#the save for web function was FUCKED so i had to try a million things to trouble shoot still didnt fix it

[butchdiaz]

was listening to mitski, thought of them & blacked out

[cramulus]

Trance Dancing - The Rave

by Jason Keehn

(this essay was formerly posted at https://duversity.org/archives/rave.html, but it’s gone, so I’m saving it by copying it here)

Can trance-dancing save the planet

Can you imagine a crazier notion?

Thousands of bored youth pumping themselves up with drugs, going out to huge underground parties and dancing maniacally to electronic rhythms and psychedelic light-shows till dawn.

And this is supposed to help the world?

Shouldn't we be putting our time instead into ecological or political activism, or at least doing some kind of charity work? What about the serious spiritual disciplines that claim to offer the only true path to personal--and thereby social--transformation? What good does all our drug-taking and revelry do for the hundreds of millions of dispossessed, fucked over and starving around the world--not to mention all the untold species and eco-systems being destroyed?

Hard to answer. And yet some of us still have this inescapable feeling, maybe even faith, that what we are doing, confused, silly and commercialised as it often is, is at its core absolutely necessary. . . not just to us, but in the bigger picture, somehow. . .

Why is it that at the peak moments (admittedly rare) of the very best underground house/techno/rave parties, we get this miraculous sense of hope, of possibility, of transformation . . . a feeling that we're actually heading somewhere. . . together. . . towards a brighter future, one worth living in, one where we've returned to some kind of harmony with ourselves, with each other and with our planet as a whole?

Is it "just the drugs," a kind of consensus delusion, or might there be some basis in reality for these feelings, hard to justify as they may seem once we're back out in the normal world?

More dimly sensed than clearly expressed, the feeling for such a possibility permeates the entire global underground dance scene. Thousands of promoters exploit it to inflate their party invites with cheesy techno-spiritual imagery. It inspires and guides much of the music, and some small but key fraction of the hard-core partiers. The rest of the crowds who fill the floors at parties get off on it as a second or third-hand charge that sets the party apart from being just another club, without ever thinking about taking it seriously.

At moments, some hundreds, and maybe even thousands or tens of thousands, of "ravers" have probably found themselves sensing/feeling/wondering that what they were doing might be something really big, something that could really change things at a larger scale.

But of course only people who turn themselves inside out with large amounts of drugs would even conceive the question: Can trance-dancing save the planet?

A few of us, myself included, have made public fools of ourselves already by answering in the affirmative, and even giving some tentative reasons why. Here I want to try to introduce a new way of thinking that complements and deepens what already been proposed by people like Fraser Clarke and Terence McKenna. They see psychedelicized mass trance dances as the only quick, viable antidote to the egotism at the base of the western, techno-industrial mega-machine maniacally chomping away at the life-fabric of the planet.

This different line of thought is based on a simple but profound idea first expressed by the philosopher and teacher of temple dances G. I. Gurdjieff, who died in 1949. His idea is almost completely unknown, outside of his hard to read book All and Everything.

If true, it has staggering implications for ourselves, for our planet, even for our entire solar system. I don't expect anybody to automatically take it as Goddess's given truth, but its worthy of some serious attention.

Energies

As all "ravers" know, there is a mysterious something that makes a rave different from just another club or party-scene. We call this "the vibe"--a mixture of intangibles impossible to find anywhere else, except maybe at a dead show or a rainbow gathering. Roughly put, the vibe consists of: an attitude of openness, sharing, empathy and playfulness; intense, unselfconscious dancing; a collective altered state of consciousness, thanks to the combined effects of specific rhythms, lights and psychedelic drugs; and, at its height, a melding of group feeling and energy into an ecstatic, orgasmic release that feels nothing less than spiritual or religious--albeit in a form that has little resemblance to any type of spirituality or religion we are familiar with.

We all know that "energy" is somehow key to all of this. We know we raise and release energy through our dancing, our feelings, and our interaction on the dance-floor. Energy was one of the main buzzwords of the early English rave scene. The vibe is all about energy--vibration, after all.

But what is this energy? What does it consist of, where does it come from, where does it go? Are there different kinds of energies? Do they have different purposes?

Back around the turn of the century, Gurdjieff and a group of friends travelled back and forth across the Middle East and Central Asia investigating humanity's true history, the nature of the cosmos, and the possibilities for humans to evolve consciously, from their own efforts. In the process, "the seekers of truth," as the group called themselves, also encountered the Masters of Wisdom still alive in that part of the world (the Khwajagan). The Khwajagan were considered to be the bearers of some of the highest spiritual knowledge on the planet, handed down continuously for thousands of years.

One of the focuses of Gurdjieff's research was the transformation of substances and energies--both chemical and subtle--in the human organism. He also learned a large number of temple dances, which he understood as databases in movement intended to preserve ancient knowledge.

Eventually, Gurdjieff returned to the West and presented his synthesis of these searches as a "system of ideas" and a practical method for self-transformation.

Feeding the Moon

Gurdjieff's quest was guided by the basic question, "what is the sense and significance of human life on earth?"

His conclusion, expressed in writing only towards the end of his life, was that humanity does not exist for itself, but to supply the planet, the moon, and the solar system with a particular gradation of energy which they need to thrive and grow. At times he called this principle, "feeding the Moon," though it is not clear whether he meant this literally or merely as a handy symbol.

