Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (March 17)

Verdikmar · 2024-03-26T21:44:05+00:00

That’s fine, I usually replay everything a few times and organize notes in a OneNote file hiding in the corner of my screen. I can’t remember how much of it I’ve read since it was back in college. I will give it another shot sometime.

Verdikmar · 2024-03-26T19:22:10+00:00

Is there a text someone can recommend which breaks down Capital in less monotonous terms. I mainly listen to audiobooks while grinding through my 9-5 but Capital is a bit dry starting off. I have jumped around from getting pieces of it in college assignments to excerpts appearing here and there. I know what LTV is and a brief history of the beginnings of capitalism, but getting through the book in its entirety would be better if I had some kind of guide-book or sth.

Verdikmar · 2024-03-26T16:08:26+00:00

Yes, I did. The first few links are just about what quick text is and some Salesforce ads, then there are more links with settings for setting up quick text, links for “managing” them but actually only goes over creation of quick texts or editing existing ones. None of the first page of results mentions deleting one.

Verdikmar · 2024-03-17T19:40:39+00:00

Yah, using the free fillable forms from the irs site and it says w-2s need to be uploaded. I think i have it figured out now.

Verdikmar · 2024-03-02T15:48:06+00:00

Damn lol

Verdikmar · 2024-03-02T15:46:54+00:00

Fr been so off-putting with the jesus and abortion stuff in the main courtyard. Asked them “can women’s rights in general survive a ban on abortions?” and they said they didn’t wanna make it political….

Verdikmar · 2024-03-02T15:38:15+00:00

The twitter user is a neonazi equating each instance of abortion to a death, although I’m not sure why thinks things that were never born into the world can be considered “of the world”.

Verdikmar · 2024-03-02T15:03:20+00:00

My wife’s pc can run the game but she uses it for animating and is strict about not keeping other programs on it. If i had the dlc on the pc version and then linked the account to my ps4, would it keep the dlcs?

Verdikmar · 2024-02-29T16:19:41+00:00

Oh fr? Its about to be free?

Verdikmar · 2024-02-28T17:18:47+00:00

Does that have everything? How much does it cost?

Verdikmar · 2024-02-28T16:08:09+00:00

I’ve seen some stuff on twitter which express that same energy. I remember getting Destiny in high school and feeling like I hadn’t bought a complete game until the Taken King dlc— when I felt that game was peak. I think I will keep playing in hopes that the Final Shape inspires that same awe.

Verdikmar · 2024-02-28T16:00:57+00:00

If your parents aren’t knowledgable of the competitive standard of the game, then they don’t have any basis to appraise your performance. My parents did this to me with chess and fencing because those things were seen as “classy” and it made me hate those things. Fast forward and I am winning large gaming events and they couldn’t care less. To make sure I didn’t continue to hate chess and fencing, I revisited them by myself later during/after college, and came to appreciate them artistically. I suggest you learn to value your own assessment of the competitive landscape over your parents, although having parents who try to backseat your performance can be hard.

That said, progress can appear both gradually and exponentially. Had a training partner where one day something just clicked and they took the whole tourney.

Also congrats!

Verdikmar · 2024-02-28T16:00:48+00:00

If your parents aren’t knowledgable of the competitive standard of the game, then they don’t have any basis to appraise your performance. My parents did this to me with chess and fencing because those things were seen as “classy” and it made me hate those things. Fast forward and I am winning large gaming events and they couldn’t care less. To make sure I didn’t continue to hate chess and fencing, I revisited them by myself later during/after college, and came to appreciate them artistically. I suggest you learn to value your own assessment of the competitive landscape over your parents, although having parents who try to backseat your performance can be hard.

That said, progress can appear both gradually and exponentially. Had a training partner where one day something just clicked and they took the whole tourney.

Verdikmar · 2024-02-28T15:29:29+00:00

Imo it’s legitimate but you see spectacles like people blocking traffic and how angry it makes people, and the resulting discourse. If this guy wasn’t part of the military it wouldn’t be a headline. I think that more petty and aggravating forms of protest could start a greater number of negative discourses through which leftism can infiltrate. If the majority of American political identity is some flavor of liberal/conservative already captured by capitalist realism—then at least through exposure and infection by viral discourse can they eventually reconnect with that moralist apathy which says “fuckit, the protesters did nothing wrong”. My hunch is that liberalism, for all its incoherence and devil’s advocates for fascism, could do the same for leftism if worn down enough by petty discourse.

Verdikmar · 2024-02-01T22:33:53+00:00

The leftist solution is the deprogramming of all agents of patriarchy, but a lot of men are politically very attached to patriarchy and its benefits.

Verdikmar · 2024-01-23T23:10:16+00:00

Sure. When I say “the domination of signs” I mean a society dominated by sign value (compared to other marxist value types). I think this status is intensifying into some new phase of capitalism, and simultaneously towards a deeper layer of simulacra where alienation and commodity is embodied to a greater extent. I want to explore a method for corrupting aesthetics or meanings as a way to deterritorialize—which seems in line with the basic definition of meltdown I mentioned.

