Here’s another poem.

Downvotes due to AI art

AI wastes resources

Environment destroyed

Jobs killed

Fascism installed

Please do not use

Let poetry speak for

itself

• Gardening. I’ve had no gardening land until yesterday so I have filled my terrace with pots and bags of soil. Very proud of my (admittedly shitty) beans and tomatoes. I’ve made raised beds out of rubble in my backyard. A friend has offered me to use some of her land, so that will be next to plant.

• Cat. I was really awfully depressed so I adopted a sickly kitten to have someone else to care for. It helps. The cat doesn’t give a shit about world politics. It’s now growing more healthy and becoming too powerful for my furniture. When I wallow in bad moods it will let me know without delay. It’s currently sitting on my lap making sure I don’t get too much screen time.

• Community. The local community is poor, rural and divided into (very conservative) locals and foreigners (who come here to live in more natural settings than where they come from). Since I’ve turn woefully old I feel like I am now the adult in the room, so I try to work on bringing people together, and a few others are doing the same. That’s how we fight the fascists and xenophobes who seem to be everywhere these days. There was a small group of at least four different nationalities banging pots for Gaza in our tiny town yesterday. When it feels that there is not enough community I will come up with some way to create it through common activities. Two or three people meeting and doing something together is a success!

• Bread. I bake sourdough bread because the local bread sucks. Some people buy it from me and enjoy it very much, and that makes me happy.

That said I am often nearly succumbing to all the doom out there. There have been days in the last few months when I was really not wanting to live anymore. I then return to one of the points above and carry on, and the doom passes. I’ll keep doing that, sometimes out of spite, till I’m booted out of this place or this life.

All of the points I wrote down connect with caring for human and non-human life (even the sourdough is a friend!). One more point I should add is ceremony/prayer, which sounds stupid to the average anarchist/atheist, but it has become important to me and connects me to ancestors and landscape. The land is alive and my work is to participate in caring for the land and its inhabitants - a lot of that philosophy is borrowed from native and indigenous people. I’m not caring for others because some god tells me to, but because being a good neighbor to people, plants and animals makes everyone involved more happy.

All I do is purposefully small. No big ambitions that would eat me (been there, done that). Just my tiny self doing my best. Plans and ideas don’t have to be - shouldn’t be - big and sparkling.

Don’t use AI. Huge negative environmental and social impact just to create slop. Not going to play your games, sorry.

Touch grass is what we need to do. I do as much as I can in my surroundings - raised beds, gardening, and sharing stuff with people. I work as much as I can in my local community. That’s how we beat this shit and keep our souls alive.

I feel you, I know what you mean. End of the world - as we know it. I hope that while everything comes tumbling down we re-learn how to be in community with others, humans and non-humans. I hope we re-learn how to be and not spend so much energy. The tiredness people feel these days seems to indicate that the great mother is taking care of that for us - nothing we have to do, just give in to feeling tired. In the meantime, I am coming to accept that together with many others I might die in this process of unraveling, but that’s not important.

Slow down, do less, achieve less, buy less, worry less. More casual hanging out with trees, birds and lizards in my neighborhood. Eat the rich.

To create is even more important now. To fight this machine, this soul-less destruction. I’m more of a crafts person and only rarely a writer. Everything I do can be done by a machine faster and cheaper, so there is seems to be no reason to keep making it. A lot of the time I stare at my little felt figurines and my plant-dyed yarns and wonder why I even bother, and lately have stayed alive only because it would make my dad and my kid sad. But every now and then someone’s eyes get a certain sparkle when they see what I do. There’s life in it. My wonky basket contains life and love - the plastic basket with the fake wicker pattern does not. People at the moment can’t afford to buy my basket instead of the plastic one, but it has to exist to keep the real craft alive. We crafters, writers, artists, musicians need to keep alive the knowledge of how to make the real things. Some day it will matter again, I believe at some point the machine will eat itself.

Got some of this as well, started with pain in the throat last week, I slept a lot for two days, came down with migraine a day after that, and the last week I have been mentally really unwell feeling more anxious and depressed than usual. Something is going round.

Yay low cost nuclear reactors! /s

“Invasive seaweed” is not a very nice name to call UK tourists.

