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chaos0pikachu · 1 year ago

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Okay so just a couple things I wanna contribute here, and I'm putting a chunk of this response behind a cut to save folks the scrollage (especially mobile users).

TLDR: I disagree with some of the "trends" listed here, specifically the stuff about the remakes, Korea not knowing what sex and kissing are, and especially that BL is being overly influenced by "modern romance trends out of the west"; the latter two read a bit, hm, xenophobic to me ngl and spread a bit of misinformation about the media from countries like Thailand, Korea, and Japan. I also added some of sources from academics, journalists, and publishers as well. Also James Cameron is a weeb so jot that down.

So regarding Japanese IP stuff, I keep seeing people talk about how ~crazy~ Japanese copyright law is, but the general laws aren't that much different from international standards.

I'm not sure if I'm like, missing something here no one provided any sources to any case files or articles on the subject when the issue with Cherry Magic came up. Which, I can only assume since I don't have access to the contract, it wasn't a copyright issue it was a distribution issue. It's complicated, as distribution falls under copyright, but it's a subset, and typically in my direct experience, creators will sell their distribution rights or share them with their publisher (or studio) so the company can handle actual distribution negotiations.

It's very typical to only have distribution rights in select countries for adapted works (which are why VPNS are a big thing). Gmmtv more than likely, only had distribution rights for Thailand, not other countries which is why their youtube broadcast got got. That's not Japan - y'all realize this is like an entire country right?? - being assholes. It's one copyright holder - SquareEnix who publishes Cherry Magic - asserting their rights b/c gmmtv was stealing money from their - and the authors - pockets.

Now like, Nintendo is highly protective over their copyright but no more so than Disney (source 02) or Taylor Swift.

Remakes like Cherry Magic aren't even new for Japan, Korea, Thailand, etc, even for gmmtv. Their series, F4 is a remake of insanely popular Japanese manga Boys Over Flowers, which does have clips of the episodes on youtube with no issue. Boys Over Flowers has also been remade by Taiwan, Korea, China, Indonesia, China (again), and India.

It's not just the rights to remake the media, usually the IP owners also get a slice of the capital as well. Japan, China, Korea and lots of other Asian countries have been cross exchanging for decades with their television and films.

The series Mr. Queen (2020), a popular Korean drama (that's very queer until the ending, but the original story is also even more queer) is an adaption of a Chinese show called Go Princess Go (2015) based on a novel of the same name, is one example, another is My Absolute Boyfriend (2019) a kdrama based on a Japanese manga of the same name.

Also, while I'm only familiar with American contracting for IP rights (and no I'm not a lawyer I've just seen and been in the room for a lot of these contract negotiations), it's entirely possible gmmtv has optioned many 90s manga.

Optioning is just the set up, its the handshake agreement between two parties "yes I would like to make a thing out of your thing" and that's it. Lots of stuff gets optioned with no announcement b/c optioning isn't a promise or an agreement it'll go into production.

Kate Mckean, one of the best agents imo in publishing, breaks down optioning really well in her article What "Optioned" Means.

So I would argue this isn't really a "trend" so much as normal film making? This stuff happens all the time, it's picking up in BL because of the rise in popularity making it monetarily valuable, but I wouldn't argue it's at all special or a new trend since this is baked into general cultural exchanges in media of which is longstanding between all these countries. Like there's already pre-established history here of this happening for decades so it's not really a "trend" nor "new".

Okay so like, I'm not gonna front I find it a bit xenophobic to say "Korea figured out boys can kiss" this is something I've seen a lot in BL fandom discussion. That Korea "doesn't know what sex is" or similar takes and I just, y'all are talking about an entire country of people here.

I find it trips a bit into a historic trend of desexualizing Asian Men in the west (<- article by Andrew Kung about the desexualization of Asian men in the west, and his exploration of sexuality, identity and discrimination).

Which, I know we're all watching BL which includes nothing but Asian men, and yet.

Like, yes porn is "technically" illegal in Korea but Koreans still know what porn is. They still watch it. In fact it's difficult even for the government to enforce those laws, as detailed in this article by Business Insider:

""It's like shoveling snow in a blizzard," Nuri Cop Moon Tae-Hwa told Hyung-Jin Kim of The Huffington Post." (source)

The existence and debate around porn in Korea is also a complex one, with a lot of historical context. This article talks a bit about Korean feminists and porn. I also find this line of thinking discounts real world politics that effects how media is made and reflected. Like activist groups fighting for discrimination protections currently in Korea.

Like, we know this to be true in American and European cinema but it stops being true for non-white media? That's weird ain't it?

Also like, manwha is really fucking explicit. Korea absolutely knows what boy kissing, sex, and queer narratives are.

Multiple kdramas or films like Hometown Cha Cha Cha, Out of Breath, Schoolgirl Detectives, and Love Alarm, all feature queer characters, narratives and romances. They may not be "BL" - tho I would argue Schoolgirl Detectives and Out of Breath toe into GL tho Out of Breath is more of an romance film for adults - but if we count Love is Science as an honorary BL b/c of Mark and Ouwen then idk why we can't count at least Out of Breath.

Beyond that tho, like whether we count these series or not, to say that Korea doesn't know queer narratives or what boy kissing is b/c one singular sub-genre of romance wasn't delivering (which is an opinion not media analysis) is discounting all the other work being done in Korea by film makers.

Painter by Night is one of the most erotic and sexual comics I've ever read (beautifully drawn as well). Semantic Error also has sex in the comic, and there's a slew of porn comics that exist in Korea and are available to read right now.

I get that a majority of Korean BL isn't sexy, but for a long while a majority of het kdramas in the mainstream weren't either. Hometown Cha Cha Cha only has a post sex scene that's hilariously chaste.

But now? Somebody a 2022 kdrama thriller had explicit sex scenes (multiple of them!), My Name, Old Boy, Squid Game all also come to mind. Has Korea been chaste in the past? Yes and no, for mainstream stuff absolutely because the mainstream will almost always play it safe for capital value, but Old Boy came out in 2013 and has nudity and explicit sex.

I just want people to realize that by making definitive statements "Korea doesn't know what boy kissing/sex is" you're distilling an entire country of people down to 1) a singular genre of media and a niche one at that 2) ignoring cultural context and history that influences said media and 3) being moderately condescending and xenophobic.

It's misinformation and it's frustrating to see this repeated over and over by numerous people in fandom.

Lastly, the "modern romance trends out of the west" with omegaverse used as an example. I'm a good 99% positive Pit Babe was not at all inspired by Teen Wolf or Supernatural.