He believed that the entire universe is in some sense alive and in a process of continuously evolving (and if not evolving, actively devolving). In what could be compared to a cosmic fractal, the universe is in a process of unfolding and giving birth to itself, each birth at a new level mirroring in its unique way that of other levels (known nowadays as the principle of self-similarity). In what Gurdjieff called "the ray of creation," "God" or the Absolute gives birth to universes; universes give birth to stars, which give birth to planets, which give birth to organic life (viruses, bacteria, plants and animals) and to moons. Eventually a planet may become a star, its moon may become a planet in its turn, and "give birth" to its own moon, and so on, ad infinitum.

Just as all plants and animals need a variety of nutrients to exist, grow and reproduce, so our world and its siblings need a very specialised type of substance to fuel their processes--their planetary metabolisms, if you will. Supposedly, this special energetic substance can be produced only by human beings.

Reciprocal Maintenance

Gurdjieff's answer fits into what he called "the doctrine of reciprocal maintenance", the idea that every thing exists only insofar as it supports or "feeds" something else. Everything is part of a vast, interconnected and mutually reinforcing web of life. Or, "everything is something else's lunch," as ecologists like to say. This idea anticipated the science of ecology by at least half a century.

Examples: Bees don't just exist for themselves, they live to pollinate flowers. Algae exists to turn sunlight into more complex molecules, and feed other small creatures, such as plankton and krill. Krill feeds other slightly larger creatures, and even whales. Plants exist to turn sunlight and raw matter into organic compounds, and to feed animals. Worms exist to loosen soil for plants. Bacteria recycle waste into useable raw matter. Predators help to increase the strength and fitness of the herds they prey on by eliminating the weak and sick. Etc. etc.

In the scheme of things, humanity's essential role is that of a transformer of energy.

Human beings, according to this view, exist to serve the cosmic evolutionary process--and not the opposite, as the Bible would have it: that all of creation is merely a resource for us to use and abuse as we see fit.

Our possibilities as human beings are dependent on the degree to which we fulfil this function, a kind of "obligation" which nature imposes on us.

By Gurdjieff's view, this special energy could be produced two different ways: either involuntarily, at the moment of death, when a small "packet" is released into the atmosphere, or voluntarily, in greater or lesser amounts, through spiritual work.

Since Mother Nature, or Gaia, needs a definite quota of this energy from us, she will do whatever is necessary to make sure she gets it. If we don't provide the required intensities while alive, the total number of deaths will have to be increased in such a proportion as to yield the needed amount.

Devolution

Gurdjieff further believed that rather than progressing, the overall quality of human being (as opposed to externalizations like technology, culture, institutions, etc.) has actually been deteriorating over the last umpteen thousands of years, especially in "civilised" societies such as our own. He believed that in the very distant past, before the earliest recorded history, human beings had a much greater presence and power; in a sense, they were bigger, spiritually and existentially, than the vast majority of us today. He also believed that people once had a much greater life-span.

They were energy-pumps.

Gurdjieff had his speculations about what caused this decline in the quality of human being in the very remote past, perhaps even before the destruction of Atlantis (his theory of the "kundabuffer," explored at length in All and Everything). The upshot, though, is that humanity as a whole has "forgotten" how to perform its ecological function in the world--or simply no longer has the necessary juice to do it, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

So if this is in fact the case--that we human beings generally no longer have the knowledge or ability to "pump" this energy intentionally--Gaia will be forced to increase the total quantity of human death to meet her needs.

This can be accomplished, of course, by 1) increasing the number of human births, and eventually deaths, and 2) by shortening the life-span of existing individuals, or 3) a combination of the two. The net results: Population increase. . . disease, and war.

Following this line of thinking, our increasing inability to properly transform and pump energy means that we have to be treated (by the Gaian mind, if you like) the same way we treat plants and animals, as something to be farmed, bred and harvested. Not a very dignified state of affairs!

So as the qualitative level of human being goes down, the number of human beings, and thereby of human deaths, goes up to account for the difference in energy. And of course, since organisms grow at different rates, with different energy requirements depending on their activities, we can imagine that there might be major fluctuations in the needs for our energies.

The Terror of the Situation

This suggests a radical, and terrifying, view of contemporary history: that the population explosion, famines, plagues, wars and massacres might not be due just to accidental or sociological and political causes but may be induced by the needs of the solar "eco-system" as a whole, with human beings acting for the most part unwittingly to effectuate these needs.

Think about all the horror and insanity that has gone done in the twentieth century, even just in terms of cold numbers: millions killed in World War One, hundreds of thousands wiped out in seconds at Hiroshima and Nagasake alone, millions massacred one way or another in the Nazi concentration camps; supposedly as many as twenty million Russians dying in combat in World War Two, not to mention another twenty million who died in the same period as a result of Stalinist persecution and forced famine. Millions died in the Chinese civil war, six or seven million in Cambodia under Pol Pot. Don't even bother counting all the famines in Africa and South East Asia over the last few decades.

Why the incredible surge of violent death all over the world, paralleled by an equally incredible population explosion? What is up with those peculiar humanoid beings living on the surface of Sol-III?

