Hello there!
Welcome to our daily scheduled post, the Daily Slow Chat.
If you want to just chat about your day, if you have questions for the moderators (please mark these [Mod] so we can find them), or if you just want talk about oatmeal then this is the thread for you!
Enjoying the small talk? We have a Discord server too! We'd love to have more of you over there. Do both of us a favour and use this link to join the fun.
The mod-team wishes you a nice day!
3 comments
I got frost punk in the current steam sale. Being a dictator in the post apocalyptic frozen wastes is a lot harder than on a tropical island. I’ve had to resort to 14 hr work shifts and child labor to meet my resource needs. People aren’t happy with those conditions and the daily number of deaths, so I’m resorting to religion to keep them in line. After they lynched one of my priests, I established my religious police that will keep everyone happy by force. I wonder if
some of them wished they froze to death during the catastrophe.
The concert yesterday was sooooo nice. I am not entirely sure about the Bacewiz viola concerto, I will need to listen to it again. It is not an easy piece to penetrate. But alone for the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet it was totally worth it. I can’t describe just how amazing it sounds in ElPhi. It makes your whole body vibrate.
On the train there was a woman who angrily got up from where she was sitting, complaining very loudly about the guy who was sitting next to her, accusing him of being an alcoholic or whatever (when people are very loud I tend to not listen to what they say). Then she sat somewhere near me, still very loud. She asked a boy why he was laughing and he said “because you’re very loud”. And then she told him to shut up and called him a slur that was used for Sinti and Roma people. At that point everyone was like whoa, lady, take it easy. Then she accused everyone of not doing their tax returns or something? And complained a while about Asians that reek of garlic and stuff. At that point people just let her be. Thankfully she left some minutes later. She also didn’t seem like a crazy person. She was just very, very racist.
That was very unpleasant, but it was also nice to see so many people tell her to shut her trap (she wouldn’t but still)
Two days ago I wrote about this philosopher and blah blah blah a bunch of bullshit about language and mythology and forgotten history, referencing one very specific Finnish verb.
This verb is *ollaan*, and I’ve now been thinking about it intensively for two days. It’s the passive form of the word “to be”. In English, and I suppose many other languages, particularly Indo-European languages, that doesn’t exist. There is a subject, someone, something, that is. I am, you are, it is, wir sind, man ist, whatever. But *ollaan* is asubjective, there is no one or nothing in particular that is.
I guess the idea behind this philosopher’s writings, from what I could understand, was that this asubjective state of being is indicative of some older way of life, the nature of being Finnish, and the later subjective state of being is a product of European colonisation. There is “a subject that considers itself as something different from its environment”, meaning in an asubjective state of being a person doesn’t separate or even distinguish themselves from the world around them.
This is where all this gets kinda silly, when you start thinking about this linguistic quirk and Kalevala and putting things together that probably shouldn’t be put together. [Few of the most well known poems are about a woman called Aino](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Gallen_Kallela_The_Aino_Triptych.jpg), who is promised as a wife to Väinämöinen, the main hero of the epic, because [Aino’s brother lost to Väinämöinen in a rap battle](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Joseph_Alanen_-_V%C3%A4in%C3%A4m%C3%B6inen_Sings_Joukahainen_into_a_Mire.jpg). Aino’s family is over the moon about it, since Väinämöinen is such a boss man, but Aino herself is not loving it at all. So she goes to a lake and drowns herself. Later Väinämöinen is at the lake fishing, thinking Aino is dead. He catches a fish, and as he is getting ready to fillet the fish it proceeds to tell him that it in fact is Aino, jumps out of the boat and swims off.
The logical conclusion here is that [Aino, the lake, the fish, everything, is all the same](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Gallen_Kallela_Ad_astra.jpg). Now, how many poisonous mushrooms filtrated trough a reindeer kidney do I need to consume until I can learn this asubjective state of being? Or rather, until I can *re*learn it? Being able to assume the form of a bird, to be the wind and clouds, a fish or the very water it lives in, would be incredibly handy I think.
I want to underline that I’m not being serious. I don’t actually think it’s possible to become a fish, or to be a fish, unless you already are a fish. Which none of you aren’t because fish don’t have access to the internet. But thinking about *ollaan* has damn near consumed my mind, I can’t stop.