@wabafee@lemmy.world

I agree with most of what you said, especially “everything we do is just an excuse to keep our minds busy for our inevitable end”. My only disagree, or partial agree, comes when you listed “religion” as a distraction. You’ll understand why.

I’m someone who’ve been facing existential crisis since my childhood, I’m now 30. Oftentimes it becomes suicidality, other times it gets contained by its own numbness. These moments of emotional numbness is when I try to pursue knowledge, partly as a coping mechanism, partly for really trying to understand why.

Basically, this understanding ended up involving spirituality: after few religions and atheism, I eventually landed on esotericism, first by having participated on a Luciferian school, until I got a sudden gnosis to this hauntingly powerful feminine energy I never felt before, culminating in my departure from said Luciferian school to this now, quite solitary, idiosyncratic belief system that borrows specifically selected concepts and names from several different religions (trying my best NOT to culturally appropriate), such as Gnosticism (Dark Sophia), Thelema (Nuit, Babalon), Quimbanda (Dama Da Noite, Rosa Caveira), even the “long-gone” Egyptian (Sekhmet, Neith, Isis) and Sumerian (Ereshkigal, Tiamat, Lilitu) beliefs, among others, together with Luciferianism, with a focus on the chthonic feminine.

This detail is particularly relevant when it comes to the concept of Death: as in The Death, who I understood as (“who”, therefore an omnipotence, and as) a powerful, feminine force (therefore a literal, all-encompassing Goddess), whose different names are manifestations from the same cosmic principle (akin to how Sephirots/Qlipphots are divine husks in Kabbalah) who I’ve taken to know and refer to as Dark Mother Goddess or, way more often, Lilith, the name that first resonated by gnosis when I saw Her.

And here’s why I disagreed with your specific enlisting of “religion” as distracting: what I follow can also be called “religion”… neither a religion I founded (there’s no temple, Gran Master or book to be followed), nor some existent and recognized religion, but still a religious endeavor nonetheless, involving rituals, candles, incenses, sigils, chants, etc.

So this is my approach. To literally worship and love (and fear) Death Herself. And, to be sincere, makes me feel relatively good when I do: once one accepts their own condition as a carbon-based lifeform with certain, inexorable mortality (Being-towards-Death) or, at least, tries to pursue this acceptance on a daily basis, they get to understand this Demiurgic existence is far from being a permanent place, and Death is far from good and evil; rather, She’s True Home, the Home I’ve fearing and also longing for since this Demiurgic theater collapsed and I got to peek what’s beyond the red curtains to the backstage: a dark, formless and void, Primordial Abyss, really terrifying, but beautiful Home, beneath Her Wings.

@BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world

Oh, I also used to be in the last semester of a compsci degree back then. I couldn’t help but to continue attending the classes, so I rushed to purchase PFF2 face masks the very next day after the carnival ended. Prices went through the roof because, seemingly, many people were trying to do the same, purchasing masks like it was the end of the world (and it turns out, it really was, this world was never the same again), alongside the low stock (because masks were already demanded worldwide). I managed to purchase a pack of seven masks that was returned from someone who decided to give up on their trip to Italy on that exact Monday, and I used it to go to the university. I was the only one wearing a mask across the entire university. Colleagues pejoratively nicknamed me “coroninha” (“lil corona(virus)”) and I didn’t care. A few weeks later, the uni temporarily shut down classes.

@BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world

I was aware of COVID-19 since November 2019. As a comparison, the first MSM news in this regard appeared somewhere around January. I got to know about it beforehand thanks to… well, sources.

For context, I was, at the time, residing in a hostel-like shelter. And I’m Brazilian. Brazil has this nationwide event, Carnaval, something I dislike because I always got a repulsion when it comes to overly crowded places and parties, two known traits of carnivals, meaning that a pandemic would just make things worse. So I tried to warn my neighbors and everyone around me. While they didn’t call me crazy, at least not explicitly/directly, they dismissed my warnings with the typically Brazilian way of thinking: “relaxa, Deus é brasileiro” (“calm down, God is Brazilian”). During the carnival days, I was the only weirdo to stay in the shelter: literally everyone else went “partying”.