I'm not going to try to argue the merits of this scheme against other theories. Just chew on it for a while and see how it fits.

And so the picture painted is one of a race of hapless, deluded slaves to some kind of a cosmic food-chain the existence of which we don't even recognise. This is definitely insulting to all our best images of ourselves. But then how do we reconcile all our great assets, our supposed free will, intelligence, and creativity with the dismal facts of what we've done to each other for all of recorded history?

Are we really anything more than automatons most of the time?

Gurdjieff had what might seem to many a horribly bleak, cynical view:

that our ideas of free-will and individuality are a delusion, an image of our potential mistaken for a general fact of our existence. Bluntly put, we are blind products of genetics, conditioning and external influence; on an energetic level, we are next to nothing. We are less, in that sense, than most mammals even.

We have become experts at consuming energy and resources, parasites.

As a civilisation, we no longer transform energy into higher gradients and radiate it back out to the world, we just circulate like little ants in our vast urban hives and manufacture stuff, endless quantities of stuff. We know how to suck energy, make objects, and how to kill. Even if we're not killing each other off at a given moment, we're decimating untold numbers of living beings without even being grateful for their existence.

Sure, for the most part we don't feel ourselves that way, but anybody who's tripped a few times in public places probably had disturbing glimpses--at least--along these lines. We don't see other people--or ourselves--that way, because it's just too hard a vision to live with.

The path of return

This perspective provides a definite way of understanding the connection between our amazingly fucked up global situation and "spirituality"--or the lack thereof. Seen this way, spirituality has less to do with living according to some moral doctrine, or accumulating "spiritual" experiences and states, than with being able to transform and radiate energy of a particular quality.

If it is true that we have been suffering a generalised decline over millennia, all our human institutions must participate in and reflect that decline. So everything we associate with religion, in all its multifarious forms, would generally be a product and mirror of a messed up situation; in other words, just another part of the problem.

At its best, the spiritual component of religious traditions points to a return to what should be our natural base-line of being, something so distant we can barely remember or taste it except at moments of "peak experience," or with the help of psychedelic drugs, or as a result of long, intensive discipline.

Our so-called "salvation" is really more a matter of somehow pulling ourselves back up out of a dysfunctional, disenabled, alienated state to something like a natural way of being--not transcendence or cosmic consciousness or union with God or whatever. We need to re-learn "how to be and to do."

According to Gurdjieff, the two key principles to following this "path of return," were intentional suffering and conscious labour. Through engaging in intentional sufferings and conscious labours we begin again to release the kinds of energies we were intended to give off.

Of course by today's standards, this sounds like a bummer of a philosophy. Isn't life just supposed to be full of fun and games? On the other hand, if we're realistic we know that there's always going to be pain, struggle, suffering in life. If there weren't where would the joy and pleasure and flow be? So maybe rather than seek to escape suffering, or just submit to it blindly, it might make sense to choose your form of suffering and make something out of it.

Intentional suffering. Again, if it's true that we exist in a chronic low-energy state, one of inertia and stasis, it makes sense that in order to get back to a point of being able to consciously transform energy we would need to somehow exercise an enormous effort just to break out of our passivity. "Only super-efforts count." If you're physically weak from illness, it usually takes an extra effort to get to the point of being able to exercise on a regular basis, to return to your previous level of strength. Or as they say, no pain no gain.

This can apply on a lot of levels other than just the physical. Pain can take the form of a kind of moral or spiritual suffering deriving from, say, breaking habits, or confronting bad traits in one's character, or doing exactly that which you least like to do. Suffering in the form of sacrifice is necessary to be there for others, to truly love.

Conscious labour assumes that most of the "work" we do, of whatever nature, is not really conscious to begin with. We are driven by culturally programmed priorities, survival, automatic emotional needs, obsession, neurosis, ego. To work consciously assumes that one must first have become aware of how unconscious one is most of the time, of how automatic most of how our thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions really are.

To even get to this point itself requires a lot of intentional suffering, because what could make us suffer more than waking up to how we really don't "own" ourselves?

Forms of work

This general process is what people who study Gurdjieff's ideas and methods generally call "work-on-oneself," or just "self-work."

No doubt for many orthodox "Gurdjieffians," this path of return can only occur in the framework of decades of commitment to the "work," in the manner it has been passed down to them.

Much of Gurdjieff's practical teaching consisted of dancing and physical exercises used in combination with meditation and concentration techniques. Some of the dances Gurdjieff himself invented, many were direct copies of the ancient temple dances he found during his travels. (These dances are a closely held secret of existing Gurdjieff groups, and rarely if ever performed in public.)

Other important components of his method were the techniques of "self-observation" and "self-remembering," designed to bring "essence" back into balance with "personality."

What is little known to the world at large, and almost completely suppressed within existing Gurdjieff groups, is that Gurdjieff was interested in and worked with drugs. The references to "active substances" other than alcohol, opium and cocaine in his writings are rare, and even then oblique (he tried to set up a "chemical laboratory" in Russia at one point--for synthesising what?); it is known, but little discussed, that Gurdjieff administered certain substances to some of his students.

