Hopepunk, explained: the storytelling trend that weaponizes optimism – Vox

In the framework of hopepunk, it’s neither. “Hopepunk is a radical call to arms for us to imagine better,” Slack said. “To embrace the fact that fantasy is not simply an escape from the world but an invitation to go deeper into it. That we must fall in love with the world that we so deeply wish to change.” Instead, he argues that love may be beautiful, but it’s also messy and painful, and far from being naive, it’s a conscious, hard-won and fully self-aware choice.

Source: Hopepunk, explained: the storytelling trend that weaponizes optimism – Vox

I think this not only sounds good, but is in and of itsself a good indication as to why #hope and #empathy aren’t just insipid concepts of naive “treehugger”-types. But a bold statement AND politcal action against the all emcompassing sinistry of the powers that be, that never tire to shove hopelessness down our throats. Well, not on my watch!

Warum Weihnachten alleine feiern absolut wundervoll ist › ze.tt

Source: Warum Weihnachten alleine feiern absolut wundervoll ist › ze.tt

Trifft voll ins Schwarze! Herrlicher Beitrag! (sorry, international readers – this one is in German. Maybe the big G’s translation service can make semi-sense of this…)

Menschen, Mindset, Meilensteine: Ein Rückblick auf 5 Jahre digitale Selbständigkeit –

In den letzten 5 Jahren digitaler Selbständigkeit habe ich so einige Höhen und Tiefen durchlaufen. Viele neue Menschen sind in mein Leben getreten, mein Mindset hat sich komplett verschoben und ich kann mit Stolz auf erreichte Meilensteine in meinem Business zurückblicken.

Source: Menschen, Mindset, Meilensteine: Ein Rückblick auf 5 Jahre digitale Selbständigkeit –

Where two oceans meet, but do not mix!

I wasn’t aware this existed – wow! A “liquid demarcation” line between two oceans. Amazing! Really, this planet is a bounty of miracles that never ceases to amaze me!

I’m a Member of the American ‘Used-to-Haves’ | Kathleen Ann

This one nails it for me! I’m a member of the Used-to-Haves’ in my country of birth and residence. And I couldn’t agree any more on what Kathleen Ann so eloquently says. We’ve gotten mugged big-time by the existing power-cartel made of (corrupt) politicians shaking hands with Big Finance, corporate CEOs and their henchmen, the lobbyists. But it isn’t only the former middle class who got robbed of their lives’ accomplishments: Pretty much everyone saw that happen to them as well. It isn’t only about the members of the “once had” class, it affects everyone else, too – minus above mentioned cartels of power. In one word: We – those, who depend on showing up at a job at least five times a week, not counting overtime – were abused! (Synonyms: Lied-to, exploited, used and tossed away, stripped naked, left-to-die in poverty). The former “American Dream” and each of their equivalents in other so-called “free countries” was the scam of the century in my book! But see for yourself.

I’m a Member of the American ‘Used-to-Haves’ | Kathleen Ann.

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Final Secret – Esquire

Yesterday’s news of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sudden passing – purportedly from a heroine overdose – gave me some unexpected and profound grief. I hadn’t known how much I had appreciated him in the movies he starred in – or so it seemed to me, when suddenly faced with the finite realization that I’ll never see him in another movie again.

“Going for broke”, is what this article by Tom Junod for Esquire offers as a possible explanation, trying to weave some consistency into the most diverse roles Hoffman played onscreen and the offscreen person, whom all of a sudden everyone feels entitled to know something about. That’s a pretty bold, far fetched stretch from where I’m sitting and it angers me beyond words to see the public apparently “owning” their celebrities as if they were nothing else than just another one of the many commodities our convenient, consumerist lives are taking for granted. At this point, we – the public – know next to zero about the person behind the actor. So we are left to speculate. And speculate we do and seem all too willing to offer special knowledge about his sudden and much too early demise.

Over the past five to six years, many of the “formative” celebrities of my younger years found an “untimely” death, in most cases brought about not by natural causes, but involving some form of substance abuse or addiction. Time and again, when this happens, the public echo seems to focus on the cause of death instead, immediately bypassing any compassion or even just mentioned piety in reporting. To me, this is clear evidence of the massive erosion of culture taking place on every level of our “societies”. It almost seems as if the greatest comfort for those left with the aftermath of a void never to be filled again is in wildly rationalizing away instead of acknowledging the more obvious in appropriate ways: We lost a fellow human being, they’re gone and won’t come back. And that’s all that should matter in the situation.