While omegaverse originated in the west - specifically via Supernatural - it's been popular in Japan and China for almost a decade, if not longer. The earliest omegaverse manga I can think of is Pendulum: Juujin Omegaverse by Hana Hasumi which was released in 2015, almost a decade ago.

There's countless popular omegaverse manga too, and the dynamics only moderately resemble the ones we're familiar with in the west. Juujin is part omegaverse and part furry/beastmen - the alphas are all beastmen the omegas are humans - while something like Ookami-kun Is Not Scary only slightly resembles omegaverse dynamics as a hybrid series - since beastmen are really popular in Japan in part b/c of historical mythology (you see the combination of romantic Beastmen and Japanese culture & folklore in Mamoru Hosoda's work The Boy and the Beast and Wolf Children).

I mean Megumi & Tsugumi (2018) is so popular they're an official English edition published by VIZ's imprint SuBlime and that's a straight up omegaverse story.

So if Pit Babe was influenced by anything, it certainly wasn't the west it was Japan, Korea and China.

I take contention with this line of thinking, because it centers the west way to much. Like mafia settings, why is that considered a "western" trope?

Korea alone in the last 3 years has had The Ballerina, Believer 2, My Name, Bloodhounds, Bad and Crazy, to name a few, and this isn't even getting into the cinema history of popular crime dramas many of which make up a huge chunk of Don Lee's career like The Gangster, the Cop and the Devil, or Unstoppable.

When I saw the trailer for Red Peafowl I didn't see influence from the west, I saw influence from Hong Kong.

The trailer took more inspiration from Jet Li (The Enforcer, Fist of Legend) and Donnie Yen (Flash Point, Raging Fire, Kung Fu Jungle) films than anything I've seen recently here in America. Which makes more sense, the filmmakers working now in Thailand, Korea, Japan, etc would have grown up watching those now crime action masterpieces and are now making their own work today.

So I disagree that BL has become all the influenced by "modern romance trends out of the west" I think that does a huge disservice to these individual countries who have their own histories of cinema and influence and cultural exchange. Like, do I believe American film making has had an influence over Japanese or Korean film making? Yes, absolutely - Train to Busan is a good example of this - however, the opposite is also true.

Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, the Wachowski sisters, George Lucas and James Cameron have all been influenced by Japanese film making, especially the works of Akira Kurosawa, Satoshi Kon, and Mamoru Oshii. Like, dios mio James Cameron is a damn weeb y'all.

John Wick's entire gun-fu sub-genre is heavily influenced by classic Hong Kong action films and the works of Bruce Lee. Legend of Korra, The Boondocks, Voltron, Young Justice, My Adventures with Superman are all obviously inspired by Japanese anime but animated by a Korean animation studio (Studio Mir). Beyond that, the rise in adult animated dramas like Castlevania, Critical Role Vox Machina, and Invincible to name a few are very clearly taking inspiration from anime in terms of style.

So yes there's totally cross cultural exchange going on, that's been true as far back as 1952 with Astro Boy who's design was inspired by Walt Disney's work on Bambi.

But do I think BL is following specific trends set by the west? No. At least not to the degree of an entire trend, because the influences I'm seeing in BL currently aren't from the west (by which we really mean American/UK don't we?) but by other Asian countries.

For example, The Sign is taking clear inspiration from Chinese & Korean costume dramas, especially Chinese ones like Ashes of Love, Fairy and Devil, White Snake (and it's many adaptions), & Guardian.

Sidenote: curious where all the femme gay chars in BL in 2023 are? Genuinely asking, I can't think of any that are very recent. I see femme gay characters more often in films than in TV shows like Marry My Dead Body (2022, Taiwanese) and Tokyo Godfathers (2003, Japanese). But for BL I'm coming up blank.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "messy gay" there's been loads of novels, comics, film and tv shows with messy gays like Shinji Ikari is the messiest bisexual put to screen. But I'm not sure what's the qualifier for "messy gay" here. Are we thinking Only Friends? B/c the only messy gay in that show is Boston, Playboyy features actual messy gay men but it's also one of the queerest BL around right now.

Again, I only take contention with this point because it centers the west and our supposed individual importance way to much. It removes the existence of history these countries have which are rich, varied, and nuanced. BL doesn't exist in a vacuum you can trace the development of Korean BL to the development of Korean het dramas almost to a T.

You can also trace their development to the queer history of each country and how Thailand interacts culturally with China, Japan, Korea, etc and vice versa. It also ignores the history of these countries influencing American cinema as well. The exchange doesn't only go one way.

Overall it feels like we're separating BL into this completely separate category of film making and acting as though we, westerners, are the target audience for any of it. Which we're not. We're a second or third tier audience, Thai studios are probably way more focused on targeting Japanese and Korean audiences than American. It feels as though we're not viewing these countries with a nuance lens, where they aren't just static producers of a singular piece of content people consume rather than a fully fledged individual country we should be engaging with.

TOP 10 BL Trends of 2023

This is just me with my analysis hat on.

1. 2023 = the year EVERYONE went outside their lanes

Everything went topsy-turvy this year in BL.

For example, Korea gave us agonized yearning and outright queerness (The 8th Sense, The New Employee) while Japan served up soft office workers and tender family (Our Dining Table).

The BL world went askew for a while, especially in the spring of 2023.

Not that we still didn’t still get Korea’s soft angsty bubbles or Japan’s “what are you doing and why does it hurt?” kink-fests. But there were quite a few BLs that made us chronic watchers sit up in confusion and wonder if Korea was dabbling in Taiwan’s territory or Japan in Thailand’s. Then they fudged the kisses and we were like… okay, back in familiar territory.

In contrast, Thailand stayed course-correcting for the damage they’ve done in the past with tropes (2022) and self referential meta criticism (2021), but also almost aggressively returned to their BL roots after last year’s series of shockers. Certainly, they are reexamining those roots, transplanting some, aerating others. But they really went back to classic Thai university and high school BL and pulps in a big way in 2023.

Taiwan is always difficult to gage because they produce so few but they seem to have stuck with what they do best with no deviation while producing more this year than they have in ages. I’m happy for that, why change a good thing? But there is a tiny part of me that really wants them to hit it out of the part with a quality piece soon. For me, We Best Love still reigns supreme, but I would really like the HIStory franchise to give us that level but longer - like a happy version of Your Name Engraved Herein. I think Taiwan has the chops to give us something as good as The 8th Sense or Old Fashion Cupcake but in their style, and I would like to see them exercise their talent for good rather than just profit.

