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
2025 as come to an end. I'll add another post tomorrow on the 1st where I address my plans, prospects, resolutions, etc. for the new year. But here I just wanted to put a few reflections on the year as a kind of bow to wrap at the end.
This was a chaotic year in the "real world." I made a policy not to talk about breaking news very much. I feel like it's important for me not to add to a sensationalist news cycle that has such a bad effect on the world today. I rather seek to give people important lessons about things at a broader, philosophical level. And the truth is that I do think this helps us with the problems of our daily existence. I also think that a lot of bad political actors today are basically the equivalent of internet trolls and that paying attention to them actually helps them get exactly what they want. I can only rely on the oldest rule of the internet: Don't feed the trolls.
A lot happened to me in the real world this year, but I prefer not to get into the details here. All that's important is that I still haven't moved out of my city to somewhere more ideal. I can only hope to build enough experience and gain enough financial independence in the near-future, and next year I will continue to do so. In a world so chaotic and frightening, I don't know what to do but to try to take care of myself first. Confucius said not to stay in a state plunged in chaos, and I am trying to take his advice... but it's harder than you might expect.
I stopped keeping a log of games, movies, etc. earlier this year. I lost some entries in the game log I used to keep and just decided to stop. But I kind of miss having a log in times like this where I want to reflect on what I've experienced over the year. So I might bring back my monthly reviews, even if it's just a list of what I've read/watched/etc. that month. I have to be honest, I wanted to reflect on all the stuff I'd been watching and reading but it blends together and I can't remember what was this year and what was last year. Oh well, it's a good opportunity to start again fresh.
I made an "animutation" this year, DREAM GARDEN, and I adored the process. It really made me want to use Flash more. It feels almost like something I was destined for. I started learning and using Flash around the time YouTube was rising, meaning that I started it at a time when it was already declining as the "main thing" of the internet. So I feel like it was a tool I stopped using back in the day just as I was getting some mastery of it. However, I'm not really sure what my next animations should look like. The one I made was basically the result of harboring ideas for almost a decade. And I don't want to wait a decade for the next one, haha. I'm sure if I just keep listening to weird music I'll get more ideas in my head!
I started adding film reviews to this site this year, and I definitely want to add more. I was watching a ton of films when I was a teenager, but I think in many cases I only have the vocabulary and (cringe as it is to say this) "life experience" to appreciate many old favorites on a higher level today. Films can be a great way to illustrate important philosophical issues, historical events, and so on. I want to focus my spotlight on more and more of them in the upcoming year. I suppose I could do something similar with anime series or games, but I don't know... somehow that feels more difficult.
One thing I've done a lot more this year is engage with my YouTube channel. I hate YouTube so I feel kind of guilty about it, but it is the easiest way to get in touch with a big audience immediately. I see my YouTube channel as a good lure to bring people to the site. I also started streaming again and I'm enjoying it. I plan to do it more in the new year. I think streaming like this always improved my social skills and ability to speak publicly, so I think it's good practice. I look back on the times I was streaming and I can tell that I was a much more amiable, talkative person in real life. And I chock a lot of that up to the practice I got while streaming. But maybe I'll eventually try to branch out to another, better, smaller streaming site. Whenever I finish Higurashi no Naku Koro ni and move on to a visual novel with real H-scenes will be a good opportunity.
Well, that's about it. I'm going to spend some time with my family and try to enter the new year with some degree of dignity. Thank you all for being a part of my year and I hope you will continue to in 2026 as well!
It sounds cliche to say it this way, I suppose, but music will probably always be the best medicine for the soul. For some time I had been listening to podcasts and lectures and stuff while in the car or on the go. But I had made a mistake of depriving myself of music while in transit for far too long. It's amazing how just listening to a song can instantly improve your mental state. Here are some albums I've been relying on recently:
Devin Townsend - Physicist
I consider this his strongest album. A perfect mix of aggression and positivity.
