LD 02 - Velocity in Dreams

I am supposedly at "square 1" of lucid dreaming again, per last post, but I am really not - I thought about writing about a specific topic on the blog, and promptly had 2 lucid dreams that were already influenced by what I was planning to write about. I kind of needed the idea of *starting anew*, but obviously that's completely arbitrary, I'm just somewhere along the road.

~

So, velocity. - Huh? Why do I think about velocity?

Well. Despite the entire surroundings in a dream being decidedly not-real, and therefore not bound to any rules, they usually conform to a lot of assumptions based on what I experience in my daily life in this world.

For example, if something looks far away, then it is supposed to take a while to get there. If something is so far away that I can't even see it (or I just know it's super far away) then it should take even longer.

But why? The only real distance is the one in my mind, right? If I want to go to Africa, all I have to do is make it so Africa starts right aroung the corner. Of course, my mind fights back, because in WL (waking life) this is an absurd statement.

In today´s LD I remembered this idea:

I manage to get out of my bed and into the dream version of the room I am sleeping in. As usual I spend the first moments establishing the dream, I put as much focus as possible into the sensation of my feet on the floor and move away from the bed, through the rest of the flat, and run outside into the inner courtyard. IRL, there is not much to go after that, a fence would block the way into the garden. In my dreams however, this fence usually doesn't exist, and I can run directly onto the meadow. I can feel the grass under my naked feet - that was another thing I was wondering about recently, how much sensation I really had in my dreams, since I often don't spend any thought on that. 

For some reason, I really want to touch some nice cool water. Looking at the closest tree, I decided that there will be water behind it. I go there, and there is a small puddle of water right next to the strunk. I use it to wash my face and enjoy the sensation. I want more water, so I pull deeper into the puddle, but  there is just a lot of mud. I take a large junk of mud and put it onto my face, and then onto my hair. I am reminded of Nnedi Okorafor´s novella Binti, where the protagonist comes from a specific Nigerian tribe that uses a specific kind of mud or clay to put it in their hair. On the tree is now a mirror, but a very dysfunctional one: While it sometimes mirrors my movements, half of the time the person in the mirror does slightly other things. I use the mirror to look at my hair, A bit later into the dream, an african person turns up and offers to dance with me for a bit.

I don't usually have dreams that are about foreign places, but the idea of "Africa right behind the corner" had been in my mind, hence the theme. I didn't travel anywhere though, I was just in an unspecified meadow, next to a nice old tree. You could say me putting mud into my hair was technically cultural appropriation of some sorts, but for me it was really just about getting a different sensation. Mud feels really nice, and I can't smear it into my hair IRL without quite some suffering consequences. ;-) Anyway, what I do in my dreams is no concern of ethics - only how and if I write about them is.

~

The second thing that made me think about velocity is the experience of speed, and of rapidly changing environments. If I sit in a fast-running train, it is to be expected that things will just woosh past me, and I can't even see them properly. In a dream, this could a bit of a problem, as my mind has to come up with new scenes in a rapid succession. It can do that, but when I fly very fast, I tend to lose contact with my environment after a while, especially since no part of my body actually touches anything besides air, which tends to count as "nothing" or perhaps some sensation of wind.

One way to look at it, would be, that my experience would be similar to someone watching TV; I sit still in a chair, but what I see can be very fast. The dream ultimately is like a virtual reality, but there is no actual space I am bolting through, I just get (some of) the sensations I would have if I did move.

Another dream of today:

As I become aware of my dream-state, I am running on the street, focussing on the feeling of my feet on the ground at first, then eventually deciding on flying. As I move upward a bit, the scene I was in fades away fast, I am accelerating towards the (very beautifully coloured) horizon, while below me, treetops rush past me. At some point, there is very little sensation of actually being there, and it is more like watching a zoomquilt. I did enjoy the changing patterns of pink sky and green leaves though.

 ~

As I write this, I feel I'm more and more unhappy about the sheer number of assumptions I make about what is possible in my dreams, despite knowing from other people´s accounts, that those limits can be surpassed. There are people for whom their dream environment is so stable and unchangable that it behaves way more like a real place than a virtual reality. Why am I deconstructing my dreams to such a degree?