I know, what a very odd thing for me to say. But if any BL is going to break into the mainstream American market, I genuinely think it’s most likely come from Taiwan.

Vietnam and the Philippines are falling behind, in general. They just didn’t bring out very many shows in 2023, and what the brought out tended to fub the endings. This is forgivable in Japan (because of their style and quality) but not what watchers want in the lower production value propositions. In other words, if you do a pulp, you can’t mess up the ending (by romance standards). that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon.

2. The Office Romance Dominated

After years of Thailand serving us an endless (and slightly bland) buffet of university (and a few high school) BLs, this year Korea was basically like…

Ofiice. We like the Office. It’s cheap to film we can use grown up actors, acting (mostly) their actual age.

And yeah… it totally worked.

To be fair, Japan has always given us office live action yaoi from the beginning (they had the source material) but this year everyone else, including Thailand, seriously started playing in this setting.

3. Boys Danced with Boys

The darling @heretherebedork was a big fan of this one, and I rather like it myself. Prior to this boys dancing together was very very rare in BL, but this year we got way more than our fair share. It was lovely.

Never Let me Go

My School President

Bed Friend

The Day I Loved You

Step by Step

Be Mine Superstar

Tie the Not

Dangerous Romance

I think there were a few more. These are the ones I remembered to write down.

4. Getting (even more) Meta With Tropes

BL has been getting more and more meta over the past few years but this year they really focused in on tropes specifically. Calling out their own biggest and most favorite tropes in a massive way, especially Thailand and especially GMMTV.

Like they tunneled in on damaging tropes with Bad Buddy and the like over the past 2 years, and now they are just having fun with us.

I mean they just started the dancing trope and already they are calling it out? That’s like rapid-fire regurgitated meta there, GMMTV.

5. Cameos are the norm now

Taiwan has always loved cameos but in the past the other countries have been show and steady with only one or two a year. (Unless Japan does a parody.)

This year Korea got in on the game.

Korea rarely starts trends but they do adopt smaller and lesser known existing ones and make them super popular.

This year they did that with cameo couple appearances, even borrowing a few of Thailand’s pairs (TutorYim and MaxNat traveled north). They did it so much I stopped tracking. Love Class 2, Why R U?, and Jun & Jun were the heaviest hitters.

Taiwan, of course, came back swinging. Kiseki was the gum-ball machine of pair cameos. (In Taiwan mafia = gay.)

6. We are entering the cross pollination age

The number of remakes picked up or started this year was startling, not just countries revisiting their own content (Thailand, Japan) but countries revisiting OTHER countries stuff.

Lemme explain…

Korea has started remaking Thai content (Why R U?) alongside cameo'ing Thai pairs.

Thailand is doing Korean IP (My Dear Gagster Oppa) and has 2 Chinese ones slated for next year.

GMMTV acquired a lot of Japanese IP (Cherry Magic, Ossen, and My Love Mix Up) - and then had problems distributing it.

This is probably the most surprising trend for me. Especially the Japanese stuff. I would have thought these properties well outside of Thailand’s price range (even GMMTV’s) not to mention Japan’s legendary IP issues (I swear I typed this pout before the pulled TayNew’s excellent Cherry Magic).

Also why not option some of the older popular manga instead? Bet that’s much cheeper. (I did see a NEW Thai translation of Finder into Thai, which is 90s yaoi, so I have my fingers crossed on that front.)

I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Thailand is running out of y-novel content. Their publication industry is just not robust enough (I was just talking to a friend about this at length recently). But I didn’t think they had the funds to option, especially from Japan.

Perhaps the option deals are for peanuts?

7. Korea got cheeky

I’m not sure quite how else to put this.

After finally figuring out boys can kiss, Korea started to do not just higher heat but playful higher heat, with more aggressive word play and linguistic innuendo, like they are entering their racy rom-com teenage years (Why R U? Love Class 2 and Jun & Jun in particular.)

I guess: Welcome to your BL teens, Korea?

It’s cute of them. I am very much enjoying it.

And now that comedy is warming them up, we get to see them play with actual queer burgeoning physicality in shows like The 8th Sense.

It’s nice. I like seeing Korea stretch its wings. They still stick to their bubble, but that bubble seems to be expanding.

8. The Amnesia Trope is back

And I, for one, would prefer to forget about it.

9. BL got trendy

I’m not quite sure how to articulate this category but basically we started seeing a lot of “modern” romance trends out of the west (like a/b/o) show up in our BL. Not a ton and sometimes quite small, but there has a been a steady rise of things like: no seme/uke, femme gay, out gay, condom use, messy gay.

We also got an increasing range of sub genre frameworks (like mafia, office setting) that’s moved BL pretty firmly (even in Thailand) out of school and into the workplace, whether actual working is involved or not.

It’s not to the point where it feels like we get more non-school BL than school BL (if I include all countries in this assessment).

Japan, in classic Japanese fashion, quietly started moving in the opposite direction. It’s what they do.

10. The Vampires are coming

This is an announcement trend, which I don’t usually report on but it’s so CLEAR.

So last year we had a spate of announcements of possible Omegaverse (2 from China, 1 from Japan, 1 from Thailand - the only one that’s happened).

This year we got 5 Vampire (or vampire-esk) Thai BLs announced including one from GMMTV.

Whether all 5 will actually get made is unlikely, but having had (basically) none prior to this (Kissable Lips), I’m pretty confident that we will get at least 2 of them. And I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one other country made one as well. (Side eyes Taiwan with interest.)

Final thoughts

It feels like we are also seeing a decline in BL (both by quantity and quality) from Vietnam and the Philippines. As you all know, I don’t track or really watch either of these two very closely. But it feels like, now, no one else is either.

I think we have likely seen the BL heyday already in both places and their industries are now on the decline.

We might be witnessing a thinning in the players in the BL field.

FYI we had approximately

136 BLs in 2023

Previous Years

2022: 117

2021: 95

2020: 62

2019: 40

2018: 30

2017: 44 (China’s last gasp)

2016: 27

2015: 17 (50% micro)

2014: 17 (50% micro)

And that’s it! Let me know in the comments if you’ve spotted any additional trends you want to call out.

Last year, 2022′s trend report

2021′s Trend report

Last Year’s Stats & Predictions

(source)

#chaos pikachu speaks #don't be a james somerton or a bandit keith y'all

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airiestar · 1 year ago

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𝑨𝑰𝑲𝑶'𝑺 𝑷𝟓 💃🏻🎭📖🎶 𝑬𝑿𝑷𝑬𝑹𝑰𝑬𝑵𝑪𝑬 !! ೀ⋆

haloo temen temen semua!! 👋🏻🥹

i'm back with another blog ^^,, sesuai dengan judul blog aku diatas, aku mau cerita tentang pengalaman P5 ku kali ini. . .

