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Stefan Laser

My blog and portfolio—a hub for research experience, social media posts, and Fujifilm photography. No cookies. 10kb. Just me navigating global economies, waste, energy, and planetary troubles. RUB Bochum, GER, with some research trips to Hanoi, VN.

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    I’m a fan (and soon co-editor) of idiosyncratic, speculative dictionaries. But what’s their story? Did it start with Serres’ “Le Trésor”? Surely not.

    More recently: “Fuel” (Pinkus) or “Anthropocene Unseen” (Anand, Howe)

    #sociology #sts #philosophy

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    Liberals from #Germany block groundbreaking #EU law. The adoption of the CSDD was just a formality. And it’s time to recognise basic human rights. So this came as a surprise. And not at all? Yet this lobbying has no clear force since many companies called for this change too. It sounds like a strange bid to gain non-existing voters.

    Listen to the recent episode of #WohlstandFürAlle: wohlstandfueralle.podigee.io/236-liefe…

    #valuechains #fairtrade

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    Chinatown KL w/ hip book store in an old cinema.

    #streetphotography #photography #malaysia

    Shelves of books in pleasantly ordered shelves from bottom to the ceiling, with stairs in between. It is the former cinema hall. Very industrial style with dirty concrete and the shelves in wood Shot on the street, vegetables in between vintage Chinese high risings. Colourful boxes Inside the cinema building but outside of the showing room, stairs up to the higher floors. It is a photo from the side, shooting along the stairs and capturing a few moving feet

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    Food for thought. Lame but 🤷🏻‍♂️.

    #Malaysia—a food paradise. Love the streets.

    Before our lunar new year visit, I read about the country and how it outplayed #Vietnam re chips. The infrastructure: on another level. The poverty: not so much?

    #photography

    Food from every corner, and beer vendors in the middle. A colourful local market with lots of people sitting around many small tables. Rather simple setup, bright lights, a few red new year lanterns hanging from the roof There's even a Vietnamese pho place, beef scoop, what else. (Only a handful of the 20 shops have veg options). This image is shot through a chair that works as a frameMobile phone repair shop in front of a socialist housing high rise, with a large Apple logo on the front Social housing, I suppose, a yellow high building with 20-something stories, a few ACs and TV antennas attached. Not in good shape

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    JNU in Delhi was a place to discuss and breathe. I experienced it in 2012. But Modi.

    www.nytimes.com/2024/02/1…

    Bonus: campus art. www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2…

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    #KL vibe.

    Lunar new year down south. Probing a (physical) filter at noon w/ harsh light conditions.

    A place that smells like sambal and dhal, and where the SkyTrain cuts the horizon in half. Sure,

    #kualalumpur #malaysia #sea #streetphotography

    A man walking with many layers of high rising buildings behind him, including a TV tower. Blue sky Just an apartment complex with some nice textureNew year decoration balloons zig-zagging left and right between two large residential houses, and yet another one behind. Lovely brick walls to the right Close up of street food on KL's food street. Many aluminium baskets filled up, some eggplant in the front, a woman in the middle doing some cooking. Good job

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    “Someone has to suffer, the writer or the reader. But the reader doesn’t want to.” (And thus quits.)

    I’m re-reading the notorious German grandmaster Wolf Schneider. Precise language can achieve a lot. Yet it’s tough to cultivate.

    #academicchatter #sociology #sts

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    A linkdump on hot climate events, web scams, and Vietnam greeting the dragon

    Starting off with an odd one: Big Oil apparently funded climate science since the early 1950s. And it was Keeling himself at the centre. Think Keeling curves and long-term CO2 measurements. But it sounds like a different time. Less evil still, so that Keeling could use this funding for the good. Part of this story is that differences between air pollution and CO2 emissions were much less clear. www.desmog.com/2024/01/3… Newly discovered documents affirm that the automobile and petroleum industries funded early climate science Keeling conducted at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) between 1954 and 1956.

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    New year celebrations.

    #Hanoi is full of flowers and colours. Usually there is a grey filter on top. But we had a sunny day!

    Just a few more days until the moon has turned.

    #streetphotography #vietnam

    Nicely sorted scented candles in different shades of red against the backdrop of street art in a famous Hanoi walking street. (Well, there are still motorbikes creeping around which makes it a hustle.)A mother wearing a mask and her child in front of colourful Tet decoration. It's the year of the dragon, expect it to be a fireTết deco means Kumquat tree which means prosperity. They spend their cute orange fruits just before text. In the background is an entrance to a white mosque. Not a common site by any means

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    Flipping things over sounds reasonable.