I want to mention that one of my side-goals for pracising lucid dreaming is to get inspiration for my fantasy worlds, in which dreams, while also deeply personal at times, can be actual places. So I'm torn between two contradicting views - one pretends to be scientific (while ignoring some data), the other one pretends to be fantastic (while sometimes being closer to actual experience).

So, where to go? I feel like over-analyzing dreams in that way does not actually help me at all. My plan was to improve my dream-control, and to do that by shredding away my misconceptions about what rules a dream has to follow. But if I'm honest, the dreams I find most interesting are not those where the dreamer is in full control, but those where the dream environment resists manipulation.

So I'd better focus on sensations (as I already did in today´s dreams!) and exploration. I got sidetracked A LOT, holy fuck.

So here's the actual points of this post:

1) There is no point in moving through dreams in a high velocity, unless experiencing velocity is the goal.

2) To travel somewhere is to assume that I am not already there, which may not be necessary at all times.

~

Next up, I want to:

a) more sensations! including eating, bc eating lots of food without any concern for health is cool

b) have some actual conversations (it has been a while) like asking people who they are

For the second one to happen, I seem to need a bit more time. My dreams tend to start with me being completely alone (even if I'm in a cityscape), and other people only appear when I got distracted by some other activity. I've had complicated analytical ideas about *why* that is the case, but honestly, I might make more progress by throwing those into a dustbin for now; idk.

~

Restricting myself to writing in english is more exhausting than I thought it would be. There is no reason to do so, if I truly do this for myself and not for other people. I thought that writing in a different language than in the past 15 years would force me to think differently, but that doesn't seem to be the case overall.

Future posts will therefore be in whatever language I feel like writing at the time.

Back to Square One! - Writing & Lucid Dreaming (and how I got to where I am now)

Introduction

Back in 2006 I started getting into Lucid Dreaming. I bought books, and started a daily dream journal which I would keep up diligently for half a decade. I joined an online community which quickly became a major influence on many aspects of my life - artistically, spiritually (until I parted with esotericism in the early 2010s), philosophically, politically; I watched and participated in countless debates on the nature of conciousness (on good days), on whether you can actually leave your body (on worse days) and on my own basic human rights (on really bad days). As I met more people personally, my focus slowly drifted aways from Lucid Dreaming itself, naturally, as there is only so much to discuss technique-wise, until you hit the barrier of "yeah it kinda works differently for everyone".

This spring, I finally decided to leave. I really feel like I have outgrown the place. Instead of taking/sharing inspiration, exchanging expertise, helping newbies, all I did was getting drawn into debates, most or all not really worth my time. In the last 15 years, I moved significantly to the queerfeminist left, while the community stayed firmly liberal-centrist, with the occasional leftists, but also occasional far-right "just asking questions" trolls. Add to that the covid-skeptics, anti-vaxxers, creepy misogynists, and just about every flavour of esoteric believers... while certainly entertaining at times, ultimately it ended up a waste of time and energy.

Reboots

I will admit, the last half year has been kinda rough. My physical and mental health went down and my wrists still make it impossible for me to play piano, amongst many other things. But while all that was going on, I made huge progress elsewhere. With writing one of the few things my wrists and my depression consistently allowed me to do, that is where my focus went.

I was unhappy with my world-building for a long time. I was constantly holding myself back in fear of other´s reaction, and there was all this "leftover energy" from not really having a good place anymore to let myself go wild into surreal/metaphysical thinking. Finally, I had enough. Screw this, I told myself, I'm doing what I want, and if people don't like it, or think that I' losing my sanity - so be it.

}{ was born, the anti-world, where no rules of conventional worldbuilding apply other than "everything can happen". I won't go into detail here, I'm just mentioning it because this project was like the bursting of a dam. I don't think I have ever been more productive in my worldbuilding than the last months. I seemlessly went from writing absurdist meta-commentary of my own life to world-building my main fantasy worlds, and from there to a new, more fluid understanding of who I am and what I want. And with that came the realization that I needed to stop wasting my time on people that weren't coming with me anyways.