It feels like being purified through fire or emerging on the other side of any number
of unsurmountable odds. A perfect album for realizing that you are well and truly an
adult. Songs like "Material" are so emotionally resonant. Somehow Devin hits much
better the older I get, which is the opposite of what I expected for such apparently
"angsty" music.
Blind Guardian - A Night at the Opera
This album always had an unfortunate status: It was some of Blind Guardian's
strongest material, but the production was muddy and muddled as hell. For a lot of
bands it wouldn't be the end of the world, but for a band where it's important to hear
all the delicate interplay of instruments and have the vocals clearly defined against
them like Blind Guardian it was a big problem. Power metal just generally doesn't
shine behind walls of mud in the way that black metal does. What I didn't realize was
that there was a remaster in 2017 that completely fixes these problems. And lo and
behold, the album is extraordinary! Probably the most "prog metal" that BG ever became,
but importantly still full of balls and endlessly headbang-able. That is the kind of
thing that has always set BG so far and above any other power metal band for me.
"Punishment Divine" might be their best song.
Kublai Khan - Nomad
Holy fuck, I don't know how I slept on this so much. I'd listened to it while
exercising a few times in the past, but it never really struck me. Then I had my full
attention on it blasting over my car speakers the other day and... FUCK this shit gets
me pumped! Amazing mosh music. Songs like "Belligerent" are DANGEROUS to listen to
around others. They will FORCE you to want to punch something! I'm too much of a pussy
to enter a pit at a concert, so I'll just continue spin kicking around my bedroom in
front of my anime figures.
It seems like music is the one medium where somehow I never am a victim of cynicism about the future of the medium (at least insofar as it's made by real humans and not an AI). I still love so much modern music and get excited about all kinds of stuff coming out. Especially when it comes to slam death and weird, metal-influenced rap music. But of course I revisit old favorites a lot these days too.
I started streaming myself playing vidya again. I used to stream very regularly on Twitch, but basically stopped shortly before I publicly launched this site. I just wasn't finding it as rewarding. But I have a lot of followers on YouTube now, and streaming was always most fun when there were a lot of people watching, so I wanted to take advantage of it. I had seen other channels I followed streaming and started to miss it. I'm having a great time doing it!
That said, I went through my major free software and anti-corporate internet awakening around that time, and it does feel a bit dirty to be "re-integrating" with YouTube on some level. Especially since I've gone to such efforts to give all my YouTube content a home first and foremost on this site. But what alternative is there to stream on? Twitch is arguably even worse. There are more "ideologically-aligned" (NSFW friendly) services like Joystick.tv or Pomf.tv, but it's hard to compete with having such a larger audience on YouTube and one which I already am likely to have such in common with.
So yeah, just consider this a mea culpa and recognition that I'm not exactly living up to my ideals. But I will continue to think of alternatives or at least ways to balance out my use of a shit site like YouTube. At the very least, I'll try to make sure that I update this site with a much greater frequency than streaming or making YouTube videos. I'm updating it close to every day right now and don't see myself slowing down anytime in the near future, so that shouldn't be too hard.
Lastly, I should note that I sometimes feared that streaming was a kind of black hole of narcissism which would lock you into an echo chamber. And I feared that it would make me too dependent on internet friendships at the expense of developing good ones in the real world. But I actually think that when I look back on my time streaming, I think being able to stream contributed positively to my social skills. I think I carried myself with a lot more confidence and assurance when I had to practice by streaming and speaking regularly. And I think it would be a good skill to continue developing and that streaming offers a good opportunity to do so. The real test would be using a cam and face reveal, and I don't necessarily want to rule the idea of ever doing it out. But at the moment I veto the idea. Every piece of anonymity you give up online is one you can't get back and it's best not to be too cavalier about it.
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.
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.
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).
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.”
Hot damn! This sounds up my alley! Let's finishing reading the description...
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.
I have finished making text versions of all my major video lectures on philosophy:
LUDWIG
WITTGENSTEIN EXPLAINED: TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS (1921)
LUDWIG
WITTGENSTEIN EXPLAINED: PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS (1953)
MARTIN
HEIDEGGER EXPLAINED: BEING AND TIME (1927)
MARTIN
HEIDEGGER EXPLAINED: LATER WRITINGS
NĀGĀRJUNA
EXPLAINED: MŪLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ (c. 150-250)
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!
