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I'm trying out a new blogging workflow (blog-flow?) where instead of using Camus I just write in TeXmacs; I was working on a book on digital circuits a month before using TeXmacs; it feels way nicer than writing raw LaTeX.
Now you might (or might not, depending on how much you care) ask, even if I were to ditch Camus, why TeXmacs instead of using something new like typst or go back to Emacs org-mode? I don't know; maybe after 4 years of professional work in the software industry I come to absolutely hate any new text-based markup language.
I write my short novels almost exclusively in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Onenote; maybe one day I'll fall even further back onto that.
I normally don't talk about things like this on the main site (they are on my other website Cloudbusting) but I think anyone who still comes to this site deserves an explanation why there haven't been any tech-related blog post in the past couple months. I promise there will be a new one after a month or two.
I moved to my current place in March.
I move places a lot - up till now I've stayed in Shenzhen for four and a half years and I've lived in 5 different places. It really is quite a stressful experience because everything you're familiar with has to crumble into dusts and you have to be familiar with a whole new sort of things as soon as possible.
Yep, postmortem... as a personal moniker it lives, but as a group it's dead now.
The thing is, I did not get involved with it; I created it. For people who don't know, FCAC stands for Fluxus Cantonia Art Collective which, despite its obvious inclination of separatist politics from the usage of the word “Cantonia”, really was an attempt to have some kind of artist group akin to The Art Guys at its conception; of course the purpose of the group had taken a much more political side but at the beginning I was really only going to do some silly stuff and call them “art”. Originally just called “Fluxus Cantonia”, this “art collective” business was added later to make sure people perceive us as an artist group so that it would look less suspicious - even though we do be one.
By the August of 2022 after a shower I jotted down the first version of the manifesto, in full caps:
FLUXUS CANTONIA MANIFESTO
CONSTANT [CRITIQUES & OPPOSITION] OF STATUS QUO.
MORE RADICAL THAN RADICALS.
HOT. SPICY. EXTREME TO THE LEVEL OF TERRORISTS.
RE-INITIALIZE CANTONIAN CULTURE INTO EVERY-DAY LIVES.
(cantonian adj. “of Cantonia” “南粵的"; not specifying the Cantonese ethnic group “廣府的", “廣府人的"; )
BRING REAL MODERNITY ONTO THE LAND OF CANTONIA; IN THE FORM OF BOTH MODERNITY AND THE CRITIQUES OF MODERNITY.
2022.8.21
As I'm writing this blog post I couldn't find the original piece of paper; I probably have lost it during the move and it was probably buried somewhere along with other trash. The word “cantopunk” was also conceived to be some kind of tag you can tag yourself - not so much in the aesthetic sense but in the “group of people” sense like how the word “cyberpunk” in the show Cyberpunk: Edgerunners refers to a group of people rather than the overall aesthetics. The idea of the word is to establish a new concept of “oh they are not Chinese; they are something different” because PRC citizens oversea have been ruining their reputations further and further day by day and we absolutely need something to separate them from us in other people's eyes. Hong Kong people have the relatively-well-established tag “Hongkonger” but we don't, so I believed that we had to take a more indirect and reckless approach when telling people who we truly are by telling them not only are we different people but also the “new and cool” people.
I forgot when - must have been in early 2023 - a few websites were setup as a communication tool for fellow Cantonians still in the Mainland (or as we like to refer as, “the occupied area”); but no one contacted, as things should be, because any kind of related activities can pose a serious risk on your life in this hell of a place (for those saying it's only a risk because we were anti-government - you're wrong, it's not, it's only because we were trying to gather on our own - people have been punished for much more innocent things like organizing a local dragon boat race).
After this massive failure we've been losing steam and there isn't really anything to do except for actually making art - we've got no money that we can spend on things that have no short-term return, so we decided to stop the activities in Mainland for good (in March originally; posponed to May 1st). I get to keep the name and Setsuna K went on to do something else.
Would I've been any safer after I've confessed everything I know? Probably not; Do I regret wasting my time on this? Definitely not - I've made a wrong judgement (not related to this whole FCAC business) about the political atmosphere, I would've suffer from my mistake regardless.
TL;DR: So what is this FCAC thing? It's a thing I'm a part of within the past 10 months and now it's disbanded and it's now only a name I use and I'm no longer associated with the old FCAC.
I absolutely hate AI, not because the tech is wack or anything, it's because with the advent of AI most of us will suffer except for those in the big AI companies or the small AI startups who are trying to score a crumb or two from the big ones' mouths - it's just not a good sight. I was not in a good mood at all during the recent months, going like “really? I've learned this shit for years and in the end this is all I got to do?” It's... humiliating, to be honest. But an AI accelerationist future is something I could get behind - I've had enough of human ruling the world.
| 2023.6.15 |