A (very) non-exhaustive listing of shit: dte and mle⸻both a chore to use, being mildly-to-roilingly obtuse to configure. sandy⸻too simple, lacked bindings, amidst other now forgotten reasons. lime⸻never got working. slap⸻more or less the same, albeit worse because JS. emacs⸻just no. Obtuse and abstruse, and bindings are for the M in S&M-fans, how in the fuck is more keypresses good, let alone better, for you (or anybody else)?! vi(m)⸻begrudgingly usable with much rebinding, reading, head-scratching, and experimenting alongside patience. Learning everything, then shuffling and juggling configs and mappings to something familiar will durate coming from anything Windows-y (exactly why emacs feels like it does). Obviously moribund, evidenced by the extended life-support proffered by neovim and Lua. Even disregarding the many, for a "normal" user, cryptic, unhelpful error messages, that one gets when trying to do something, one can at least get some work done. zed is written in a tranny language by the fuckers at jewgle. So very likely trash, until I get a binary without installing a language and its shit package manager, I'm passing. zed, zsh's editor, partnered with fast-syntax-highlighting (and kakoune rebindings, also edited because incomplete and haphazardly) is splendid for anything shell-related under 10kb (when the lag from fsh starts annoying). ed, ex, acme, sam, and joe, amidst other antiquties, I'd put besides emacs⸻lepers. lite-xl is another Lua-based one. Easy to write plugins for (probably more so than neovim), as well as much prettier and with sane-r default keybs. kakoune does everything I want of it: good choice of regex though not Perl-compatible; snappy; sane defaults. helix is almost great. Well, not 'almost', but it did some stuff in the right direction for all the wrong reasons, with the wrong goals, and bad spirit, and bad 'toxic' community/users/devs. *sigh* I dislike its modal paradigm, to start off. It should be kept as simple as possible, rather than adding modes willy-nilly. At least 2 of its can be outright slashed (Selection mode..? Append mode, which is not insert mode..? Why?! Why not just call every command a mode?) by using alt/super (or any other modifier or, any other key as a modifier), which it by design disallows. So, it's a much, much less customizable than vim/kakoune, with much less the functionality. I couldn't for 30' rebind selection mode's modified h, j, k, l keybs to the ones I used in kakoune, which are WORD by default. Very fiddley and clunky. But hey, being integrated with tree-shitter is a big giant plus for normies and other smoothbraineds. Which is also why it's triple the star count on github despite, as of writing, being only 4 years in age, versus the 13 of kak . You can't write your own syntax files neither quickly, nor simply⸻you must use treeshitter. *sigh* Kakoune which abides by the UNIX philosophy is taken up by 'hackers', supposedly, allegedly, people ready and willing to put in the time and effort to understand and customize, to make the program to their work, rather than have it call another upteen programs to slow defecate a grotesque of a result. No plugins, no integration with *NIX by design, limited scope and unextendable. Does exactly one thing, and I mentioned it last, as I don't see value in it. A mess. Shit language, too.
browser manager: noice, clifm
hp->Music player: mpd, mpv Dicking around for several hours-to-days with ncmpcpp is the closest thing to foobar2000, which is still the undisputed godkingemperor of players. *nix users supposedly often run it through wine. These two are stable, reliable, quick, easily configurable, have terminal user interface, and support online radio stuff. The cover art thing is annoying...
sort -uing some big-ish lists of elements to hide (concatenate easylist, easyprivacy, fanboy-(social|annoyance|cookiemonster) antiadblockfilters, etc.), and append to the default stylesheet, one gets decent results, alongsite a big /etc/hosts file. elinks has the 'benefit' of not being able deal with javascript, or any 'modern' web bullshit. User-provided stylesheets have the desired effect because the terminal doesn't change its colors and backgrounds, yielding the exact same style for every website⸻no to-n-fro css switching and fiddling⸻and being faster to load anything, because many of them cannot be handled. For reference material, (simple) fora, and plain text reading, it beat the rest by a country mile. Librewolf I installed after installing the flatpak for MuseScore4. Concurrency and or parallelism are vimb, surf/boredserf, and nyxt's greatest bottleneck. The difficulty of tailoring anything is noticeable. Its speed is its only grace.
--unique option of qpdfview requires dbus, which I do not want (to touch). zathura with tabbed is a patchwork. It has some issues: lag-ready and -prone, like vimb, which is also undiagnosable; requires a refresh of sorts, what I do is select the same tab. Higher zoom level calculate really slowly. Otherwise minimal and decent. Sioyek hasn't integration with the X and or prefers to not utilize so called 'tabs'. It also has obtuse keybindings and defaults. It therefore is least useful.
