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
I've been doing a lot of research about how to make an ideal OS of sorts and am getting excited to perhaps try to build a more minimal distribution from the ground-up, learning a lot and almost certainly getting frustrated in the process. However, I am also becoming aware of the danger this presents. I fear getting to the point where I never actually work on anything of substance and just spend all my time trying to find more and more ideal programs and workspaces to use. That is, to become obsessed with the tools instead of the creating itself. So I figure when I start this I should force myself to work at least a bit on writing, video-making, or something else "real" first xD. Even if it's just a silly update like this. Maximizing privacy is sort of the same story. Even though it feels like you should make sure you have good opsec before anything, the whole rabbit hole that opens up of maximizing your privacy and so on is pretty overwhelming.
I started trying to edit some of my HTML on Vim. I like a lot of things about it. But I would need to explore the commands more to be ready to fully transition to using it for all my needs instead of Geany. For now, I like the idea of sometimes using Vim for simple .txt files and other things like that. Neovim supports Emmet unlike Geany, which seems nice for HTML use. This seems like the only thing that would tempt me to move away in the near future.
In other news, I turned 31 two days ago. I didn't feel much change at 30 and I feel even less change now. I wouldn't say I "hate" getting older and being reminded of my birthday as much as some do, but I feel like this isn't the kind of birthday that means much. I think 30 was the last one that really felt like it means something. I probably won't have one that feels similarly substantial until I turn 50. In China, 60 is the most important age as it means you made it through a full cycle of both sides of the stem-branches associated with the Zodiac, Yin/Yang, and earthly elements. It means you are becoming old and withered in either case.
In other news, I've been rewatching an old anime which is one of my favorites called Cyberteam in Akihabara. It's perfect late 90s otaku excess: full of cute girls with the most huge, moe-laden eyes you've ever seen, toys and collectable gadgets being a main theme, idols, henshin superhero shit, and about halfway through everything is clarified to be part of an unbelievably ridiculous plot that is the chuuni-est shit I've ever seen. I'm forcing my friends to watch it and loving their confusion and frustration with the pure nonsense on screen. Meanwhile I'm just shrieking and giggling and having a blast with how moe-tastic it is. Watch this shit please.
Hi there. I'm not deleting Discord any time soon... unfortunately. I need it to keep in touch with a few important IRL friends. But I don't want to use this disgusting excuse of a platform any more than I have to. So I will be removing references to my Discord account from this site and no longer encouraging people to reach out to me there. Fuck Discord.
If you have me already added on Discord, don't worry, I'll still talk to you there. I just want to minimize the number of new acquaintances I have through it so I can be less dependent on it. I would be happier if you reached out to me using one of these superior methods (I have them on like three other pages on this site already including the front page, but fuck it):
Email me: pantsuprophet@disroot.org
Add me on an XMPP client: amlux@xmpp.earth
Add me on a Matrix client: @amlux:matrix.org
Anyway, I've been quite busy for reasons I don't exactly wish to get into, but in all likelihood updates will be more frequent and thorough in another week or so. I've made some quite nice progress on a major philosophy work which will eventually become a video lecture like my ones on Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But I wanted to experiment with first posting it here in a text format. I'm pretty happy with the videos I've made on my YouTube channel related to philosophy and do think that they make a lot of the points easier to follow with all the illustrations/notes on screen, so I want to keep them close to the site. I'm going to eventually try to set up a PeerTube instance for that purpose I believe, although I'll wait until I have this new video completed first.
I've updated my ATLAS section, with some big help from a friend in creating an interactive map thing. I've finished making some little maps for the China section and hope to do the same for Japan before long. I started with China because I had less stuff in it so it would be easier... Ideally it would be cool if you could zoom in on the image and see all this stuff in one place, but I also don't mind it spread out. I might have to make different pages aobut history, about religion, etc. and could see this section expanding to be about more than just maps. I'm even considering using some software like DokuWiki and converting it into a little wiki of its own. But I'm still up in the air about it.
Because I can't work for too long without having to go back to being a ricingfag and fapping over my neofetch screenshots, I've thought a bit about tinkering with my environment on this laptop more. In theory at least I like the idea of having a distribution on this computer which is completely minimal to the point where I've set up everything on it, even if that means copying commands from a YouTube tutorial! I guess it's just a symptom of distrohopping disease though. I use Mint right now and I'm quite pleased with it. I've been purging a bunch of the Mint software suite and really there's nothing too different between having the full system and stripping everything down versus building it from the ground-up, now is there? I guess I'm just addicted to that feeling of "OMG look at this 1 MB being taken up by this default image viewer!!! Now my computer is 1 MB more efficient and in my control and I deleted everything from the command line like a true hax0r!!!!" Well, I guess there's not much harm in enjoying playing with software toys as long as you don't start thinking you're a genius too quickly...