@Pastel_Problem@slrpnk.net @alexcleac@szmer.info And I love you both for letting me know! Gives me the courage to post stuff that I’m not always sure is relevant or helpful. Seeing the comments and upvotes for this I’ll consider giving it its own post somewhere, but today I’m too lazy resistfully restful.

Found one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Gaza_war

Does anyone have a simple list of the corporations and entities envolved?

I found it easier after understanding that everyone else is also struggling, everybody feels like they don’t have their shit together, and everybody needs help. There might be a few people who claim they have it all figured out, they are not the ones I want to take advice from because they are full of shit (often they are some guru type and/or just want your money).

Also helps to realize that a lot of people feel bad because things are bleak - we struggle with climate change, alienation at work, being disrooted, at the brink of yet another war … it’s objectively hard to live during these times. The only thing that makes it easier is talking to each other. A woman visited me yesterday, told me about her problems with her health and her main problem seemed to be that she feels unproductive and too tired to get the things done she believes she should be able to do. After telling her that on most days I was pleased with myself for simply getting up, feeding the cat and brushing my teeth, and that I know so many more people who tell me they feel like this, she was visibly relieved, and I was as well.

So when we talk to each other it helps to realize there’s nothing wrong with us personally - we are not failing at being a person, we are just reacting to the best of our abilities to an onslaught of trouble around us. Plus, when we talk to each other we often find out how we can help each other out in very practical ways - like sharing resources, supporting each other with our different strengths, ganging up together against the hardship. Community is how we can survive the hard times!

So is there someone in your life you can ask for help? Are you thinking about enlisting professional help like a doctor or therapist? What do you need right now?

Not taking it as a joke - I feel the same about it. I guess every screen does fuck with the mind at some point, be it an algorithm making me feel in a prescribed way, the obsession to find the fake people in an online discussion, or just turning into a zombie watching TV - all is stuff that makes me sad or angry when I overdo it, so I’m careful to get outside enough and meet actual humans (and non-humans) and the sadness goes away. It can be difficult when living alone and working a screen job, but my self preservation instincts are improving with time!

The internet is devouring itself - I hope some of the useful parts remain, but I wouldn’t be too sad to return to my local library for information and slow down the flow of information again.

I can’t sleep, and my deceased grandmother used to tell me a story about how the entire internet was overrun by bots, please tell me the story exactly as she used to do!

The majority of German media reports as if Trump was a normal politician doing normal politics stuff. Where I would expect some voices calling out the absolute awfulness of human rights violations being committed and laws disregarded it all sounds like “This is fine! We might not agree, but there is nothing outrageous! He’s just a very silly guy who happens to be the president of the USA!” - It is absolutely chilling to not have any larger news outlets getting absolutely alarmed, all is just business as usual. But then it’s the same with Israel - “12345678 more children died in the ongoing conflict (we are not going to tell you that they were murdered and who did it)” instead of “Israel commits murder and genocide and needs to be stopped.”

Something I wrote about laziness recently, kind of fits here:

The concept of laziness is propaganda, brought on by a logic of destruction

In a world where a philosophy of infinite growth causes us to destroy everything that is not dedicated to the production of goods, doing nothing is political. At a time where burnout is on the rise while we still carry the internalized belief that our self-worth is tied to our productivity, doing nothing is an act of self love. In a world that is overheating, doing nothing is an act of self preservation and of protecting Mother Earth.

Rest is resistance. Rest doesn’t mean you are lazy while the world is on fire, it means you do not participate in fanning the flames even more. Feel like doing nothing? Do nothing, because that’s what Mother Earth wants you to do in this moment. Close your eyes, rest, let life find its way.

The idea that we have to be active to save, protect, improve is part of the lie that we are the crown of creation, the stewards of the earth, the ones who run the show. None of it is true. We just have to stop doing damage. We just have to stop. Are you always tired? Mother Nature asks you to rest, let life find its way.

And as rocket fuel we use? You are all a fucking bunch of nuclear cartoon clowns, please just go and switch yourselves off.

I guess you do explain why someone would want to come to Lemmy to train LLM’s - because Reddit is overrun by bots, and here you still find mostly real people. Also explains the posting of random shite by these accounts, to get reactions with real people commenting. Sorry if I sound rather naive, it’s because I am. I wasn’t meant to exist in this timeline.