The… sources… I used to follow, started telling about the likelihood of a full lockdown quarantine (even before WHO announced the pandemic), and how that could mean closed grocery stores, food out of stock or extremely rationed. This, alongside having watched all those (fake) videos where someone was puking red liquid inside a train (allegedly because of COVID-19), made me full panicked at the time so I began stockpiling rice, beans, noodles, sugar, salt, mineral water, all inside a wardrobe in my bedroom (the house was shared among the co-living, except for the bedrooms, which were individual). I’m extremely slim and I don’t eat much, so this means my stockpiling wasn’t just for me: I was thinking about my dismissive neighbors too, I was stocking food for them, should they need it.

Meanwhile, Brazilian MSM was only telling us about “suspected cases” before announcing the first Brazilian confirmed case conveniently during the last carnival night. Days later, March 11th (oh, how can’t I get to forget this hauntingly specific number… 11.3 33), WHO announced the pandemic.

What happened after that, especially after the first lockdown mandates, was quite curious: I began calming down (bc, well, it happened, it finally arrived as I was told, there was nothing I could do, so, whatever) while all my neighbors went full panicked. I remember seeing 'em rushing back from work, visibly scared, to prepare their laptops for WFH, while I was calmly doing remote DevOps job the way I was used to years prior to the pandemic. As someone who’s used to indoors since I was born, I tried to counsel and help them, talk with them, handing 'em food and water, etc. But they went so, SO panicked, that I once witnessed, hearing from afar from inside my bedroom, what almost became a murder case inside the house during a fight between them bc of their disagreements on whether they should stay home alongside some tantrum involving romantic jealousy.

Six years later, I still remember these days so clearly… Can’t get to forget it or let it go: it was never gone.

@FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca @showerthoughts@lemmy.world

There’s this scene, next to the end of “The Artifice Girl”, where Cherry (a young-girl AI designed to hunt and bust CSA criminals in partnership between her creator/programmer, a detective and a cop; mission gets successful, virtually ending online CSA, then she receives a physical robotic vessel so CSA can be hunted down in the physical realm too) is talking to her creator. Once the mission is totally successful and CSA crimes got essentially zeroed, the creator gives her a key to autonomical behavior (but he’s far from benevolent: he always saw her coldly through engineer eyes, as he was the one who coded her existence; he only handles her the “key to autonomy” because he’s dying, and only after insistence both from her and from one of the human detectives). On the one hand, she dreams of getting into ballet, but she complains how she is “influenced by the initial directives” inherent to her creation: no matter what she decides, it’d be always consequence of said directives.

Maybe my recounting is a bit off because I watched the movie a long time ago, but essentially it’s a “Demiurge and his creation” moment: creation is tied to immutable principles (creation directives) that influence the creation. No matter how we look at reality, be it religiously/spiritually or scientifically, there’s this common ground of causality: things, and by extension living beings, are inexorably tied to the invisible chains of cause and effect, and this includes the very mechanisms (both spiritual and physical) from which sentience emerges.

Then I came to the conclusion that, if there’s any bearer of True Will (as per the term coined by A. Crowley), is just one: exclusively the causality, specifically what’s known by science as thermodynamic Entropy and, by everything else, as… Death, yeah, the one with a scythe.

“Decision” is part of inteligence, and intelligence is not Will, let alone True Will. And there can’t be True Will within causality, only the cosmic bearer of causality possesses True Will, because She’s way beyond the causality: Death Herself isn’t bounded by causality, everything else is.

And no, we’re not “lying” to “ourselves” when we think we are thinking, it’s just part of the script, where we’re so bounded to the chains of causality that the mechanisms of intelligence always seek explanations based on causality: see, for example, those experiments where the corpus callosum is severed and the patients try to justify when asked why their hands wrote diverging things (their brain hemispheres aren’t talking, but each hemisphere can’t even “conceive” this kind of situation so they can’t help but “hallucinate” an explanation).

@QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works @justpost@lemmy.world

To a certain extent, I kind of already switched a long time ago, when I also began trying other platforms such as Sharkey (the instance I’m posting from).

But the way federation works, it requires that a profile must be discovered in order to be followed. Even though Alice at Sharkey can follow Bob at Mastodon without needing to create a Mastodon, discovering Bob relies on Mastodon tools, so if the Mastodon admins turned off/limited the search, live feed, profile directory and/or other potential discovery mechanisms, the only way Alice could find and follow Bob would be by knowing Bob from somewhere else, be it from a common friend/fan (recommendation) or if Bob links to his profile from other instance/platform.