-dump(-like) option, you get plaintext. Viewable in a pager. All RSS items (entries?) that contain text are passed through, giving the selfsame reading experience for all html files, rather than possibly necessitating context-switching and not focusing on, that is, distracting yourself from the wildly different designs of websites. Also, insert 'The virgin API vs. the Chad scrape' meme.
Ripgrep is the 'GOTTA GO FAST!' meme compared to the rest. Specifically more so than ag, the silver searcher. Its option set allows it to be a better it a better fgrep, and it's capability to handle PCRE is swell. Everything said about former is more or less true of the latter. My fallback chain is usually perl neat or (a lot of) zsh.
I claim that art can be (sub-/ob-)jectively good/bad⸻this gives rise to four distinct categories, illustrated in the below table. The subjective two needn't explanation. The others do⸻definitions for 'good', 'bad', and 'objective' are required.
| subjectively | objectively | |
|---|---|---|
| good | 4 | 1 |
| bad | 3 | 2 |
On the one hand, you can start a tirade on artist merit, tradition, technique, etc. On the other, a straightforward, qualitative measure such as 'how many people like this how much' (a histogram) could be used. A rough guide to examples of good/bad, but not good/bad themselves⸻the four categories pertain not to why, but to what, so is fine. Answers from a large enough, random population, clusters should/will form, widely appreciable pieces of art.
I hear you say, 'How is this not medium-agnostic bubblegum pop?' Intensity should cover that. Hearing a random piano concerto from the last 3⸺4 centuries, from a composer whose works never grew to a sufficient prominence to allow his name cause to be forgotten, i.e., a nobody, people wouldn't have on average the same reaction as to a 'better' one. Complexity's invited back if one starts asking questions: '(Why) is x better than y?', where x and y may be groupings (genres), creators (artists), individuals (band members), and not necessarily of the same type: 'Is Lars Ulrich better than Metallica?'. The latter is readily answerable when put up against: 'Is 'popular', radio music better than more technical, abstract, inaccessible, or experimental music? Surely a single high score can't equal 1000 mediocre ones?' A non-linear relation is mayhaps a remedy⸻logarithmically on a 10-point scale, the '8' of 1 person could be equivalent to, say, the 10 '7's of 10 others. The most accurate and precise discernment would take place only if perfect knowledge were issued to participants.
A 4-year-old can express liking (or at least consistently pick when given choice) one thing over another. It requires: 1. a natured and nurtured (human) being⸻this allows differences in preference to arise according to circumstances of both; 2. an object of evaluation. I don't think a fully tasteless, preferenceless human, even lab-grown, would be possible, as, given a set of goals (to live, to be happy, to etc.), there would be objectively and subjectively better routes of attaining these. I'm treading on rationalization territory in attempt to extend the argument. One without an overarching or short-term aim would nonetheless tend toward evolutionarily instilled, hard-coded likes and dislikes, albeit these won't be as refined as modern-day choice'd grant, such as: fatty over lean meat, or sour/bitter over sweet plant matter.
A mature individual should be able to state, and continually introspect and permit change to (instead of doubling down) the why of its this-over-that. These two steps⸻acknowledgment of what and reasoning behind why, I think, are prerequisite to fair(er) appraisal of any objects to and not to one's nigh intractable liking.
To for the first time notice and observe that some feelings and emotions, and even states of being depend very much on context, is not merely eye-opening, but more akin to a dot being transported from a 1- or 2-dimensional world, to one of infinite dimensions. Say you've been stranded in the wilderness six months, and your pudge just isn't enough to permit that long a fast. Once the circumstances of your predicament settle in, hastened by the danger, discomfort, hunger, thirst, exhaustion circumscribing you⸻social media (dis-)likes, unfulfilling job, relationship, life, and many other previous concerns will be beyond trivial at this point, they shan't skitter around, nor across your mind. Whether you're happy, or were a good friend, family member, worker, whether you paid your bills, etc., will not matter. A sharp shift in one's context necessitates reshuffling of priorities and reasons.
The meaning of 'loneliness' given in Wiktionary on at time of writing are: 1. the depression resultant from being alone or deficit companionship, and 2. the condition/state of being alone or without companions. Just as rich/poor are inherently comparative adjectives, so too, I think, are lonely and whatever its antonym may be. One may be lonely compared to a person with solid connections to others, or one, center of attention for multitudinous others, or one alone yet un-lonely. But always compared to somebody else. Never would you genuinely experience it in the wilderness, outside the context of human society. You wouldn't mind some help, or a chat over a beverage, but you wouldn't be sulking day in, day out.
