Author: Kamiel Choi

I am a thinker and a poet born in 1979 and I make ideas dance.
You think fingers!
When I was a boy, I took violin lessons. I remember playing Vivaldi in a room with a blue carpet and high windows. The teacher listened and made remarks, most of which to the benefit of my musical development. One time however, the teacher, a woman who must have been in her early thirties, noticed ...
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The good life
The Experience Economy
Years ago, our century had just begun, progressive voices heralded the transition from a product economy to an experience economy. Instead of selling cars, car companies told us in their advertisements that they were selling a "driving experience". Of course, we realized, the experience is everything. We go to restaurants in order to have a ...
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Essays
Consolation
This is me eventually There is comfort in the thought The slope I climbed is not a slope It is a boundless space flat without horizons Directionless, unencumbered I am here Writing old comfort on new pages
Poetry
Do you have that too, dad?
Recently, I purchased a used Konica Hexanon prime lens with an aperture of 1/1.4 and I am enjoying the amount of light that it can take in. With such apertures, the field of focus becomes very thin, and objects really stand out. Because the camera takes over some of the routine work of our eye, ...
Miru
Reading of Jeremy Rifkin: The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
When a very experienced author like Rifkin presents his ideas on how the Internet of Things changes everything, we can expect an abundance of beautifully crafted sentences. Since the mind of a budding reviewer might suffer from scarcity thereof, I have decided to quote a lot from the book. Explorations of the topic of abundance ...
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philosophy, Reviews
Collaborative Anti-Consumerism
The word "consumerism" seems to imply that the act of consuming is the essence of our being, something more profound than what existentialism or Freudianism were hinting at. I understand that pushing a shopping cart and loading it with things that we decide all by ourselves to pick from the shelves can occasionally give us ...
Essays, Resistance
And (what if) I say, that it is this culture of excessive individualism that has created the constellation where "community" is perceived as some kind of higher purpose, and our "ego" as something low, something we need to be ashamed of. If community is our true value, the individual would be celebrated as the valuable ...
Pfffrt.
[series-miru] Pfffrt. Miru is now sixteen months, and she's adorable. I think I can't find the words for it, which is a wonderful irony because she is getting more expressive every day. I've been meaning to write this for a long time, and I have the feeling it might already be outdated because Miru is ...
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Essays, Miru, The good life
Aging with you
I want to see my hair turn grey while you are smiling at me I want to sit next to the sea with you, and kiss your temples every day I want to sense the slow decay of time, behind the windows of our place I want to drink the smiles from your face and ...
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Essays, Poetry
Let’s call it a day
Suppose a respected scientific magazine would have written in October 1962 during the Cuba missile crisis, that a blow-up was inevitable, or even that the rockets were already in the air. Would the public just shrug it off and go about their business? But this is not the 1960s. In our "information" age, the intensity ...
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Essays, Resistance
Countdown from Peak Child
I watched an entertaining and instructive talk by Swedish professor Hans Rosling the other day, because YouTube recommended this video. Mr. Rosling introduced himself as a dry statistics professor but did everything humanly possible to maximize the probability of laughter he induced among his mixed audience. Watch the first few minutes of his presentation and ...
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Essays, philosophy, Resistance
Loss
I've been dreaming about loss, why? Loss of material objects that were in my possession a decade ago (such as computer disks or books), or still having to finish some exams to earn my college degree or even my high school diploma (a recurring dream I have that I'd love to look up in the ...
Essays, The good life, writing