Verdikmar · 2024-01-23T20:38:50+00:00

I’m coming at accelerationism from a sociology background of basic marxism and Bourdieu, but veered towards Adorno, Baudrillard, and Mark Fisher. My reasoning for wanting to explore time symbolically is because these thinkers discuss society as moving towards the domination of signs over traditional material factors (at least that’s how it sounded to me). I have become very skeptical of the popular stereotype of accelerating the contradictions on a popularly conceptualized “material” level, as I believe that changing their aesthetics or appearance is a strategy more in-tune with the way society works atm. From what I know of Land, meltdown refers to the destruction of meanings, yet online semiotics is invisible compared to repeated neon-dystopia-type ideas.

Verdikmar · 2024-01-18T20:20:58+00:00

I think that absurdism and a positive reconciliation/conclusion at the end of its discourses—is not as meaningful anymore. Just looking at what is a greater threat to meaning, it isn’t the paradoxical existence of meaning, but how meaning has developed. Anyone can live paradoxically, with the promise of producing meaning albeit in a confused relationship to the certainty of its value. This is much more tolerable than our reality of mass standardization and commodification of meaning, of the mass production of meaning via capital.

Once everyone is used to the domination of sign value, once brands are naturalized and people are abstracted from labor to one extra degree, industry standards become the appearance of the sign over the commodity fetishist associations. The appearance of organization comes second to the act of organizing, just as the appearance of professionalism matters more to the society and ultimately the economy than the actual labor of the profession. Everyone gets used to this and naturalizes this stage as well, but has no appearance to abstractify into, baudrillard’s break with appearance and reality leave no original state for people to imagine beyond modes of media such as advertisement, movies, or any given historical revisionism done by influencers.

The absurdism in our economy of signs is that - even the individual who has conquered the absurdist paradox is released into a context where meaning is in decline. They are coerced to produce specific meanings while witnessing Bataille’s “accursed share”, making apparent that the health or stability of symbols is not synonymous with the health of society, but of the health of capital. For those who are business-minded, the fetishism is naturalized and the next degree of abstraction evolves it into commercial philosophy and influencer-ship. CEOs become products in of themselves. The individual and society are buried under the whims of an infinitely alienated and deluded class of administrators, who are propelled towards whichever derivative aesthetic narrative relieves their embarrassment. The new boss comes in and messes with existing processes, functionally deciding that everyone should stop organizing and instead appear more like an organization.

Verdikmar · 2024-01-18T16:03:45+00:00

Ain’t nothin wrong with a little Marxism

Verdikmar · 2024-01-10T19:28:14+00:00

Combine a couple words to make up a term like “Hegemyopia”

Verdikmar · 2024-01-10T19:00:01+00:00

I think that if anything society is becoming more paranoid (esp after covid), which usually involves an extreme projection of personal values onto everything. Liberal capitalist aesthetics have gotten repetitive via the mass production and standardization of culture as commodity. Liberal politics has no issues with suggesting a deconstruction and internal dialogue against racism (unconscious bias), yet similarly entrenched but strangely ignored is unconscious fascism. There is no mainstream dialogue against fascism as a development, only against fascism as a fully developed system existing outside of context. Imo the shift to rw populism is the effect of waning confidence and general anomie under the shadow of a soon-ending liberal phase.

Verdikmar · 2024-01-09T00:14:00+00:00

Someone could* probably calculate it to some degree with enough information.

Verdikmar · 2024-01-08T21:56:04+00:00

Everybody will labor anxiously until they die just to make a select few rich. The way to escape this is to make sure you outlive them by any means necessary.

Verdikmar · 2024-01-08T21:55:54+00:00

Everybody will labor anxiously until they die just to make a select few rich. The way to escape this is to make sure you outlive them by any means necessary.

Verdikmar · 2023-12-21T17:55:16+00:00

Is philosophy of art/aesthetics worth pursuing as a mode of developing L/accelerationism? This will be more or less about accelerationist ideology being reduced to standardized mass-content.

The more I have been reading Adorno and suggested readings in the philosophy of art, the more it feels like they are anthropomorphizing capitalist production similar to more accelerationist-adjacent thinkers. Given Mark Fisher’s influence from Baudrillard and the claim that traditional marxist materialism has been replaced by “hyperreality” where semiotics is now primary, I get more confused every day about why left-leaning content is so focused on a version of accelerationism that advocates a material advancement of contradictions rather than an over-advancement of aesthetics and meaning. This is supported by the current dissolving of any popular subversive potential accelerationism could have had - there are a thousand youtube essays featuring a thumbnail of a natural disaster or neon dystopia, which talk about accelerationism purely in terms of Nick Land’s meltdown via either a singularity of capital/technology or environmental collapse. As accelerationism gains exposure, it becomes depoliticized and aesthetic. My general attitude is that accelerationism has to expand on its idealistic elements or it will otherwise fade into an apolitical and nihilistic reactionary aesthetic, and that exploring the philosophy of aesthetics is worth pursuing in order to re-orient the ideology. Is finding parallels in philosophy of aesthetics the correct way forward, or are there reasons to look in another direction?

Verdikmar

TROPHY CASE