Still, since I have a Linux Mint installation on my desktop which I back everything up to, I guess there's never any harm in backing up everything and using this laptop as a playground of sorts if I want to experiment with installing Arch Linux. One thing I would really like to eventually have is a setting where I could swap the locale language very quickly, with a tiny command. I have my locale language set to Japanese because it helps to reinforce fluency, but for the sake of looking through man pages and other command-line intensive shit it helps to remove even that extra layer of second-language uncertainty. Not sure if something like this would be possible but it would be awesome if it was. I'll have to report back. Anyway, I promise I won't sacrifice working on real projects for the sake of /r/unixporn updoots, don't worry.
Hi all! I haven't been very present recently. I'm doing some personal things for the next couple weeks and may not have as much time for writing and working on projects for this site, or even for playing games. However, I am still here and slowly chipping away at my writings. I have a never-ending list of to-do projects in calcurse and right now have been working a bit on an essay which is more off-the-cuff where I talk a bit about old vs. new nerd culture and to what degree my obsessions are based around "nostalgia." I also have been reading quite a bit and finished a book by Judea Pearl called The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. I can't say I was totally blown away by it, but it was in part because a lot of it went over my head. It basically talked about models of cause and effect used in statistics. It was pretty dry but the main takeaway points were about implications for artificial intelligence which made it more interesting.
Thank you for your continued patronage. I will be sure to post some more soon with some reflections that people will hopefully find interesting.
As per the last update, dwm proved to be a bit too much for a GNU/Linux n00b like me. I love everything about it in theory, but the config file was far more opaque and difficult to understand than I was ready to work with at the moment. I would love to move to it someday, but not yet. However, after touching it, I just couldn't go back to Cinnamon or any other normie window manager. So I decided to set up i3 instead. I love it. The only thing I can't set up in it that dwm has is gaps between windows (I didn't feel like starting over with i3-gaps). I guess ideally there would be more space between windows, but then again I don't have a massive screen on this laptop, so the real estate is appreciated.
After a decent amount of tinkering, I got just about all the programs working with i3 and I'm in love with the way it looks and feels. It's like I'm looking for excuses to use this laptop now. Of course, it was a pretty difficult experience for a total programming/CS babby like me to set up everything. Tons of breaking the .conf file and frantically looking up Arch Wiki pages and YouTube tutorials to figure out how to get things back in order. I didn't do too much crazy "ricing," mostly because a lot of the fully "riced" setups just look like the gay MacOS/Windows bloat that I use GNU/Linux to get away from in the first place! But I did the following:
＊Replaced dmenu with Rofi (lots of programs I couldn't find by searching in dmenu, so I needed to have drun as an option... because I'm still a pussy weaning myself off of the Windows Start Menu)
＊Used picom to set windows to be transparent. Right now I'm running 90% opacity for active windows and 80% for inactive. Not interested in any stupid animations. Not interested in blur effects either. But it's important to see my desktop when I'm using a tiled manager. As usual, I have a bunch of Arcana Heart 3 wallpapers on rotation. Speaking of which...
＊Wrote a systemd timer to shuffle my desktop backgrounds, like the slideshow option you find on normie stuff like Cinnamon or Windows. This is an incredibly easy thing to program, but for a complete beginner like me it felt extremely satisfying to implement. I can't tell you how it felt when I wrote my first script (by which I mean copied 90% of it from a YouTube tutorial), ran it from the command line, and saw the background change! Someday I might have to do something similar for creating weather widgets or whatnot.
Anyway, here's what my desktop looks like right now:
I'm excited to start writing and researching for website articles on my new workspace. I've been setting up a physical "study" in my apartment as well and I love the way it feels: alone at a desk, entombed by books, like a mad philosopher of old! Now that I have the electronic workspace pretty much perfect, I'm going to work on the physical aspect, and of course continue working on some of the projects I have in progress (some of which you can see a preview of in the screenshot).
In the endless quest to optimize my workflow instead of just, you know, WORKING, I installed dwm and set it up as a desktop environment to use in place of Cinnamon. Luckily I am able to keep both present on the same laptop and simply choose between them on startup, which is good because I messed around with dwm and found myself to have perhaps bitten off a bit more than I could chew. I got interested in dwm because I love tiling managers and love the idea of opening windows and having them automatically tile and adjust. Now, I'm sure there's a way to set this up to work with gTile, my current extension on Mint, but I figured I'd try the one all the cool kids recommend. Since I downloaded a wonderfully tiny little file manager called nnn, I've replaced most of the time I spend opening windows and clicking through folders with loading commands through the terminal, and I like the way it feels. So I would be fine with generally steering my computer usage in that way.
dwm is... interesting. I immediately opened it up and was able to open some of the programs I most wanted to and loved the way it was operating, but also had trouble opening some other programs for some reason. I think it will require a lot of time tinkering with this environment before I feel comfortable with it, even though I love everything about it in theory.
