TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
If I have something to say about what's going on in my life or with the site, this is where I dump off-the-cuff updates. Some of them are more serious than others.
I've been thinking a lot about a pattern that seems common in the history of thought. We tend to assume that things that are "older" are more simplistic and that our understanding only becomes deeper and more refined as it goes on. We assume that philosophy, ethics, politics, religion, etc. follows the same linear curve as science. But that is an illusion. Here are some examples of what I think are more simplistic, "mainstreamed" versions of an earlier, more rich tradition or idea that went on to become more popular than their original:
Christianity is a simpler version of Platonism (the most famous example taken from Nietzsche)
By the same measure, Platonism is a simpler version of the Presocratics (this is Heidegger's innovation of the above)
Marxism is a simpler version of Hegel
Logical positivism of Carnap etc. is a simpler version of early Wittgenstein
Sartre's existentialism is a simpler version of Heidegger's early thought
Barthes's death of the author is a simpler version of Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art"
Anarcho-primitivists like Kaczynski and Zerzan are simpler versions of Heidegger's writings on technology and Enframing (yes Heidegger is probably the biggest victim of this haha)
Ayn Rand's Objectivism is a simpler version of someone like Stirner or Nietzshce (maybe?)
It's worth remembering this in case anyone feels like skipping the earlier writers for being "antiquated." Though it can be blackpilling to see how much the greatest thinkers are quickly sapped of nuance and complexity in order to get popular.
As I've talked about before, I do most of my writing, website operation, and just daily tasks in general on a ThinkPad running Arch Linux. But I have a desktop PC which I primarily use for gaming, video editing, watching anime or movies, and so on. It dual boots Windows 10 and Linux Mint. Since normie-mode Windows 10 is reaching the end of "official" support next month, I decided to replace it with Windows 10 IoT LTSC. I'm happy to announce that I was able to do so with no problems!
For those who don't know, Windows 10 IoT LTSC is a stripped down version meant for businesses and devices that need long-term support. It has official support until 2032, which is the real reason I got it. But as a bonus, it is also comparably less bloated and full of spyware than "normal" Windows 10. Don't get me wrong, it's still Windows. Nothing could make Windows feel pleasant to use after using Arch so extensively. But I was surprised how much faster it seemed and how much more I managed to forget what operating system I was even on, which is really what an OS should do at the end of the day.
So yeah, 7 more years of trying to get all my games running on Linux Mint, in which case I can kick Microsoft to the curb once and for all! I've even considered trying to move this very Arch install to my Mint partition on the desktop, but for relibale game functionality it might be better to not use a rolling-release distro. Not that I've had any really major breakages with Arch so far, but I have only been using it for a few months after all.
If you, like me, never want to even get close to Windows 11... well, you should
really just switch to Linux. But if you also need to buy some more time, I highly
recommend IoT LTSC. Here's some guides to follow:
The Concise Windows 10 LTSC Guide
Windows/Office Installation
Guide
Also, I changed a few programs and it's really made the Windows experience even more tolerable. I use Pale Moon as a browser. It's pretty nice. I love the look of it. I switched from DaVinci Resolve to Kdenlive just because I wanted to maximize my free software use, but I still have a lot to figure out about it. I use something called SumatraPDF which looks like a bloated piece of shit compared to zathura of course but is still infinitely better than whatever the default PDF reader would be. And I use something called Nomacs for image viewing which is quite solid. It's amazing how slow and chuggy a simple image viewer can be in the defaults, but this fixes it. None of these hold a candle to alternatives you can get on Linux systems, but if you're stuck on Windows you could do a lot worse.
As you can probably tell, I gave this site some notable CSS tweaks. For one thing, I created an external CSS file for the site and linked all pages on the site to it. I thus performed my last major overhaul of all 50+ pages of the site at once. From now on if I want to change the CSS, it'll just be that one file! Although I use Geany for mass-edits in the first place and being able to open all 50+ pages and do a mass Crtl+F and Replace for all documents in session makes it very easy!
Anyway, the big changes to the CSS amount to three things:
1. All links are now blue-colored. I've realized the wisdom of even plain text
sites with no CSS at all in having colored links. It makes this site a lot more
readable and makes it clearer where new pages are on first glance. When everything
including the links are white, it's easy to kind of zone out.
2. I set a consistent size to all headers on the site. It's a default h3, but I
think it works perfectly fine.
3. I set the line-height to 1.1 instead of 1, lol. I thought the text on my site
looked a little cramped but anything more than 1.1 looked too spread out to me. So
there's a subliminal change you might have not noticed!
Also, I don't want to seem like I'm shilling, but I'm merely mentioning this for update purposes: I have a link for donations now: DĀNA. The PayPal link seems to be working now after the site took a few days to verify everything. I take Monero if you are into crypto in the meantime. I don't exactly love crypto due to its environmental footprint so I might abandon this eventually, but for now I'm considering it a necessary evil. Anyway, please only donate what you can afford if you would like to. If not, the feeling of gratitude is more than enough!
