UPDATES

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.

2025/10/05: ELEGY FOR THE WIKIPEDIA "INFLUENCES" SECTION

I remember a while back on Wikipeida every page for a philosopher or other "thinker" would have a little section called "influences" and "influenced" under their bio, where there was a list of all the thinkers that they were influenced by and influenced in turn. I sort of understand why they removed it. Where do you draw the line and stop adding names? Is not every other thinker we read an influence on us? Do we not become influenced as much by those we disagree with as those we agree with, if not more? Do we not become influenced as much by those "boring" people in our daily lives as much as by earlier thinkers, if not more so? It's difficult to canonize these things.

But I do miss the influences/influenced section. It's nice to place a thinker in that huge nexus of relations that all thought emerges in. Even the most original thinkers in the world can only grow out of earlier influences. All "innovation" and "creation" is the re-shuffling of matter.

This sounds very self-important, but I sometimes wonder what my "influences" section would look like if I had an article. Honestly, I would never even want a Wikipedia article. I hate being spotlighted like that. But I like to wear my influences on my sleeve. Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arthur Schopenhauer, Mishima Yukio, Ilarion Merculieff, Mencius, Dougen, maybe something like that... Potential figures to investigate are Ludwig Klages, Wang Yangming, Motoori Norinaga, Nishida Kitarou, Kuki Shuuzou, John Dewey, etc.

2025/10/04: TO SPOOK OR NOT TO SPOOK

I watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the first time last night. I have to admit, I'm a pretty jaded viewer for horror, but I still found it pretty frightening. I especially liked how there wasn't really any music in the film. Even during the chase scenes, you hear nothing but screaming and the whirring of the chainsaw. That was very intense. If you're a fan of gritty old drive-in horror and somehow had never seen it (like me!), I would recommend it. I hope to watch some of my other favorite horror films this month.

I hadn't really focused on something Halloween-themed in October for years. Traditionally I've always loved Halloween, so I always associated the feeling of autumn with something eerie and frightening, which was exciting. But I did my best to "go local" when living in Japan, and Halloween is of course an American holiday. This was nice, in a way. I got to relate to autumn as a season with new eyes. I got to see it without the association of eerieness, but more with the classical Asian associations of mournfulness and contemplation. I was very thankful to experience something like this. I became opposed to celebrating Halloween while living in Japan, because I didn't want to contribute to the Americanization of everything.

However, now that I'm back in the states, circumstances are different. The sad thing is that even here, Halloween seems to disappear as a holiday as I knew it. Fewer kids trick or treat, fewer decorations are up and the ones that are up are more cutesy and corpofied. I worry about the ramifications of this. Halloween was traditionally a great way for kids to understand the fun of playing pretend. I remember being very afraid of the Scream mask as a kid when my family was giving out candy. I ran away and hid. But my mom asked the trick or treaters to raise their masks for a moment and show me that they were just people underneath. They did. I felt like this was a major educational breakthrough for me. It gave me a very healthy understanding of reality and fantasy. Halloween is a great way for kids to make these discoveries and set those boundaries. And it provides the experience of something liminal and otherworldly. I fear, especially, that conservative Christians will take advantage of this and culturally sever the "satanic" Halloween from children entirely. But no holiday can survive without the eyes of children seeing it in the purity of their imaginations!

So while I am in the states, I seek to take Halloween back as the Samhain that it originated from. This is a time of communion with spirits and a time to make offerings to protect yourself from any baleful spirits. We must keep our pagan traditions alive! And part of that is watching scary movies, as we can nullify the effect of evil spirits by watching movies about them.

2025/09/29: LIVING OUT OF TIME

I have a Kindle that I use to read EPUBs and PDFS. I first bought one when I moved to Japan, and it's been fairly handy. But recently it's started to get slow and clunky and shitty. I could blame Amazon for poor manufacutring (and I never like to avoid a chance to shit on Amazon), but I also have dropped the thing, gotten it wet, and otherwise abused it. So I bought a replacement recently. But I hadn't realized how much more evil Amazon got in that time. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

This piece of shit SHOWS ADS ON THE LOCK SCREEN. When you turned off the older Kindle, it would just be some abstract design. This thing shits ads into your eyes even when it's off. You can't have this thing near you without it raping your eyeballs full of ads. I stopped using it that minute and felt like an asshole for wasting my money on this hunk of trash. So I shoved it in a drawer and don't plan to use this thing again any time soon. I'm not going to return it because there really will probably be a time that I need to use it, but I just can't read books like this as a daily thing.

