(26) | #17. Trillions

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[8.-29.11.2023]

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[T]

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   Now that I’m pretty much staring down the barrel – now that November is here and there’s just two pages left on the calendar hanging from my living room’s wall… what to do? What entry-idea, that’s been a floater in my head for a time, is ambitious enough that I shall try to make it come true?

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   Oh! I know! Trillions !

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   That number is used in spoken language as an exaggeration, most of the time, but what are there actual trillions of? …Believe me, it took me days to compile this list: turns out it is a number not quite often found in nature. The earth is not that old, or that wide. It is an exorbitant number. A million millions. Maybe exorbitant doesn’t even properly describe it, now that I’m thinking about it.

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1,000,000,000,000.

What is there, that is in trillions?
…Here are 40 things

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1. The GDP of the United States of America (25,462 trillion USD). The most value added to their economy was by ”Finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing”, according to statista.
2. The GDP of China (17,963 trillion). 33.2% of the distribution of their GDP was from the Industrial sector in the last year.
3. 2,626 trillion MWh of Solar energy had stricken the earth today, at 9:30pm on Wednesday (8.11.2023).
4. There were 1,386 trillion barrels of oil left in the world, grand total, at 9:30pm on Wednesday.
5. There was 1,071 trillion boe [barrel of oil equivalent] of natural gas left on earth, at 9:30pm on Wednesday.
6. 4,279 trillion boe of coal left in the world, at 9:30pm on Wednesday.
7. The GDP of Japan (4,231 trillion). Japan’s most profitable industry in the fiscal year 2022, was the transportation equipment-industry. The industry amounted to approx. 7.7 trillion (hah there’s an extra-mention of the entry’s name hah) Japanese yen.
8. The GDP of Germany (4,072 trillion). Germany’s biggest source of income is the service sector, contributing the largest part of their GDP.
9. The GDP of India (3,385 trillion). Their country is yet another one whose biggest economic contributor is the service sector; and it has been like that for a while.
10. The GDP of United Kingdom (3,070 trillion). The United Kingdom continues an already-emerging trend of countries here making the most profit out of their service industry; only in this country’s case it’s 82% of their entire GDP. One important thing to note about that big number is that the financial services-industry has particular importance in the country; London is the second biggest financial center in the whole world.
11. The GDP of France (2,782 trillion). France has a particularly diversified economy, with three industries being noted leading contributors: tourism, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.
12. The GDP of Russia (2,240 trillion). In 2022, service sector of the country contributed 53.98% of their GDP.
13. The GDP of Canada (2,139 trillion).
14. The GDP of Italy (2,010 trillion). 64.79% from the service sector in 2022 alone.
15. The GDP of Brazil (1,920 trillion). The biggest contributor to their GDP is their services-sector.
16. The GDP of Australia (1,675 trillion). Services sector.
17. The GDP of South Korea (1,665 trillion). Services.
18. The GDP of Mexico (1,414 trillion). SERVICES!.
19. The GDP of Spain (1,397 trillion). Gimme a ”SER–”.
20. The GDP of Indonesia (1,319 trillion). Oops that chant (SER!-VI!-CE!) got cut short. The industry sector is actually the largest in the Indonesian economy and amounts for 46.4% of GDP.
21. The GDP of Saudi Arabia (1,108 trillion). You know what their most profitable foreign export is.
22. A Rubik’s cube has about 43 trillion (long scale) possible positions. source: wikipedia > Trillion
23. The current five trillion-dollar companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia. source: nasdaq.com
24. The most recent estimates by scientists, indicate that human bodies have around 30 trillion cells in their bodies. source: healthline.com
25. There are (according to estimations) 3.04 trillion trees worldwide. A study published in the Nature-journal came to this spacious conclusion. Another way to put it is that there are 422 trees for every person on Earth. source: a-z-animals.com
26. In Minecraft, the odds of getting a full end portal (naturally spawning with all 12 Eyes Of Ender already in their place), is one in 1 trillion). Only a couple of known world-seeds are known to exist including the extreme rarity. source: minecraft.fandom.com
27. A light-year is almost 6 trillion miles long. source: grc.nasa.gov
28. The world’s least valuable currency is the Iranian Rial (IRR). So, with that making me so curious, and I wanted to know how much a trillion of that would be in the currency I use. The Euro. Googling it, I got my answer that one trillion Iranian Rial is 22 121 620,29€. One Finnish person won more than that money from EuroJackpot, two years ago. MTV Uutiset reported on the twentieth main prize to go to Finland from the lottery-game, on September 25th, 2021. The amount of the winnings for this lucky winner was 22,2 million euros. Of the world’s most powerful currency; more than a trillion of the world’s least powerful currency. sources: bankbazeer.com; google; mtvuutiset.fi
29. There are a confidently speculated amount of 110 trillion mosquitoes in the world today – working out to almost 16,000 mosquitoes per human. source: The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator (Timothy C. Winegard)
30. There are 3.5 trillion fish (osteichthyes, chondrichthyes and agnatha) in the ocean. source: wikipedia > Lists of organisms by population
31. Going back to the tree-point: The top three countries of the world with the most trees within them, already make up a trillion. #1, Russia, has 642 billion trees. #2, Canada, has 318 billion. #3, Brazil, has 302 billion. source: The Geography Bible @ YouTube
32. London is the world capital of foreign exchange trading, with a global market share of 43.1% in 2019 of the daily $6.6 trillion global turnover. source: Wikipedia > Economy of the United Kingdom
33. The Great Pacific garbage patch has 80,000 metric tons of plastic inhabiting it, totaling 1.8 trillion plastic pieces. source: wikipedia > Pacific Ocean
34. In 2022, the total value of cash currency in circulation in Japan amounted to over 129.9 trillion Japanese yen. This is a record high within the surveyed period. source: statista.com
35. Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A. revealed a report from their Costs of War-project, that stated that 20 years of post-9/11 wars have cost the U.S.A. an estimated 8 trillion dollars. They’ve also killed more than 900,000 people. source: brown.edu
36. It would take 6666666666 people weighing an average of 150 pounds (light for an adult, in my opinion; but then again I am on the heavier side myself) to get to a total weight of 1 trillion pounds. 6.666 billion people is less than the current population of the world! So while this is not a possible thing in any conceivable way, there are still enough people that we weigh over a trillion pounds together. source: math.answers.com
37. 1 grain of ordinary rice is about 25 milligrams. So a thousand grains is 25 grams, a million grains 25 kilograms, billion grains of rice would be 25 megagrams which is equivalent to 25 tonnes. So a trillion grains of rice would be 25 gigagrams which is equivalent to 25 kilotonnes. 25,000 tons. That’s how much a trillion grains is, in plain numbers. We’re ignoring all the supply-lines’ loss and spoilage and bad crops and all other human context here and doing numbers strictly.. Now, of course not every single fucking grain of rice gets picked, used and passes inspection but I will still care to wager that Indonesia’s production of paddy rice in 2022, accounts for more than 1 trillion grains of rice. Because Indonesia is one of the world’s leading paddy rice producers, and their production in the last year was estimated at around 55.67 million tons. So, yeah. Absolutely exceeding a trillion grains. sources: quora.com; google.com; statista.com
38. It was an early Monday-morning and I was watching something from the old cellular phone to entertain myself in the first slow moments. Happened upon a video essay about Disney comics, and a large section of it was (obviously) dedicated to Donald Duck. Donald’s secondary cast is easily the largest out of the earliest, classic, staple Disney Male Leads. One of them is Scrooge McDuck who’s the richest man in the world, and so I asked Google Assistant ”scrooge mcduck net worth.” According to Quora, one estimation of Scrooge’s net worth is 27 trillion US dollars.
39. The Rothschild family, deemed the world’s wealthiest by Forbes has a combined wealth of 20 trillion U.S. dollars. Yes I understand this post has turned into a fun facts-post by this point but I had a lot of fun making this and that’s all that needs to be said about it. source: caclubindia.com
40. A terapixel is one trillion pixels. Reports came in 2018 of the world’s first terapixel macro image. It was a food mosaic, whose size (size of the actual elements pictures) was higher (1,825ft) than the Burj Khalifa (1,776ft). Other incredible statistics this picture boasted, were equally deafening: 629,370 individual photographs. 2.8 terabyte BIGTIFF file. 6,571,172 x 160,256 pixels. 1,053,066,534,912 pixels – 1.05 trillion pixels.
    On gigamacro they talked about how they got bored-enough to even throw Easter eggs in there such as this one.
    ”Thanks to Naomi Cooper [from the capture team and the post-production team of the image] there are over 60 non-food items that are in the image.” Gigamacro’s article said. ”Why are they there? Well, first of all, fun! This whole project was intended to be a learning exercise, and to stretch photographic and imaging tools and techniques. sources: petapixel.com; gigamacro.com