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biar kalian enjoy bacanya, sambil dengerin musik yukk ;)) semoga kalian suka yaa,, selamat membaca 🎧🤩

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jadi . . . tema Proyek Penguatan Profil Pelajar Pancasila kali ini adalah "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika" yang pasti TIDAK tampak asing bagi kalian. kalo sampe masih aja ada yang gak tau kebangetan banget sih 😤👎🏻 reminder, kalian ga boleh cuma tau apa itu Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, tapi kalian juga harus melaksanakannya dalam keseharian kita nihh,, TANPA PENGECUALIAN!!😡

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now here comes the exciting part!! 🎉 PERSIAPAN UNTUK PEMENTASAN DRAMA 🎉

jadi, tim projek mengamanahkan untuk setiap kelas menampilkan sebuah drama cerita rakyat yang juga akan diiringi tarian daerah dan lagu daerag yang nanti akan akan dipentaskan pada tanggal 23/24 Oktober, kelas ku, kelas 9.2 kebagian untuk tampil ke 4 pada tanggal 23. dengan waktu yang tidak begitu lama kita harus berlatih dengan sungguh sungguh!! 💪🏻

cerita rakyat yang kita pilih adalah a classic, "Malin Kundang" yang disutradai oleh teman ku Raeesa 🥹🥰 sedikit apresiasi buat raeesa, she's done such a great job, thankyou so much!! okay back with the blog, di dalam drama, aku berperan sebagai penari yang menarikan tarian dari Sumatera Barat, tari Bagurau. lalu untuk lagu yang ditampilkan, kita memilih lagu "Kampuang Nan Jauh di Mato" yang juga ditambah dengan koreografi ringan. kita bener bener kerja keras untuk persiapan drama kali ini, mulai dari buat prop sendiri, latihan sendiri tanpa guru, menyiapkan bahan bahan sendiri, menyiapkan kostum kostum sendiri. LIKE WE WENT ALL OUT!! bcs we want the best for our class. and tbh, it was all worth it 🥹🫂😍

akhirnya, hari yang ditunggu tunggu. Hari Pementasan Drama, akhirnya tiba. jujur, sebelum tampil, all mixed emotion, grogi, excited, takut, gak siap, can't wait to actually perform. deg deg-an banget rill 😭😭 but in the end, we know we did our best. dan benar, kita tampil dengan penuh semangat, give all our best. iya mungkin ada bagian bagian yang belum sempurna, tapi juga ada banyak improve. dan itu lah yang membuat performance kita bagus. aku bangga, aku bangga dengan SemDu. terimakasih SemDu, kita semua hebat. 👏🏻😍🎉🫂 esok hari nya gantian, kita nonton pementasan pementasan drama kelas lain yang keren keren semua 🥹👏🏻 bener bener ya OZoNe, hebat banget aku akui . .

the final chapter, the last day. untuk selebrasi diadakan pawai. kita diperintahkan untuk memakai baju adat atau profesi, aku memilih untuk memakai baju adat Yogyakarta, karena aku dari sana dan aku cuma ada itu baju adat nyaa 😭😭 sesampai di sekolah, aku shock banget!! pakaian adat dan profesi yang dipakai beragam banget. aku heran, ko pada niat niat yaa, sedangkan aku yang cuma pake kebaya & rok songket 😔 but its okay, kan emang biar beragam heheh. pawai, kita jalan keliling kodam, sumpah kaki aku sakit banget lecet pakai flat shoes keliling kodam, sesampe sekolah lagi aku langsung nyeker karena udah ga tahan BANGET!! and then, waktunya istirahat,," selesai istirahat, kita mengerjakan soal. lalu menyanyikan lagu Pelajar Pancasila terakhir 😔 (alay, masih ada projek selanjutnya). The End.

that's it dari aku, seru banget^^ i mean, i surely had fun while doing it. sedih sih karna projek selesai, jadi harus balik ke KBM biasa 🙏🏻 but that's ok👌🏻 there's still next time;)) thankyou thankyou thankyou udah baca blog aku 🥹💗💓 as always, see you guys next time!! bye byee

#Spotify

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sidekick-archer · 1 year ago

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To get to know him better, you can see what he adores below:

Interest.

Currently eyeing for movies/series; tv shows, anime, music, games, youtube, and sports.

Movies & Series.

Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), DC Extended Universe (DCEU), BumiLangit Cinematic Universe (BCU), The Conjuring Universe, Insidious, The Hunger Games, Jumanji, Enola Holmes, Jurassic Park, Dark, Stranger Things, The Crown, Fate: The Wings Saga, All of Us Are Dead, Lost in Space, Alice in Borderland, Wednesday, The Umbrella Academy, The Last of Us, Queen Charlotte, Cleopatra, RWRB (Red, White, and Royal Blue), Game of Thrones, and so on.

K-Drama.

The Heirs, Pinnochio, 49 Days, Missing You, The Legend of the Blue Sea, School 2013, School 2015, Hwarang: The Poet Warrior Youth, Descendants of the Sun, Reply 1988, Cheer Up, Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo, I'm Not a Robot, Hotel Del Luna, The Eternal Monarch, The Tale of Nokdu, The World of the Married, The Penthouse, My ID is Gangnam Beauty, Extraordinary You, True Beauty, 18 again, and so on.

TV Shows.

F.R.I.E.D.S, Brothers & Sisters, Modern Family, The Vampire Diaries, Days of Our Lives.

Anime.

Clannad, Love Live! School Idol Project, Bakuman, Sword Art Online, SpyxFamily, Chainsaw Man, etc.

Music .

Kpops: (Girls' Generation, TWICE, Blackpink, Dreamcatcher, Secret Number, WJSN, LE SSERAFIM, New Jeans, ATEEZ, THE BOYZ, TXT, Stray Kids and Seventeen, etc);

Western: Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Bring Me The Horizon, Why Don't We, New Hope Club, 5 Seconds of Summer, Keenan Te, James Arthur, Khalid, Bruno Mars, Troye Sivan, The Weeknd, Rex Orange County, DPR, XGALX;

2000s Indonesian songs: the one that is now currently on music festivals. NIKI, JKT48, V1RST, Vierratale, Yovie and Nuno, Juicy Luicy, and many more;

Japan: Yoasobi, Vaundy, and Back Number.