Go forward, don't look back too much.

Square One

So here I am. Lucid Dreaming.

["Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor, und bin so klug als wie zuvor..."] 

Yesyes, thank you Mr. Goethe! Anyways. I am interested to see whether I can get some of that fascination back that had gripped me back in 2006, when it felt like I had basically discovered an actually working magic. The promise of "endless possibilities" faded away soon, met with the realization that endless possibilities, by definition, also included "kinda mediocre, boring experiences". The worthwile lucid dreams were spread out far between tons of false successes - where I did become aware of my dream-state only to quickly lose control, be dropped in ever-new variations of the same boring empty dreamscape (usually the house where I grew up in), or just in a dark void.

If I have learned something from the last months of worldbuilding, it's that it is always a good idea to check where I am; trying to figure out the issues I am having as precisely as possible. So that is what I want to try next. And while I'm doing that, I might as well see if I can give some basic introductions into LDing for people that have no experience. That is also a good way for myself to find out what I don't know or have never understood properly. Let's see.

Lucid Dreaming 101

So, for all the newbies: What even is lucid dreaming? :)

Well, the basic definition: A lucid dream (LD) is a dream where the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming, and have some control over the dream.

This isn't the only way to define it. Some people consider being aware of the dream-state to be sufficient in order to count as lucid, some people go way farther on the control-side. German pioneer Paul Tholey´s criteria include being able to have full sensations (being able to see, hear, smell, ...), having a good memory of what happened, or even understanding the meaning of a dream while dreaming. ["Klarheit über den Sinn des Traumes"] That last point of course raises the question: Do dreams even have meanings? And if so, what do we mean with that?

I'd say that there is some consensus that lucidity exists on a multi-dimensional scale: One can be fully aware of the dream-state while having poor control, or vice versa be able to navigate through a dream effortlessy while not even thinking about it as being a dream.

Abbreviations

Lucid Dreaming communities have come up with a lot of jargon and acronyms - far too many, honestly - and I'm not sure if I want to use them here. If I force myself to avoid commonly used language it might even drive me towards a better understanding, since often, if you have learned what a word means, you fall into the trap of also thinking that you know a lot about it.

So, just for the sake of giving sort of the minimum, the most common distinction being made is whether one enters a dream directly from waking state (ie staying lucid during falling asleep) or gaining lucidity during an ongoing dream, whether through some kind of sudden realization, or gradually.

The first one is called WILD (wake-initiated lucid dream), the latter DILD (dream-initiated lucid dream). Those terms, as far as I know, were coined by dream researcher Stephen LaBerge, who was also (one of) the first to prove that LDs are actually a real phenomenon to the wider scientific community. Paul Tholey used a similar dichotomy, he wrote about Klarheit bewahrende Technik (technique of staying lucid) and Klarheit gewinnende Technik (technique of becoming lucid).

From there, language evolved over the years, so nowadays a verb to wild could just mean to be in the process of (attempting to) entering a dream-state (and not refer to to be dreaming a dream that was entered directly from waking-state) I should also add that the "directly going from being awake to being in a dream" is something that many dreamers don't actually experience that literally; it can also be about staying just aware enough that you can regain full(er) consciousness when the dream has formed.

And now?

This state of in-between is currently the one that is most interesting to me to pursue - in part because I sometimes only have very limited time to dream between one louder snore of my partner to the next. :D

Another goal is getting access to earlier dreams, the ones that happen when I am still very much asleep, and therefore less at risk of just randomly waking up over and over again.

Lastly, I have to figure out a way to deal with memory. I have a major handicap in that I am quite literally unable to keep a written dream-journal (even if I was super-motivated, which, honestly, I'm really not) because of my wrist issues. That almost forces me into a position where my main focus is the actual dreaming and not so much remembering it. From a journaling, analyzing and re-living perspective that sucks. But I'm gonna try make the best of it, because, in principle, I actually like the idea of putting the focus right there, on the actual thing.

That's it for now. As usual, I cannot promise that I will continue this, but as I have explained, I'm kind of out of places to go with this one interest of mine, so if I have something to say, I might as well do it on a blog - a space that I have more personal control over. Dreams are pretty personal, after all.