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Finally, here are all this entry’s sources (some with indicators of placement [don’t expect this to be an easily retractable list]):
worlddata.com & statista.com {#1-2 & #7-21}
worldometers.info {#3-6}
wikipedia > Trillion
nasdaq.com
healthline.com
a-z-animals.com
minecraft.fandom.com
grc.nasa.gov
bankbazeer.com
google
mtvuutiset.fi
The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator (Timothy C. Winegard)
wikipedia > Lists of organisms by population
brown.edu
math.answers.com
quora.com
caclubindia.com
petapixel.com
gigamacro.com
viewer.gigamacro.com

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pics:
The Irish Times (header)
gigamacro.com (#1)

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(26) | #18. More daylight / Just like me

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[20.-21.11.2023]

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[M]

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   It is Monday. This day follows a week during which I reaffirmed my close-future goal with myself. A close, imminent resolution. That I will cease consuming alcohol come 2024 (February; there’s a company get-together happening right before that and I must attend). This dry season is going to go on – tentatively – until my brother’s birthday-celebrations which take place in the month of [none of your business]. It’s a beautiful time of the year. Probably gonna feel even more beautiful when I haven’t had something shuffling my brains’ chemical balance once every week. Maybe I won’t drink even then – I’ll see how it goes – but the winter is definitely gonna be sober. Sober; without a mentally torturous hangover-day once every seven days, where NOTHING HELPS and NOTHING can be done.

   What happened to coincide with that decision’s finalization is another thing. A more abstract concept; but hopefully potent. I finally came to a head with a certain kind of itch. An itch that roams free and wild inside my mind. I could NOT STOP thinking about higher education. Friends who have it. The places they describe. Places where you can get paid and feel worthwhile FOR YOUR TALENTS. For your intelligence, for your curiosity. Places where you feel needed, and probably where your thoughts matter too, I don’t know, I haven’t decided upon if my jealous fantasy includes that yet.

   Yeah. I know it’s all imagined – not to mention exaggerated – and I’m never gonna really know what that kinda life is really like unless I start going to college. And I don’t wanna go. But still there’s this itch. You know? Like I am currently – actively – missing out on something. Like everybody I know, is having some particular kind of fun that I’m not having. This feeling has marred me for so logn this-Autumn that it’s almost festered into a certainty.
  Then, click.
 What was that? Well that was me realizing what this itch was about all along.
  It was about a similar oncoming lesson as one I’d had about hangovers (more specifically ”morkkis”, a Finnish term specifically about regretting your own behavior while hungover). There was a time years ago, when I gave myself an ultimatum about ”morkkis”:

”Hey, 20-year-old Jani from 2017. FYI, You only go through these because you have too high an expectation of yourself. Everybody acts like a fool sometimes; you should give yourself permission to, too. Nobody would want to be your friend if you ragged on them for every little stupid mistake they made, as much as you rag on yourself. If you were as hard on everybody else as you are on yourself, you’d have no friends.”

   Something like that. I can’t remember the exact wording because I didn’t write it down anywhere back then; but I do remember the resolution. It was to stop being so hard on myself and let me talk my shit when I’m on outings with friends. To calm that “I’m talking too much”-sense down.

   Now, back to present day, I see parallels between that resolution and the decision, today, not to put out (26) as a book. (Yup that was something I only decided in November which was a month before I was finished writing). Just like years ago, I had been suffering with something (regretting drunk behavior excessively back then; being jealous of friends in universities now) because of my own vanity. My vanity back then told me I should be ”above” slurring my words and making drunken mistakes; my vanity this year kept telling me that I need to compete with other people who are probably making money off of their minds, by trying to make some using mine.

 

   I will talk about this very heavy decision later on in the #10-entry of this list. My dream still is to make the most out of my day, every day, but it’s gotten a more specific meaning. The name of my new dream, new main aspiration in life is more daylight. I wanna be happy with the simple things in life, especially now that the cold season’s starting. Daylight is in sparse supply. Somehow the simple phrase more daylight carries meaning over to my internal question about the virtue of taking a long break from drinking, as well as my internal question about if my creative work has become a vein affair. Somehow ”more daylight” answers all of that for me.

More daylight:
   I don’t wanna be too busy patting myself on the back, to notice that I should open up a window.

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   It is Tuesday. I spent another day thinking about shit, chilling at home with the occasional creative breaks outside (walks). Just a regular Tuesday at home. ’Til I walked outside, evening had fallen and the sky had gotten dark-grey. Then it hit me, why ”More daylight” has become such a crucial phrase in these spinning waters of my mind. Why it felt like it answered two questions that are like distant corners of a triangle. In the spinning waters of my mind, ”More daylight” is like a block that won’t go down a whirlpool. Something I need to keep on processing.
I need to keep thinking about that phrase because my subconscious is telling me something and I need to go deeper down it to find out what is the real meaning of “more daylight“.

I realized the reason.
“More daylight” is an answer to more than one question because the winter daylight is just like me
Me and it, both, are personified by harsh and unforgiving conditions – for winter it is the cold, for me the anxiety and all-around difficulty of everything.

   But to other people I am not like that. I am not the constant negative force, spending hours of every Sunday repeating ”you are not liked. Everything you do is wrong. Nobody sees anything special or worthwhile in you”, to other people. I do that only to myself. To family and friends I am a comforting presence. Someone who helps see the fun and the lightness of things all-around. Someone who’s nice to talk to; and with whom you don’t even realize the passing of time. I am just like daylight in the winter, in that sense. The way I treat other people.

I should find a friend like that for myself. And I think I have.
Winter-daylight itself should be my friend.

   I realize now what this lesson means in practice. At the same time I realize why in the ”life in july”-segment, the physical composition of the picture of my CD-shelf looked so significant (that whole ”insert and exert value”-bit). It’s because I do have something special to offer. And it is not my writing, my taste in other art, or my reflective ability. It’s my empathy. I can be the daylight of winter, to the people in my life. When I’m in a conversation, from now on – and don’t know where to take it next – I’ll take it down a course of empathy. I’m tired of seeking personal satisfaction. I wanna seek that for other people. This is one of the best lessons I will go into the immediate future with. Stop being so inwardly focused in terms of seeking happiness, and use a talent that I know I have that people will find help, catharsis and direction in. Be empathetic to them.

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So, I conclude:
If I feel without-a-friend, winter daylight is my friend
If I feel like I’m not enough as a friend, I shall be to others what the winter daylight is for me.
More daylight in an environment that is brutally cold.