As another update, I've grown out a bit of a goatee. It's not fully connected yet. Just a bit of beard and mustache. I've never tried growing out facial hair before, but I think it's a good look for me. My hairline isn't what it used to be and having some more hair on my face helps cope with that. Also, I have a slight reddish tint to my facial hair which I think looks cool. Muh Irish roots show themselves at least a bit! I bought a tiny pair of scissors and am trimming my beard and mustache and I guess I'm finding it... fun? I never used to understand being so interested in fashion and vain shit like that, but I somewhat enjoy tending to the garden that is my face in this manner. I've planned to at least keep it until the end of June and see how much I like it or not.
For a while I've been using a very old MacBook that I got as a hand-me-down from my dad, because he is unfortunately a slave of Apple and their obsolescence treadmill horseshit. I use it as a second monitor when gaming and when I need to write in bed. I've been doing a lot of the latter, however, and since that MacBook is unlikely to last much longer, I decided to invest in a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad and install Linux Mint on it. Now, I'd already been using Mint as along with Windows 10 in a Dual Boot and trying to slowly make Mint my main operating system. But it's proved harder than I thought it would be to get all the games I want working on it. Of course, it's such an improvement for lots of other reasons that I try to still use it for most other things, including all the time I spend writing. I'm going to try to turn this laptop (writing on it now...) into my "work" computer (if all my website business could be called work, which is suspicious!) and use the desktop PC I have almost like a game console. At least that's the ideal until I can get everything working on Linux. I really don't want to upgrade to Windows 11 later this year, but I might have to find an alternate version of 10 to keep alive or just try to make 11 as anti-shitty as possible. I have a friend who's had great success with that.
Here are some things that I have tweaked/upgraded on my laptop version of Mint, many of which I am quite stoked about:
＊I started to use a tiled window manager (gTile) and I FUCKING LOVE IT!!! I feel like I've tried to make my own version of this for years and it was always messy and cluttered, but this feels incredible! I've heard there are better managers than gTile, but I use Cinnamon as an environment, which seems like it has limited options. Maybe a good impetus to switch distros eventually? The one thing I want to do most is to make my windows more transparent, especially my text editor and eventually terminal too I imagine as I become more used to it. I have a great desktop background (rotating ones of all the characters from Arcana Heart 3) and it's a shame not to see it. Seems like Cinnamon might not help here. But maybe a bit of bash scripting (read: copying commands into terminal from the Linux Mint forums) can get me there. Eventually I would like to go all the way and start using dwm but it's a little too daunting for me right now...
＊I started using zathura to read PDFs. I can't tell you how in love I am with this program. The sheer fact that you can put PDFs into a "dark mode" with a mere Ctrl+R is a dream come true on my weary eyes. It took a bit for me to set up though, and I feel like it might be a big "gateway" of sorts. For one thing, it was the first program where I've had to write the .config file myself to change things (it starts out in a very tiny-sized window and I got sick of resizing it). It felt cool! Also, the program uses Vim-like commands to move around with basically no buttons or much of a GUI at all. It's taking a bit to get used to but I love not having to use the mouse as much. I don't know if I'm ready to throw out Geany and start writing everything for my site in Vim yet, but I can see the appeal.
＊On that note, I have an extension which lets me switch between active windows with Super(Windows)+Alt and the arrow keys now, which I love to death. Amazing how much time this saves.
＊I switched from FireFox to LibreWolf. Granted, I had FireFox tweaked enough that there isn't much difference at this point. And I've done some cuckery in LibreWolf which has reduced the point of it anyway, perhaps (namely adding some exceptions where I stay logged in, and yes they are some of the worst like YouTube but what can I say... don't want to go through 2-factor authentification every time I open the browser). I downloaded two more extensions I had on my Windows partition but not my Linux one as well: LocalCDN and ClearURLs. Both are basically aimed around reducing tracking.
＊I made my main image viewer a little program called sxiv. Thanks to Luke Smith for this one as he had a good video on it. Luke is so much more enjoyable when giving these kinds of tutorials instead of his no fun allowed Orthodox BS. Anyway sxiv is great. Super lightweight and straightforward. I'm also trying to get its fork, nsxiv, to work but it's proving a little complicated for my GUI-addled brain.
Looking forward to using this computer more and more for updating this site and generally anything I can. May all my games work better on Linux someday! (It's just a shame that one of the ones that had to fuck up on Linux was Touhou Bunkachou 〜 Shoot the Bullet... If I can't have that one work I won't feel complete).