In the context of the 'standard' (whatever that may be to whatever majority) or 'proper' course of live as considered by people, living on inertia for a year (or decades, since childhood), or having had the 'luck'/opportunity to do so, one could regard me as a failure in most if not all aspects they value. These, in general, are along the lines of the following with my say bracketed: no finished formal education (dropped out twice), no friends (left) (I've pushed all people⸻I've never considered myself as having had a friend⸻, for various reasons, mostly not living up to my standards), little connection with family (needn't a greater one, I gain nothing I value: these people give only to receive later on according to what they believe is right and proper⸻human selfishness masquerading as care, internalized and rationalized), no love life/partner prospects (eh), bad/shit job/pay (gives me freedom I'd not have elsewhere).
Big city life in so-called first and second world countries has degraded the quality of life for many folk by constructing a faux context⸻ostentation built upon sand or an eroding shore cliff. Perhaps this extends to smaller settlements too, but I don't have neither experience, nor information about which. Still, I'd wager the QoL of all on average is higher in these. There is much wrong with society. Somehow humans successfully, inevitably, intractably fuck up things⸻up the ass, up the nose, through the ears, in the unhealing, gangrenous stabs from chronic mutilation⸻for themselves and everybody else. It is a grim thought, that this should be the normal course of huge swaths of humans densely populating the same area. I am reminded of the 'takers' from Ishmael
by Daniel Quinn.
I gave up on competition a (as if) long time ago, that with others however. That with oneself, with one's ideal(s) is eternal for me, as it should be. Another crucial idea from Ishmael
: that 'takers' took evolution in their own too capable hand, and that man removed survival of the fittest, inter- and intraspecial competition for resources, mates, land, etc. Being alone in yours, or having no frame at all, grants the freedom to do as one wishes, to experience life without beforehand bias, priming, or expectations. You decide what has value (what is to be regarded and what ignored), and what that value is for you, and you derive these value, and opinions from your knowledge and your experience.
I gave up on people, on other people, on society, albeit not absolutely on the last two. Because one person rarely makes a difference⸻the amount of people with an IQ within 10 points (can't remember source for this) of me are far too low. The amount of people not on the same page is cosmological. I don't believe in exploitation, even though I was jokingly named science Hitler, SH, once, and it'd stuck. Given absolute power, it's very easy to end up being a dictatorship with population of yourself only: just see or study any leftist government from the past 200 years for examples for this occurring. Because the task is so towering, unending, because teaching one person is so hard, let alone all, because getting everybody to agree on the prisoners' dilemma is so damn difficult (although not impossible).
The single most depressingly frustrating fact about humanity's state of affairs on this rock is this⸻we are, on average, improving according to purely objective, measurable qualities like wealth, access to food&water, education, excess death, etc. (s.: Better Angels of Our Time
, and Enlightenment Now
, both by Steven Pinker). But this is done with extraneous hardship, excessive inefficiency, and that lovely human quality as if⸻prideful refractory ignorance and unknowledge.
I cannot stand this context. Rather, one gains nothing positive living in this context, others' context, big X's context (where X can be way too many actors), especially not of worth equal to the imposed perpetual suffering. I've isolated myself from nigh everyone I know/knew, from 'modern' ideas and gadgets, in a monk- and hermit-like state. My disappointment, my fury at humans I cannot put into words. I am so very malcontent only because I know how much more optimal, efficient, better things could be for everyone, directly and indirectly.
As it stands, I'd be better off 500km from the nearest other fucker, innawoods (or desert, boreal forest, tundra, arid mountain, maybe I'd even accept the fucking jungle). This is somewhat of a long-term goal of mine, if I don't off myself in the interim.
I don't really play much. I'm not barely a gaymer since 23-ish. To escape the possible negative interpretation, I'll not say I've grown or matured out of it. It's been a combination of those (neutrally), and decreasing fun to be had, evolution as a person, refinement of taste. I've been finding it decreasing rewarding over time, so I've cut down. Historically: less Flash, less MMOs, less open-world explorations, less RPGs, less of everything. Sifting to the quintessence of what I like: infinitely replayable and configurable spatial puzzles; a some roguelikes; and ripping and tearing⸻solo boomer shooters. I rack up 1⸺3 hours weekly in Tetris, likely less, and the rest see sporadic binges of play every every 1⸺3 year.
Tetris is an inventory management survival horror game from the Soviet Union 1984.
. 2010-ish I saw this lassie, I proposed, she said hell fucking yeah yeah, boiii
, n' that's all she wrote :j Before that I'd never felt a craving to continue playing, to do better. Very few puzzle games succeed at that with me.