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pics:
huggingface.co
(except the first one; I made that)

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(26) | #19. Two dreams in one night about love and airports – departures and arrivals

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[8.9.2023]

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[D]

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   Had a dream where I had a forbidden love with a rich Italian lady. It felt like something straight outta the movies. Dream ended with her going into the check-in at the airport – returning home – and us having a long passionate last kiss. She just asked me at the end,
— ”do you wanna never see me again?”
— ”no no, I totally want to see you.”
   She said ”Then you’d better remember this” and gave me a kiss. Five pecks long.

   To be honest with you I believe this dream just came from me being horny. But that’s okay and cool lol.

   …But you saw the title of this entry. Soon after this one shook me up in the middle of the night, I fell right back asleep and had another one.

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   Had another dream where me and a couple of other guys were out drinking and had a big bright idea to go out to Papinjärvi. The walk there takes a couple miles from anywhere in Oulunsalo where there is even the vaguest hint of residential area. That lake is quite in the middle of nowhere. It also has the airport’s runway right next to it. Really, location’s the only thing that is connecting this dream to the previous one. Imagery about airplanes… this lake’s location… but I still think that that is a connecting thread. I think a vague hint of flying on an airplane is connective tissue between the two vivid dreams. I sincerely think that. Because the flying-detail really, when you think about it, was only implied in the previous one as well. Nobody was in a plane in it, but the location suggested it
Suggested flight. High-speed airborne travel.

   Anyway, this dream and the premise of me and these guys deciding to take a whole hike out to the beach for a fun summer-night, was inspired by real life. We did do that but instead went to Värtönranta on our bikes one summer day.

   Moving on. On our way there we took a forest-trail instead of the gravel-road where cars go. We got kinda lost on our way and stumbled onto somebody’s backyard where it smelled like sausages on the grill and sounded like clinking glasses. We had no other choice at this particular crossroad, but to try to swiftly traverse through this backyard. We had to shortcut through it. It was standing firm on our way and thick forest was on each side. So we went, and we got caught trespassing. What was going on in that backyard was indeed a barbecue. And because the men in my company were such a bunch of smooth talkers, we actually convinced the hostess – who was planning to have a private night with a couple of her friends – that we could stay there and make our sausages on her grill instead of the firepit that would have awaited us at the beach of Papinjärvi. She was super nice to us. A convivial host. She let us pretty much just have the backyard to ourselves because our group could get a little bit loud when we get on our shit. So the host, and her friends, were all inside. Then at one point later-on, a couple guests from the house were leaving. It was starting to look like me and my dudes were the last people there, and she came out. She complimented us on how suave and funny we all were. Very entertaining to watch us gettin’ along on the backyard-terrace, even though she’d just been watching from the inside. She had pinpoint-accurate personality-analyses of us all just from the things she heard us say over the course of the night, and I admired her perceptiveness. It radiated from her when she talked.

   Later that night I went home – don’t remember how I got there but I guess that comes with the territory. Sleeping the night over, the next day I felt super-inclined to write something. And I wrote like a prose-poem about how insane it was that this woman is now in my life. I felt such a connection with her. This feels like a person that I should have met years ago. Then I realized I might be in love.

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And then I woke up.

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SYMBOLS
First dream

• dream about kissing: No hits on the specific search-term, but I had a feeling that doing a general search about just kisses in dreams, would lead me to what I wanna read.
  I did get to read what I want to read: exemplore.com went on to say twice on their website, that ”If the kiss in your dream is a French kiss, then you need to express your emotions more honestly and need more passion in your life.” Twice it said that, in separate bullet-point-lists within the article. auntyflo.com was specific with their advice when it got to the specific question: ”You need to unmask your true calling.”
  Now, I didn’t know which one to lean on; both of these explanations fulfilled my wish that my dream-symbol now felt compelling enough that the dream itself is worth breaking down like this! Compelling enough! Yay!
  But then I got a third hit, and it sided more with AuntyFlo so that is the side I’m going with, then. It was wikihow.com that said: ”Kissing a stranger might mean that you’re hiding your true personality.” It was the first secondary headline of their article about kissing-dreams in general; all kissing dreams. So that is my conclusion, then: I need to start flying my own colors, so to say.
• dream about departing at the airport: …this google-search was riddled with more ”general reading” about just airport-symbolism, and I’m familiar with that already because of some recurring dreams back in 2019. No, to get the consensus-answer for this specific symbol’s meaning I’d need to be specific.
  And I was.
  Without too much of a hassle to get some specific ”answers” (and by ”too much” I mean ”little enough that I don’t accidentally start taking this seriously”) I had two hits. tabir.app and tellmemydream.com had different things to say about the particular scenario, but they seemed to agree that you will be enriched by new adventures. Both dream-interpretations – read from front to back – weren’t exactly the optimistic affair that the headline may imply… but they only had that one common thread. That whatever change is coming next in your waking-life, will be an opportunity. Perhaps even unequivocally so.
  ”Departing from an airport is an indication of enjoyment and excitement in life. You will find new adventures and experiences which will enrich your life. They may not be all positive or exciting, but they will be more than worth your time because you will gain new knowledge from this experience while enjoying it to the fullest.” –TellMeMyDream
  ”The plane can symbolize being ready to soar and embark on new adventures.” –Tabir.App
• dream about standing at a door: Quite unfortunately, this specific symbol yielded no interpretative meanings from a google-search. All that came back from it, even after rephrasing it in the search, was links to read some shit about dreams where somebody else stands at your door, and that’s not what happened here. So I had to widen the scope, generalize the search to just ”door dream meaning”. The three first hits seemed to agree – in as/so many words – that door stand for new opportunities and challenges. I’m gonna take the liberty to add my own twist – since nobody wanted to tell me what it means when I’m standing there – to conclude that I’m the one who needs to allow a new, approaching change to come into full effect in my life.
  And it did actually resonate, this subconscious message, because this was also around the time I decided to re-connect with a good friend I’d lost contact with a year ago. Just… to see what was what and how we’d get along now that we’ve both had that time and space in between ourselves.

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VENN-DIAGRAM

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SYMBOLS
Second dream

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• dream about walking into a stranger’s backyard: With this symbol (and how specific it is; I had to search a bunch of things that kinda meant the same) I wanted to do exactly what people do, when they look up dream-meanings. That is, I attached myself to the first thing I liked and looked for other websites to back it up. dreamsopedia.com said that ”walking in garden is a premonition for your network and connection to others. You need to expand your relationships and create a cooperative network.”
  How much did my other search-results agree with this assertion? Well, auntyflo.com had another interesting point, to start: ”Backyard is a small garden and in dreams suggests childhood memories.” That was their headline about backyard-dreams in general.
  dreaminterpret.net gathered a bunch of answers together about what a backyard meant in a dream. One of them stood out to me and I intuited it to be important to tie in with these other two, and that was ”Dreaming of a green, grassy backyard is a forecast of personal happiness” (Author: myjellybean @ My Dream Interpretation); this backyard was indeed full of all the beautiful things about summer, despite me having the dream in September with Autumn well-on-the-way.
  You know what I draw together, from these three answers – all equally good? To expand one’s cooperative network, and get into the habit of trusting new people, lets you be a happy child once again.
• dream about having a barbecue: This indicates, according to dream-meaning.net, that ”you will open your personal life and invite people into your private circle.” And that would be quite something because I haven’t let anybody into my private circle (excluding girlfriends) for at least eleven years. …Anybody that hasn’t fallen out of it, anyway. That’s neither here or there, though; I’m not saying I don’t regularly make friends but just… those friends usually stay at work, stay at the designated pastimes I met them in, and shit. Private circle though? Nnooo.
  So, yes, with this symbol actually the answer was interesting enough that I will not look up any other dream-interpreter’s interpretation but just accept this as the meaning of this symbol.
• dream about falling in love, either at-first-sight or overnight: dreamguideme.com said (about falling in love in general), that one possible answer is ”You’re ready for the next thing. […] To dream about falling in love could mean that your heart is open and that there are high chances you’ll find someone you’ll love.”
  This next one wasn’t even any dream-interpretation but a relatable quote from a reddit-comment – in a discussion started by somebody who had pretty much the same experience as me: ”Two lovers being separated forever by the fact that the other does not exist is one of the most fucked up feelings ever.” I just really felt that, when I read it… even though this dream didn’t really make me feel sad, instead more… ready for the next thing. Open-hearted.
  One thing that the earlier site, as well as basaltnapa.com agreed upon, is that when you fall in love with somebody it’s an optimistic sign for real-life developments in the near future. HOWEVER both of them stressed that it could just mean that you’ll get a new friend very soon and they’ll make you feel good things. I want to be un-cynical and believe in that friend-theory. ”You’re most likely about to meet an actual person with whom you’ll fall in love.”.
  