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...
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.
I've been playing Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne online since 2021 or so. It's still one of my easiest go-to games when I need something that I can just blow off steam with. When I don't know what to play, I play a few rounds of Warcraft III. I keep a log where I chart the matchup and map of games that I win as well. Of course, I often forget to record some of these so it might be an imperfect record, but I can glean something about what my strongest and weakest matchups are and which maps I would choose if I ever played a tournament (LMAO I say that as someone with like sub-800 MMR). Anyway, no one will find this info interesting but me but here it is:
Best Matchups:
Night Elf vs. Human - 103
Night Elf vs. Orc - 67
Night Elf vs. Night Elf - 46
Night Elf vs. Undead - 43
No surprise that Night Elf claims the top four spots. And I'm not surprised that Human is my best matchup here either. When Human starts with a hero like Archmage, Mana Burn is a killer. In general I just feel like I have a decent feeling for that matchup. The rest are about what I expect, but I'm surprised Orc is the second to be honest. I remember struggling for ages to learn to defend my base against Blademaster harass. But I do feel as though I've managed to get past that purgatory. Let's continue:
Orc vs. Undead - 24
Human vs. Human - 16
Human vs. Orc - 15
Orc vs. Orc - 14
Orc vs. Human - 13
Human vs. Night Elf - 12
Orc vs. Night Elf - 12
Undead vs. Human - 11
Human vs. Undead - 10
Undead vs. Orc - 8
Undead vs. Night Elf - 8
Undead vs. Undead - 5
Also no major surprises here. It confirms more or less how I felt about myself: I'm far and away best with Night Elf, then Human and Orc I'm about tied with, and my worst race by far is Undead. Undead feels much more demanding than the others early on in terms of having a perfect build order and not losing units. Everything just feels weak as hell! But I do like Undead a lot at the same time. It might be worth it to try to just match-make as Undead for a while to try to learn the quirks of the race, feel more on my feet, get an intuitive sense of game time, etc. But it's not like I'm too worried about it either. I pretty much always play early Crypt Fiends with Death Knight into Lich into Dark Ranger or Pit Lord, so maybe learning Ghouls would pay off.
Top 10 Maps:
Last Refuge - 56
Concealed Hill - 48
Tidehunters - 43
Northern Isles - 38
Echo Isles - 31
Springtime - 28
Hammerfall - 27
Terenas Stand - 27
Shallow Grave - 24
Autumn Leaves - 20
I pretty much only play 1v1 maps, so no Turtle Rock or Twisted Meadows. Though maybe it's time to try these again. For the longest time I didn't touch them just because knowing exactly where the opponent spawns was a big help when I was first beginning and had to learn a lot about controlling my scouts. But now I see no reason why I couldn't handle them. As for the maps, there's nothing too surprising here. Whenever I think of what map if my favorite, my answer is always Tidehunters. I dunno, something about it just feels very intuitive and easily understandable. I of course love the appearance of Northern Isles most, and it's also a quite fun map. The only one here that really surprises me is Echo Isles, as I always feel like that map is a bitch and a half and that I suck at it. But the stats say otherwise I suppose.
Anyway, Warcraft III is great! If you were turned off because of the fucking-over it got with Reforged, I can't blame you. But if you have an old copy or don't mind making a bit of a deal with the devil and giving some money to Activision-Blizzard, you should download W3Champions and try. I like RTS games in general, but I have trouble making the time to play any other because Warcraft III is just too damn good... I keep telling myself I'll try to learn to play StarCraft: Brood War one of these days but realistically I'll probably just keep watching it as an e-sport and never stop playing Warcraft III, sad as it is to admit...
