🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

Glad to see Noelle over at the wonderful elekk.xyz instance make this post. In all my dealings with her she has always shown to be a person of excellent character. My only fear is I hope this post isnt used against her in some way.

She has my sincerest thanks and respect.

Tagging a few interested parties: @noelle @arteteco @mngrif @design_RG #mastoadmin #fediblock #fediadmin #mastodon #fediverse

@freemo

> Based on current growth rates [QOTO.org's] active user count is likely going to surpass [mastodon.technology] by the end of the month too. That would officially make QOTO the largest technology oriented instance in the fediverse.
Good to know we are doing something right at #QOTO :)

Well, if we're going by active users, #fosstodon is right there with you (2.08k vs 2.06k)

I think we're *all* doing something right 🎉

Hopefully this place isn't full of Orwellian wankers. All they want is to silence a man for having opinions.

Some people asked me what meritocratic egalitarian means. It's actually very simple. Obviously all people deserve a basic level of sustenance, it's the only moral thing to do. But it's also a fact that some civilizations contributed more to human knowledge and advancement, while others spread only war and disease. It'd be unfair for all these people to be treated as equal.

@freemo @design_RG Oh yeah, I forgot:

o Ever wonder why there are barely any facial features (or much of anything but the bare minimum to be a human body) on most anime characters? Say hi to Zen again, inviting you the viewer to accept your mind's eye to "fill in the blanks" like the slight wrinkles and damage from surviving teen acne below Rintarou Okabe's left cheekbone. You don't see them? No, don't LOOK closer, as that would be getting in your own way as Taoism helps one avoid. Don't TRY to see, ALLOW yourself to see...

@freemo @design_RG
Japanese art, much like almost every other aspect of Japanese culture and society, is heavily influenced by almost a thousand years of the philosophy of Zen.

Zen originally was Japan's adoption of China's Cha'an Buddhism, which ITSELF is a mixing of India's Mahayana Buddhism with the native Chinese philosophy of Taoism.

Like most branches of Mahayana, Zen embraces sunyata ('emptiness' or 'the void') as a powerful, necessary force unto itself -- which. This shows itself in so much of both ancient and modern Japanese artwork, architecture, poetry, and the like.

There's also Zen artwork embracing the whole "flowing of the energies of life and nature" from the no-mind/no-thought concepts from Taoism's creative quietism -- which does NOT mean "not thinking" but more like "getting out of your own way" and "INTELLIGENTLY going with the flow, working with it as it works with you until you and the flow become as one" as a third option between "fighting the flow, thereby tiring yourself out and drowning" and "nihilistically letting the flow drag you around until it smashes your head against a rock or throws you down a waterfall".

To keep this post from becoming a multi-page thesis on the ins and outs of Zen and Taoism, here are a few examples of the mixings of both sunyata's and Taoism's celebrations of the beauty of emptiness and the positivity of nothingness -- as opposed to a Westerner's fundamental distate of 'nothing', seeing it as somehow a bad thing; Easterners tend to find this idea as bizarre and illogical as hating a valley but loving a mountain peak when they're both as inseparable and necessary for each others' existence as up & down, black & white, life & death...):

o The large area of a canvas untouched by the brush above a painting of mountains and trees expressing the grand, untouchable sky.

o A room with only tatami mats on the floor, the futon kept rolled up in a corner closet during the day, unlike a bed whose unmoving bulk keeps "interrupting" the visual silence of pure, empty space.

o Rule Of Three. I can't be arsed to come up with more examples, I ran out of brain...

@snow

I keep wondering whether it's "zzzz" as in snorlax or "zzzz" as in chris tucker in 5th element...

@freemo

@freemo Compared to the splendor of light colour and shadows in the European images, the Japanese one does look poor.

Is it a gravure, a reproduction? (the other ones being oils, one of, very limited audiences art).

I would mention the "Great Wave off Kanagawa" as a counterpoint, as an artistically brilliant piece, which at the same time was reproduced in quantity and reached a lot more people. Slightly later than the examples above (maybe 40 or so years later).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa

Japanese printmakers were outstanding, the colour and details are superb.