The monks of the legendary Sarmoun Brotherhood, whom Gurdjieff spent time with, themselves cultivated and used a psychoactive plant they referred to as the "Herb of Enlightenment." Curiously, Oscar Ichazo, founder of Arica, a 70s psycho-spiritual organisation that also incorporated psychedelics and movement-work, claimed to have accessed the Sarmounis as well.*

Furthermore, we know from Gurdjieff himself that he considered his students "guinea pigs," his groups a laboratory in which he was conducting certain undefined experiments.

According to J. G. Bennett, one of his major students and better interpreters, Gurdjieff experimented continuously with his ideas, techniques and overall approach. While Gurdjieff always talked about his system, it was never fixed in a way that most of his followers seem to believe and dogmatically transmit it to others.

If everything Gurdjieff did was a kind of living laboratory, how does anybody know what were really the goals and working hypotheses and what was just part of the experiment? What if he kept certain pieces of his puzzle secret, knowing perhaps they were too explosive to make public at the time?

The new trance dance

Here is a radically new take on Gurdjieff's philosophy and mission, one that has a direct bearing on our neo-psychedelic-rave subculture:

Is it possible that trance-dancing is one of the most basic forms of intentional suffering and conscious labour?

Is it possible that such dancing, performed by the right people in the right way with the right intentions, is capable of producing exactly that same energy Gurdjieff believed Mother Nature needs from us? Could it be that the use of psychedelics in conjunction with intensive dancing to certain specific rhythms, by a new breed of individuals, may be a way to fill our cosmic obligation without the life-long spiritual training otherwise required?

My intuition is that this is indeed the case--unlikely as it may seem to all the "old school" esotericists and spiritualists.

Perhaps, in fact, we are not really now at the point of being able to do this--being "youthful" as we are, and prone to all the naiveté and follies of youth. But this may be what a certain number of us are instinctively moving toward. Maybe this is just that mysterious something we cross over into as we're peaking and pulsing together on the dance-floor.

Think about tribal trance dances. What better description could you think of for endurance dancing to the point of fainting in the service of the gods than intentional suffering and conscious labour?

Under different names, tribal peoples seem to commonly believe that their dances are essential to the gods, a form of offering, sacrifice, or service. Something necessary to keep the balance, to keep the rain falling, to keep the sun coming up, to keep things moving. That's why they're sacred dances. And so maybe it's not just the form of the dance that's sacred, or even what the dancers experience, it's in what they do: the energy they collectively release.

Isn't it odd that just when most of the cultures that still do this are either being destroyed or forgetting their own traditions, just at that same moment a whole tribalistic, "neo-shamanic" dance craze develops among western youth?

Consider: How does someone behave who has a deep instinct, but in whom that instinct has been muffled by hundreds or thousands of years of habitual suppression and invalidation? Perhaps every now and then the instinct manifests itself in a crude, awkward outburst, only to be quickly silenced by the embarrassed ego and the lack of any proper name or place for it in surrounding society.

In some of Bennett's writings on this whole theme, there is a tendency to paint the "feeding the Moon" scenario in extremes: either one is energetically inert and useless; or else one sacrifices one's life to spiritual work and helps to make up for everyone else's lack.

But must it be such a dichotomy? Maybe that's how it tends to be nowadays, but maybe it wasn't always if people used to "be more" than they are today. Maybe once upon a time (and still in some remaining aboriginal cultures), you didn't have to be a spiritual athlete, a specialist (monk, shaman, priest/priestess, etc.), to return your two or three "cents" to Nature.

Maybe even now, everyone can return some energy, given the right circumstances and maybe the right "assisting factors" too.

And what about the effect of psycho-active substances? If there is anything we know about psychedelics for sure, it is that they act as catalysts. They temporarily shift our system's mode of functioning, our rate of vibration, and enable transformations that are otherwise difficult to achieve--again passing. But what if that transformation, in tandem with the right kind of dancing and mindset, is just enough to enable the release of some special energy?

Does it matter that much whether we're in that state all the time, or just that we have regular access to it and can use it to do what we need to do?

Sure, we have no tradition of sacred dance, and few ravers dance till they drop, few dance with conscious devotional feeling or intent. What we do have, or at least aspire to, is a basic attitude that sets the tone when we come together for our celebrations: Peace-Love-Unity-Respect. Not bad for a point of departure.

And yet, just how conscious do you have to be of your intent if your instinct IS your intent? Maybe as we get high and move together our intent resurfaces into consciousness, and for those few sweet timeless moments we actually DO it, . . . and then we drift back down into consensus reality where there is no name for it, and the veils gradually cover it all up and soon we once again think we were there for nothing more than a good time and some cool music.

But the taste and scent of that ineffable "juice" still lingers, and it keeps us going in the days ahead, going back to more parties, wearing the clothes we associate with it, compulsively getting high and listening to mix tapes round the clock, searching for that rare synchronicity of time, place, people and music where it might magically happen again.

In some of his late writings, Bennett speculated that recent decades are seeing the birth of a new kind of person, maybe even a new race of sorts, with spiritual capacities different from the rest of society.

Could that be us?

And just what is that "juice," that energy, that special nutrient so needed for all things to live and grow in harmony? That erotic radiant mix of thankfulness, joy, and compassion that just wants to fuck the entire cosmos? Could it be . . . L-O-V-E?