This is a gem, a masterpiece. It don't get any better than this. Yes, really. What Diablo II with modding is to the ARPG genre replay-wise, this is to the 2D, grid-based puzzle genre. Customizablity out the wazoo for settings and gameplay, rules. I play not for score. To castigate the casuals: 1, T-flips are höchst niggerlicious; 2, speed is a young man's game for the most part; 3, exploiting anything is retarded and against the spirit of the game. My favorite modes are: real-time dig challenge, goal-18 dig race, and practice. Nullpomino is the sole reason why Java and its runtime ever ought be installed. I play daily. It is, has been, and will be a good companion, an understanding silence, and challenging friend. Headpats and tummyrubs.
The rest haven't a tenth or hundredth the playtime. More honorable mentions. Tetris takes the gold, silver, and bronze in my world. The day I tap into pentominoes and or three-dimensional grids, it'll be like swapping cannabis for crack.
Anyway, I played like a madman: 16-hour sessions, interspaced with minimal, disturbed sleep. And still, I wanted more. (When, in your dreams, you see both the keyboard controlling your effigy (third-person dreaming, ffs!), and yourself, being that effigy, from the third person, yet feeling everything, then you know you're overdoing it. Not doing well. Not knowing how to control yourself. You wake up⸻liquid panic not brimming, but flooding the floorboards beneath your soggy bed and mattress. This dream I've had with Cataclysm as well; both times I'd taken a 1⸺2-month-long break to forget their control schemes and gameplay loops.) Well, after that came mods and attempting modding. The one that stuck, that kept me coming back was Resurgence. Both Path of Diablo, and Project Diablo 2 exhibit the exact same problems they attempt or claim to solve; MedianXL is a shitshow, visually and gameplay-wise, too complicated and distant from Diablo to be fun for me. 'Anti-cheat' mechanism baked in makes it some much more unfulfilling, unfun, unworthy. Fuck these three mods.
Loot-wise, Path of Exile might exceed even MedianXL let alone the base game. It don't scratch dat itch tho. D2 is the ARPG, and a quarter century later it's still fresh and enjoyable for quick, intense romps once every one-to-few years.
After a realization in the student bar under the chemistry faculty in the spring or winter of my 2. year in uni, I willingly or unwillingly started diving into depression. Not gonna write 'deeper'. Fuck that. I'm not gregarious, not a socialite, not social even, but I could go out, and have a ball drinking with people. Regardless what it was, that blight that struck me, led me to start imbibe alone⸻something I'd never done, because I thought it unnecessary or not fun. Alcohol accented, accelerated, buttressed possibly hidden, nonetheless extant thoughts and emotions.
I wasn't drowning my demons, no. (I can't concretely say what I was doing: was withdrawing, pushing away?) At my zenith, I'd be doing consuming some combination of: 4⸺6 beers and either 1⸺2 bottles wines or 1/3⸺1/2 bottle gin, almost daily. I had a filled in heart of wine bottles in the middle of my room, an almost meter-high stack of these rectangular cheap gin bottles. (I'd gotten lazy with recycling.) Half-bragging, half saying this with zero feeling. But whatever the reasons, I'd been having less and less 'fun', or whatever pluses I'd seen. In my 3. year, on some sunny April day, it struck me. I'm wasting my and my parents' money. I could play guitar drunk, a single beer impaired fine motor control sufficiently; I sure enough study or read drunk; and paying attention the extremes was difficult. I could down a bottle of vodka with ice or tap, and for what? Cold turkey stopped. Other than the about 10 dreams with pilsners, from all the sensory data my noggin's stored during potation, I've had barely any desire to drink. More so to be or die (mega) drunk.
Around here for a period of 1⸺2.5 years (?) due to the many things going sideways and loopty-fucking-loop in my life, the chronological order, as well as the details of who, what, when, where, and why, are missing, muddled, muddied. The narrative module of my CPU responsible excusing, explaining, exculpating shrugs and hand-waves it all away under '(acute? chronological?) psychological trauma'. I don't really give a fuck. Thanks to a then friend, I spent a night at the uni psych ward. Turns out, in some countries, the police are obligated to, if you agree to be taken/accompanied by them, to minimize your risk to living persons, including yourself, by handing custody over you to a psychiatric facility. Where from could agree to coerced admission, or decline, and be forcefully admitted through state-issued violence.
I stayed at an empty desk and basked in the hovering silence and stillness of the place. Thinking mostly. About how not to trust people ever. About the state's roles and actors. About Klara. About caffeine. I'd gone to bed, but the screaming from outside my room by this lady with actual problems kept waking me up. The free coffee at 'breakfast', was nice, albeit they served nothing I can eat, so I drank 10 cups til noon, flipping through a book, and they let me go. I actually had to pay a bill for this shit.