J C

New Blog, who dis?

Is this a beginning? Or a continuation? When I took down my old blog, I soon realized that I was not the least bit sad about getting an opportunity for a fresh start. It has never been easy for me to leave behind my past. But here I shall introduce myself as I am now.

~ ẞ ~

Ist dies ein Anfang? Oder eine Fortführung? Als ich meinen alten Blog vom Netz nahm, bemerkte ich schnell, dass ich keineswegs traurig war darüber, eine Gelegenheit für einen Neustart bekommen zu haben. Meine Vergangenheit hinter mir zu lassen, fiel mir noch nie leicht. Ich werde mich hier aber vorstellen, wie ich jetzt bin.

~ ẞ ~

Jundurg

That's the name I use online, in most spaces I go. Some people call be by that name offline too. Recently I've added Delphimė as a surname to go along with it.

Bi*

I was always interested in anything LGBTQ* that I could find, and I have known myself not to be really straight from a young age. And yet I did not say a word about myself, because I did not know if I was „queer enough“ to really belong in those communities. It was pure luck on my side that I decided to visit the Austrian pride parade in the exact year when there was a group of bi people there for the first time.

Since then I've learned that my experience in that regard is far from unique – bi people face both being excluded from queer spaces and being alienated in heteronormative spaces. It can sometimes seem like we belong nowhere.

Fortunately, there is now a growing bi* community in Vienna, to which I'm quite happy to contribute in whatever small way I can.

Neurodivergent

I've only recently been diagnosed with ADHD, but I have had problems with executive function(s) from early childhood on, especially in school. I'm also very likely on the autism-spectrum. I do not consider either to be something to be cured – it's just how I am. How to function in a society that is not constructed to accommodate divergence in general is another question.

Non-binary

I've been uncomfortable calling myself a man for most of my adult life, but only in the last few years have I found the necessary vocabulary to describe this discomfort, and it took even longer until I was finally able to acknowledge to myself that I could indeed be transgender. I do not fit the stereotypical narrative of „being in the wrong body“ (most trans people don't, by the way) – it's my body, how could it be the wrong one? – but I also don't feel comfortable if people want to describe me in masculine terms. I am also not a woman – neither of those societal boxes fit me very well, so I remain outside of the gender binary. :-)

At the moment, I use the pronouns he and she interchangable. You may use other pronouns for me – since the german language does not have any established gender-neutral pronoun for non-binary people, I tend to not using a singular they for myself even when writing in english, although I very much support it's use for other people. [Update 2019: I use she pronouns now, and he does feel wrong nowadays, though neo-pronouns are fine.]

Composer

I studied composition at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna for about seven years. I will hopefully get my degree this year, but due to executive dysfunction and depression, I am sometimes not able to work towards it for months.

I tend to have opinions about music. One of these is this: Any music that is purely based on sound will become more and more obsolete as soon as computers and artificial intelligence will become better at creating compelling music pieces all by itself. There are plenty of ways to go beyond just creating sound that other people can listen to – I will probably get to that in future posts, as experience tells me that I cannot keep my mouth shut about such things anyway. ;-)

Conworlder

I love creating fiction, and I especially love creating fictional worlds. In my fantasy worlds, I can explore different cultures and their philosophies, how they think about art, and how they think about gender. I can construct languages and think about how they inform the culture around them – and vice versa. Or any other topic that interests me. As a friend of mine put it „The nice thing about worldbuilding is that there is no idea crappy enough that you can't use it at least somewhere.“

In addition to that, the german worldbuilding community feels like a family to me. Sure, like in every family there are a few 'odd uncles' that I don't want to meet. But being surrounded by people who will have a long-winded discussion about even the most absurd topic is something I don't want to miss in my life. :-)

~ ẞ ~

Jundurg

Das ist der Name, den ich online am meisten verwende. Einige Leute nennen mich auch offline so. Vor kurzem habe ich Delphimė als Nachnamen angefügt.