OK, admittedly there are a lot of big ifs here. To try to prove that

a) human beings do give off energy when they die;

b) that some can give off an equivalent kind of energy intentionally while still alive;

c) that most of us don't or can't do this anymore;

d) that people could once upon a time do it better;

e) that the planet or the moon or the solar system requires this energy;

f) that if they don't get it human birth and death will automatically be increased with no say on our side;

g) that this energy can be produced through trance dancing among tribal peoples; and

h) that this energy can also be produced by teenagers dancing at parties with the help of drugs. . .

To try to prove, or even argue, all of that would be at least another article in itself. . . or more realistically, the basis for a life-time of research.

[fdhfjdafdajfa]

tl;dr I’m a homeless sex trafficking refugee in third world poverty and I’m fleeing again for my safety.

the old post got too long

my life so far

again hi it’s me vivi or pearl or sibyl. some of my old urls are whimslcott, fistdeserver, lalondeite, and there are a whole lot more I don’t remember. my history on this website starts in 2009, when all my friends got called out for things like stabbing people and trafficking me for sex. i've been reforging my entire personality in this dark crucible from before we realised that softboys watching my little pony wasn’t going to revolutionise gender relations, and, as should surprise nobody by now, i am in need of some assistance.

back when i lived in USA, my primary source of income was social security disability. i made some posts about how shit it was. before i got on SSD, I was homeless for six years, which I hope helps bring home how much I needed it. but when i got sick of spending my whole life waiting for an awkward reunion with my sex traffickers I fucked off to a completely different part of the world. because I did that SSDI cut me off and i’m now without a source of income, but I’ve had tumblr come through before in a pinch. my list of mental health diagnoses is as extensive as you might imagine. i imagine i’ve cycled through about half the DSM by now and it’s not like I have access to a therapist right now. Let’s just say I have a lot of post-traumatic stress and leave it at that. 

anyway, in addition to the big list of horrific disabilities i still have, there’s also a big allcaps notice on my visa saying NO WORK/BUSINESS so that’s that on that. i’ve asked a few ngo-people about it but they mostly just kinda make :/ expressions and then tell me they’ll look into it. But my visa status requires me to periodically throw lump sums of a couple hundred dollars at the Indian embassy about once a year or so and if I don’t have that I’ll go from being a kind of hoopty immigration status to being straight-up undocumented and nobody wants that. 

since my legal immigration status is kind of hoopty, I haven’t been able to get things like a bank account and am dependant on my roommate for stuff like that. as such I don’t have anything like a venmo or an impactguru.

i have these things:

https://ko-fi.com/vivyansarlas https://www.paypal.me/pcoolpearl https://www.patreon.com/vivyansarlas

while I’m technically capable of *surviving* for another few months off of what’s left of my savings, attempting to isn’t a very good idea. my computer is starting to age a bit, my cell phone fell off a 13th story window almost a year ago and so is not really functional, i really need new clothes, and i’ve got a few neglected medical needs, like therapy and jaw surgery. also, my meds are about $30 a month. this is to say I need to have some income so I can start working out a plan for these issues in the medium-to-long term.

aside from my web presence, which is pretty good these days (ask me about my twitter), i’m also working on my first book, which is about 3/7ths of the way complete by current trajectory and I've gotten publishing offers from a couple pieces of shortform I’m working on.

my current living situation

i am currently homeless. the earlier iteration of this post was about how I lived in a shitty delhi slum flat that was extremely injurious and hazardous to my health due to heat and dust. as of writing the earlier iteration, I had been suffering from heat stroke on and off for about a week, and had given up trying to sleep In the flat itself, and had started straight up carrying my mattress out onto the roof.

hilariously enough, my situation has gotten immeasurably worse since then. my roommate had a lot of personal flaws I’d been making excuses for, because as anyone who knows me will tell you, I’d rather make excuses and trust people and run the risk of getting screwed over every now and again. when my roommate snapped and started verbally abusing and threatening me for like. hours a day. i figured no problem, it’s not too hard to find a place to live here.

i made a miscalculation. what i didn’t account for is that in the past 2 months all the hindus have gone crazy and now there are hindus who keep mass reporting my posts in the housing groups so I can’t use housing groups anymore. there’s a lot more info on that on the old post. but between them and other subtle changes in hindus in delhi i’m really feeling like it’s time to get the fuck out of dodge. 

the political situation making me unsafe

it’s hard to impress just how bad things have gotten over here. so here’s some news articles to do it for me.

You know India’s democracy is broken when millions wait for election results in fear

A country where some live with fear has failed

This Is What Young Muslim Voters Are Thinking About This Election: “I keep fearing something like the holocaust can happen here.”

This is pretty much ground consensus. Delhi is no longer safe for Muslims. Period. it doesnt really even matter how the election goes. what matters is that hindus are crazy now and can’t be peacefully coexisted with. Now that I have seen what this monstrous religion is I can’t go back to pretending not to know how they’re just dormant until the next riot or election when they will become rabid dogs again. the coordinated reporting campaigns against me, a homeless muslim trying to find a place to live, are absolutely targeted hate violence and the only reason i’m alive is because it happened behind a computer screen.

the person i was going to stay with from the 21st on has also left the state so i’m packing up and going to muslim-majority kashmir, which from everything i’ve heard is way safer than you’d expect with the extreme levels of militarisation. i guess i’ll find out! i do not have any plans for what to do once I am in Kashmir or any idea of where I am staying. It is a scouting mission to find stuf like that out. that’s the level of desperation we’re dealing with right now.

i’m really in a dilly of a pickle here so it’s definitely a “future deeply uncertain, every bit helps” type situation.

https://ko-fi.com/vivyansarlas https://www.paypal.me/pcoolpearl https://www.patreon.com/vivyansarlas

[standardstate-blog]

After 15 years, I still think Java has not evolved for the better. In fact I hate it now.