Yesterday I rewatched a film I hadn't seen in some 15 years: Code 46 by Michael Winterbottom. I remember liking it decently when I first saw it, but now I really appreciate it a lot more because I'm in a better position to appreciate the philosophical implications of it. For those who haven't heard of it, the film is set in the year 2077 and presents a quite frightening, though perhaps plausible, view of the future: Humanity is sharply divided between those on the "outside," who live in the wilderness, where most of the world is a vast and uninhabitable desert and those who live on the "inside" in giant mega-cities with strict barriers. In the future, the world is so interconnected that racial and linguistic demographics barely exist. Most of the film is set in Shanghai, but the people there are a mix of Asians, Middle Easterners, Indians, Hispanics, etc. They all speak a kind of pidgin of the major global languages like English, Spanish, Chinese, French, etc. Because of this interconnectedness as well as the omnipresence of cloning, genetic splicing, and in vitro fertilisation, traditional genetic lineages have been obscured and it has become increasingly likely to "accidentally" have sex with someone who you are genetically related to. To preserve the quality of the human gene pool, all sexual encounters that haven't been verified and approved by the government are illegal, with mandatory abortions as part of the punishment.
At the end of the day, the film depicts a love story, and an unexpected one. I don't want to give away more of the plot than is necessary, but the film is exceptional at its storytelling. Sometimes the "lore" gets spelled out in a way that's a little confusing and you need to watch it unfold to understand everything about the setting, but at least they didn't clumsily have to do a bunch of infodumping. On top of that, it's just a beautiful film in terms of visuals, music, etc. It's a great depiction of warmth in an extremely cold, sterile, dark, and ugly world. As far as a depiction of the future, there is definitely more that feels believable rather than fantastic, although a few things do show its age. Its depiction of a world destroyed by global heating is pretty simplistic: everything has become a desert. Of course, that's not how heating will play out all over the world. Some places will become more humid and rainy, for example. Also, some of the technology seems very clear that this was from 2003. All the phone calls show peoples' faces like a kind of Skype or FaceTime, but a lot of people didn't realize that we probably wouldn't want to have our face shown at all times and that this would only be widespread for stuff like meetings, not for simple calls.
All in all, it's a very thoughtful film which I think more people should watch and know about. I sought it out again because I've been doing some research on genetics and the strange future we will see with it when gene splicing becomes more widespread and contentious. I have my fingers in a lot of pies right now, including scripting a new YouTube philosophy lecture, writing more in MY LIFE STORY, and doing research for a sweeping re-write of a lot of my FOUR PILLARS section. In the FOUR PILLARS section on REVERENCE OF NATURE, I would especially like to come back to the problem of "Enframing" which Martin Heidegger sketched out: the way that in modern revealing, everything in nature comes to appear as nothing but standing-reserve. I think that the future of transhumanism and artificial intelligence have the potential to exacerbate Enframing on a level we've never seen and I want to write some about how to deal with and prepare for that. I've always had a side of me which is sympathetic to the idea of a sort of voluntary, consensual eugenics (vaccines are eugenics when you get down to it), but I do see some dangers and fears over a future where the human genetic code is so open and up for grabs.
So yeah, watch Code 46. More people should see it and think about its implications. It touches on elements of dystopia that I haven't really seen get expressed in any other story.
I've been reading a lot these last few weeks. And there's a reason for it. I've considered a major rewrite of my FOUR PILLARS, and one that might take a long time. I think a lot of it needs to be updated and revised. Part of me feels as though doing so might be biting off a bit more than I can chew. It might be overweening and too ambitious of me to make a huge, unified work that touches on just about everything I advocate for and am interested in rather than writing piecemeal about each one. But it's the way I think. I cannot talk about any one of those pillars without touching on the others.
If I update it, the orders of the pillars will change. I started with ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION because I was most afraid and anxious over it at the time. I still think it deserves more concern and attention than literally anything else on the planet. But I also think it's the worst-written of my pillars. I would re-order them as follows: REVERENCE OF NATURE > SOCIETAL HARMONY > FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION > ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION. These would move from the most abstract ontological foundations to the most concrete policy recommendations. I'd also like to ground a lot more of what I talk about in science, because I think it's a weak spot but that there is a lot in scientific research that can ground my views.
In research for that, I found a rather interesting lead while reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos:
The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott has performed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 preindustrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence. Even societies without notable fondling of infants develop nonviolent adults, provided sexual activity in adolescents is not repressed. Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived--during at least one of two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence--of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torturing and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Chapter XIII: "Who Speaks For Earth?"