Games.

Currently plays Mobile Legends & Plato.

YouTube Channel.

Diary Misteri Sara, Kisah Tanah Jawa, Nessie Judge, Nadia Omara, Aurel Val, Hirotada Radifan, Kok Bisa?, Sepulang Sekolah, BW, TS Talks, Pita’s Life, Keluarga Bahagia di Jerman, Ibu RT di Belanda, Breakdown Channel Universe, Invoice Indonesia, Arif muhammad, Warintil, and many more.

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taylorscheeseburger · 5 years ago

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Hey @taylorswift @taylornation just wanna tell you that Indonesian Swifties love you so much.

This is some of us doing a fun walk in Jakarta. Sunday morning, in Jakarta’s main road. It’s car free day time.

We sang the songs from lover with shiny smile on our faces.

International Swifties doing the best we can to promote Lover. @taylorswift

(Credits to TSwift_ID on Twitter)

#taylor swift #we love you taylor #indonesia #indonesian swiftie #swiftie #fun walk #lover #lover album #bop #asian swiftie #taylor pls notice us #lover tour indonesia #lover promotion #jakarta #taylor #cornelia street issa bop #daylight is a masterpiece #indonesia needs taylor back #indonesia misses taylor

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stillgeekingout · 1 year ago

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part 2~

I finally actually read all of pride and prejudice, it was great everyone was right lol. also I made character playlists for it for sara’s bday but I also just like them

speaking of playlists. ingrid and I went back to working on our narrative playlist project and we are now hopelessly invested in it lol. all of the playlists are done as of last week but more things to come. also I put together a box of props based on the characters for ingrid’s bday but also for me (are you sensing a theme lmao)

I wrote a song!!! I have always wanted to and never succeeded but I did do it and I think it’s good. I probably won’t ever do anything with it but it exists. maybe in 30 years I’ll write another one. or maybe sooner if we do our OLS thing

we went to a couple of Musical Mondays at a theatre near us and sang in their open mic competitions (and didn’t win but it was fun)

I thought last year was concert year but this was truly concert year. concerts I saw this year: lucius w/ingrid & my mom which was CRAZY good and we were super close and then they came into the crowd and stood right in front of us, aly & aj with ingrid, muna in atlanta which was my first time going to a concert alone (it was still fun but I prefer not going alone), twice in atlanta with shannen and ingrid, black midi with ingrid/sara/sara’s dad lol, and tessa violet w ingrid and the people we made friends with in the crowd (this one was also really small and cool). we started listening to chappell roan like the week she was in orlando and it was already sold out rip. also darren came to orlando but I didn’t go to that either bc it was his christmas show and I don’t care

I lost my beloved yellow water bottle in an airport :’(

I feel like I didn’t really go feral over any tv/movies this year? we watched not dead yet and taskmaster but idk there weren’t any new-to-me shows that I got super into. I was underwhelmed by barbie…. nimona was good and I’m glad it exists but it didn’t Hit Me the way I think it hit other people

one of my parasocial relationships got to the point where even I was like ok this needs to stop

on the flip side my other parasocial relationship is going great on bluesky lmao

my sister was in indonesia the whole year! :o I miss her a lot! in september we were the depression bros

I saw snow for the first time!! we went on a roadtrip to virginia and north carolina to see friends

got addicted to fb marketplace and got 2 new armchairs (and the infusion tea couch)

ingrid and I took spanish in the fall but the teacher was bad so I didn’t learn very much spanish

our roommate stayed for a second year, she is chill

shannen moved farther away :( but we still got to hang out

we did 2 friend group powerpoint parties

I guess I can’t not say it…. the eras tour took over my entire social media feed which first gave me fomo and then it was fine and then annoying but it did make me start talking to hannah and now we are friends outside of ingrid :)

also this was My Year for taylor’s versions, speak now and 1989 are The Ones (even tho I don’t prefer the new versions)

ingrid and shannen FINALLY finished corey & sherlock. and I read it and it was fun despite also being A Time because it fell during my depression month rip

rory was born!! the first baby in my Vicinity in a looong time

obligatory bullet point for muna bc I love them… I’m still not a podcast person but I listened to so much gayotic this year. yeehaw silk is my roman empire

saved it for the end: my goal in 2023 was to write a lot of my rough draft and I did it! we went to see manatees, we went to st augustine multiple times, I read seasons of real florida & braiding sweetgrass (until I had to return it to the library lol) and I researched weaving and made a connection through an infodump match blog and drew an insanely detailed castle map… working on this book is occasionally stressful but mostly it’s just fun!

did a lot of writing in the beginning of the year and then stagnated for a while and then I was looking for a distraction from work hell and rainbow convinced me to do nanowrimo on a whim and I completed it!

I was in a writing group with someone I used to rp with on forums when I was like 13. WILD

anyway 2023 was a lot but a lot of good things happened too. I hope this year to stress less about work and just focus on what I can control, like my house and my book etc. my mom keeps saying “ready for what’s in store in 2024” so I made up a mcelroy year title for her which is “20 what’s in store: the adventure awaits”. personally idk if I want an adventure this year so I’m sticking with fungalore hearing my wish to get a lot of writing done. if you made it this far I hope you have a year of human connection, restful sleep, and good snacks. peace and love <3

I was gonna be like "would you believe it's my 10th one of these" but apparently tumblr has a CHARACTER LIMIT now????? why would they nerf me on the year I decided not to worry about how long it was

anyway I guess I'm splitting this in 2 so reflections on 2023 part one~

let's start with work bc then I want to be done with it: I spent all year doing trainings (& 2 conferences) and researching and preparing to apply for an advisor position if it ever opened up. it did open up in spring, I applied and did not get it, the new advisor was not good and got fired, I applied again having done much more training and still did not get it, I applied for a different advisor position trying to triumphantly leave my office and did not get that either. so now I’m still in my same position working under the person who beat me for the job but this time with a bunch of extra responsibility that I gave myself trying to prep to be promoted. lol. if I sound very bitter it’s because I am :))))

all that being said, I do still mostly like my job from day to day. and I still want to do advising, probably. if they’ll ever hire me for it

related to work but less bitter: I had mostly good relationships with my coworkers. one of them was pregnant for a lot of the year and just had her baby last week and I’m very excited to meet her (we went to her baby shower despite all her friends being Very Christian lol it was a time) (this coworker is uhhhh A Lot but it’s complicated lol). I got to be on the hiring committee for another coworker which was a cool experience and also she is very nice. got closer with another coworker who I previously had kind of a tenuous relationship with (and now she works fully remote so it doesn’t even matter) (jk)

another thing I did in my quest to Be Hireable was basically take over supervising the student leaders (work study students) at work. shoutout to esteban, isa, aar and sheri lol

