prompted by the recommendation system to increase engagement, but also because the difference is ultimately an illusion. Essentially everyone on Twitter who tweets a lot is the same by virtue on being there and engaging so much with social media, especially because they constantly read and respond to one another anyway.
It's also, unsurprisingly, tech- and system-friendly and I don't want to have my mind flooded by the bullshit needed to uphold the vision that the future will be just fine if we trust in the direction our system is taking.
I tend to spend time on social media because I have been operating under the assumption that reading essays and books is somehow "hard", when it really isn't the case. It certainly requires more care and "focus" than mere scrolling, but it isn't that much harder from what I experience, and it is also significantly more rewarding, unlike social media which always leaves me a bit ... bleh, like a deep sense that I am not attending to my life.
But I also came across some people and writers which have expanded my views and helped me deal with some of my problems, so I am also glad for that. But I have clearly reached the point where more time on it is far more harmful than it is beneficial. The only good thing you can find on Twitter is helpful information, but life is far more than just what you know, it has to be lived, which is why ultimately Twitter is a betrayal of life.
On a Friday night in May 2024, significant rain have hit areas around where I live, which fortunately didn't affect me as much, but still have left a noticeable pool of water in our basement, though nothing drastic.
Our house has already been hit in Summer 2021 by an actual flood, one that left the ground floor with a good 70-80cm of water, which left the walls covered with moisture and destroyed many of our belongings. My parents and I didn't lose anything significant in the process — some furniture and some personal belongings, but nothing that couldn't be replaced — but the time needed to clean and renovate the house, and the wake-up call that something like that could happen even in Europe was a sobering realization for me: the modern world, in all its "technological advancement", is still powerless in many ways against Mother Nature's wrath.
Of course there are many human factors at play too: surfaces entirely covered in concrete or asphalt are unable to absorb water, neglected river beds become incredibly poor at evacuating water, and an abandoned dam system meant that there was no way to direct the excess water elsewhere, etc. Don't take my words too literally, I'm not very knowledgeable in practical matters, but all that to say that there is a large part of decaying infrastructure, which means that many things could have been done within the system to avoid this.
The thing though is that when it happened, people were far more interested in finding people to blame — government, politicians, workers who were supposed to maintain the dams etc. — than to actually work on proactive measures. A lot of blaming, some reactive measures, but not a whole lot of sitting down and finding ways to prevent future problems. Not surprising to me, but still disappointing.
At the end of the day, the technological system can only exist through human beings and their coordination, and let's just say that I don't trust the latter. Too many conflicting interests, too little incentive to care about others that one doesn't personally know, too much systematic incompetence and corruption, not enough skin in the game.
The flood that hit us in 2021 were a good reminder of the fragility of the system we have come to rely on. Do not be fooled by the tech gizmos such as LLMs and generative art. If the basic infrastructures that provide us with food, energy and housing break down, the fancy tech doesn't matter. And the signs of fragility are everywhere, it’s just that people do not dare talk about them.
More recently, this month I witnessed in the middle of the night a car burning in the streets. It felt quite surreal to see such an expensive item burn like it was nothing. I have to admit that, as insensitive as it might sound, I did find the fire quite beautiful in the middle of the night, the orange hues piercing through the blanket of darkness around it, and the smoke flying around.
Is it insensitive to talk about material loss in this manner? If someone's house was burning, I would feel bad for them for sure, because we all need a place to sleep in, especially during Winter, and houses contain many personally valuable items. But a car burning on the other hand? I don't know, as much as it sucks for the convenience and it's quite a hassle to get payments back from your insurance, I can't say it felt like a big loss from my point of view, but then again it wasn't my car, so perhaps I am simply judging this insensitively.
I put these two events one after another here, because I just want to note that as someone who is quite obsessed with viewing things in terms of the 4 elements, it seems quite funny that the elements are literally inserting themselves into my life, whether I want it or not. Ultimately the lesson is the same: impermanence of what we believe is stable, solid. Finite forms are bound to disappear, which is why we want to appreciate them for what they are, but not cling tightly onto them, otherwise we make Reality itself our enemy.
On a lighter (ha) note, I just had a thought about how mirrors are usually explained, and realized it's actually incredible simple, and has nothing specifically to do with mirrors.
The first thing to notice is that mirrors and cameras both project an image by virtue of how light travels in straight lines. But the reason why a mirror "inverts" the image is that you are seeing the same projection from the other side, compared to what a camera would see. A camera is such that it has the subject, and its projection (which then becomes the photograph) on the same side, whereas with a mirror, you are seeing what a camera would see but on the other side of the projection.
So now the only question that needs to be answered is why do objects seem to "flip" when you see them from one side versus another. For instance, if I look at a table from one side, and then go over to its other side and look at it again, why has it seemingly flipped? The answer is very simple here, it's simply that the act of going to the other side and looking at the same object involves a rotation of my body of 180°. This rotation happens along the axis of my spine, the vertical axis, which is why things are inverted horizontally but not vertically.
So really, there is nothing about mirrors that "invert" from left to right, it's simply that we see the image of a mirror from another side than if we were to view it from a camera.
In each location, the inhabitants are given access to food, but the utensils are too unwieldy to serve oneself with. In hell, the people cannot cooperate, and consequently starve. In heaven, the diners feed one another across the table and are sated.
Also known as the Allegory of the long spoons
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2025-11-30