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VENN-DIAGRAM

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pics:
huggingface.co (the second and fourth one)

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(26) | #20. Exactly how many beans

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[7.9.2023]

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[S]

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A Zen-koan.

   A young wife fell sick and was about to die.
— ”I love you so much”, she told her husband. ”I don’t want to leave you. Do not go to meet any other woman. If you do, I will return as a ghost and cause you endless trouble.”
   Soon, the wife passed away.

   The husband respected her last wish for the first three months, but then he met another woman and fell in love with her. They became engaged, to be married. Immediately after the engagement, a ghost started appearing to the man, blaming him for not keeping his promise. The ghost was clever too. She told him exactly what’d transpired between the man and his new beloved. She told him what he got her for presents, and would describe it in detail. She would even repeat conversations and it so annoyed the man, that he could not sleep.

   Someone advised him to take his problem to a Zen-master who lived close to the village.

   At-length, in-despair, the poor man went to the master for help.
— ”Your former wife became a ghost, and knows everything you do”, commented the master. ”Whatever you do or say, whatever you give your beloved, she knows. She must be a very wise ghost. Really, you should admire such a ghost. The next time she appears, bargain with her. Tell her that she knows so much that you cannot hide anything from her. And that if she can answer you one question, you promise to break your engagement and remain single”
— ”What is the question I must ask her?” said the man.
— ”Take a large hand full of soybeans and ask her exactly how many beans you are holding in your hand. If she cannot tell you, you will know that she is just a figment of your imagination, and will trouble you no more.”

   The next night, when the ghost appeared, the man flattered her and told her she knew everything.
— ”Indeed,” replied the ghost, ”and I know you went to see that Zen-master today.”
— ”And since you know so much”, demanded the man, ”tell me how many beans I am holding in my hand.”

   There was no longer any ghost there, to answer the question.

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pics:
secretsofzen.com (the first one)
terebess.hu (#2 and #3)
huggingface.co (#4)

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(26) | #21. Krakatoa/Krakatau

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[22.-28.2.2023; 9.8.2023; 27.8.2023; 3.-26.11.2023]

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   This is a compilation-entry from along the year about this wonderfully interesting volcanic doomsday-event.

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   At the Westernmost tip of Java, Indonesia, the Ujung Kulon National Park resides. It’s one of Indonesia’s three National Parks that are also UNESCO World Heritage-sites, and it is special because it’s an island-tip completely taken-over by jungle. Because of its’ proximity to Krakatoa. So fertile is the soil, that the jungle’s takeover was relatively quick. Now a whole host of animals live there, including the Javan Rhinoceros which is completely – uniquely – native to Indonesia. Other members of its’ species were eradicated in nearby nations and it is highly endangered today.

   Rhinos are just an example, though: pretty much everything you could imagine living here, does.

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   Merely saying that Krakatoa’s eruption was the largest explosion in recorded history, does it neigh-enough justice; it was measured as being equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT (840 PJ) – about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.

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   the difference between produced and audible sound

   Comments on a Sambucha-short about the loudest sound ever produced (Krakatoa’s eruption; the 140th anniversary of which is coming up this month actually) that illuminated me on the difference between produced and audible sound. First a guy called John said ”310 dB is not possible in our atmosphere. Sound is limited to 194 dB on Earth.”
   (on the Facebook-repost) A person called Kimberly tagged him, asking ”why is it not possible?”
   John responded ”Well, I guess I should clarify. He’s correct in a manner of speaking, but not correct when speaking about hearing sounds in the traditional sense. […] Sounds are nothing more than the waves of pressure passing through the molecules of air. Think of a pebble being dropped in a pond. It creates areas of high pressure (the compressed wave of molecules themselves) and low pressure (the space between the high pressure waves). As you increase the pressure of the waves, it conversely createt lower pressure between them. Eventually the low pressure area reaches 0 (a vacuum), and a sustained sound cannot be amplified further (in our atmosphere). This happens around 194 decibels. […] However, when the pressure is increased further, the sound is no longer passing through, but rather pushing the air with it. This creates a blast or shock wave. This is ”louder” in a sense, but is not really a sound in the way we normally think of sound. I assume this is what the presenter is referencing. I guess I was just spitting hairs with my comment because in the way he presents it, it seems as though sounds can just get louder and louder, but that is not accurate.”
   Kimberly replied: ”Oh, so when the sound reached 194 dB, it stops in becoming sound and the excess energy becomes shockwaves? Wow! I never knew that. Thank you for sharing.”
   A third guy, Caleb, replied to John ”Sort of yes, but when they say 310 dB, they predicted the potential for it to have that much SPL, not that it necessarily did. But even 194 dB is absolutely insane. 175+ dB is enough to do bodily damage at extended periods of time. 180-190 Db can do irreversible damage to a body if not straight up kill you. Higher than that, combined with massive shockwaves, I can definitely see an explosion like this killing plenty of nearby people and other animals on impact.”
   It was enlightening convo to read, but did feel a little bit like stuff I know already. Oh well, Kool G Rap was right when he said that you never stop learning!

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   I sat and wrote this on August 27th

   Today was the 140th anniversary of Krakatoa’s eruption!

   I dug up and down just a little bit just for this special occasion. To find out some facts about the largest recorded volcanic eruption in human history. Facts that I hadn’t known, so no basic stuff such as ”the sound was so large that almost half of pressure itself (310 dB in a 194 dB-limited earth) turned into pure shock-waves”. No basic stuff like ”Ujung Kulon National Park at the West-end of Java island is most likely born from the exorbitant nourishment it received from the falling ash of the Krakatoa” or no basic stuff like ”the ash from the eruption got lodged into the earth’s atmosphere for such a long time, that Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) probably depicts a realistic Norwegian sky”.

   No basic stuff.

• In November 1883 – three months after the eruption – New York Times had reported: ”Soon after five o’clock the western horizon suddenly flamed into a brilliant scarlet, which crimsoned sky and clouds.”
• The ash drifted around the globe, causing halo effects around the moon and sun. The ash also acted as a solar radiation filter, lowering global temperatures by as much as 0.5 degrees celsius in the year following the eruption. Temperatures didn’t return to normal until 1888 – five years later.
• Death-count is actually the statistic where Krakatoa is not #1 of all known volcanic eruptions; Tambora killed 60,000 people in 1815 when it erupted. That’s almost double the (immediate) casualties recorded from Krakatoa.
• And also, I should add that the eruption wasn’t a ”singular event” happening just over the course of a day, but like any natural event it went through phases and had its own evolution. August 27th was just the day of the peak of the seismic activity; additional seismic activity was reported until Fabruary 1884* and the 20th of May, 1883, was the first day of the eruption.
• *Dutch geologist Rogier Verbeek dismissed any reports after 1883 in his subsequent investigation into the eruption, so this is disputed.
• More exact numbers about the explosion: The loudness of the blast heard 160km away from the volcano has been calculated to have been 180 dB. 80 requires you to use headphones. 160-170 kills you.