Also, I have taken down the "ATLAS" section for now because I'm working on revising
the whole thing eventually. I think I will even use DokuWiki and make it into a more
robust wiki-style area to collect knowledge, primarily about countries, traditions,
religions, history, and so on. But my main order of priority for the site right now is
the following:
1. Make written versions of my philosophy lectures to host on the site and later
reference (I just finished one for PHILOSOPHICAL
INVESTIGATIONS!)
2. Write a few more film reviews (I have like three in mind)
3. Recreate the ATLAS (or maybe call it something else since now it's not just
about geographical information)
4. Rewrite my FOUR PILLARS (I've created a big outline with some mind-mapping
software, but also feel like I need to do a lot of reading in advance. In any case, I
am working on this bit by bit.)
Hope you like the new look of the site as much as me!
Yesterday I listened to an audio recording of Christopher Hitchens's Mortality while reorganizing my bookshelves. He wrote it as he was near the end of his "battle" with terminal throat cancer. (He actually make some pretty wry observations abot the way we describe cancer and cancer alone as something we never just "have" but always "battle" with... Yet the position of being hooked up to a chemo machine certainly feels so passive and weak that the image of a "battle" starts to feel like stolen valor!) Anyway, it's a nice little book which is just a little over 100 pages. I recommend reading or listening to it, especially the version with an AI of Hitchens's voice on YouTube (as much as I normally hate AI voiceovers).
One observation in it I've been thinking about: Hitchens received a lot of religious groups offering "prayers" on his behalf when they realized he was in terminal care. You can imagine his bemusement with this. His analysis of prayer runs something like this: "The belief that the best way to honor the will of an omnipotent and all-loving deity is to bother him by telling him how he should do his job."
A very apt observation of the hypocrisy of Christian fundamentalists. But it got me thinking. This contradiction would never occur in a religious tradition that believed that gods are fallible like humans. And that was more or less the attitude that all the "pagans" had: Gods were more perfect than us, but were not "perfect" by any means. While it might seem to besmirch the honor of the gods at first glance, it is actually the opposite. It actually makes a relationship with the divine more meaningful. When people and gods have to rely on each other, the act of faith now has meaning. When a god is perfect, it ceases to be make itself available to us.
Are you using newsboat, newsraft, or some other RSS reader to help you make better use of your time spent checking your favorite sites? If not, you really should be. I can't recommend them enough. But recommending them without having my own RSS feed reeked of hypocrisy. Time to fix that:
PLOP THIS BAD BOY IN YOUR FAVORITE RSS READER
Still testing it for bugs and everything. I'm new to this technology. But you can help me! And I can help you save time by not f5-ing on my page every single day to check when updates happen.
In other news, I've applied to join a PeerTube instance which I hope to upload my videos to soon. Still waiting for moderator approval. I can then hopefully embed them on the site here. I do eventually want to have text versions of my major philosophy lectures on the site, but I have come to understand that they will be much easier to grasp in a video form. So if I can have both in one place that would be awesome. One day I want to actually make a subdomain of my site into my own PeerTube instance to become even more self-hosted, but I tried and hit critical snags even just installing the dependencies. It's how becoming a power user goes: Try to do 3 things on my computer, fail at 2 of them, then put them at the end of my to-do list to come back to later!
Where have I been the past few days? Working on a video version of the lecture on Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā that I wrote a while back. I eventually want to set up a PeerTube instance of my own to host this video and others. I will be busy with that for a while now that I have this video lecture completed. I also feel as though I can finally do some real good work on a revision of certain FOUR PILLARS points, as I have these five lectures on early/late Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Nāgārjuna complete. With those, most of the complex ideas that my worldview is based on are taken care of. Although maybe it won't truly be complete until I can do some work on Shintou, Confucianism, and Daoism. But this feels like a good time to start working on personal writing.
Right now I need to work on PeerTube configuration. I have a lot of stuff to learn so it might take some time. But it really would be ideal for me to have all my videos truly self-hosted. You never know what's going to happen to any site, especially one as sensitive to market pressures as YouTube. For all purposes, text is superior to videos in this sense, as it is easier to copy and archive. For that reason, I eventually wish to make text versions of the other big lectures, although it will be a daunting task. But I do think it's important to keep these videos around. Sad as it is to admit, the most effective way to spread any ideas is by appealing to whatever is easiest, and most people find it easier to watch a video than to read. You just have to prod them away from their comfort zone little by little.
Today I was walking home from a grocery store which is about a 10 minute walk from my house. I was carrying two somewhat heavy grocery bags in my hands. I made an effort to walk there and carry them back rather than driving as a way to get some more exercise in and help my dieting so I can lose weight (I'm still hovering at around 90 kg unfortunately so I'm trying to be more serious about it). It wasn't that bad, of course.
When I was a few blocks from my house, an older gentleman was getting out of his car. His back was pretty arched over even if he didn't look that withered or wrinkly. He asked me how far I was going and offered to drive me there since I had these heavy-looking bags. I thanked him gracioulsy but explained my plan to increase my steps in the day. I was touched by that gesture of niceness in any case.
It's worth it to remember these small gestures of kindness when you feel like the world is a cruel and scary place, as it's easy to these days.