My caring mother passed me some later summer to a some female psychologist. Big yikes. Women should not be allowed in many a profession, any requiring mental work, for example. Of zero help, I'm regret my mother perchance offering this quasi-charlatan money. The one thing she could suggest me was that I see a philosopher. Didn't know this was a service provided. Albeit, I'm too cheap to give anybody money for something I can do myself. Fuck everybody.
So, existential depression. Nothing to do with off brain chemistry, and even if it did, I don't want external or exogenous help, albeit I put up with insulin, reassuring myself I'd've never survived in the wild with these poor mutations, genes, etc. My one calming, soothing, equalizing thought is that suicide is always an option. And you really don't need much, a door knob and a belt or scarf can do the trick. You can have your final say in the matter if it's so bad. Is it bad? Yeah. But I've no firearm access, and the chance of botching it is frightful. Imagine screaming 'LET ME DIE' while your relatives or just somebody cuddles you, the sweet little potato, the vegetable boy, bedridden, with irreversible hypoxic brain damage. Defo don't want any of that shit. Be your own master, decide on something and do it. No point being a little bitch, whining and pouting on the crossroads of life and death.
Reading Geo Stone's Suicide and Attempted Suicide
among other references, statistics such as: 45m falls in any orientation have >95% fatality rate, shotgun blasts to the head are fairly lethal, etc.; were fun enough to read once, but frustrating or further depressing due to lacking opportunity. I decided, were to ever have a, say, 1 in 20 chance of a failure, I'd take it without prior thought. I say that now, I said and thought it then, but the instinct for self-preservation might holler depending on the means that appears. Up til now, I've not heard of force multipliers, steep cliffs, cyanide salts materializing for wanton ideation of humans. Were we only in the beginnings of the industrial era⸻you could've gotta cocaine as cough medicine without a prescription at your local pharmacy... If it comes, it comes; if it don't, it don't. Suitable arrangements are better created, not prepared for: reading up on the method(s), securing location having backup plan(s). If you can't commit to a proper creation, then for you is not suicidal ideation. (I wanted to rhyme, sorry-not-sorry.)
Until then, I pass the time. I live minimally with little-to-no stress from human things; human society. I do what I value. I don't actively await death, but I'd welcome its premature arrival. Were I to have an epitaph⸻He went through the motions.
I obscure my 'bad', useless thoughts by preoccupied myself constantly til exhaustion. I've no steady sleep schedule, often hitting it around dusk, seldom noon, rarely before midnight. Reading, music, games, movies, fora, etc., etc. Emotions are easy-ish. You perceive/think, and choice how to react. Keeping a clear head and thinking it through is relatively easy compared to being a third-person observer of yourself, your life, your surrounds ever vigilant, strict and ready to take necessary action, not proceed on inertia, on defaults. Practice makes perfect better.
Suddenly, as with all things of import as if, it blindingly dawned on me around the time my condition was as if at its worst (if you could one-dimensionally measure it). Roughly, you can take either a proactive, or reactive stance. To what? To anything really. But 'anything', 'everything', 'everyone': there are nebulous terms whose meaning you expand as you go along on a case by case basis. Here I'd expanded mine to include depression and loneliness. (Putting anything into words subtracts a deeper felt meaning that you can easily act out. Rereading the text from few days ago, it strikes as insufficient, unworthy, imperfectly overlapping with what I meant. However...)
In the former, you take action⸻what that is, when it is, etc. is up to you to decide. In the latter, you fantasize about how you'd react, how things'd be if so-and-so happened. Well, nice things don't happen, generally, normally. Or at all, but that's an eternal disapproval. Being on the defensive, a reactive stance would seem natural. It needn't necessarily be wishful thinking⸻cocooning up, building walls could be viewed as a mix of both, albeit this happens when you have somebody to keep away, but you get the idea, it's not an either-or. But if you do engage with fantasy as your main strategy, only a catch-22 of deeper disappointment and further self-delusion comes of it. The former is an ever-present constant of life with others, not inherently bad; the other leaves you more vulnerable, less prepared. Neither extreme of accepting all blame for everything and attempting to remedy the world of its people's plights, or of wishful thinking, daydreaming without action taken or at least plans for it, help you towards any goal, possibly least to that of whatever you define friendship as.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, expect the unexpected.