   There’s a famous series of chromolithographs about Krakatoa’s effects around the world, made in Cambridge and called Twilight and afterglow effects at Chelsea, London (Nov. 26, 1883).

• Krakatoa’s eruption even changed the population-distribution of the United States. Temperatures became intolerable for many New-Englanders, so they migrated to the Northwest-territory, which resulted in Indiana becoming a state in 1816, and Illinois just 2 years later.

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   To honor this historic date I ordered a book about the Krakatoa eruption (biggest one in the era of recording) that’s supposed to be the best. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester.

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   A Dutch pilot in Anjer, Indonesia, was quoted in Krakatau – a short story by Jim Shepard (1996) – as saying ”And I thought: I would give all these people’s lives, once more, to see something so beautiful again.”

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   Anyer was the name of a village on the Java Sea-coast which was completely wiped-out by Krakatoa’s eruption. More exactly, completely destroyed by a 100-foot-high tsunami coming off the Sunda Strait.

   The present settlement on Anjer still houses the Cikoneng Lighthouse built by Dutch government in ’85; two years after the cataclysmic eruption.

   Angier became the starting point of something galled the Great Post Road, built by the Dutch in the 19th century. A journey of re-built infrastructure at Java Island, built by the Dutch and going over a distance of 1,00 kilometers through the island.

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   ”Krakatoa til entry”

[3.-26.11.]
     Bunch of things I learned about the eruption of Krakatoa in November:

Yeah there’s no denying it, this catastrophe has fascinated me this year. The country all-around it as a whole but this mountain is a definite hot-spot of interest and I definitely didn’t use that word there just to make a pun, just now. So much of a hot-spot it was that there is another (potential) entry called ”The 140th Anniversary of the Eruption of Krakatoa!” where I found out new not-so-well-known trivia ’bout it, and there was a (potential) entry called ”A bunch of stuff I learned about Indonesia in late February”*; a lot of that was also dedicated to the mountain and the cataclysm.
These are the reasons why I made a combination-entry of all of them while still including the entries that predate it – upon deciding that I would spend a little time every day of every weekend, in November, reading this book about it. The mountain and the cataclysm, all bearing the same bone-shaking name: Krakatoa.

I want to do one last hurrah of Krakatoa-facts in this book(’s notes where all the potential entries are) so I made myself read the book every day of every weekend of November, until I find one thing that’s entry-worthy.
Why?
Because I can.
*that February-entry is coming later in this countdown.

• The Dutch hold over Indonesia was a pretty remarkable achievement for the European power, considering the obvious things you see when you look at a world-map and check out both countries. One is INDONESIA and one is Netherlands. Netherlands weren’t sole owners of the trading-empire though, despite having their headquarters in the most prominent locations: In the 1600s, the Portuguese ruled Malacca and Banten was ruled by a Sultan whose congeniality was questionable, to say the least. BUT. Dutch outposts had been – throughout their time ruling Indonesia – outposts have been located in Japan, India, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mauritius, Ceylon [Sri Lanka], and even the Cape Colony in South Africa. All of them were at various points, ruled by the Dutch main-outpost back in Java, Indonesia. That reach was quite something. The ”Dutch East-Indies” were what people remember of it, now, but lines on maps were different hundreds of years ago, and international travel for a conquering European power, brought them a lot of new homes in a lot of new lands.

• At the first mention of the island of Sertung, Winchester stopped to make a footnote which needed to take the bottoms of two book-pages. The issue her an into, was that some nations around the world have the poor misfortune of suffering colonization at some point, which results in places having three different names. This time the islands of the Krakatoa-island-chain betwixt Sumatra and Java. See, Panjang was originally called Panjang, then it became Lang Island under colonization, and is now Rakata Kecil. Sertung became Verlaten (lonely, forsaken island) during Dutch times, and did not get a third name but went back to Sertung. Quoting Winchester: ”Mercifully for this footnote, which would be further awash in explication, the island in the group that had the English name Polish Hat no longer exists, since it disappeared, a victim of the eruption.”
• The population of Batavia – capital of the Dutch East Indies; nowadays named Jakarta – had seen its’ population skyrocket in the fifteen years leading up to the eruption. From half a million people in 1866 to well over a million at the time of Krakatoa’s eruption. On that Early-Autumn day in 1883, the volcano’s eruptions could be heard clearly in the city, which was 160 kilometers away from the island on the Sunda Strait. It’s easy to credit the opening of the Suez Canal in the 1860s – the opportunities for international trade provided – as the obvious cause for this boom in population. Most of the new residents of the capital were East Indians (Indonesians).
• Lifted entirely from page 144:
  As early as 1832, according to an account written by the renowned Dutch scholar of Javanese, Professor P.P. Roorda van Eysinga, there were widespread signs of an accelerating prosperity:
  ”…hundreds of carriages of European officials and shop-people raising clouds of dust on the streets, while the Chinese, with their recognizable and unpleasant features, with their long pigtails and silk caps, are everywhere busy hammering, sawing, painting, sewing, building and so on. Rich Arabs and Chinese rode through the streets, half-clad Javanese carried heavy loads, shabby Eurasian clerks walked beneath their sunshades to their offices, old women sold cakes, an Indian sat calmly eating his rice on a banana leaf, and vegetable, milk and fruit sellers, butches and hill-dwellers offering monkeys and birds all mingled together in the crowd.”
• The year was calm, people were lulled into a kind of easy complacency. From January to May 1883, the Batavia observatory had only logged fourteen earthquakes in all of the East Indies. (Indonesia is the country with the most seismic activity in the world even still at this day, due to being entirely on the Pacific Ring of Fire; these numbers were indeed small for five months in the region). Western Java (the main island Krakatoa’s closest to) was, in any case, a comparatively quiet corner of the archipelago, seismically speaking. [p. 154]
• The first major rumblings leading up to the August-eruption, were documented by a lighthouse-keeper in May 1883. It was just after midnight, Thursday, May 10th, when the keeper of First Point felt what he knew only too well was a tremor in the air. First Point was the name of a lighthouse located on the rocky headland at the Southeastern entrance to the Sunda Strait. One of a pair of two lighthouses in the strait, it was known to approaching mariners as Java Head also. The lighthouse suddenly seemed to shift on its foundations. The sea outside whitened, appeared to freeze briefly (as we now know it does above a depth charge), and behaved quite strange for some moments ”before returning to its usual sickly swell.” [p. 155]
• On the day of Krakatoa’s first 1883-eruption (there were three), Dutch Lampong-resident Mr. Altheer, and colonial contrôleur from Ketimbang, Willem Beyerinck (Beijerinck) set sail for the island. Making a lot of first contacts with the violent effects and giving some of the most melancholy testimony about the event. Other witnesses’ testimonies had a silver lining. All the same. All of a beach spewing out fire and smoke and magma.
  Later that evening, when the Sunda Strait was thirty miles away from the eruption and almost in the open ocean, the doctor asked a sailor onboard to drop a bucket into the sea. The man pulled back up only pumice, with barely any water at all. [p. 166-168]