I finished writing a lot of words for a thorough commentary on Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (HERE), which I'm very glad to finally finish. However, I do think these philosophy lectures are best in some sort of video form. I'm working on recording audio and making slides for a video version which should hopefully be finished by the end of the month. After that, I don't see myself doing anything like this for quite some time. It feels like every time I finish one of these, I swear it's the last one I'll make, but it never really is. In about six months I'm always energized enough to do another. But I really don't know any thinkers as well as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Nāgārjuna. Maybe a big lecture about the Confucian tradition would be the only other candidate that I have a decent background in.
In any case, I look forward to finishing this lecture so I can focus on some more important logistics work: moving my videos to a PeerTube instance and integrating it with this site in order to be less dependent on YouTube. I won't be deleting anything from YouTube, of course, but I don't want to use it any more than I have to. The truth is that I really just suck at working at more than one project at a time. Before making another lecture from scratch, I would like to make text versions of the four major ones on my YouTube channel (the two Wittgenstein ones and two Heidegger ones). But I fear it might not be as simple as expected. There are some really good speech-to-text AIs for YouTube channels these days which might make things easier, but with the case of the Heidegger one at least I feel like the pictures add a lot.
I've become quite a fan of RSS feeds and have successfully set up Newsboat on my Arch Linux laptop. I love having everything I care about in one place and being able to quickly check what has updated and what hasn't. It saves me a lot of time checking random bullshit and just generally wasting time online that could be spent doing more productive things. Even watching anime or playing video games seems like a better use of my time in a lot of instances. However, there are still many sites I hold in high value that do not have working RSS feeds that I can find. Of course, mine is one of these. I really do want to get a working RSS feed for my site, but there's a lot on the inside that I don't understand about how it works. Well, RSS-Bridge seems like a good option I suppose.
Not much else to say, really. Life often feels cruel and scary. But sharing the wisdom of pilosophers with others is something that I feel gives me meaning and purpose at the very least. I hope others can get out of Nāgārjuna what I do. I go back and forth about whether to talk about issues in the world which I feel great grief and anxiety over or whether to keep this site as a place which is peaceful and tranquil like a shrine of my own. I also feel like the teaching of philosophy is my best way of advocating for what I think matters, in some sense or another.
There is never any excuse to watch an anime with a dub... yes, even if it was nostalgic to you as a kid! It is all blasphemy! Though, I can make an exception on one occasion: Watching shitty random OVAs from the 90s. I still prefer to watch it in Japanese first so I have some idea of what the original is like, but if it's a crappy enough OVA that the dub doesn't become actively offensive to your values and sense of beauty (like most dubs do), you might just stumble across some of the funniest shit you'll ever hear in your life. And I rewatched an old OVA with two friends the other day which I think is actually the worst dub I've ever heard in my life. And for that reason, one of the funniest. The OVA is called Dark Cat (1991).
I don't even know where to start about this shit. The OVA beneath the dub is pretty mediocre. I've definitely seen worse anime than this, don't get me wrong. But it's quite uneven in terms of quality. They blew their load on some stray moments of sakuga and left most of the animation to be quite average. Not Aqua Teen Hunger Force-tier like some of the worst anime out there, but nothing to write home about. The story is about two bishounen shapeshifters who turn into cats and protect this random girl who has a crush on her childhood friend. And there's some demonic creature named Jukokubo (!) who the two shapeshifters have to stop. I've seen worse. Some of the fights were pretty cool and the character designs weren't bad. But let's talk about that dub...
Sometimes when you watch one of these really shitty dubs, you can tell that whoever did the dubs back then were running some clown shoes operation that had never even heard of professional dubbing standards. Sometimes you will have cases where they just record over everything and say "fuck it" to the idea of recreating all the sound effects and music underneath. Usually this just happens in the most extreme cases. But in Dark Cat it's almost EVERY dubbed line. They take place in a complete void of uncomfortable silence because the chucklefucks who dubbed this over apparently didn't know how to extract the background noise at all, which is hilarious. They often put in some very rudimentary sound effects in once in a while, but it really is so much of a bare minimum that the silence is uncomfortable. Some fight scenes have stuff like monsters writhing and being scary and making NO NOISE AT ALL. There's even a few scenes where there are windows breaking that make NO NOISE! That's like the easiest sound to make for foley work in the world! It probably is included on the "40 Free Sound Effects" CD you bought from the dollar store xD.
