432 - ephemeral

Описание: Hello, this is a piece I had finished 3 months ago. I only recently found a title for it.

And what a great excuse it is to write about life again, and how everything about it is so temporary, fleeting, ephemeral... From the simplest things like the face, voice, scent or touch of someone you might never see again to the complex routines we let go of when life quietly shifts.
But then, if you really pay attention to how unique each moment is, there is this paradoxical risk of detachment from it. As if, in order to live in the moment, you have to be less aware of it happening.
And then there is of course the possibility of falling into a deep state of grief because of this realization, which can be hard to explain, unless you have experienced it.

Meanwhile, the internet grows louder, becomes increasingly polluted with things that provide no actual value beyond mindless entertainment. Every headline, thumbnail, topic, increasingly personalized to provoke a reaction and create dependency. Anything your mind craves, it will give you something to soothe it.
Are you feeling okay? Here is some bad news you should care about.
Are you scared now? Here is an echo chamber for you to feel validated.
Rampant disinformation, bots, pseudoscience, oversimplified pop-philosophy and psychology, AI slop, and shallow relationship advice.
It creates the problems, then sells you the cure. But that's nothing new. Like divide and conquer, it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.
By the way, here are a thousand single people close to you. What's that? You can't form long-term relationships anymore? Ah, the Paradox of Choice...here is a dark romance novel, or a (sex) robot.
(I'm trying to keep this gender-neutral and vague...but we can't ignore the modern power dynamics and which sex holds more social leverage. This "gender war" is just sad, full of hypocrisy, ignorance and double standards).
So what is the ultimate solution to dependency?
To detach from life and never engage with anything? To never own anything? To never truly love anyone? To never learn their idiosyncrasies and little details, the ones that actually deepen your connection?
Probably not. As with many absolute questions of this kind, there is no ultimate solution, there is only our perpetually limited ability to understand what is good and what is bad for us.

To deny that we are limited is hubris.

If people don't understand that, we risk replacing everything we used to love with hollow convenience.

Then there is also this culture that just blames the individual if they are not "successful", completely disregarding the fact that the environment they grew up in is a very important factor. And I'm not saying this to remove accountability from the individual, but to point out that it indeed can be the case, that the environment isn't fertile for growth.
It's also harder to commit to something when the environment is unstable and you need flexibility.
But if no one commits to anything, the environment only becomes more unstable.
These are global issues nowadays.

This channel has been here for more than 13 years now. It's nice to return to it once in a while, to see what it once was. Something relatively stable, in the chaos that life can be.
While it would have been nice to see it flourish even more, at the same time it's sort of liberating, to see it wither.
Because I am not this channel, not the videos, not even these words.
But there is still one "atomic b*mb" of a video I would like to see the impact of.
If you’ve been here long enough, you know what I mean.

Anyway.

Technical details:
The visuals are made with OpenGL and Python. It's essentially a 3D audio-spectrum visualizer.
You give the program the audio track and it generates the video. No blender used this time.
I've never talked about it here, but I already had experience with OpenGL and C++ (and C#).
For instance, I co-led the development of a 2D CAD-style drawing application for a university project 5 years ago, where you could draw geometric primitives (lines, polygons, arcs, Bézier curves, etc.). But this was quite simpler, especially now that you can use AI.
There are two versions of the visualizer in the video, the 1st one which renders on the CPU, and then the 2nd one which renders on the GPU and is much faster, even if it looks more dense. Throughout the video, I often fade between the two or overlay them.
The spectrum begins from the lower frequencies, like 30 Hz, close to the camera and gets up to 20 kHz in the distance, the color of the sound-waves changes depending on their amplitude, and then, for aesthetic and practical reasons, the waves get exponentially more sensitive the more distant they are. This is why you can see "muted-color mountains" in the distance, while the louder waves near the camera turn red without going off-frame.

That's all. See you, and good luck surviving this hell of a world.
(...don't mind my 6.66K subscribers)

https://danixks.bandcamp.com/track/43...