Bi*

Ich habe mich immer für alles was ich aus dem LGBTQ*-Bereich finden konnte, interessiert, und ich wusste schon recht früh von mir, dass ich nicht wirklich hetero bin. Dennoch habe ich nie etwas davon nach außen gezeigt, weil ich mir nicht sicher war, ob ich „queer genug“ sei, um überhaupt einen Platz in queeren Orten zu haben. Aufgrund eines glücklichen Zufalls habe ich mich dann endlich entschieden, die Regenbogenparade in Wien ausgerechnet in dem Jahr zu besuchen, als es dort zum ersten Mal auch eine Fußgruppe von Bi*sexuellen gab.

Seitdem habe ich immer wieder gehört, dass es nicht nur mir so ging. Bi*sexuelle erfahren sowohl Ausgrenzung von queeren Räumen als auch Entfremdung in heteronormativen Räumen, und manchmal scheint es so, als würden wir überhaupt nirgends hingehören.

In Wien gibt es nun aber eine stetig wachsende Bi*-Community, in der ich mich gerne einbringe, so gut ich das halt kann.

Neurodivergent

Ich habe erst vor kurzem eine ADHS-Diagnose bekommen, aber ich hatte schon von meiner frühen Kindheit Probleme aufgrund von exekutiver Dysfunktion. Ich bin zudem höchstwahrscheinlich am Autismus-Spektrum. Nichts davon ist etwas, das „geheilt“ werden sollte – das ist einfach, wie ich bin. Wie es mir gelingt, in einer Gesellschaft zu leben, die nicht darauf hin ausgelegt ist, wie verschieden Menschen sind, ist eine andere Frage.

Nichtbinär

Ich habe mich schon über den Großteil meines Erwachsenenlebens unwohl damit gefühlt, mich als „Mann“ zu bezeichnen. Aber erst in den letzten paar Jahren habe ich die notwendigen Begriffe kennengelernt, um dieses Unwohlsein weiter zu präzisieren, und es hat noch um einiges länger gedauert, bis ich mir eingestehen konnte, dass ich trans sein könnte. Ich passe nicht in das gängige Klischee „im falschen Körper geboren“ (wie die meisten trans Leute übrigens!) - es ist mein Körper, wie sollte er der falsche sein? - aber ich fühle mich auch nicht besonders wohl damit, wenn andere Menschen mich mit männlichen Begriffen beschreiben. Genausowenig bin ich eine Frau. In keine dieser gesellschaftlichen Schubladen passe ich wirklich gut hinein; daher verbleibe ich außerhalb der Geschlechterbinarität. :-)

Im Moment verwende ich die Pronomen er und sie gleichermaßen. Andere Pronomen für mich zu verwenden, ist auch okay – da die deutsche Sprache kein etabliertes geschlechtsneutrales Pronomen (abseits des sächlichen) hat, tendiere ich dazu, auch im Englischen keines zu verwenden, auch wenn ich das Singular-They ansonsten sehr befürworte. [Update 2019: Ich verwende jetzt sie Pronomen, und er fühlt sich mittlerweile falsch an. Neopronomen sind okay.]

Komponist*in

Ich habe sieben Jahre an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien studiert – und bin dort immer noch Student*in, denn mir fehlt noch der Abschluss, den ich hoffentlich dieses Jahr machen werde. Aufgrund von exekutiver Dysfunktion und Depression schaffe ich es leider oft monatelang nicht, darauf hinzuarbeiten.

Über Musik habe ich oft einiges zu sagen. Zum Beispiel: Jede Musik, die einzig und allein darauf basiert, wie sie klingt, wird immer mehr obsolet werden im selben Ausmaß wie Computer und künstliche Intelligenzen immer besser darin werden, selbst überzeugende Musikstücke zu kreieren. Es gibt eine Menge verschiedene Wege, um darüber hinauszugehen, bloß einen Klang zu erzeugen, den jemand anderes anhören kann – darauf werde ich bestimmt in zukünftigen Posts eingehen. Die bisherige Erfahrung zeigt, dass ich zu diesem Thema ohnehin nicht den Mund halten kann. ;-)