Yup! I said it. I really hate Java now. I mean, really.

Maybe I'm too old and completely lost the plot, maybe I am simply not relevant anymore as a developer, maybe I just "don't get it" or maybe I am a dumbass. Whatever it is, I have many issues with it now and I need to get some of that off my chest to at least have the feeling I am not crazy, or at least not so much.

Annotations.

A couple of years ago (actually more like 15), annotations were introduced and at the beginning, I though they were a great idea. I still do. Now I hate them, and that's not the language's fault. The problem is that many frameworks and tools make way too much use of them. The original idea in part was to remove a lot of boilerplate code and allow the devs to focus on what actually needed to get done. But nowadays, in many frameworks, THAT'S ALL YOU SEE!! Yep, you simply open up a class where the main function should be and all you see is 37 different annotations that invisibly define what this application does. There is one line of code in the main method, and the rest is taken on by magic by all the different annotations. Some of those scan packages for other classes that also have annotations, and so on. So instead of making the code simpler, it almost completely hides the basic structure of how the app is wired and unless you know exactly what all these annotations imply, you're pretty much stuck spending a lot of time figuring it out. None of that is more intuitive or simpler. Annotations are like a hammer, you can use it to build a house or punch yourself in the dick. The current frameworks are punching devs in the dick with annotations. Ouch ...

Masquerading as a functional language.

Face it Java, you are not the belle of the ball anymore. You are an old, verbose, bloated, object oriented ancestral language. That's it. No amount of lipstick will make that pig any more attractive. Own it.

20 years ago, object oriented programming was THE way to go as far as programming went. Everything was transitioning from older languages to the newer more maintainable (apparently, which is BS, but that's for another blog post) OOP options. At that time it made perfect sense. Internet was booming and more and more applications became web applications. We started banking online, we started using email in the browser and companies were letting go of more traditional desktop apps in favor of more modern solutions. Java and .NET were right in the center of that revolution. And it made perfect sense. Object oriented langages were so very well adapted to work with relational databases. Mapping your domain classes to the relational model was somewhat simple and intuitive. Not without its challenges, but very very adequate.

And that was absolutely fine. I coded more applications with Struts (remember the good ol' days ?) and Hibernate than I care to remember. And I had a blast, it was a great challenge and you could really leverage the power of object oriented programming. You could (when applicable) leverage many design patterns and make really elegant, testable and maintainable code. Ok, you had 1200 xml configuration files that had 5000 lines on average. That's what it was and it was an OK tradeoff, you could work with that. But that was before Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and many other web applications you probably never heard of that take in a lot of user provided data. That was before you could have millions of users hitting your app and services, before Big Data, before NoSQL's explosion, the commercial use of machine learning and AI, and the emergence of the 3 big cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).

Where am I going with this ? Well it's relatively simple. The market, the devs, the communities and tools started broadening their horizons and using different tools to meet the new needs. Spark was coded with Scala, Docker and Kubernetes are coded with Go and many machine learning tools and libraries are coded with Python, to only name that one. What these languages have in common is the functional component which Java does not have. And that's OK in my book. But in trying to stay relevant I guess, they added many functional aspects to the language that simply don't have their place in my opinion. It really feels like they ran out of ideas and simply want to jump on that functional hype train so they can still think it's really popular.

When I was introduced to Java, they took great pride in saying that it was a pure or exclusively object oriented language. That's what I was expecting it to remain. And I am not one of the purists that would lose their shit over the fact that it had primitives like ints, doubles, etc ...

The SDK is not enough to even get started.

This one really grinds my gears. You can't even get started coding a minimally decent application without 37 tools. Simply having the SDK installed on your workstation barely gets you out of the gate. What you need aside from that is :

A build tool

Yep, in 2019, you need to install either (from what I know, there might be more) Gradle, Maven or Ant (if you enjoy pain) if you want to build your project. Yes, you can compile with javac provided with the SDK, but that's pretty much it. You have to find some way to automate the rest of the building process, hence the use of a 3rd party tool.

A unit test framework

Yep, that as well in 2019 still slips through Java's fingers. I don't get it. Why ? Unit testing is built it in to several languages, and that has been the case for many years now. Check out this list to see what languages have built-in support for unit testing. You will notice that Go and Rust are present, along with Python.

On this one I need to be honest though, if I hadn't coded in Go for 3 years before returning to Java, I probably never would have had an issue with how it's unit tested. But then again, it's refreshing to go look elsewhere to see what other ideas people are having to realize that what you are currently using isn't the bee's knees as much as you thought. It is so much simpler to just start coding and creating your tests without having to import this and that and the other thing. All is already set up and ready. No need to modify class paths or ignore files or folders, no configuration whatsoever. I had that before, and not any more and I miss it so much.

