Dennis Biba

Star ratings are an attempt to translate the quality of art into a quantitative scale. They aim to create comparability between often fundamentally different artworks and thus assign them a value based on arbitrary criteria. It would often be more meaningful not to ask whether something is good or bad art, but rather what qualities make a piece of art interesting enough to engage with.

My blog posts are reasoned opinion pieces and deliberately do not meet scientific standards. Firstly, I lack the time for that, and secondly, scientific rigor in this format is not my aim. Quotations are marked as such; however, within the scope of this side project, it is currently not possible for me to compile a bibliography for every text.

Yes! Each post has a comment section. However, the comment doesn’t appear immediately; it first needs to be approved by dark forces beyond Saturn. These forces are highly biased and not well-disposed towards critical voices.

Columnist would be a more appropriate term.

If you’re reading this in English, the question is irrelevant, because English, unlike German, has undergone a language development process that makes many things easier. However, for anyone who’s interested, here’s a brief answer:

Gender-inclusive language is a highly complex topic that can be broken down into countless individual aspects. While researchers from various disciplines occasionally offer recommendations, the fundamental question of when and whether language is fair is subject to broad societal negotiation processes and therefore cannot be definitively answered empirically. However, the topic polarizes society so strongly that linguistic registers now refer more to the speakers than to those being spoken about. The decision (not) to use specific linguistic forms serves as a means of self-presentation. The fact that this blog uses the generic masculine, however, should be understood less as a self-positioning of the author within one of the two (or actually three) camps, but rather stems from a number of reasons that cannot be elaborated upon here.

Keen observers will have already noticed: Most of the images on this blog (in fact, all those not found on the „About“ and „Art Gallery“ pages) are products of artificial intelligence, allowing the author’s natural stupidity to fully unfold in the texts. The motif of the library, which could have come from a science fiction, horror, or fantasy story, naturally refers on the one hand to the books reviewed here and the attempt to establish a small but, in the truest sense of the word, fantastic archive in the long term; on the other hand, it serves as a reminder that even speaking about stories always takes place in the form of stories. And therein lies—as the sacred architecture suggests—something sublime, for humanity has little more than this to offer its repeatedly wounded ego.

This is a science fiction blog. What did you expect? AI, in its current form, has many problems, such as its energy consumption, theft of art, susceptibility to errors, and the policies of the companies behind it. On the other hand, hardly any of the arguments stand up to critical scrutiny: Energy consumption is highly dependent on the type and frequency of use, copyright debates are being exploited, and blaming users for the policies of companies benefits the criticized companies the most. A complete boycott of AI technology is often based more on technophobia and is hardly effective, especially since it overlooks how widespread AI already is. Some images on this blog were created with the WordPress image generation plugin. However, the paintings in the art gallery and all texts are purely human creations. Translation software may be used for the English translation of the texts.