    RT social.tchncs.de/@stefanla…

    #photography

    Upside down shot from an earlier post. Turning around a lake/sky pic works surprisingly well. A dull scene suddenly turns interesting.&10;&10;Anyways, clean air for all!
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    Particles.

    The energy sending them afar is here. And it’s not. People see the burning. But they cannot fathom the coal plants, close, far.

    How many particles can power plants send travelling? How can you know? You.

    #photography #airpollution #vietnam

    The west Lake in Hanoi in the afternoon. There's construction in the lake thus a bit of sand floating around. Most strikingly, it's foggy. A lot. Just a grey sight. There's a rusty pole on the left, because rust gives a nice aura The view of the red river (and delta) from the highway bridge. Again, foggy. Sky and water merge. There's a boat floating, carrying sand of sorts Close to the lake, someone burns residual plant waste. You see the smoke rising. This is actually a waste reserve pumped empty for construction. Anyways, burning is forbidden but no one implements that kind of regulation. It's a nuisance but not the core reason.

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    A linkdump that explores the lovely new web, the Vietnamese chip news cycle, and ambivalent ecological developments

    “Where have all the websites gone?” is the question posed by blogger Jason. And he sends us a link with a marvellous list. Let’s go down this path. It’s a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something’s missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web?

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    “The making of critical data center studies,” Dustin Edwards, Zane Griffin Talley Cooper and Mél Hogan have finally published their piece in Convergence. Countering Truth made by Big Tech.

    journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.11…

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    Twisted.

    Tết, lunar new year, is almost there. And everyone’s busy heading out of town. Or is it just the daily rush?

    #vietnam #streetphotography #traffic

    Shot from a bridge above traffic. There's a spherical glass on the left which shows the reflection of palm trees. It's a contrast to the (blurred) cars and busses and motorbikes on the street
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    Proud smoker. Indeed, the men love to smoke.

    Shot through two wine bottles and a window. Layered #streetphotography. But this is also an admiration of architecture and alleys in #Hanoi. So many cozy sightings.

    #vietnam #photography

    A man smoking on a balcony, in the midst of greenery. The wall behind him is white and has a nice texture. The wall below, under the balcony, is made out of red-ish bricks. The entire picture is framed by two shadows from bottles, left and right.
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    I’m a satisfied reader of Dominic Boyer’s new book “No More Fossils.” What a splendid excercise in energy thinking. And just today, Dominic and Cymene published an episode of my favourite academic podcast discussing this very book w/ Cara Daggett. Cultures of Energy ftw.

    The book is open access, and so is the podcast.

    www.upress.umn.edu/book-divi… podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0…

    #energy #humanities #sts #sociology

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    Talking blogs.

    I got many fluffy podcasts by asking on social media, so here’s the blog question. What do you follow? I enjoy my RSS reader setup (miniflux btw) and seek diversity. 🙏

    #tech #ecology #sociology #criticalthinking #asia #feminism #sts #photography, that kind of thing.

    From pluralistics and kottke to grist and rest of the world.

    Attached, a recent shot from a coffee place I like 🌄

    A minimalist stairway in washed white is in focus, while there's a little bit of coffee house chairs on the left in a separate room, and on the right, where the stairway goes up, there's a round peel hole with coffee decorations in sight
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    Still a smart low-tech invention, the dumpster.

    #waste #vietnam #streetphotography

    A green waste container filled up and waiting for treatment stands proud on the curbside, with sweet sun coming from behind. Golden hour
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    Conducting.

    And an update on my recent blog post featuring repair, air purity, and a bit of Taiwan.

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    stefanlaser.net/2024/01/1…

    #photography #trains #landscape #vietnam

    A Vietnamese train maintenance guy waiving a yellow flag, he just stood up from a red plastic chair he apparently was sitting on. He's got a nice hat Looking at an approaching train through the window of another train, the tracks in front The sea shot from above through trees, or, from the railway tracks. There's a ship floating around and cables near the line

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    A link dump featuring: Public decay

    Picture me as A Person Who Stares At Infrastructures, focusing on anything to do with repair, a lot of tech, low-carbon experiments, and a bias towards Asia-Pacific. #linkdump #vietnam #taiwan #Asia #tech #sts 👇🏼 Let me know what you think of such a dump. I’m sitting in front of a screen in the capital of Vietnam, and we’ve seen some curious trouble recently. We, meaning: the caste of expats. There have been rumours of the most important man, the general secretary of the CPV, being sick.

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