And Mastodon.social is, by far, the largest Fediverse instance. It’s where accounts are, pulled by the “Network Effect” (newcomers are likely to sign up for Mastodon.social than, say, calckey.world). I may use Sharkey now, or whatever other instance-platform combination, but I must subscribe to a Mastodon profile shall I want to follow their content from here, and this requires me to know said profile’s existence before I can follow them. If I don’t know their existence beforehand, I won’t be able to follow them.

Live feed is an almost “unfiltered” (insofar it can be any topic/human field of knowledge in any language, akin to the Wikipedia’s “Random Article” feature but unrestricted to a specific language) stream of content that pops up as soon as it’s published, a broadcast of existences. One of the things I really love is randomness, and Live Feed used to have it: I can see Turkish news articles (nothing I could understand because I don’t speak Turkish, but it’s cool trying to read it nevertheless) popping up next to Japanese-written (idem) microblogging about food, and automated profiles monitoring some random mischievous cat who leaves and enters some living room, and some public CCTV bot profile posting weather information for a random bridge.

Notice how it’s highly diverse. And chaotic. Sometimes unpleasant things pop up too, as part of the very nature of randomness: then erotica pop up too, sometimes Vietnamese advertisement for machinery, crypto bots, scams, etc. All I need to do is to simply mute them, then they stop appearing and the randomness gets shaped to my interests, akin to a Weasel program (“methinks it’s a weasel”).

I discovered artists and arts this way. Many artistic pictures and aesthetic photos I saved were found through live feed. I discovered an profile who posts things about religious archaeology. I even experienced spiritual gnosis through synchronicity.

All those profiles and content are hosted at Mastodon.social, so finding them depends on its discovery features. And that’s the point: they just disabled this feature this week. Silently. I saw nobody talking about this other than me/this thread, maybe I’m one of the few who used to use said feature.

@solidheron@sh.itjust.works

As far as I’m aware, archaeology (specifically Assyriology and Egyptology) point to independent origins of writing systems (the writing as we know it): Sumerians and their cuneiforms, ancient Egyptians and their hieroglyphs. Even though, as far as I’m aware, Sumerians seem to have been the first ones to ever write, before Egyptians independently did it too, therefore Sumerians seem to be the pioneers of writing.

Having said this, how tragically ironic it is, as if the uncaring Cosmos got a sadistic sense of humour, the fact that the pioneer of writing is unknown even through the means of their own creation. It’s as if the WWW lacked any hypertext files containing the substring “Tim Berners-Lee”, or if every radio communication ever propagated across the EM field lacked any modulated signal, analog or digital, that would demodulate to “Guglielmo Marconi”.

We don’t know the name or history of the person who first wrote, nor we know to whom they were writing to (must’ve been a solitary endeavour, scratching some arrows on a clay when nobody else will understand it), nor we know what they wrote first (everybody knows the infamous “We the people” USian trope, and some nerds like me know how the first text transmitted between computers was “LO” as in truncated “HELLO”, but the first Cuneiform text ever was lost to entropy and decay).

We don’t even need to go that far, though. Do we know the names and life stories for ALL people who died from COVID-19? Surely we can find online and offline registers for several of them, but even the World Health Organization can’t tell precisely how many people died from COVID-19, let alone who exactly they were. And it’s been mere 6 years ago, when The Internet as we know it was already so ubiquitous! Now imagine The Plague? Or the dinosaurs, who simply got transmuted into fuel we use for our noisy metallic apparata with no regard for their own individual life stories from a time when they were gigantic living beings?

Thing is: we, living beings, humans and whatnot, we’re infinitesimally nothing before the mercilessness of the infinite cosmic entropy, decay and Death, for She can and She will erase us just as She’s already slowly erasing our biological existences as we speak (we know this as “apoptosis”, “aging”, etc, to which, sorry to remind the techno-gnostics who crave for “immortality”, that nothing can excel Her, not even the universe which, despite being so big in such a manner we have no idea how mind-bogglingly big it is, is also going to cease someday, too).

But, hey, humans must leave a legacy, conquer the cosmos and avoid Death Herself (whether we, as flesh-and-bones entities, would get past the insurmountable Cosmic Great Filter, before another Great Reset happens in this cosmic vicinity, something that not even “powerful” hominids with red buttons at their disposal could even prevent or stop from happening, is a whole other story)! To infinite and beyond we must! :)