I thought I could buy a Kindle and just load it up with stuff from LibGen to avoid having to get involved in the Amazon ecosystem. But if this thing is going to be this obnoxious, it might ruin the whole prospect of doing so. Of course, the main reason I wanted a Kindle was to be able to have a near-infinite supply of books to read whenever I wanted to without breaking my budget by constantly buying them. If only there was some way to do this in person! Oh wait, that does sound familiar... maybe there was something like that. A "library?"

So I recently started using my local library again. I can even get really obscure books through inter-library loan if I need to. It's great! It's an amazing way to support local institutions which have never been more important. And it pressures me to finish books before their due dates, which means that I get a lot more reading done in general.

So that's my life these days: I rent physical books from the library, I watch videos on FreeTube by opening them in mpv with no algorithms, I play old point-and-click adventure games with my friends and other games alone with no streaming, I watch old anime and movies, I check small websites with RSS feeds, I talk to online friends on XMPP software and emails through a personal client. It feels like I'm living in the 90s and IT'S GREAT! You can't fully escape the algonet. I still have to use Zoom and Discord and other stuff like that on occasion. But you can massively cut it out if you just have the courage to walk away and find the world as it was (for the most part).

2025/09/22: MODERN CONTINENTALS ARE GAY

I was reading a description of a book by some modern continental theory guy, Byung-Chul Han by name. It says this:

For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the “inferno of the same.”

Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources--Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others.

FUCK! Why do they always do this? I don't want to hate on Han because maybe I'd actually like him. I can't know for sure. But I'm very annoyed by this writing style. Why can no modern continental philosopher make their point without referencing a bunch of random pieces of pop culture? Sometimes it can be informative to use for an illustration, but whenever I read about these continental circles they start to sound like the Nostalgia Critic of philosophy, ramming a bunch of random references in just to get your attention. I blame the Slovenian sniffler for this shit. This is why I still incline towards modern analytics despite loving Heidegger and generally being more in tune with the continental lineage pre-20th century.

2025/09/21: TEXT VERSIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURES

I have finished making text versions of all my major video lectures on philosophy:

I have video links for them, which are all uploaded on a PeerTube instance now. I think that these might be easiest to understand in video form, as I have some helpful illustrations etc. at times. But I ultimately prefer expressing myself in text over video, and I took the time to improve areas of these lectures that were either unsatisfactory or overly cluttered. But sometimes this consisted of removing some auxiliary info, and it's nice to have them in the video just in case you need more detail. Having these in text form helps a lot for review and reference. I'm scared of the way the world is right now, I won't lie. But reading Heidegger always gives me comfort and inspiration. If there is one thinker who I want to spread to everyone right now it is him.

Now that I've finished these big projects, I see myself maybe writing a few film reviews and then eventually starting some work on what might be something like a wiki for this site, with information about history, languages, cultures, religion, etc. Just a general space to dump information without giving you my opinion on it too much. Sometimes the best way you can help the world is just by presenting information. I might even merge my MONUMENT TO THE HERETICS section into that wiki eventually, as I would see this wiki as basically being a way to document historical individuals etc. like this. But I'm not sure exactly.

In other news, I removed my Goodreads profile from the front page as an active profile. I don't think it's going to be totally inactive yet, but I've stopped using the site outside of following a couple important profiles via RSS feeds. I prefer to log books in my own BOOK INDEX. In most cases I have to ask if using the site still has an advantage to me. For RateYourMusic, I still haven't transferred all my data to this site (and it will probably take me years and years to); for MyAnimeList, it's handy to keep chart of which episode I'm on and be able to look up stuff like seiyuu info; for Restart Syndrome, it's at least fun to have your name on the leaderboard (even if it's at the very bottom!). But I just don't see anything like that for Goodreads these days. Also it's owned by Scamazon, so I can feel extra nice about not using it any more. I hope to one day abandon it all and live in a utopia where I only interact with websites and never with profiles!