I have inherited my mother’s trait of getting attached to problem children. there are several students who are a recurring Thorn In My Side but also I’m rooting for them

last work thing that is only tangentially a work thing: I became the advisor for GSA at my campus and now I have a bunch of queer college students under my wing. a few of us walked in pride which was my first time being in the parade and it was wild. also we had an event for trans awareness week and I am proud of them for coming up with it :)) more exciting things to come this year. feels good to have a little corner where I can provide support in the face of so many attacks from the FL govt

let’s get the other big bad thing out of the way! my mental health was shit lol. I briefly was doing virtual appointments with a therapist in the spring but it mostly just made me feel weird and untherapizable. (as in, I didn’t feel like I was getting much out of it but I think part of that was that it was zoom calls from my car on my phone during lunch breaks) although it did lead to me leaving my phone outside of the bedroom at night and putting timers on my apps which I think have been net positives even if they haven’t made as much of a difference as I hoped.

the aforementioned job stress was a huge part of it, the application process lasted like 2 months and then they left me on the hook after the interview for Multiple Weeks which was. a bad time.

another part of it was I was alone a lot on weekends and I’m not very good at using my time off to do fun and nice things when I’m by myself, usually I end up just stewing in my brains. I did try to get in the habit of occasionally going to these nice gardens near us so maybe I will do that more this year also.

also health related: got my first mammogram this year. it was uncomfortable but fine. also got my first pap smear which was QUITE PAINFUL AND UNPLEASANT but I did survive it

also tangentially health related: I tried a few times throughout the year to do yoga. for a lil bit I was doing it with some coworkers after work once a week. some of it I did with some people from the carry on discord. it was very intermittent but better than nothing at all!

last health thing: my dad’s siblings had an Exceptionally Shitty Summer. one of his sisters died, another of his sisters had an extreme staph infection and was in the hospital for weeks, and one of his brothers had a mini stroke and possibly also a heart attack? the latter two are doing okay now but it was rough for a minute there

ENOUGH BAD STUFF I turned 30 this year! three full decades on this earth

Ingrid got her work authorization and a job and later in the year her green card!

I paid off my car (and also my car is having a lot of minor problems but that’s just… having a car)

I made a few financial mistakes (messed up our taxes, accidentally got a best buy credit card) but they are hopefully still fixable and overall we still saved money by the end of the year. we tried to keep a budget for a while but it was hard to keep up with. we also tried to join a credit union but their customer service was really weird

made a halfhearted attempt at local politics (went to a few protests, one city planning thing, and one socialist alternative meeting)

stay tuned for part 2 since tumblr hates me apparently

#personal?#I'm ngl I'm still annoyed about having to split this #tumblr why do you hate me and my verbose year end summaries

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thesevenpalmtrees · 5 years ago

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we fancy you taylor @taylorswift 💗

we roamed the streets on Car Free Day in Jakarta to promote Lover! Indonesia really miss you, please come play for us again 🇮🇩✨

#taylor swift #taylurking #lover

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scifigeneration · 5 years ago

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The end of the world: a history of how a silent cosmos led humans to fear the worst

by Thomas Moynihan

NASA

It is 1950 and a group of scientists are walking to lunch against the majestic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. They are about to have a conversation that will become scientific legend. The scientists are at the Los Alamos Ranch School, the site for the Manhattan Project, where each of the group has lately played their part in ushering in the atomic age.

They are laughing about a recent cartoon in the New Yorker offering an unlikely explanation for a slew of missing public trash cans across New York City. The cartoon had depicted “little green men” (complete with antenna and guileless smiles) having stolen the bins, assiduously unloading them from their flying saucer.

By the time the party of nuclear scientists sits down to lunch, within the mess hall of a grand log cabin, one of their number turns the conversation to matters more serious. “Where, then, is everybody?”, he asks. They all know that he is talking – sincerely – about extraterrestrials.

The question, which was posed by Enrico Fermi and is now known as Fermi’s Paradox, has chilling implications.

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Bin-stealing UFOs notwithstanding, humanity still hasn’t found any evidence of intelligent activity among the stars. Not a single feat of “astro-engineering”, no visible superstructures, not one space-faring empire, not even a radio transmission. It has been argued that the eerie silence from the sky above may well tell us something ominous about the future course of our own civilisation.

Such fears are ramping up. Last year, the astrophysicist Adam Frank implored an audience at Google that we see climate change – and the newly baptised geological age of the Anthropocene – against this cosmological backdrop. The Anthropocene refers to the effects of humanity’s energy-intensive activities upon Earth. Could it be that we do not see evidence of space-faring galactic civilisations because, due to resource exhaustion and subsequent climate collapse, none of them ever get that far? If so, why should we be any different?

A few months after Frank’s talk, in October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s update on global warming caused a stir. It predicted a sombre future if we do not decarbonise. And in May, amid Extinction Rebellion’s protests, a new climate report upped the ante, warning: “Human life on earth may be on the way to extinction.”

Meanwhile, NASA has been publishing press releases about an asteroid set to hit New York within a month. This is, of course, a dress rehearsal: part of a “stress test” designed to simulate responses to such a catastrophe. NASA is obviously fairly worried by the prospect of such a disaster event – such simulations are costly.

Space tech Elon Musk has also been relaying his fears about artificial intelligence to YouTube audiences of tens of millions. He and others worry that the ability for AI systems to rewrite and self-improve themselves may trigger a sudden runaway process, or “intelligence explosion”, that will leave us far behind – an artificial superintelligence need not even be intentionally malicious in order to accidentally wipe us out.

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In 2015, Musk donated to Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, headed up by transhumanist Nick Bostrom. Nestled within the university’s medieval spires, Bostrom’s institute scrutinises the long-term fate of humanity and the perils we face at a truly cosmic scale, examining the risks of things such as climate, asteroids and AI. It also looks into less well-publicised issues. Universe destroying physics experiments, gamma-ray bursts, planet-consuming nanotechnology and exploding supernovae have all come under its gaze.

So it would seem that humanity is becoming more and more concerned with portents of human extinction. As a global community, we are increasingly conversant with increasingly severe futures. Something is in the air.

But this tendency is not actually exclusive to the post-atomic age: our growing concern about extinction has a history. We have been becoming more and more worried for our future for quite some time now. My PhD research tells the story of how this began. No one has yet told this story, yet I feel it is an important one for our present moment.