Only, be rational and weigh things by their estimated likelihoods⸻it's possible to win the lottery, just not too likely (s. also: birthday & Monty Hall problems for how human don't do well with probabilities)⸻, as well as your (in-)capabilities and circumstances. Nothing is static. Forget the first third of the quote: don't hope. As Bane says: there can be no true despair without hope
. Just don't fall for a saving angel. They don't exist. Symptom is externalizing all your problems' solution into a near (wo-)man-shaped package (or child, if you're into that thing). Only you can save yourself. See also: Adlerian theory and or my remarks on The Courage to Be Disliked
by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga.
All music linked to in this article was composed by me. I permit its usage under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. If you hear a real guitar, then the piece is playable irl by a single human being, specifically or notably⸻me (on a, like, 40⸺50cm cheap-ass guitarlet, I got as a gift; my good ones were back home) (also, recording quality is spotty at best as it served as audio providence: I sure wasn't going to write it all out in MuseScore). If you hear piano, it is very possible to have been composed for the music's sake, without regard for performability by even a five-handed virtuoso.
I use MuseScore for composition. It's a score-typesetter, whose feature-functionality creep has from has yielded something really nice, actually. Considering I've never accomplished more than (un-)installation with any DAW, or tracker for both Windows and Unix, I am content. V2.x's grand piano soundfont was kino, and thankfully it is free for use and download from the site, which I recommend, since the new one sounds hollow, meek, and flat. Exported score .pdfs will be under an 's', and the .mp3s'll be the piece titles themselves. I do absolute music: music for music's sake and my sake, therefore, mind not the titles. I also fancy atonal, or frequently modulating music. I wish I could begin composing with any variety of microtonal music too. I don't despise repetition, even though I inadvertently, unconsciously doodle the same ideas over and over often enough. Forget about chronological order, years've past and, yeah... I've no surviving records of at least two complete pieces, and so many more DNFs, which is unfortunate. But hey, spillt milk and all that jazz.
There are no nice things.
from above; and have barely listened to music, trauma and all that, for 2.5y, as the index notes. But I tried my hand.
The theme for the April 2023 /dmp/ album was to be genre-less, or genrefluid, or genrequeen. To me that'd not mean a quodlibet, like what I usually (poorly) do with my compositions. Not a mash-up either, a chaining of interpretations and or remixes of existing melodies, whole pieces. I wanted a few genres flowing into once another. However, even when I did music semi-proficiently when I wasn't rusted as Mars' surface, I still did transitions, non-repetitions, variation, and extension/idea-development very badly. I wanted to do a 20. century, French chançon, (atonal) free jazz, eurobeat, soundscape/environments, some jazz shit, idunno.
As of writing, there 4⸺5 days extension on the deadline for submission. Another 'part' and polish may be cobbled together with spit and yarn. Copious duct tape. The version here, the beta's beta, you will discern, as I know, abjectly denying as you may be about it, is problematic: my attention is/was distributed very unequally; the french fancy's ending is too long and dead, I have to infuse those 4 bars into the preceding ones without changing their intensity or disappear them; beginning is too short and don't grow, doesn't lead anything decisively either, rhythmically repetitive too; the whole thing is rhythmically malnourished and harmonically surfeited, yet poorly, the latter. I'll not let the idea putrefy and sublimate. Again, fuck both of you, three of you, so, so much.
Name might've'n the date of the germination, that is the fourth of March. Though I've worked less than 36h in toto on this due to 2⸺3 week-long emotional setbacks. Name requires both hands' work and there are no "q"s, so it's must be neither placeholder, nor laziness embodied. Has too many 3 too many keystrokes for the latter.
are alive, conscious; perceive directly and indirectly; focus on at most one thing at a time, can (attempt to) direct your focus, can be distracted, can distract yourself, can decide, can think, can not simply react, can observe yourself impersonally. In my case, the prior sentence wasn't etched into my eyeballs for reading ease, rather over 7. grade's the autumn-winter I remember being conscious for the first time. I remember realization. Actually thinking things through. Principal thesis of Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning
is precisely this, with more sentimentality, wishful thinking and other shit things.
Years later, around 2016-ish, a study about the prevalent (overwhelming whose had them) absence of an inner voice in test subjects. These were memed as NPCs. Never mind the meme, it's still staggers, given solipsism, and the psychological phenomenon of believing you're the center of the universe, world, other people, etc., that you're the action hero there to undo injustice against unfair odds, and succeed. I'm not even gonna try searching for that one. It might have overlap with maturing, unveiling just how insignificant you, your life, possessions, family, choices, job, etc., etc., etc. are in the scheme of not only the world or further cosmos beyond, but within your country, state, city and very likely even neighborhood. Hell, most people have conversational, ethical and intellectual capabilities on par with a bonobos, and struggle getting those most tightly bound to them to cooperate, obey, listen, understand, etc. What animals have over humans is honesty, in strength and cunning, in relationships and intentions. Good-faith actors in human society are few and far between.