Weltenbastler

Ich liebe es, fiktive Welten zu erschaffen. In meinen Fantasywelten kann ich fremde Kulturen und deren Philosophien erforschen, oder wie sie über Kunst denken, oder über Geschlechter. Ich kann Sprachen entwickeln und darüber nachdenken, wie sie mit der Kultur, in der sie gesprochen werden, zusammenhängen. Oder im Prinzip jedes andere Thema. Wie eine Freundin es mal ausgedrückt hat: „Das Schöne am Weltenbasteln ist, dass man jeden Scheiß irgendwo einbauen kann.“

Zudem ist die deutsche Weltenbastler-Community für mich wie eine Familie. Klar, wie in jeder Familie gibt es auch hier ein paar komische Onkel, die ich nicht unbedingt treffen möchte. Aber von Menschen umgeben zu sein, die auch noch über das absurdeste Thema eine ausgedehnte Diskussion führen können, ist etwas, das ich im Leben nicht mehr missen möchte. :-)

~ ẞ ~

Other Things of Some Importance

This is getting long already, but I want the introduction post to be somewhat comprehensive, so here we go:

• Designing games: Somehow, I haven't finished any of the board games that I started to make in the last ... too many years. I still want to eventually get back to it. In the meantime, I will play other people´s games.
• Lucid dreaming: I used to be very active in the german lucid dreaming community, but lately, dreams aren't really a main focus of my life anymore. Nevertheless, the possibility to consciously experience being somewhere else than in the real world provides a phenomenal experience that has lots of potential both for creative and self-exploring purposes.
• Atheism: I grew up catholic, but it was mostly my evangelical christian friends that made it „necessary“ for me to know a lot more about religion than the average european. Because there have been to many prominent atheists who turned out to be assholes in some way or other, I nowadays only really care about the intersection of atheist and social justice activism.
• Feminism: My perspective here is informed by being bi* and non-binary. Reducing or ending sexism or any kind of privileges based on gender are important topics to me, but I admit that most of my attention goes to the specific areas that concern me the most - or those I think I know better.
• Mental Health: I have benefitted greatly from people who were open about their mental illnesses, and so I want to give some of that back and talk about mine. There is much harm done in our society by pretending that those are something to be ashamed of.
• Randomness: In all my creative work, I have a tendency to flirt with random elements – whether it is a random number generator, or a twenty-sided die, or a random page from Wikipedia. However, I do not leave art fully to chance.
• Dadaism and Surrealism: I owe much to both of these art movements. Within Dadaism, I am very fond of sound poetry. Within Surrealism, I am more interested in methods rather than a particular aesthetic.
• Teaching: This is what I am currently studying for – philosophy, psychology and computer science. I do not know if it will be possible for me to be an openly genderqueer teacher in Austria, but I won't find out if I do not at least try.
• Skepticism: I don't care much about some random weird beliefs people may have, but there are a few that I consider dangerous, both for an individual and for society. My prime example is the belief in fate, whether it is thought as a power far beyond human control, or – worse – something that can be controlled by positive thinking, prayer, or various other methods involving magical thinking.

~ ẞ ~

Weiteres von einiger Wichtigkeit

Der Post ist jetzt schon recht lang, aber ich möchte die Vorstellung auch einigermaßen vollständig haben, also:

• Spiele designen: Irgendwie habe ich es nie geschafft, eines der Brettspielprojekte der letzten Jahre auch abzuschließen, aber irgendwann möchte ich da auch wieder weitermachen. In der Zwischenzeit spiele ich halt Spiele von anderen.
• Klarträumen: In der deutschen Klartraumcommunity war ich mal sehr aktiv, aber in letzter Zeit sind Träume nicht mehr so ein zentraler Teil meines Lebens. Nichtsdestotrotz bietet die Möglichkeit, sich bewusst als außerhalb der realen Umgebung zu erleben, eine phänomenale Erfahrung mit viel Potential für Kreativ- und Selbstforschungszwecke.
• Atheismus: Ich wuchs katholisch auf, aber es waren hauptsächlich meine evangelikalen Freund*innen, die es für mich „notwendig“ machten, deutlich mehr über Religion zu wissen als eine durchschnittliche Europäer*in. In den letzten Jahren erwiesen sich zu viele prominente Atheisten in der einen oder anderen Weise als Arschlöcher, daher interessiere ich mich meist nur noch für die Überschneidung von Atheismus mit Social-Justice Aktivismus.
• Feminismus: Meine Perspektive ist geprägt davon, bi* und nichtbinär zu sein. Sexismus oder jegliche Arten von geschlechtsbezogenen Privilegien abzubauen ist mir wichtig, aber ich gebe zu, dass mein Hauptfokus auf den Bereichen liegt, die mich selbst betreffen, bzw. wo ich mich besser auszukennen glaube.
• Psychische Gesundheit: Ich habe viel von Leuten profitiert, die offen über ihre psychischen Probleme geschrieben haben, und daher möchte ich etwas davon zurückgeben und auch über meine offen sein. Viel Schaden wird in unserer Gesellschaft durch die Idee zugefügt, dass psychische Krankheiten etwas wären, wofür eines sich schämen müsste.
• Zufall: In meinen kreativen Arbeiten habe ich eine Tendenz dazu, mit Zufallsmechanismen zu flirten – seien es Zufallszahlengeneratoren, oder zwanzigseitige Würfel, oder die Wikipedia-Funktion „zufällige Seite anzeigen“. Allerdings überlasse ich in der Kunst nichts gänzlich dem Zufall.
• Dadaismus und Surrealismus: Ich verdanke vieles diesen beiden Künstler*innenbewegungen. Im Dadaismus finde ich vor allem Lautgedichte toll, im Surrealismus sind es eher die Methoden als eine bestimmte Ästhetik.
• Lehren: Darauf hin studiere ich im Prinzip im Moment – Philosophie, Psychologie und Informatik. Ich weiß nicht, ob es mir möglich sein wird, eine offen genderqueere Lehrperson in Österreich zu sein, aber ich werde es kaum herausfinden, wenn ich es nicht zumindest probiere.
• Skeptizismus: Wenn Leute nur irgendwelche seltsamen Ansichten haben, ist mir das eher egal, aber es gibt einige Ansichten, die ich für gefährlich halte, und zwar sowohl für Individuen als auch für die Gesellschaft. Mein Paradebeispiel dafür ist der Glaube ans Schicksal – ob es nun als eine Macht jenseits der menschlichen Kontrolle gedacht wird, oder – schlimmer – als eine Macht, die durch positives Denken, Gebet, oder sonstige Methoden die sich aus dem magischen Denken ergeben, beeinflusst werden kann.

~ ẞ ~

A Comment on Comments

While I appreciate discussion in some cases, I do not want to have to moderate this comment section. I've thought about closing it completely, but that does not seem necessary at this point. I've set it so that every comment goes into moderation, so don't be surprised when you cannot see it immediatly after writing.

Just be warned that I will not host comments that I am uncomfortable with, or that could potentially stir up a debate that I don't want to have at this moment. Also I will delete any comments that so much as mention a particular right-wing Canadian professor, whose bigotry and outright lies have done enough damage already. I'll add more people to my list of unwanted persons or topics as time goes on.

~ ẞ ~

Ein Kommentar zu Kommentaren

Während ich in manchen Räumen Diskussionen schätze, möchte ich hier eigentlich nicht moderieren müssen. Ich habe sogar darüber nachgedacht, die Kommentarfunktion komplett zu sperren, aber das scheint mir doch arg unnötig im Moment. Jetzt ist sie so eingestellt, dass jeder Kommentar zunächst von mir freigeschaltet werden muss.

Seid also vorgewarnt: Wenn mir etwas so erscheint, dass es eine Debatte entfachen könnte, die ich im Moment nicht führen möchte, werde ich die Kommentare dazu nicht freigeben. Außerdem werde ich alles löschen, was z.B. einen gewissen politisch rechten Kanadischen Professor erwähnt, dessen Intoleranz und bewusste Lügen schon genügend Schaden angerichtet haben. Ich werde wohl im Lauf der Zeit noch mehr Leute oder Themen meiner imaginären Bannliste hinzufügen.

~ ẞ ~

Jundurg Delphimė, 2018-04