I haven't even started talking about the voice "acting" here. Oh man... It's an otherworldly level of bad. The "best" voices are probably the two shapeshifters, who still have some of the most hilarious groaning sounds I've ever heard during the fight scenes. Like most of these dubs of the time, all the girls sound like valley girl bimbos from LA. But the main girl, despite supposedly being in high school, sounds like she's a 40-year-old mom who's drunk a few too many mimosas. Her friend sounds more appropriate in terms of age, but sounds like she has a mouth full of tumorous ulcers. Then there's her crush... He sounds like a football player who took a few too many hits to the head at his best... at his worst, he sounds like he has straight-up Down's syndrome and I'm not even kidding. Lastly, I have to give a special shoutout to the evil demon Jukokubo. He's not as awful as the love interest, but most of his lines are smothered in an echo voice filter that makes you have to listen carefully to what he's saying. But I have to give special attention to a line in a dramatic scene at the end where the voice actor legitimately stumbles and goes "uh... ah..." in the middle of his speech and THEY LEFT IT IN!
So yes, if you think these horrible dubs are comedic gold like I do, you have to watch Dark Cat. It's some of the funniest shit I've ever heard.
So I fell for the Arch meme. I jettisoned my Linux Mint install on my ThinkPad and installed Arch Linux. Why? Well, I like the idea of a minimal installation where there's the absolute minimum amount of stuff on it that I don't want or understand. And while Arch might be kind of "difficult," it has a hell of a lot of documentation and information. I didn't fall for the Luke meme and go for Artix and I'm glad about that.
With the excellent guides on YouTube these days, it really wasn't that hard to install from the command line, all things considered. Sure I could have used archinstall, but I found it educational to do it the more "hardcore" way. I recommend people to try it at least once. And it was rewarding. For example, I later had to troubleshoot to figure out how to mount a USB drive and copy stuff to and from it. I would have had a much harder time understanding what I was looking it via lsblk and identifying drives if I hadn't manually build them!
So far I mostly only have essentials on this computer, but I'm already loving the way it feels. I was using i3 on my Linux Mint install, but I finally made the jump to dwm and I LOVE IT!!! I was having trouble with dwm in the past because I had LibreWolf not showing up in dmenu. Not sure exactly why but maybe it was because I installed it from the snap store or something. But now it shows up perfectly and works like a dream. I really can't get over how brilliant dwm is and how much I love using it. Also I discovered how to boost audio level past 100% on this ThinkPad with something like pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ 120%, which is helpful since these ThinkPads, lovely though they are, don't have the best speakers in the world.
One thing happened which was quite scary and exposed my retardedness. I use a framework called fcitx5 to use mozc (Japanese input) on my Linux OSes. But on Arch it wasn't loading automatically and I had to manually enable it. Simple fix: add it to my .xinitrc file. Except I only put "fcitx5" and not "fcitx5 &" before "exec dwm." You can imagine what happened next: I logged into my account and saw nothing but a wallpaper and couldn't do anything... no mouse, no windows, no tabs... no dwm. So the desktop environment was completely unusable. Oh fuck. Luckily, the solution was pretty simple: Ctrl+Alt+F2 at startup screen to switch to tty2 so I could log in to a pure command-line interface and edit the .xinitrc without loading any graphical environment. What a relief! I was getting ready to start from 0 and reinstall the whole system with a USB. A good lesson to make backups of everything and be very very careful when editing such important system files.
Lots of stuff to continue setting up. But I try to set a timer for something like an hour and a half everyday so I don't forget to do other stuff that really matters more to others than making my computer sw33t and d0p3. I do think I'll eventually make a page in my BATTLESTATION section where I talk more about all the programs I use and why, just to spread the word of some excellent software that more people should know about.
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.
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 thinTHANK GOD FOR TTY2k 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.
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.