I wanted to find out how current projects, such as the Future of Humanity Institute, emerge as offshoots and continuations of an ongoing project of “enlightenment” that we first set ourselves over two centuries ago. Recalling how we first came to care for our future helps reaffirm why we should continue to care today.

Extinction, 200 years ago

In 1816, something was also in the air. It was a 100-megaton sulfate aerosol layer. Girdling the planet, it was made up of material thrown into the stratosphere by the eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, the previous year. It was one of the biggest volcanic eruptions since civilisation emerged during the Holocene.

Mount Tambora’s crater. Wikimedia Commons/NASA

Almost blotting out the sun, Tambora’s fallout caused a global cascade of harvest collapse, mass famine, cholera outbreak and geopolitical instability. And it also provoked the first popular fictional depictions of human extinction. These came from a troupe of writers including Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley.

The group had been holidaying together in Switzerland when titanic thunderstorms, caused by Tambora’s climate perturbations, trapped them inside their villa. Here they discussed humanity’s long-term prospects.

Read more: Why a volcano, Frankenstein, and the summer of 1816 are relevant to the Anthropocene

Clearly inspired by these conversations and by 1816’s hellish weather, Byron immediately set to work on a poem entitled “Darkness”. It imagines what would happen if our sun died:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air

Detailing the ensuing sterilisation of our biosphere, it caused a stir. And almost 150 years later, against the backdrop of escalating Cold War tensions, the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists again called upon Byron’s poem to illustrate the severity of nuclear winter.

Two years later, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (perhaps the first book on synthetic biology) refers to the potential for the lab-born monster to outbreed and exterminate Homo sapiens as a competing species. By 1826, Mary went on to publish The Last Man. This was the first full-length novel on human extinction, depicted here at the hands of pandemic pathogen.

Boris Karloff plays Frankenstein’s monster, 1935. Wikimedia Commons

Beyond these speculative fictions, other writers and thinkers had already discussed such threats. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1811, daydreamed in his private notebooks about our planet being “scorched by a close comet and still rolling on – cities men-less, channels riverless, five mile deep”. In 1798, Mary Shelley’s father, the political thinker William Godwin, queried whether our species would “continue forever”?

While just a few years earlier, Immanuel Kant had pessimistically proclaimed that global peace may be achieved “only in the vast graveyard of the human race”. He would, soon after, worry about a descendent offshoot of humanity becoming more intelligent and pushing us aside.

Earlier still, in 1754, philosopher David Hume had declared that “man, equally with every animal and vegetable, will partake” in extinction. Godwin noted that “some of the profoundest enquirers” had lately become concerned with “the extinction of our species”.

In 1816, against the backdrop of Tambora’s glowering skies, a newspaper article drew attention to this growing murmur. It listed numerous extinction threats. From global refrigeration to rising oceans to planetary conflagration, it spotlighted the new scientific concern for human extinction. The “probability of such a disaster is daily increasing”, the article glibly noted. Not without chagrin, it closed by stating: “Here, then, is a very rational end of the world!”

Before this, we thought the universe was busy

So if people first started worrying about human extinction in the 18th century, where was the notion beforehand? There is enough apocalypse in scripture to last until judgement day, surely. But extinction has nothing to do with apocalypse. The two ideas are utterly different, even contradictory.

For a start, apocalyptic prophecies are designed to reveal the ultimate moral meaning of things. It’s in the name: apocalypse means revelation. Extinction, by direct contrast, reveals precisely nothing and this is because it instead predicts the end of meaning and morality itself – if there are no humans, there is nothing humanly meaningful left.

And this is precisely why extinction matters. Judgement day allows us to feel comfortable knowing that, in the end, the universe is ultimately in tune with what we call “justice”. Nothing was ever truly at stake. On the other hand, extinction alerts us to the fact that everything we hold dear has always been in jeopardy. In other words, everything is at stake.

Extinction was not much discussed before 1700 due to a background assumption, widespread prior to the Enlightenment, that it is the nature of the cosmos to be as full as moral value and worth as is possible. This, in turn, led people to assume that all other planets are populated with “living and thinking beings” exactly like us.

Although it only became a truly widely accepted fact after Copernicus and Kepler in the 16th and 17th centuries, the idea of plural worlds certainly dates back to antiquity, with intellectuals from Epicurus to Nicholas of Cusa proposing them to be inhabited with lifeforms similar to our own. And, in a cosmos that is infinitely populated with humanoid beings, such beings – and their values – can never fully go extinct.

Star cluster Messier 13 in Hercules, 1877. Wikimedia Commons

In the 1660s, Galileo confidently declared that an entirely uninhabited or unpopulated world is “naturally impossible” on account of it being “morally unjustifiable”. Gottfried Leibniz later pronounced that there simply cannot be anything entirely “fallow, sterile, or dead in the universe”.

Along the same lines, the trailblazing scientist Edmond Halley (after whom the famous comet is named) reasoned in 1753 that the interior of our planet must likewise be “inhabited”. It would be “unjust” for any part of nature to be left “unoccupied” by moral beings, he argued.

Around the same time Halley provided the first theory on a “mass extinction event”. He speculated that comets had previously wiped out entire “worlds” of species. Nonetheless, he also maintained that, after each previous cataclysm “human civilisation had reliably re-emerged”. And it would do so again. Only this, he said could make such an event morally justifiable.

Later, in the 1760s, the philosopher Denis Diderot was attending a dinner party when he was asked whether humans would go extinct. He answered “yes”, but immediately qualified this by saying that after several millions of years the “biped animal who carries the name man” would inevitably re-evolve.

This is what the contemporary planetary scientist Charles Lineweaver identifies as the “Planet of the Apes Hypothesis”. This refers to the misguided presumption that “human-like intelligence” is a recurrent feature of cosmic evolution: that alien biospheres will reliably produce beings like us. This is what is behind the wrong-headed assumption that, should we be wiped out today, something like us will inevitably return tomorrow.

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Back in Diderot’s time, this assumption was pretty much the only game in town. It was why one British astronomer wrote, in 1750, that the destruction of our planet would matter as little as “Birth-Days or Mortalities” do down on Earth.

This was typical thinking at the time. Within the prevailing worldview of eternally returning humanoids throughout an infinitely populated universe, there was simply no pressure or need to care for the future. Human extinction simply couldn’t matter. It was trivialised to the point of being unthinkable.

For the same reasons, the idea of the “future” was also missing. People simply didn’t care about it in the way we do now. Without the urgency of a future riddled with risk, there was no motivation to be interested in it, let alone attempt to predict and preempt it.