But there is one small aspect that gives me some comfort and seems capable of vanquishing my anger. Apparently, Hoffman managed to almost completely shield his private life – including whatever struggle he had with any substance – from his work. According to Doris Barr, mother of the late Hoffman’s brother-in-law, he was completely dedicated to his work, which was his passion, his calling from early on, and he seems to have managed – for the most part – to hold on to this dedicated work ethic. “Going for broke?” I don’t think so. Quite the opposite: I find grace, style and dignity in Hoffman’s consummate way of going about his career, that never seemed to allow whatever personal troubles get in the way. Until now. There is no farewell note or other information that may give a clue as to what lead up to this. I find it a great victory on his part that he’ll take most of the private person that he was to his grave, leaving us with his legacy of films he starred in. Well done, Sir.

R.I.P., Philip Seymour Hoffman.

P.S. And if by all means you can’t help blaming it on the drugs and his battle with addiction – which I take as a symptom for something running a lot deeper, b.t.w. – then treat yourself to some very pragmatic and potentially life-saving ideas as expressed from someone with firsthand knowledge, a recovering heroin user himself.

New Experiments to Pit Quantum Mechanics Against General Relativity | Simons Foundation

I’m not all sure, I want to know the outcome of that. If I read this right and if the outcome is what the scientists hope for, it basically eradicates the concept of intent and consciousness from a philosophical/anthropocentric point of view. It would make gravity the new “consciousness” as the defining ultimate ‘creator’ of all possible experiences, wouldn’t it? In other words: If their theories prove to be(come) accurate, those findings will then basically say that (quantum) gravity is the counterpart to superposition, forcing the latter to ‘decide’ for a definite state if (quantum) space-time curvature reaches a certain threshold (in line with the Penrose-Hameroff argument of orchestrated objective reduction leading to a collapse of the wave function, this ‘forcing’ quantum superposition to collapse into a definite state). Again: If right, there is no need for consciousness, intent or any of these concepts humankind has clung to for eons. It will then basically confirm what I’ve been thinking for as long as I have been able of thought: We are the random result of a quantum gravitational field. Dedicated believers, of course, will defend their position arguing: “Who” made the gravitational field then? I don’t know. But I don’t think that the existence of the field is proof or reason to believe that some”one” made it in the first place. However… you’re free to believe what you prefer as I reserve the right to trust my own intuitions. Agreed?

New Experiments to Pit Quantum Mechanics Against General Relativity | Simons Foundation. And associated with my above thought, this might be of interest, too: http://www.iep.utm.edu/lp-argue/#SH3b

Our Narrow Slice – YouTube

Whoa!!! Talk about putting things in perpective! Slightly intimidating in terms of the insignificance of each of us – not for the emotional unstable ones. But on the upside: Majorly educational. And sobering. Both don’t need to be a bad thing, right?

Our Narrow Slice – YouTube.

Liar, Liar!

Show Stopper

“That’s a fat lie!”, Kelvin screamed at the top of his lungs. “I would have never signed up for this had I been made aware at the briefing”, he exclaimed.

“A lie”, Salomon chuckled softly. “You know with certainty that your biovatars can’t lie – you made them so”, Salomon replied in a most collected and calm manner, oozing self-confidence thick like Canadian maple syrup and knowing he’d push every single one of Kelvin’s buttons.

“I made them the way you ordered me to make”, Kelvin retorted with a sudden trace of discouragement in his voice.

“Be that as it may, lying isn’t within their realm of options”, Salomon persisted. “The truth table is infallable, you know that. And the way I remember it, we went over that during briefing more than one time.”

“No such thing as infallable”, Kelvin hissed back, barely audible. “If you knew the first damn thing about mathematics and logics, you would have seen the infeasability of this project your damn self”, he now said with firm resolve and gritted teeth, almost salivating with rage. “But kissing your investors’ asses apparently rules your days. Guess, you must have come to like it.” Kelvin knew that he was way out of bounds. On the other hand, he was very sure that they needed him. If anyone, he was the person to complete a project that had left many hopeless and burnt a plethora of intimidatingly intelligent – not to mention hungry – predator-like up-and-comers from various think-tanks that had been hired on and off, while this madness of an undertaking barreled along, ridiculing any budget calculation done prior to initiation.