This point would be a powerful argument for a society that is more sexually open and encourages adolescent sexuality rather than demonizing it, which would definitely be a major point in my upcoming revisions. A quick web search for this guy revealed a post on /r/atheism (yes, I know...) looking for the study and someone found this site which is beautifully simple and old-fashioned: The Origins of Peace and Violence. It really sucks that the better-designed the site is these days, the more likely people (even including me) are to doubt that it is scientifically valid, because all the big institutions of science are now tied to all the other big market forces that push bloated, shitty web design.
(By the way, we need to find a way to find a simple verb for web searching. Everyone, including me, reflexively says "google it." And this is very damaging as Google is one of the worst companies in the world and nobody should use their site, especially for web searches. But it's a very short word with only a few syllables that can very efficiently become "invisible" in a sentence. I say "searched on the web" or soemthing like that but it sucks and is unwieldy. What should I say instead?)
Anyway, in the process of working from the most basic first principles in my research I've started the background for a new YouTube video on another major philosophical work. It'll probably be months, especially because I want to read some books in full to understand it. But I look forward to working on it. Also I'll have to include some parts in the new FOUR PILLARS that will piss people off because you can't write about something and really get at the truth without doing so, haha. I'm spread so thin these days...
Sometimes I go back over my FOUR PILLARS section and feel the need to rewrite some parts of it. I would say that the ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION section is probably most in need of it, because it doesn't quite land like I want it to. I tried to write that essay by asking myself "What information about global heating do people most need to hear today?" To me, the answer was not just information about the science behind the heating. Most people will admit that global temperatures are rising and have been for some time (though sadly not all... and that category includes some of the most powerful people in the world!) I did want to give a primer about the science behind the phenomenon at a level that would be comprehensible by an elementary school student, as that is about the level of scientific literacy you can expect from your average American voter. And I wanted to give a few killshot questions for those who deny the science (why does our data show the stratosphere cooling when the troposphere is warming?) In order to show why this information gets suppressed and left out so often, I wanted to show the way that large fossil fuel corporations and related industries have obscured the information and waged huge propaganda campaigns to sow seeds of doubt. I then wanted to give people some actions to do, so that I would translate this message into some kind of action instead of just having them sit and feel hopeless about the situation.
However, I feel like I come across as very naive in the essay. I'm too drunk on left-wing populist rhetoric in it and it makes me cringe. In my defense, I had just finished reading the book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which exposes some of the most disgusting and reprehensible actions of corporate entities and their lackeys. But I think that dressing up everything as the fault of "the big bad corporations" doesn't do enough to get at the heart of the issue. Corporations are egregores. They materialize from the self-interest and greed of countless diffuse parties (shareholders, CEOs, workers, etc.) And a lot of them probably know that they are engaged in evil, but that if they try to change anything, they will be fired and replaced with someone even worse. Corporations are manifestations of negative karmic energy. In short, I don't think that you can separate the responsibility of corporations from the society they grow out of.
So I would like to rewrite the essay to focus less on the "rah rah rah fuck billionaires" populist messaging. Because it sounds very soy, gay, and hypocritical. I would rather present it in a way which is much more honest and also severe. I'm not speaking at a city hall here. I have nothing to lose by telling you that if I ruled the world, we would have a global government enforce a two-child policy on the entire world and require reproduction licenses for having children until global temperatures started falling. Though I have disagreements with it, I've been very inspired by Zero Contradictions's article on the subject. I don't know. I think that civic engagement is important, but no one really has the energy to do it anymore. Most of us don't have any special attachment to where we live. I'm the same. I don't know what the answer is. Honestly, I just feel like the answer is to give money to a good advocacy group or something. It's not cool or inspiring but the nuts and bolts of societal change rarely are. So I would just rather focus on what I can talk about effectively.
I haven't updated this site in over one month as of today. It was not by choice. I was moving around a lot of stuff in my apartment and I got into a fucking mess with my internet company. I debated whether or not to name names, but I think I have to: Verizon can go eat shit. So here's what happened: When I first moved into this apartment, I had my PC in the living room and had a modem mounted on the wall along with it. Now I felt as though I wanted to open up my living room a bit to make it more of a social space so friends could come over and enjoy their time there. So I chose to move my PC into the bedroom and I called Verizon because I needed someone to come unmount the modem and move it into the bedroom. So, first problem was that the guy who came out apparently said he was only hired to "unmount" it and not to "mount" it again... Someone else would need to come hook it up in the bedroom... in a week! I tried to plug in that modem and it didn't work. Correction: WiFi did work, so I could use my laptop, but not ethernet, so I couldn't use my desktop PC. If I didn't even have WiFI, I would have actually gone insane. But that meant that I couldn't update this site, upload anything to YouTube, check XMPP or Discord, and so on. So I called to ask what I should do. They said that they had apparently took my request as terminating the modem I had and that I would have to be sent a new one and send the one I had back. WTF!