It was the dismantling of such dogmas, beginning in the 1700s and ramping up in the 1800s, that set the stage for the enunciation of Fermi’s Paradox in the 1900s and leads to our growing appreciation for our cosmic precariousness today.

But then we realised the skies are silent

In order to truly care about our mutable position down here, we first had to notice that the cosmic skies above us are crushingly silent. Slowly at first, though soon after gaining momentum, this realisation began to take hold around the same time that Diderot had his dinner party.

One of the first examples of a different mode of thinking I’ve found is from 1750, when the French polymath Claude-Nicholas Le Cat wrote a history of the earth. Like Halley, he posited the now familiar cycles of “ruin and renovation”. Unlike Halley, he was conspicuously unclear as to whether humans would return after the next cataclysm. A shocked reviewer picked up on this, demanding to know whether “Earth shall be re-peopled with new inhabitants”. In reply, the author facetiously asserted that our fossil remains would “gratify the curiosity of the new inhabitants of the new world, if there be any”. The cycle of eternally returning humanoids was unwinding.

In line with this, the French encyclopaedist Baron d’Holbach ridiculed the “conjecture that other planets, like our own, are inhabited by beings resembling ourselves”. He noted that precisely this dogma – and the related belief that the cosmos is inherently full of moral value – had long obstructed appreciation that the human species could permanently “disappear” from existence. By 1830, the German philosopher F W J Schelling declared it utterly naive to go on presuming “that humanoid beings are found everywhere and are the ultimate end”.

Figures illustrating articles on astronomy, from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. Wikimedia Commons

And so, where Galileo had once spurned the idea of a dead world, the German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers proposed in 1802 that the Mars-Jupiter asteroid belt in fact constitutes the ruins of a shattered planet. Troubled by this, Godwin noted that this would mean that the creator had allowed part of “his creation” to become irremediably “unoccupied”. But scientists were soon computing the precise explosive force needed to crack a planet – assigning cold numbers where moral intuitions once prevailed. Olbers calculated a precise timeframe within which to expect such an event befalling Earth. Poets began writing of “bursten worlds”.

The cosmic fragility of life was becoming undeniable. If Earth happened to drift away from the sun, one 1780s Parisian diarist imagined that interstellar coldness would “annihilate the human race, and the earth rambling in the void space, would exhibit a barren, depopulated aspect”. Soon after, the Italian pessimist Giacomo Leopardi envisioned the same scenario. He said that, shorn of the sun’s radiance, humanity would “all die in the dark, frozen like pieces of rock crystal”.

Galileo’s inorganic world was now a chilling possibility. Life, finally, had become cosmically delicate. Ironically, this appreciation came not from scouring the skies above but from probing the ground below. Early geologists, during the later 1700s, realised that Earth has its own history and that organic life has not always been part of it. Biology hasn’t even been a permanent fixture down here on Earth – why should it be one elsewhere? Coupled with growing scientific proof that many species had previously become extinct, this slowly transformed our view of the cosmological position of life as the 19th century dawned.

Copper engraving of a pterodactyl fossil discovered by the Italian scientist Cosimo Alessandro Collini in 1784. Wikimedia Commons

Seeing death in the stars

And so, where people like Diderot looked up into the cosmos in the 1750s and saw a teeming petri dish of humanoids, writers such as Thomas de Quincey were, by 1854, gazing upon the Orion nebula and reporting that they saw only a gigantic inorganic “skull” and its lightyear-long rictus grin.

The astronomer William Herschel had, already in 1814, realised that looking out into the galaxy one is looking into a “kind of chronometer”. Fermi would spell it out a century after de Quincey, but people were already intuiting the basic notion: looking out into dead space, we may just be looking into our own future.

People were becoming aware that the appearance of intelligent activity on Earth should not be taken for granted. They began to see that it is something distinct – something that stands out against the silent depths of space. Only through realising that what we consider valuable is not the cosmological baseline did we come to grasp that such values are not necessarily part of the natural world. Realising this was also realising that they are entirely our own responsibility. And this, in turn, summoned us to the modern projects of prediction, preemption and strategising. It is how we came to care about our future.

As soon as people first started discussing human extinction, possible preventative measures were suggested. Bostrom now refers to this as “macrostrategy”. However, as early as the 1720s, the French diplomat Benoît de Maillet was suggesting gigantic feats of geoengineering that could be leveraged to buffer against climate collapse. The notion of humanity as a geological force has been around ever since we started thinking about the long-term – it is only recently that scientists have accepted this and given it a name: “Anthropocene”.

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Will technology save us?

It wasn’t long before authors began conjuring up highly technologically advanced futures aimed at protecting against existential threat. The eccentric Russian futurologist Vladimir Odoevskii, writing in the 1830s and 1840s, imagined humanity engineering the global climate and installing gigantic machines to “repulse” comets and other threats, for example. Yet Odoevskii was also keenly aware that with self-responsibility comes risk: the risk of abortive failure. Accordingly, he was also the very first author to propose the possibility that humanity might destroy itself with its own technology.

Acknowledgement of this plausibility, however, is not necessarily an invitation to despair. And it remains so. It simply demonstrates appreciation of the fact that, ever since we realised that the universe is not teeming with humans, we have come to appreciate that the fate of humanity lies in our hands. We may yet prove unfit for this task, but – then as now – we cannot rest assured believing that humans, or something like us, will inevitably reappear – here or elsewhere.

Beginning in the late 1700s, appreciation of this has snowballed into our ongoing tendency to be swept up by concern for the deep future. Current initiatives, such as Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute, can be seen as emerging from this broad and edifying historical sweep. From ongoing demands for climate justice to dreams of space colonisation, all are continuations and offshoots of a tenacious task that we first began to set for ourselves two centuries ago during the Enlightenment when we first realised that, in an otherwise silent universe, we are responsible for the entire fate of human value.

It may be solemn, but becoming concerned for humanity’s extinction is nothing other than realising one’s obligation to strive for unceasing self-betterment. Indeed, ever since the Enlightenment, we have progressively realised that we must think and act ever-better because, should we not, we may never think or act again. And that seems – to me at least – like a very rational end of the world.

About The Author:

Thomas Moynihan is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Oxford

This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

This article is part of Conversation Insights

The Conversation’s Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges. In generating these narratives, we hope to bring areas of interdisciplinary research to a wider audience.

You can read more Insights stories here.

#featured #space #extreterrestial life #climate change #extinction #fermi paradox #enrico fermi #end of the world

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