“Our investors”, Salomon blandly deflected Kelvin’s insult. “They put food on your table and in your kids’ mouth. And they afford your wife’s fancy ‘time outs’ at the spa, when she’s been long over your face and marriage. How many times do we have to reiterate this?”, he continued with the faintest trace of impatience.

Kelvin paid him no attention. He had fixed his eyes on the status report coming back from the latest in-vivo audit. 35 out of 100 biovatars were sent back with a malfunction flag. He didn’t have to read the fine print of that. Malfunction meant bad news, in particular in this high a number. It basically boiled down to a 100% failure in design. And he had lost count of how many times he had gone over the functional specs documents in order to identify a false assessment on his own part. The engineering team had overindulged on break points in the operating system’s code, but still – at some point, those damn heaps of carbon, wires, silicon and a central battery pack the size of a grown-up’s liver ran into an infinite loop. He just didn’t seem able to track down the error.

“What am I going to tell the board?”, Salomon insisted while poking around his nailbeds with boredom, not even raising a brow.

© W. Nieke, all rights reserved

Cocktail Party Donts: No Religion, No Politics! And my Apology…

I should and could have known better: You stay away from religion and politics in situations that call for a friendly, slightly superficial atmosphere. Like e.g. at cocktail parties. Or their social media equivalent: Facebook. (Don’t take it personal, Mr.  Zuckerberg… some party! A multi billion dollar party, actually. Kudos, Sir! What? Wall Street had that one covered? Anyway…) However, with my compulsive sharing-every-thought-every-minute disorder I couldn’t help it – and voiced my opinion on one or the other topic, and oftentimes on matters, I didn’t have all the facts in first. Like US politics, for example. Or how they (don’t) work. Like, where or when the POTUS should have delivered or missed out on. Fact is: I don’t know shit. Or if I did, it’s a slightly different kind of shit. I mean, don’t get me wrong: Shit is shit here in my country as well. And from the smells of it – yeah, a big turd all the way, too! But still not the same turd and not flushed down the same W.C.

Fact is: I grew up in a different country. While a thing or two could be said about having gotten americanized from early on – can you say syndicated TV shows? AFN radio? Troops stationed in our backyards guarding nuclear missile launchpads? – and while some even go at lengths to prove that we’ve never been a sovereign nation after WW II ever again, it still is and was not US soil. The point being: The mindset used to be different. The inner workings of our government and their politics were different. And the “people’s identity” – if there was such a thing to begin with – is and was different, too. I think, I have understood that Americans don’t wait on their country to do something for them, but instead make things happen for themselves – and expect their administration, their country to stay out of their way doing so. I think, I have understood that families provide for themselves and don’t expect their nation to provide for them. Hard working people, the American Dream, you make the bed you lay in and all those good things. While “we” tended to expect our politicians and their politics to take care of us in cases of emergency. Good, hard working people here as well. People, who show up at their 9 to 5 jobs for the bigger part of their working lives in order to generate some modest as in: carefree wealth and maybe even modest property for themselves. But in return, we used to trust our politicians to know our needs and requirements and for the first to take care of those. Like public healthcare, pension funds, all sorts of insurances keeping you out of harm’s way should something unforeseeable ever happen. Kind of a “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” sort of  a deal. I would have to stress: It used to be like that when I grew up. Now, some 30 years later, things aren’t the same here anymore, either. But before I really get into a drawn-out debate over exactly when things fell to the wayside in my country and where the chips landed, let me say this:

Pardon my ignorance! And I apologize for having hurt one or the other’s feelings with any of my posts in the past.

But… I can’t promise it won’t happen again. This probably is, what intercultural communication was all about: You understand a people’s identity and respect their feelings about the first. I have not always followed that paradigm. And while I’ll surely try to do better in the future, I can’t guarantee anything. With every issue, there is a plethora of aspects and facets to them. And maybe not. Maybe it’s indeed become a “follow the trail of money” world – or has been that kind of world all along. Be that as it may. What I’m trying to say is: (Try and ) Don’t take anything personal. It’s not. There are great and wonderful people everywhere. And each nation or culture has their share of a-holes, too. So, after all – things aren’t all that different altogether when you drill them down to the human level, aren’t they?

Peace,

w.