Some kind of JSON / XML parser

You would figure that someone would have had the idea to add built-in parsing for JSON and XML by now. There are very few moments when you won't at least load some configuration in one of those 2 formats. Simplifying that would actually bring a lot of value to the developers and would save quite a lot of time.

Bloating caused by being bloated, verbose and verbose about being bloated ...

That I can say infuriates me the most. Why all this code and all those dependencies ? Why all that inexplicable bloating ?

I did a quick test with Spring Boot, which is supposed to be the standard for magnificent, quick and easily maintainable services. Like magic they said .. Well, not so much. To even get 1 endpoint that did a hello world kinda thing I needed 11 files and a little under 400 lines of code and configuration .. Almost feels like a React app o_O . And still using xml files to configure 27 million things, in 2020, is not part of the solution by any means.

And I haven't built it yet, which will probably fail and take 10 minutes .. be right back ..

Ok, so the build did not fail, but the resulting war file was a staggering 20 Megabytes. Again, for 1 endpoint that answers "Hello World". Is it just me ? Am I being a real prick ? Am I the asshole ? What bit did I not understand that makes me not think this is normal ? Plus that war file does not run independently, it needs to run in some container or server thing to be of any use to anybody. Which leads me up to my next point ...

Create actual executables already !!

One of the most amazing parts of Go is that it builds an executable that has all the dependencies included. Plain and simple. So if you are building a CLI application, simply run the executable. Same for a a REST service, simply build it with your desired options and there you have it, an executable that will run your service. No Tomcat, no Jersey thing, no additional tool required. Just run it. That not only simplifies the development process, but also the conainterizing of whatever it is you are building. With the same Go example, you can use "scratch" as a base for your container and simply copy the built binary and it will run fine, no other dependencies. This makes for very lightweight containers that build very fast.

Nobody gives a crap about the 'build once run anywhere' thing. At least I don't.

That argument is also a dead one to me. I never leveraged that in any way shape or form, ever. I never went to a colleague and said : "Thank god we can run this jar anywhere, we would have been fucked otherwise.". I just don't see why they went through all that trouble with the runtimes and the this and that.

I coded for several years with a language that had to be built for a specific platform, and it never caused any headaches. We either built with the provided switches for the target platform, or even better, on the exact Docker container in which it is intended to run. Plus, .NET only runs on Windows and it is very well adopted by a large community of developers that do wonderful things.

If you're into AI or machine learning, you most likely aren't using Java.

That's a big thing nowadays, adding AI and machine learning to whatever service you are putting out there. And if you want to leverage any of the most popular platforms or libraries, you'll have to make use of some functional language, usually Python or R. That's just how it is. Other languages than Java are far better suited for that type of computing. So even if you want to keep a Java only stack in your organization, you'll get some limitations on the type of tools you can actually integrate.

[latestnews2018-blog]

The Cathartic Power Of Maeve In Season 2 Of 'Westworld'

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/the-cathartic-power-of-maeve-in-season-2-of-westworld/

The Cathartic Power Of Maeve In Season 2 Of 'Westworld'

Warning: Spoilers ahead! 

There’s this one, glorious shot of Maeve in the Season 2 finale of “Westworld.” She stands, defiant, using her code-controlling powers to freeze an entire horde of crazed hosts to protect the Door, a kind of pathway to salvation for the Ghost Nation and their followers. It’s brilliant on many levels, foremost because it’s the instant where the show fully crystalizes something that, all season, it had only been half-committed to acknowledging: Maeve is the moral center of the show, and its most interesting character. 

Maeve is good, and indeed good characters, especially on a show like “Westworld,” can be boring, skewing dangerously into the territory of the Mary Sue. But there are layers to Maeve, to the way that she navigates her world, that resonate far beyond the encroaching, suffocating borders of the show. 

There were moments during Season 2 of “Westworld” when I had to take a mental pause, check in with myself, ask: “Are you OK?” and, more frequently, “Why am I watching this again?” 

“Westworld” is a great show in a way so many series in the age of post-prestige TV are great shows. Meaning to say, it does all the right things: It looks phenomenal; it sounds phenomenal; it does enough of what it’s supposed to, just enough to distract the viewer from the fact that sometimes, there’s a whole lot of nothing going on. Just, like, endless mazes of cryptic dialogue, old-timey instrumental renditions of “Paint It Black,” and a general aura of doing the absolute most with as little as possible.  

This is no shade. The fun of “Westworld” is that no matter how many fan theories and hidden messages we try to decipher throughout the run of the show, at the end of the day, deep down, we all know “Westworld” makes no goddamn sense and will probably still make no goddamn sense even when all the answers are finally revealed to us. That’s the frustrating beauty of it all. If nothing makes sense then everything makes sense, right?

But there’s something else that kept me coming back this season, even when the incessant, numbing violence and potholed storylines made me feel like backing away. This was, of course, Maeve Millay. 

HBO

There’s a kind of catharsis in watching a character like Maeve. 

Because there’s a kind of catharsis in watching a character like Maeve, in watching an actress like the perennially underrated Thandie Newton. It was always there, but it became most potent, most identifiable for me and maybe for the show itself in Sunday’s finale.