• Animals began to act weird in and around Krakatau as well as the general Sunda Strait area. Bees mysteriously evacuating their local hives, mice appearing so dazed their ability to run away gets worsened and they can be caught by-hand. Quoting the book: ”A retired United States Geological Survey scientist collected lost-pet advertisements in American newspapers and claimed to find a correlation, such that within two weeks of any rise in the number of missing animals, there was an earthquake near by.”
  To clarify: Winchester’s book took a skeptical stance on ”the pseudoscience called etho-geological prediction”. Predicting subterranean shiftings and strainings that precede massive eruptions, by animal-behavior. ”But no one has yet measured the link, if indeed there is one.” [p. 207]
• Anjers newly appointed telegraph-master Mr. Schruit, was living in the Anjer Hotel in late-August 1883. His first work of the day was a mundane task, as was the second. The second task was going on up the eastern Sumatran coast to Aceh – to the North – and there delivering, among others, some 300 miscreants, all members of a chain gang destined to be put to work on a variety of government building sites. Schruit described the first roaring explosion – and the immediately following visual spectacle, when Krakatoa indeed erupted: ”as if thousands of white balloons had been released from the crater”.
• The invisible and inaudible pressure wave from Krakatoa’s final – hardest – explosion was measured at the Jakarta Gaswork. It blew off scale; it cause a pressure spike of more than two and a half inches of mercury, unheard of in any other circumstance. [p. 218-219]
• By five o’clock on Sunday evening, when in normal circumstances ordinary civil twilight would be only an hour away, it was nearly totally dark up and down the entire west Java coast, and was becoming similarly so in the capital [Batavia, known nowadays as Jakarta]. [p. 219]

• The sound of the great explosion could be heard as far as off as Rodriguez Island, nearly 3,000 miles from its’ origin. Records suggest that people living in the shaded area of this image, were able to hear the rumbling and banging, most thinking it a noise of a naval bombardment. Other places that this map of the radius indicate, are Ceylon, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, big ol’ BIG capital cities. Also the almost laterally opposite side of (current-day) Indonesia, the Western half of New Guinea felt the direct pressure. Perth, Dalywater. Krakatoa’s reach was wide. [p. 274]

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pics:
Mongabay (second one)
Sambucha @ YouTube (#3)
Linda Hall Library (#4)
Science Museum Group Collection (#6)
Penguin Books (#7)
borneoficus.info (#8)
wikipedia > Johan Maurits Mohr (#9)
huggingface.co (#10)

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(26) | #22. Socotra

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[24.4.2023]

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   Existing on the Indian Ocean, just off of the Eastern coast of Somalia – off the horn of Africa – is an island called Socotra (native name suqutrā). And this island… this island! This island just has a bunch of things about it that could make it a good setting for any history-laden storybook’s final chapter.
First and most obvious is the Hoq Cave. A limestone cave, it contains a lump sum of inscriptions, drawings and archaeological objects. In 2008 Oldowan stone tools were found in the area, from what’s understood to be the island’s oldest culture.

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   The most instantly recognizable thing about Socotra to any geography-enthusiast out there is obviously the biodiversity. Socotra supports so many unique species of bird, plant and animal that it’s been described as the most alien place on earth. For something more recent and more controversial, it was also a refueling-stop for Somali pirates; being geographically closer to Somalia than the country that governs it.

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   Obviously this place is a UNESCO World Heritage site, but the specific reason it became one is that it has such an incredible amount of endemic species. 37% of its plants, 90% of its reptiles and 95% of its snails, are native to the island and live only there. This one island is only second to Hawaii and Galapagos in biodiversity, according to most sources. Although there are different accounts; one article on WorldAtlas claimed Socotra was FIRST and Hawaii #5, Galapagos #2; and that article is newer (2018) than SciShow’s 2012-episode. Which I got that initial list from. Remember to always double-source your information, folks !).

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   Dracaeona Cinnabari, also known as the ”Dragon’s Blood Tree” has been redlisted by the I.U.C.N. calling it ”an umbrella species for conservation”, which according to Hank Green (@ SciShow) was ”kinda funny ’cause it kinda looks like an umbrella blown inside-out on a windy day”. The tree got its’ name for its’ habit of oozing a dark red sap. Sap that has been used since ancient times in the making of dye, cosmetics and medicine. More recent usage for it is violin varnish.

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sources for this entry:
wikipedia > Socotra
SciShow @ YouTube
EW @ YouTube
tendrandomfacts.com
wonderopolis.org

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   Then there is the bulbous Cucumber Tree. This tree is so different from its’ family – biological family including pumpkins melons and gourds – that it’s also the only species of its genus. And the species is older than dirt. Literally, older than the dirt that sits around it. Has been in the world for a longer time. Than dirt. Go outside and look at dirt. The Cucumber Trees that originate from Socotra, are older than that.

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   OH! And another beautiful thing I found out about Socotra, from German news-channel EW’s documentary about the place: apparently children on the islands’ beaches, living near them, don’t play with toy-cars but toy-boats.

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   According to tenrandomfacts.com, the ruins of an ancient city were uncovered on Socotra in 2010 by Russian archaeologists. It’s got a long history of pirate-refuge – Somalia was only the most recent country to make news for old-fashioned piracy.

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   There have been many caves, as well as shipwrecks found by archaeologists on the island and the eponymous archipelago. They’re actually accessible to tourists as well. However, due to the military-tensions in Yemen, people aren’t as encouraged to go to Socotra as they could be perhaps.

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   Despite the insane biodiversity in Socotra, you won’t find any native amphibians there. There’s only one native mammal too, which is a bat.

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slight tangent:
   The Socotra-island and ’er UNESCO-Heritage-Site status made me think a bit. Then I remembered, the first UNESCO-world-heritage-site was another archipelago noted for similar reasons as Socotra (biodiversity). Galápagos Islands (belonging to Ecuador). There exists a really close alternate reality where Socotra could’ve just taken that, but granted people generally care about special animals more than they do special plant-life.
 end of slight tangent.

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   Socotra was important in first-century international trade over the Indian Ocean. Hoq Cave boasts inscriptions in the Indian Brahmi, South Arabian, Ethiopic, Greek, Palmyrene and Bactrian languages. A significant portion of Hoq Cave’s writings were traced back to the sixth century, as well as the first. Two time-periods that are remarkably far-apart.

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   Persian geographer Ibn al-Mujawir (1204-1291) testified in his findings of Socotra – traveling there from India in 1222 – that two groups of people inhabited the island then: indigenous mountain dwellers and foreign coastal dwellers.

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pics:
wikipedia > Socotra (#1)
wikipedia > Dendrosicyos (#2)
Travel2Unlimited (#3)
bbc.com > BBC Travel (#4)

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(26) | #23. René Magritte – Not to Be Reproduced (1937)

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[9.8.2023]

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   The ”Ruckenfigur” movement (literally ”back-figure”) is just… when a painter’s artwork’s central human perspective is someone that is not facing the viewer. Looking away from the viewer. I learned about the compositional device’s name (and about what it contemporarily aims for) from a video essay about Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818). A painting that, if googled, you will recognize right away. A work of art that – seems now – couldn’t help but become iconic.

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   But. While you’re googling, look up this other painting I discovered – it was mentioned in the same video essay.