So whatever, they shipped a new modem. I tried to set that up with instructions over the phone... no connection. So apparently another guy would have to come look at the modem and see what the problem with it was... in another fucking week! So fine, whatever. He came and said that my modem was working fine, but that the internet "node" the receiver was picking up was down and that Verizon would have to reset it for me. What on earth are these incompetent fucks doing?! This was a Saturday (3 hours late to scheduled time btw). He said it would be reset on Tuesday. If it was, nothing happened. I called. They said that the node had been reset and verified that my receiver was picking up an excellent signal, but that I must have a wire issue with my modem since I still did not have internet. I was getting completely irate at this point. The truth is that I still have an appointment with them tomorrow, but now, somehow, the internet is working again. I just don't want to touch anything because it feels like their modems must be built with twigs and bubblegum at this point. So if I go dark again, you can blame Verizon and the absolute clown show they seem to view my life as.
I'm really not the type to get on my high horse and get mad at representatives from a company. I know that the vast majority of people at all companies are just people trying to make ends meet and that few of the retarded things companies do is really the fault of the people you have to deal with on an individual basis. But I've just about lost my patience with this goddamn company. If I find myself having to move and set up a new internet provider, I am not using Verizon anymore.
Okay, so a bit of an update about the time I spent off. It would have been really cool to say that I spent my time doing some intense training and finally got my Ketsui 1cc, but I did not. I have, however, gotten to the final boss on 1cc pace multiple times now. I really do feel like I've broken through a slump I was in with the game for a while. I also started playing Final Fantasy VII for something very different from what I normally play. So far I am enjoying it. The visuals are nice and the battles, if often mindless, are quality big-numbers-go-up dopamine. My biggest complaint with the game is that pretty much all the minigames and deviations from turn-based fights suck and are awful. I guess it helps to break things up, but man...
I revisited some movies as well. I watched Kiss Me Deadly by Robert Aldrich with my mom, and then again with my dad and stepmom. It really is a marvelous picture. I love how everyone in it is a crooked, corrupt bastard. And the ending is just on a whole other level... never seen anything like it in another Hollywood film of the time, or ever maybe. Everyone should watch it! I rewatched Through a Glass Darkly by Ingmar Bergman as well and found it pretty great. I always thought that the next two films in the Silence of God trilogy totally mogged it and thus didn't remember it super fondly. But it is a nice work and I feel like I've come to appreciate it more. The ending was quite touching. The scenery was nice and all but somehow I feel like it's the least visually impressive of the trilogy, even if it's on the very picturesque Fårö and the others might as well be stage plays for how few places they take place in. Oh, and I watched You, the Living by Roy Andersson for the first time. I love Songs from the Second Floor but never saw any of his other features until now. It's just as good as Songs honestly. I loved all the scenes of the jazz band.
A lot of my time off has been spent writing. I've been working a lot on the FILM INDEX on this site and am ready to post a big update to it after this update. I do love having the whole list on one page, but I feel like maybe it's getting a bit unwieldy at this point. I think I might keep one page with a full page view and then make separate pages to break it up by decade. Also, I've worked a lot on some biographical writing about my upbringing. It's pretty raw, vulnerable material to write about, but I'd like to think it has some insights about how I turned into the person I am. I just find it therapeutic to talk about I suppose. I hope it doesn't come across as narcissistic. In any case, I will be posting an update to the defunct MY LIFE STORY (IN PROGRESS) article I started a while back. Once I stopped trying to follow a strictly chronological retelling and think more in terms of themes, it felt much more free and the words just started flowing.
All of this will be uploaded soon, but, first things first, I need to play some fucking Warcraft III... it's been entirely too long!!!
Me and a friend took a bit of a jaunt out to a theater in our state that plays a lot of "arthouse" and revival stuff, and in this case I watched Possession by Andrzej Żuławski in a beautiful new restoration. I've never seen the film look so crisp and beautiful, and the power it had on the big screen was astonishing. An excellent experience. However, the audience annoyed me. They were laughing weirdly at a lot of parts. Some parts of the movie are kind of funny (scenes with Heinrich in particular), so I didn't expect them to be silent the whole time. But most of it just seemed weird.
I don't know if I'm imagining it, but it seems like in recent years when I see these "arthouse" movies (I hate the term, but to distinguish them...), people are laughing at them a lot more. It's weird. I can't proclaim to diagnose the reason, but maybe people aren't as used to watching movies alone in silence and find the experience uncomfortable, so have to react in some way and find laughter the easiest way to dispel the uncomfortable feeling. Watching a movie in a theater is a pretty intimate experience. You are alone with people focusing on the same thing and being silent for so long. There really isn't a lot like it in our modern world where everyone is isolated on their smartphones. I think it's really precious and I'd like to keep going to revivals like this for that reason. But I wish people would be more pleased being quiet and just being internally moved.
