« Milarepa referred to this disruption as a great marvel, singing from his cave, “The precious pot containing my riches becomes my teacher in the very moment it breaks.”
This is the Vajrayana idea behind successive deaths and rebirths, and it is the first essential point to understand: rupture. The more we learn to recognize this sense of disruption, the more willing and able we will be to let go of this notion of an inherent reality and allow that precious pot to slip out of our hands. »
I do have a D and an E drive for the same reason. Their data are still intact; the data from the c drive have been backuped in an image but I was sloppy and the image avaliable is two months old. (Plus the hassle that Windows didn't create4 a properly working image...)
In fact, that's not the issue. I wiped the c partition accidentially while trying to reconfigure the boot loader with the help of an instruction manual that guided me through the diskpart commands in the prompt. The guide was not clear at one point and my faulty interpretation created the mess.
Anyway, the experience of the bardo (in the afterlife or in this life) is a valuable achievement in its own right. For that I give up valuable data, bookmarks, and tabs immediately
Had to reinstall my Windows c: drive. Lost a lot of data and files, texts and bookmarks, etc. Thank God! I would have carried them around forever... :-)
Many files I could restore from an image backup and I had a prior backup of all passwords and sensitive stuff. Plus the reinstall gave me the opportunity to finally change the boot system from MBR to GPT. (Thus getting Windows 22H2 and its security upodates until 2025.)
It's always a funny experience, this tension of exhaustion, relief, panic, and sadness when I lose so much (and so many) data and have to start anew.
Perhaps crashing the boot loader is merely a first step, the wiping out of the installation the closest what nerds and computer addicts can reach that may resemble the teachings of the Bardo Thödol.
Remember that death is certain. Remember that you don't know when you're going to die. Remember that no installation is permament. Contemplate death.
(People's fear of AI is the fear that impermanence will be impermanent.)
Killed my system's partition and the command prompt won't let me install the backup image. And only because I had troubles with the boot loader that I wanted to "fix". Well, boot loaders... it's always going to be a mess when you have to deal with them, and a lost weekend is assured. Guess I will have to completely "clean" the partition. Fortunately the backup image is not too old but I surely lost a lot of bookmarks and open browser tabs. <sigh>
Awfull when there is no back-up system in cases like you experience. This hotel will have gained more bad publicity over this incident for the next years than any old-fashioned way to lock and open their hotel rooms could have caused. I guess they're going out of business soon.
> I imagined Europe becoming a sort of demilitarized zone but without conflicting armies on each side of said zone.
This is a common misconception. The Treaty of Lisbon (2007) introduced a strong mutual defence obligation of all members of the EU into the Treaty of the European Union (Article 42(7)).
That was arguably too late for the Eastern European countries who joined earlier, but not for aspiring new candidates like Ukraine. (Perhaps one reason why Zelensky put aside NATO membership for now and insisted on a speedy admission to the EU.)
> ... despite NATO's clear intention never to admit them to its membership.
At the NATO summit in Bucharest 2008 Germany and France vetoed membership of Ukraine and Georgia against the insistence of the U.S. on a clear timetable for negotiations and speedy admission. Instead, both countries achieved a watered-down communiqué that vaguely granted both Ukraine and Georgia admission in some distant future. The reason, obviously, was to not rattle Russia. (And perhaps Germany and France saw themselves vindicated when in 2009, after the end of START 1, Russia declared the Budapest Memorandum to still be valid.)
> So when Finland and Sweden finally decided that the threat of invasion was greater than their longstanding neutral stances could overcome, they too applied to join NATO.
Both Finland and Sweden are members of the EU but perhaps don't put much trust in a mutual defence alliance without NATO and U.S. participation.
Didn't know Joaquim Vancells (1866 – 1942) before but a quick image search yields an impressive oeuvre. One striking aspect is how both, Vancells and Turner, focus on mist, how differently they perceive and work with it. (To Turner, mist is a medium to diffuse colours, to Vancells it's one to spread brightness and darkness.)
I'm a dishwasher, cleaner, lavatory attendant. At night the latrine faerie and I sing dirty duets. — Annotated tag list : https://gnusocial.net/conversation/7497705#notice-13090788