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René Magritte – Not to Be Reproduced (1937)

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MORE TO KNOW ABOUT THIS PAINTING:

• Person depicted on it is Magritte’s patron Edward James, and the painting itself was commissioned by him.
• book on the mantel is a well-worn copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (written here in French as Les aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym). Poe was one of Magritte’s favorite authors and this is just one of his references to the author and his work.
• In Per Petterson’s 2003 novel Out Stealing Horses, the protagonist Trond references this painting after a bad dream: ”I realised that what I was most afraid of in this world was to be the man in Magritte’s painting who looking at himself in the mirror sees only the back of his own head, again and again”.
• This painting was one of three produced by Magritte for the ballroom of James’ home in London. The other two were The Red Model (1937) and Time Transfixed (1938). Different depictions. But Magritte’s distinct style glides over all. Looking at all three side-to-side, it’s easy (personally, to me) to see they all sprung from the same sessions or at least the same environment.
• (In The Republic) Plato challenged art and portraitry, saying in the beginning of Book 10 that ”works of art are dangerously removed from the truth”.
  He gives the example of a bed. The true bed is the idea of a bed. Secondary is the reproduction of a bed. A crafted bed, a bed you can see; a bed made by a carpenter. ”A carpenter cannot make the idea of a bed. They can only make a rendition.” If ideas are truths, an actual bed that one sees with one’s own eyes, is not the essence of a bed. It’s just a particular bed.
  Those were levels 1 and 2. Idea and rendition. The reason Plato considers art to be ”dangerously removed from the truth” is that portraits and other depictions are way down at level 3. He would have counted photographs too, if they’d been invented yet back then.
  A representation of a bed equals an imitation of a reproduction of a bed.
  An artistic representation is twice-removed from the truth; from reality.
  René took a stance on this relationship between an artist’s art and the reality it represents, with that man looking into the mirror and seeing only the back of his head. If art becomes the way you reflect upon yourself, that point-of-view is always going to be skewed.
  Because it escapes reality.
  I guess my infatuation with this painting – it being the only painting that in itself will be an entry in this book; I don’t want to turn too much of the final product into art-criticism – is because it made me feel so much. Made me feel the same revolutionary feeling as the first time I heard the lyric from Bob Dylan’s Visions of Johanna,

”Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo ’this is what life must be like after a while’.”

• It made me see through what artists and writers do. Life-affirmingly, it reminded me that the way I live life is not congruent with reality if I spend too much of said life identifying with any art.
  Because it escapes reality.

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sources:
horses @ YouTube
wikipedia > Not to Be Reproduced
The Canvas @ YouTube

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pic:
renemagritte.org

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(26) | #24. Jean-Paul Sartre said

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[19.7.2023]

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   Jean-Paul Sartre said:

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”If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.”

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   Now that’s a good quote on its’ own, but I googled it to find if regular online-people would have some things to say about the simple sentiment of the phrase. About the skill of being alone. One did! Mr. Tomassio Rubinshtein at Quora said, ”Being alone is equivalent to horsemanship. The more you are in control of yourself, the less likely you might fall into the painful, hot ground.”

   I thought that was a wonderful choice of words. To go even further, it’s wonderful enough to include in a writeup. I will remember this quote for the rest of my waking life.

   This quote has 4393 likes on goodreads.com as of me writing this and is the most popular quote by the author on the website.

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   My favorite comedian, George Carlin, once did an act on the difference between ”being alone” and ”being lonely”. Actually in a quote of his – and I am aware we’re drifting a little bit off of the Sartre-quote, but bear with me – Carlin recalled his early childhood’s traumatic events that forced him to be brought up in a way that involved a lot of solitude. ”So, I sort of raised myself.” He said in that quote. ”I was alone a lot and I invented myself – I lived through the radio and through my imagination.”

   It’s interesting that someone I look up to, had a lonelier life than I could ever imagine and I could pick up on that fact just from him describing it and somehow, that information not really… changing anything. Loneliness is that universal. So I guess… what I mean by talking about this – I’m lacking a good segue – is that if loneliness is this-universal, maybe the measure of one’s achievement is how head-on he faces his life’s inherent loneliness.

   I’unno. That’s all I got tonight before bed. The sentence you’re reading right now is actually the last one I wrote for this article.

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   There’s some ruminations on loneliness in Sartre’s most-well-known book Nausea (1938) as well. This one was more pessimistic in the way I read it at least. It goes: ”I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.”

   Or eh, when you read that quote really thoroughly, in a silent room with the voice inside your head… there’s a vague hint of optimism in it too. After all, the loneliness of being forgotten after your death would be more final than the loneliness of regular life. There’s nothing you can do about being forgotten. By killing one’s self, one would also kill their potential to achieve more, self-actualize or give more to the world… or what’s even wilder come to terms with your own loneliness. In this wild scenario, you might just fuck around and say good things about loneliness, in your work about it. Resonant and meaningful things, that people can then read decades later and find comfort in.

   Like this Sartre-quote. Which so, so deserved to be an entry in my list of ”50 best things I learned at 26” just by being so eloquent, short, to-the-point, and makin’ me think so much. Makin’ it so ceaselessly interesting to find out all the insights people have had about it. No single quote from a work of writing, has affected me exactly like this one has.
 I know I said it once already, but I will remember this quote for the rest of my life.
 I promise that,
 to myself.

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the second picture in this article was from adlibris

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(26) | #25. But last night there was a bee in my apartment

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[14.5.2023]

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   Last night an old Tinder-match of mine from three years ago, matched with me again. Well I, to put it into more unfolding terms, had a pending like from someone with her name. Hers is a common first name, so I have thought nothing of seeing it in pending likes for the longer time… thought it can’t be her. Then her card came up, and I checked the list of pending ones again. Because their blurred pics show me the color-scheme of the card-photo and this one matched. So I swiped right. And we matched. She’d been a big deal for me, that’s why I remember so much detail about it. The way me and her left things in 2020, was that we had an argument on that midsummer, over something… that I can’t even remember now. But I wasn’t right in my head. I was very infatuated and she gave me all this attention and I didn’t know what to do with it. Had no idea how to respond to it, so I got possessive and ugh. Just became a nasty person to be around. I have expressed my concerns and apologies and regrets about that and honestly, she’s been nothing but a memory for a couple of years. Until today. These’ve been busy years, dating-wise. But something about her matching with me again, stunned me in a way that I don’t remember anything else quite stunning me. I sent her some casual conversation-opener, and then 10 minutes later came back to check and she had unmatched me.

   So that was weird.

   That also made me think. That morning alone in the house, I thought about this woman and two other ones that have a significant similarity or rather correlation when it comes to their role in my life. That correlation is: they have all blocked me across all social media. Because of the way I behaved towards them. Because I have made them feel uncomfortable.

  

 Encountering this woman, the 2020-woman in the same dating-app where we’d met three years ago, again, reminded me of a time when I had a panic attack one morning. It was a regular morning, as regular as they come except me and ”2020-woman” had been texting coooonstantly for two straight days. Sharing every single solitary thought to one another. I couldn’t think a thought without it echoing into a snapchat-chat sent to her. Then suddenly just stopped, on a summer morning sitting in the same living room where I spend my time now. In the middle of a panic attack, and needing to run to the backdoor to breathe in some outside-air and help myself the best way I can.

   My past theory of that attack, and what had caused it during such an emotional high-time, was that I was afraid of my own light. I know that sounds weird, but hear me out. That summer had been a big time of meditating on identity, whether I liked it or not. Something I was writing at the time, struck a particular chord and a lot of 2020 then got diluted into wide-eyed search for identity, for Jani. “What Jani Ojala means”, “what distances mean”, “what darkness means” and “what’s unique about what I see when I look up at the night-sky as it keeps getting darker”. I believe that this particular inexplicable panic-attack in 2020 was caused by this sense. There’s no other reason I would start to suddenly feel like I can’t breathe when I’m having the nicest chat with the nicest young lady and the weather is nice beyond-compare. This identity-crisis… I was so good at keeping up conversation, got along so well with 2020-woman that I started getting this feeling, that I’ll always get when I get just copious amounts of attention from women. And it’s that ”I’m living someone else’s life.”