I've decided to not necessarily do a monthly "recap" any more, because I don't feel like I have as much to report in the way I used to. I am not necessarily piling up movies and anime and stuff. I move at a slower pace these days. At least I have recently. I was starting to dread making monthly reviews because it felt like more like work, and that's never a good sign. But I will try to replace that with some more free-form updates and journaling, because that is more pleasurable to me.
I have a habit of being reticent to post or express things on the internet in general because my mindset is always that the bytes of data it takes to host this stuff costs electricity and that consumes resources. If I'm just writing to get my thoughts in order, I can do that in a .txt document on my own end. And I think it actually is better than paper in some ways. Being able to quickly erase and delete things is an excellent feature of something like a word processor which is very different from paper. And in truth, it's not wholly new. In the ancient world, wax tablets were what all the poets did their messy writing on.
Anyway, right now I have been basically doing nothing but working on a large-scale philosophy lecture. I will keep it secret over what work it is, but I abandoned my last idea and am now doing another. What it is shouldn't be much of a shock, though, based on my track record (hint: it's in German). I haven't been reading, playing, or watching pretty much anything else since I started and this and won't until I finish. Of course, that's what I'm happy doing, so it's no issue.
Recently, I rewatched a movie I hadn't seen since... 2010 maybe? It's called Black Snow by Xie Fei and it's a Chinese film from 1990. I liked it a lot when I first saw it, but rewatching it made me appreciate it much more. It's about an ex-criminal who is partially literate as he was deprived of schooling during the later Cultural Revolution. You can see a China in quick cultural whiplash as it looks VERY modern and globalized, with 80s fashion and movies and music and all that. But there's a whole kind of lingering trauma in it. And a lot of the people still live in these crowded little commie hovels. It has a great tone of fatalism and anxiety towards the lurch of modern society. After having read the biography of Mao Zedong and some oral histories of the Cultural Revolution, I find this era of China at "the end of history" to be extremely fascinating. I definitely recommend watching this film if you are interested. In any case, it is a nice character-study with excellent, muted, handheld cinematography and perfectly restrained pacing and atmosphere.
I'm always late on finding out about this stuff, but it seems as though David Lynch died on January 15. If I was going to talk about my personal favorite directors, Lynch might not be at the top of the list. My view of his filmography was always a bit mixed, with some films seeming like pure works of genius and others as being merely alright. But few directors, indeed few artists period, were as important for me in coming to understand the nature of film and art itself. Lynch is up there with a few others like Edward Gorey insofar as artists go who completely defined eras of my life and taught me a lot about what it means to create.
Of course, there are a lot of ways to be creative. But for me, Lynch is one of the greatest examples of our most stereotypical images of someone "creative": someone whose head just truly seems to be a portal to a dimension that is beyond any earthly realm of comprehension and seems completely original and pure. Obviously this image is romanticized and exaggerated. Even Lynch had his fair set of prior influences. But he was the kind of artist who one is tempted to say put a lie to the idea that all artists are thieves who stand on the shoulders of giants. It is truly a sign of someone deeply in touch with and resonant towards their own mysterious inner impulses and it's something I try to learn from.
It's hard to know exactly what to say that others haven't already. Lynch always taught me that the "meaning" of a work of art is usually its least interesting part, and that we should hunger and chase after works that are infinitely challenging and mysterious and that always evade our attempts to trap them down. I also appreciate that he managed to retain this instinct so strongly even while living in the Hollywood hills and being so impossibly up to his neck in the "movie biz," with all the inhumanity that implies. My favorite works of his were always Lost Highway, INLAND EMPIRE, and the entire Twin Peaks universe, as I think these are the purest examples of it. Eraserhead is an extremely compelling alien world, but I have recently found its symbolism a little comaprably easier to understand. But when I was a young teen Eraserhead triumphed and stood tall over all other films period for me for several years, so I can't pretend that it isn't a film with a strong personal resonance and importance for me. In any case, it certainly is a sign that our world is changing very much if now we must imagine one without Lynch. I already miss him dearly, even just knowing that he was out there in the madness of it all...
The year is now 2025 by the Gregorian calendar. By the Japanese calendar, it's Reiwa 7. By the old Shintou calendar, it's 2685. This year is the Year of the Snake. The Serpent has always been one of my favorite animals in terms of symbolism. Uh... the Dog is my birth-sign, but the Serpent was my sign in Morrowind, ok?! It is unfortunate how the Serpent has become so maligned and reduced to merely a symbol of evil in many Abrahamic societies. The Snake is an important symbol of rebirth, of transformation, and of eternity. Thus, while every year is a chance for renewal and rebirth, it seems like this one especially calls for changes. I feel as though I have made dramatic progress on understanding and coming to terms with a lot of things about my life in this past year. So I feel as though I have a duty to myself and to the world to shed a lot of negative parts of myself, just as the snake sheds its skin and comes out pure and clean.
