NEW BLOG POST:

Two things scare me the most….

Read it on my website (recommended):

tiotrom.com/2024/09/two-things…

Or read it here:

Two things scare me the most, personally. First is death or health related issues. It is normal, if I die I’m fucked for eternity :). I think this is easy to understand for many people.

Second thing that scares me so much is to slip back into the fantasy world that humans created and forget about the amazing reality discovered for the past hundreds of years. To become too normal, even if that can mean to laugh, have fun, enjoy. I am scared of this. I battled this for all of my life trying to inject myself with reality bits and info (atoms, galaxies, evolution, stars and everything real) in the hope that my brain can understand the value of reality. It is hard. It is so hard and it is something I feel not many, if any, understand. It is also something that you can lose very fast, when you “get it”.

I wanted to put a printed Hubble image of the Andromeda galaxy on the ceiling in my room when I was in college so that when I wake up it will remind me of how reality is mind blowing and the human invented one is a simplistic, myopic and colorless at best.

Most humans are today as they were 400, 1.000 , or more years ago. Let’s have a beer, a chat, get married, fuck, have kids, gossip, have fun or war. Not saying some of these are not good or reasonable, but isn’t it mindblowing that not much has changed in the core of our global society and the day to day life of humans for the past 400 years considering in this time we discovered cells, atoms, galaxies, evolution, and everything in between?

To me, this is so odd it creates a turmoil in my head. I think I have an explanation why this is the case tho: an aggressive trade-based society where everyone is a working ant. No time to even know about reality, let alone absorb it.

Reality is shocking, mind-blowing, fabulous, scary, infinitely complex and amazing.
Day to day life in this society is simplistic and almost parallel to reality.

If you don’t fee like losing your mind when you think about this contrast, I don’t think you understand.

#society #trade #capitalism #andromeda #science #TradeRuinsEverything

Season 4 episode 9: The Fantasies of Post-apocalyptic Dystopian Fiction, with Ariel Kroon

Classic, post-apocalyptic, dystopian fiction is a type of fantasy where we’re dreaming of starting over in an empty landscape from a societal and cultural slate wiped clean by some devastating event that we don’t have to feel guilty about having happened—at least, it is according to our very own Ariel Kroon, who does, yes, have a PhD in it.* Yet, at the same time, these fantasies generally suffer from a strange lack of imagination, wherein the characters use the “fresh new start” to recreate the same old society, albeit with themselves at the top, with the same old systemic socioeconomic, environmental, and structural problems.

It’s almost as if it is easy to dream up apocalypse but next to impossible to envision a different way of living. Although a failure of imagination would most likely look different for solarpunk, can solarpunk creators and dreamers of a positive future avoid falling into the same sort of trap?

*Post-apocalyptic Canadian science-fiction 1948-1989, she wants to clarify. She’s even got the thesis to prove it.

youtu.be/IdouMiiRoWc?si=fJgNd4…

#Episode #Season4 #YouTube #solarpunk #SolarpunkPresentsPodcast #podcast #apocalypse #PostApocalypse #fantasy #DystopianFiction #Dystopia #AntiUtopia #FutureImaginary #Futuring #Scholarship #ScienceFiction #SF #SpeculativeFiction #ApocalypticFiction