 In my past and adolescence, I have been so isolated, so lonely through my youth, that now as an adult when things are going better and more steady, it has taken me years of work and introspection to get right. By getting right I mean, realize on-time whilst I’m getting into something good with a woman, that this natural built-in inner voice telling me ”this good feeling doesn’t belong to me, it’s not supposed to happen to me” is actually quite a personal demon. It needs to be fought off just like any other inner demon.

   Let’s come back to this morning though; May 14th 2023. Because that’s really all that that 3-year-old memory had for me in terms of perspective today.

   So… yeah. It is an old and very applicable wisdom in my opinion that our potential is the thing that scares us most; much more than our ineptitude. I am much more scared, generally – due to my own unique line of experiences across a lifetime – of the terrible things I am able to become, than of the satisfying things I can’t become. I’ve made some peace with all specific feelings of inadequacy I have. It is what it is. Personally I want to be a better friend to myself than to just constantly nag myself to death about everything in life I am missing out on. I am more interested in growing, than looking angrily at the past or other people. It is what it is.

   But.

   One thing I am, among all the good and all the bad things that I am… I am also a person who has made three different women block him across all social media because however severe the cases and events were (and I won’t belittle anybody’s experience because they have theirs and I have mine)… they couldn’t take any more of seeing my face. That is not a form of inadequacy! That is a form of letting one trait/predisposition run over your more pragmatic and socially conscious instincts. That trait is not a darkness (lack of ability) but a light (an ability that’s probably too bright). If I had to categorize that trait (being hard to be around), of myself as either light or dark, I wouldn’t describe it as a ”dark part of me”. I would describe it as a light that’s so bright it is blinding. With 2020-woman I let one thing grow too much, and got to be a possessive and paranoid person whenever getting vast amounts of attention from a woman. My lonely upbringing did not prepare me for being popular with women.

   All that possessiveness is a form of overcompensation. But in my case I don’t overcompensate for the most obvious things like one would a short penis (my shit is bangin’, FYI). I overcompensate for a lifetime of feeling inadequate. An awkward autistic kid, an emotional burden with my meltdowns, what have you. These are painful things to admit and to talk about but I realize now – after memories such as the one with 2020-woman, which sent me down this path of reflecting on the nature of my personal failures – that talking about them is much healthier than letting over-compensatory impulses override my more pragmatic judgement in relationships. The kind of judgment I want to preserve. Because I have way more potential – light – than I can ever imagine beforehand.

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   I’ve been thinking about identity a lot lately.

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   But
last night
there was a bee in my apartment.

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   I feel like the reason I’ve been trekking through all these memories and all these uncomfortable thoughts in this entry right now, is to get to this point about not just the morning, but the night before. It was the late hours of the night, and I guess the outside had gotten so cold and since I had my window open, the bee thought it was alright to come pay me a visit. The thing about me though is that I hate bees. Well, not hate. But I have a fear of them. I was stung by one when I was eight years old and I’m never letting that happen again. So when this buzzin’ lil’ thing faced me in that summer-night I took some steps back, opened the curtains because this dumbass thought he could fly through glass. Like they always do. I had to get the fly-swatter out of my storage-room where it’d been stored for the winter; for a serious mission now! Had to even practice swatting before going in, so I’ll be sure that I’m not so rusty from the winter that I’ll miss a crucial shot! Bees get angry from that. Someone trying to kill them. Entitled creatures, right? For now it wasn’t angry. Just confused, and looking for a warm place with light. It ended up escaping me, I think I scraped it once but who knows? You know. It sneaked into a long crevice under the living room-window, and I couldn’t find it for five minutes. And since it made no sound, I figured I’d broken its’ wing or something and it would die over the night.

   I already told you what happened later in the night when I went to sleep, and what happened when I woke up in alone in my two-person bed with a match from ”2020-woman” and had all this space for all this introspection out there by myself.
Literally all morning, nothing but introspection about my dating-history’s darkest and most insecure aspects.

   Right after that morning’, I booted up my Playstation and started to play Minecraft. I sat my bones on the living room’s couch, which is situated right in front of the living room’s window. Then, wouldn’t you know it, that same fucking bee started buzzin in there after like an hour of me mining and crafting away. That same fucking bee. Sneaky little shit had just slept in my house rent free all thru last night. This time I’d had it. It was doing nothing else but trying to fly through my living-room-window. It went on and on and on and on. I opened up my curtains to see it, when it’ll stop moving. It stopped moving. I saw it. I had practiced the swat. One decisive blow, and the bee was dead. Finally, it was dead.

Dead in my opened living room-window.

Then I looked outside from that window. I normally never keep those curtains open, but now I had opened them. Now I was staring out of them because of this bee-situation and the distraction it served as, for me, after this introspective morning. Then I remembered everything. All at once. Everything I had been thinking about today, about inadequacy and “doing too much”; light and darkness.

   And Jesus Christ, the amount of light that shone in from that window!
Simple, plain-as-day light!
I thought for a half-second I would have to close those curtains because the light was just so intense, …but it wasn’t.
It was beautiful.
It meshed into the living room-scenery that I watch at least once every day and made the room’s elements pop, environment come alive.
I thought it’d shine too brightly, for me to not see the game I’m playing properly, but no.
Quite the opposite. Everything about my living room had color-grading that it hasn’t in half a year.

   (to any non-Finn reading this: half a year is how long Finnish winters last.)

 Now, suddenly, there was all this spring-light again.

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”You’re looking at it wrong. Once there was only dark.”
(Thanks True Detective for being such a good show, and Matthew McConaughey for being such a good actor).
”If you ask me, the light’s winning.”

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pics:
huggingface.co (second and sixth image)
Urban Paradise @ YouTube (#4)
The Weeknd @ YouTube (#5)
True Detective (HBO) (#8)

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(26) | #26. I feel like a spirit of January has taken me

incl. “Take a gamble that love exists. And do a loving act.”

Top 50 Things I Learned About Life at an Unremarkable Age

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[10.1.2023; 15.1.2023]

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   I am writing this on the tenth of January.

   I was watching a video essay on YouTube that had an extravagant title. It was about Red Dead Redemption 2, a video game I have never played but was there for the hype around it, five years ago. More specifically this video essay was a recap about the journey of that game’s main character and the emotional journey he went on. A quote stuck out to me that was A REVELATION.

”Take a gamble that love exists. And do a loving act”

, a nun called Mother Superior Calderón said to Arthur while the two were waiting for a train. That impactful line was built up by such a good emotionally potent dialogue-scene, that it feels almost like I’m robbing it from some of its’ power by presenting it as simply as I did in this article. Watch it! It is as good, as is.

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   I am writing this on the fifteenth of January.
   I don’t know whether it was the affirming feeling of sitting down one day recently, on the mattresses of my bed-to-be that I still haven’t used.
   That are currently have standing upright in my smaller bedroom.
   I don’t know if it’s looking out of that room’s window to nice pleasant winter-weather that has a stillness.

   A poetic innocuous stillness, un-interruped by wind; the day’s snow had just set in.
    I don’t know if it was the affirmation of having this great idea of text-to-speech audio-books and maybe even getting people to read(/consume) my stories if I do complete that idea.

   I don’t know if it was just about everything today, going not perfect but…
only bad to the extent that I expect it to on a morning after drinking.

   Don’t know if it was the innocent affirmation and freshness of turning on the air-conditioning in my bedroom right as I took the voice-note that became this current, ongoing entry…
   But I feel like a spirit of January has taken me.

   It’s one of the best feelings to have when I’m alone in the house and have no plans for the day.

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pics:
1-2 Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

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PROGRESS

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