I use the word 'reactionary' in a non-political fashion, as in 'of or pertaining to reaction, as opposed to action'. I have, over the past, say, 6 years, tried my hand some 3⸺4 times during longer conversations, at augering this concept through my mother's thick skull. I failed. I believe not once have I taught her something. She's a woman, and old, though neither of these is a valid or acceptable excuse, and even if it were, excuses are of no worth, they're mere superficial social lubricant with bad aftertaste, that drive nothing close to the goal. She plows on, reactionarily.
So, are more people philosophical zombies? Reactionary automatons? Nested chains of if-statements? I'd say no to the first due to untestability by nature of definition. Latter two, however, I'd answer positively, prostrating years of observations. If I⸻, a bright but not genius, 1-in-1e7 human being, can model the vocal output (true thought is personal) and actions of individuals in my head with accuracy >50% (let alone approaching 1), then either I need better subjects, or... the hypothesis is not disproven. For all relevant purposes, most people I interact with or observe are hollow.
Before wrapping your taffy around this concept, that you inhabit (some portion of) the space of a meat suit, that you are and are not it⸻a fetching name for this period would be what? 'Pre-enlightenment' bares historical meaning, burdens. 'Pre-consciousness' is probably false on more than one grounds. I'm groping for something like 'pre-consciousness-consciousness', anybody dead or alive can tell you that's a bad name. I'd call it 'pre-consciousness-awareness' (still ghastly). Regardless, until my 14. earthly roundabout, I'd been riding a monorail. No control over direction or breaks, no knowledge of being transported through life. And sitting down and enduring it is perhaps the default behavior of any conscious animal⸻expend less energy, survive, procreate, repeat. The danger of easing back in persists, looms. Saying 'be self-aware, ever-vigilant' is easy, whereas being in the mindset to do so, and further so doing it, exponentially harder than one another. But it is your choice. If you're know: nothing is static, almost everything depends, much is relative, little is certain, you know fuck all overall, you can only trust yourself⸻, then can decide. And really, it's not a decision. You know which future you prefer, trudging through to it is wherein the rub lies. Defaults kick before the observer's noticed, if the other's not done the mental exercise of asking the right questions, realizing this and that, pondering it some time, wanting to know, etc.
You arrive at awareness of your agency once, afterwards you remind yourself, or are reminded. It's profound similarly so to how sometimes simple, or rather short, equations in physics describe physical reality. Just as some believe civic duty should be inculcated in school (and in pre- and uni, too), and as some argue that critical thought (however you may define that as a subject) should be in curricula, I think, one should realize and every day not forget that one is human, one is conscious, one is aware one is conscious, and can. take. action. You can decide and take steps towards, e.g., becoming a Somali pirate, or a New Zealand goat-herder; becoming less angry at things of no direct consequence to yourself, or fully controlling your emotions, their ultimate intensities; thinking through your current life situation, where you'd want to be, where you'd not want to be.
I dunno, man, but calling it empowering is like calling electricity 'shocking'. No. It's the difference between being given an nonfungible, irrefusable movie ticket to the 2.1/10 movie named "Life" starring (You), feeling every moment of it without ever noticing the all millions sitting beside you, nailed to their seats with canvas tunnel-vision (never mind, they're doing it most likely to distract from the fact, the cinema's built on a mound od bones so high, Everest's pale cheeks would crimson); and looking around, picking a better seat (continually so according to current scene), or chatting up some other awake anon, or going to the concession stand.
You can even decide on how you'd like to leave the theater, if you so choose.
Anyways, I have learned nothing of value from any doctor, endocrinologist, diabetologist, cardiologist, neurologist, or ophthalmologist I've had contact with over the years. No-thing. Nada. Naught. Nil. Zilch. Fuckall. Calling them 'baboons' would be a deep insult to these 'lesser' primates. These complaisant, stupid mites⸻these '''people''' should be hung for their crimes against humanity. University and higher education is an often a self-contained shitshow of cosmological proportions, but when it seeps out⸻by, say, ill-educated drones regurgitating provably, objectively false information as 'medical advice' (and defending it via arguments to authority, popularity, naivety, and much, much more) to the general population⸻then, motherfucker, we have around a third of the major issue. The other two being current system of higher education, and the people themselves.