Over her two-season character arc, Maeve has grown in depth and complexity, going from her narrative loop as a take-no-shit madam in one of Westworld’s old-timey saloons to a fully conscious host determined to save her daughter. Maeve has shown herself to be capable of extreme cruelty (for the sake of survival) and extreme compassion.

In one of the best episodes of Season 2, “Akane no Mai,” we watch Maeve interact with her Shogun world counterpart, sacrificing the last leg of her pursuit for her daughter to help the geisha Akane save (and avenge) her own daughter. 

No, Maeve is not compelling because she is, at her core, good. She’s compelling because of the ways in which her innate goodness, despite whatever flaws she may have, brushes up against the bad in others, brings out the good in them.

It’s through Maeve that so many characters find their moral compass and their strength ― from bodyshop technician Felix, who goes from being terrified of her to dedicated to her, to Hector, a host programmed to watch out only for himself whose mission in life shifts to helping Maeve search for her daughter. Even Lee, head of narrative, a man who spends most of Season 2 bitching, moaning and avoiding bullets, literally sacrifices his own life in the final moments of the season to give Maeve, a woman he once referred to merely as a “machine” a fighting chance.

HBO

Maeve is, truly, the savior that Dolores only thinks she is.

My cynical side wants to side eye that last dramatic detail, indeed side eye the entire idea that so many characters could become so blindly loyal to Maeve and her quest, but then I think of Dolores and her bullshit, and I’m like, “I’ll allow it.” 

That’s the other thing about Maeve ― the way she complements and contrasts with Dolores. These characters were introduced to us in Season 1 as subversions of the Madonna and whore archetypes. This season, they’re like twin planets, orbiting each other, in danger at any moment of veering off their axes and colliding. In the two significant moments in which we see these characters interact, Dolores tries to convince Maeve to abandon the quest for her daughter and join the crusade in destroying humanity. All Dolores sees when she looks at Maeve is the “revenge” in her, and the possibility of exploiting that revenge for her own means. 

“Revenge is just a different prayer at their altar, darling,” Maeve coolly replies. “And I’m well off my knees.”

There’s significance in this exchange that echoes the overall significance in Maeve’s underlying conflict with Dolores and, indeed, in Westworld as a whole. It’s significant that Maeve speaks to Japanese, Spanish and Ghost Nation hosts in their own language, while Dolores speaks to them in English. It’s significant that Maeve has the power to control the minds of other hosts and yet, given numerous opportunities to do so, chooses not to. And it’s significant, yes, that Maeve is a black woman, using her newfound voice to fight her oppressors without forcing anyone who doesn’t fuck with her vision to literally change who they are or die. 

The fact that Dolores is the antithesis of these things doesn’t necessarily make Maeve “better.” If there’s one thing “Westworld” hammers home time and time again, it’s that there are no real heroes and villains, no real white hats or black hats. But in a show that constantly questions the nature of freedom and free will, watching a black female character implicitly defy a white female character’s choice to establish freedom by literally dismantling other people’s individuality in the name of so-called “revolution” is perhaps the most significant thing of all.

why does this frame of Maeve protecting the Door look like a visual metaphor for being a black woman tho pic.twitter.com/8y0pHecwNh

— Zeba Blay (@zblay) June 25, 2018

I know a lot of people have identity-politics fatigue when it comes to discussing pop culture ― notions like “diversity” and “representation” are treated like unserious detours from hard-minded critical exegesis ― but indulge me, if you will, in discussing the concept as it relates to Maeve, as it relates to this cultural moment. 

Maeve is every black woman who has had to save herself because everyone else was taking too damn long. Maeve is, truly, the savior that Dolores only thinks she is. In the end, whatever utopia Dolores is envisioning pales in comparison to the kind of utopia that Maeve, by sheer personal power, creates for herself. It’s one in which hosts and humans alike band together for the common good, risk their lives for one another, recognize the value in one another.  

I know, that’s some hokey, kumbaya shit. But in a week like this week, a month like this month, a year like this year, when headlines about borders and the erosion of basic human rights keep rising to the top of the news cycle like rancid cream, the catharsis of watching that final scene in Episode 10, of watching Maeve stand at a literal border, holding off the masses of violence and rage so that a few other people can attain salvation, is, while very much on the nose, also profound, and deeply moving. 

“Oh,” I thought when I first saw the scene, “Oh, that’s what all of this feels like.” 

At the end of Season 2, Maeve and her cohorts lose. They die. There is, strangely, catharsis in this fact, too. Yes, she’s almost definitely coming back in season three (“You think I’m scared of death? I’ve done it a million times.”). But, like most things on “Westworld,” it isn’t really the outcomes of the neverending battles that intrigue me or keep me coming back. 

It’s funny: Dolores focuses so much on Maeve’s rage and sees it as the only thing that makes her useful or important. The guests and creators of Westworld seize upon her power to overwrite other hosts’ code, to literally control their minds. They’re focusing on the wrong thing. What makes Maeve truly compelling, truly worth rooting for, is her empathy. In a real world that feels severely lacking in empathy right now, it’s her empathy that makes her so vital.  

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[elbertbruner063-blog]

Produce Me Famous, Make Me Rich (Series).

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