Speaking of Utopia, I've been listening to a few famous books in audiobook form while gaming and I listened to Thomas More's Utopia. It was interesting to read, and I definitely see how More and Eramus got along. It's always nice to return to these early humanists to remind yourself of how hard-won the fight was to prove the dignity of human curiosity, intelligence, wit, and everything else under attack today. Of course, More's Utopia has some surprisingly dystopian elements (they had slaves!). One of the worst is a puritanical fear of sex outside of marriage. But even here, More made some reasonable adjustments (you can imagine how this was inspired by a real experience or two, lmao):

In choosing their wives they use a method that would appear to us very absurd and ridiculous, but it is constantly observed among them, and is accounted perfectly consistent with wisdom. Before marriage some grave matron presents the bride, naked, whether she is a virgin or a widow, to the bridegroom, and after that some grave man presents the bridegroom, naked, to the bride. We, indeed, both laughed at this, and condemned it as very indecent. But they, on the other hand, wondered at the folly of the men of all other nations, who, if they are but to buy a horse of a small value, are so cautious that they will see every part of him, and take off both his saddle and all his other tackle, that there may be no secret ulcer hid under any of them, and that yet in the choice of a wife, on which depends the happiness or unhappiness of the rest of his life, a man should venture upon trust, and only see about a handsbreadth of the face, all the rest of the body being covered, under which may lie hid what may be contagious as well as loathsome. All men are not so wise as to choose a woman only for her good qualities, and even wise men consider the body as that which adds not a little to the mind, and it is certain there may be some such deformity covered with clothes as may totally alienate a man from his wife, when it is too late to part with her; if such a thing is discovered after marriage a man has no remedy but patience; they, therefore, think it is reasonable that there should be good provision made against such mischievous frauds.
Thomas More, Utopia [SOURCE]

Stay happy, stay peaceful, stay mindful, stay free, and stay horny in these dark times!

2025/09/14: DOWNLOAD FREETUBE AND STOP USING YOUTUBE

A lot of people on YouTube have been making a fuss about some tweak to view counts that apparently Goo-lag recently implemented. I don't know much about the details, nor do many others it seems. A part of me has a dirty accelerationist glee and hopes that they make the site so damn unusable that more and more people start to move off of it. But I've felt that way whenever they've fucked the site up before and usually people continue to take the path of least resistance, so I'm not optimistic about it.

But I've finally had enough. Of course, I speak this as someone with a YouTube channel with a lot of subscribers. I'll continue to upload to YouTube if I have videos. I receive notifications on my phone and so on for comments on my videos and I don't really mind that. So I still see those comments and I appreciate being able to read them, because I get a lot of thoughtful ones. I don't see myself abandoning that.

However, just using YouTube makes me feel like I'm losing IQ points by the second these days. It's the ugliest, sloppiest garbage shoved in your face from every corner. The greatest thing that FreeTube does is removes the optimized slop algorithm. It only displays videos from my subscriptions, with no "watch next," no "recommended" on the side, no algorithm'd suggestions up front, no garbage shorts in the search terms, etc.

Do not underestimate the importance of this. You are not as strong as you think you are at resisting the way Google has found to optimize its rape of your dopamine receptors. And I say that as someone who had lied to himself about it for so long. Just recognizing how all that shit works does not mean you are not being played by it. And I was. I now plan to use YouTube entirely on my own terms, because FreeTube at least makes YOU direct what you are looking up and why. And that is important. It's the same reason that I've recently started carrying a small notebook and doing small calculations by hand instead of with a calculator. Anything you can do to exercise your mind and take ownership of your own experience is healthy for the brain.

When I browse YouTube for slop, my focus and direction to my activity inevitably suffers. There are much better things I can do with my time. Even just playing a video game or watching anime for hours on end is an infinitely better and more valuable use of my time than almost any video on YouTube. The internet was a better place when people had to be more proactive in creating stuff on it. And I hope to do this.

I want to encourage everyone: Download FreeTube (and add me to your subscriptions ^^). You might also want to do what I do and use the Redirector add-on to block YouTube links in your browser. Don't feel like you're somehow weak for doing this. You have been psychologically mind-fucked by the MK-GOOGLE secret psyop for years and years whether you realize it or not. No one asked for this and no one is fully prepared to resist it on their own.

Btw, I would like a program like this for Twitch. But it might be a better idea to just stop watching streams on Twitch altogether...

2025/09/10: THE ILLUSION OF "PROGRESS"

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)

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.

2025/09/09: WINDOWS 10 IOT LTSC

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.

2025/09/05: CSS MAKEOVER

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.)