To start with, I have two important resolutions that I am placing on this site as a way to make myself hold to them and take them seriously. These are my solemn oaths:
RESOLUTION #1: I will not go to any restaurants on my own.
I have a vice of eating in restaurants a decent amount, especially after a long day of work where I don't feel like cooking. But it's a bad habit. No, I'm not going to levels of full Luke Smith autism about this. That would be an ideal, for sure, but I have to start with something more realistic. I will go to restaurants if friends or family want to go together as a sort of social event. I also sometimes go to a nearby cafe unaccompanied in order to study and put myself outside in the hope of making some friends. I usually just have a drink there, so I think this is also acceptable. However, I will not go to any restaurants by myself. All my solo eating will be what I buy and prepare myself from the grocery store. This has several benefits:
1) I will save a lot of money. I can put that money aside towards more important things, like saving up to move to somewhere else, including one that potentially might have a higher cost of living.
2) I will get better at cooking. I'm a horrible cook right now. Now, I'm not going to start by cooking everything from scratch. Microwave meals and so on will be accepted. But it is a good first step. Girls like guys who can cook, right?
3) I will have a smaller environmental footprint. I will be eating less meat and have smaller meals where I can eat only as much as I need to feel full. It's a small step since it's not like I'm going fully vegetarian or anything yet, but it is a step in the right direction.
4) I will lose weight. I tend to make better choices when I have to shop for myself. And even if I don't have the best choices in all cases, I tend to eat less during any meal when I prepare it myself rather than what I get at a restaurant.
RESOLUTION #2: I will meditate for 20 minutes everyday.
I was doing 20-minute meditations regularly in 2023 and I always was much more clear in my thoughts and positive in my emotions when I did it. It helped me through stressful and despairing times.
I must say that I have had a lot of spiritual growth in the last year, and not without bumps along the way. The greatest trouble I've always had is that I really dislike the modern "spiritual" person who basically just picks a bunch of random things from 100000 different spiritual traditions at will and creates some feel-good mush out of it. This is a deeply narcissistic form of spiritual consumerism. But what else can we do in the modern world? What is certain is that for any enlightened person, the entire world will come to be their scripture and they will learn from any source. So the best thing I can think to do to stay grounded and have the adequate attitude of a disciple is to practice what is indeed an authentic spiritual tradition near me at a Zen center.
One of the most difficult pills to swallow has been the idea that Shintou is, at least for the time being, off limits to me. Is it because of my race and is it truly impossible for a gaijin to ever practice Shintou fully? One of the most important writers, Sokyo Ono, says that pretty explicitly. He said that even Lafcadio Hearn, the gaijin who understood the Japanese spirit better than anyone else, could only ever "understand" Shintou but never really "practice" it. I'm not sure if this would read as overly old-fashioned today. I know that at least one gaijin has become an ordained Shintou kannushi in Japan. But what I do know is that even if it is possible for a gaijin to practice Shintou, I don't think it can be done when severed from the LAND of Shintou and everything physical about the religion that goes along with it
So I practice Zen Buddhism instead because it is the closest thing I can find that I have a license to be a part of. It might seem cringe in a MUH ANCESTORS way, but I think I might have to take the Varg-pill and integrate some kind of neopaganism into my life that I am authentically genetically tied to so I can have the same sort of Zen/folk religion balance that gives Japanese life such a lovely spiritual balance. Of course the sad truth is that most neopagans in the US are repulsive hamplanets with purple hair, septum piercings, 1000 tattoos, and six Free Palestine stickers all over her computer, bag, and thermos. But being part of any tradition, be it Zen or otherwise, is certainly a hundred times better than being a "spiritual" person who worships only themselves and their own ego.
A few other remarks
In general this year I want to direct my energies to people who are good and doing good things. There are a lot of evil, awful things in the world. But you influence the energy of the world by where you focus your attention. Does this mean ignoring bad things? No, that is a recipe for disaster. I think the rule of thumb I want to use is to try to talk about two good people, events, ideas, etc. for every one negative I center on. And I don't intend to focus on feel-good BS to pad that out either. I need to find people who are doing good in the most genuine, difficult ways. If there is a problem, focus on the ones helping instead of the ones causing it. Other than that I will try to read eroge everyday (It keeps my Japanese skill at a passable level) and experiment with drawing cute girls at least once a week.
The snake is a sign of infinity and the infinite possibilities of renewal. Shed your scars and wounds, and along with them your illusions, your hatreds, your fears, and your very self. I hope you all have a wonderful Year of the Snake.