Anyways, a year and something in sticking to whatever they'd told me, unconsciously I was noticing things. After the honeymoon period, in which exogenous fast/mealtime insulin requirements sink drastically (possibly to 100%), already with an interest in science, I'd searched around the internet and came across the arguably single most valuable resource for T1DM: Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution, (crucial information/chapters are provided gratis on the website in the form of navigable html pages, if you would rather not pirate the book).[5] Bernstein's story is astounding: that of a child diagnosed with T1DM and living through the tougher years (he says in interviews he's the only diabetic from those days left alive, not to mention his top notch health; reminder: T1DMs, on average, live 10 years less), when insulin's discovery permitted longer lives with less suffering, later getting hit PhD in engineering and dropping out to go through med school and specialization as an endocrinologist/diabetologist to be allowed to publish his various findings from experimentation with himself over the years. At some 85 years, he is still active, has new patients, gets articles published, and is even on YouTube.[4] Type1Grit became a thing after 1⸺3 low-carb conference talks on T1DM: it's a facebook group with strict rules that is tight-knit, encouraging and helpful to T1DMs. I know of two papers comparing results from Type1Grit and a control, the standard of care.[6,7] I've never had any, nor needed any, support, and have always disliked top-down, communal things; fb is, and I say this with no humor, evil, and about as pernicious as cpp-funded reddit. The people you can meet there, could be invaluable to your health journey. Personally, I dislike all the emotional, communal, top-down shit, but if it works you, if it floats your boat, don't let me stop you. This last example is of a family with child going through the ires these same ires, albeit two-fold (I doubt it can perceive all the damage being done to it, let alone comprehend all the science behind it) or more, since they'd be feeling like impotent parents.[8]
Post-Bernstein, I saw significant improvements glycemic variability and value range, and general salubrity. These have, with the years, become better (albeit diminishingly so) with diet strictness and adherence . Various other health markers (in standard T1DM bloodwork) also swam to the respective 'better' limit, up or down, of the reference range for normal, healthy individuals (not diabetics!). Docs be, like, Yo, dawg, I dunno wu'kindsa magic you be spinnin', dawg, but, so long's I gotsa do nuttin, you cool wid me, dawg.
Lest I question them on important to me and my fucking life with this permanent fucking chronic illness details, the answer to which they cannot hope to fathom to guess at, my visits are prompt and pleasant. I'd read Steven Phinney's papers, and the resultant books from his work with Volek.[9,10] I'd come across Jordan Peterson as he was experiencing his 15' of internet fame. Them first did I get ac,quainted with carnivore diets, from his daughter's and his experiences with it.[11] Here are two other resources, one of a Navy SEAL dude turned doctor and spreading the word, albeit in a very American-y, annoying at times way, and the other very focused, proper way.[12,13] Low Carb Down Under and AncestryFoundation conference introduced me to many new ideas, information, things I hadn't thought of myself, and I'm most grateful for getting to think about exclusionary principles in life, in general (big X wants you to buy product, add more stuff to fix problems), e.g., 'carnivore' diet, and (intermittent) fasting, and plant toxicity.[14,15] Paul Saladino was a new-comer with his own story and journey, although he kinda became a shill and annoying, to me at least. He is very thorough with the science, however, look in both camps for all the best evidence, and isn't afraid to 'get technical' which might scare the lay.[16] His book includes many key citations, pieces of information, and is, I'd say, lay-friendly. What then for me then was new: archaeological and anthropological data, and studies on plant toxins.
As of initially writing this, I've been doing (mostly subconsciously) intermittent fasting for ≥18⸺20 h with one meal consistently for 3.5⸺4.5 y, and have been consuming (almost) exclusively animal products: meat, lard, butter, eggs, fish, some cheese for ≥6 y. Once a week I may have sugary dairy, and once to twice every season plant matter due to rare meals with others cohabitants, or pressure + exhaustion. They're accommodating usually to prepare separate no-carb food for me. If I lived alone, I'd not have any trash (food) in my household (like, back in the day); being among people, however, can be another stimulus: every second eye-stabbingly reminding me of what happens when you're a comfortable, stupid fuck, replaying all the detrimental effects on your health, wealth, and on the country paying for the former. I easily recall the effects of every infraction, every misdemeanor, every 'try', or cheat, or anything wrong: be it a thin film over chompers, hour-long bloating, flatulence or loose stool, dehydration, bad mouth-feel, or just overall not-well-feeling... Being alone and conscious of one's duty toward oneself; and reminded of others' failures to themselves, their society and world grants me resolve to be strict (not 'uncompromising'⸻shit food doesn't lose any quality or quantity when you very one-sidedly forfeit to surfeit) and thorough. But getting back to some stability is easy, if you're smart.
veg\w+ who some-fucking-how practice low-carb without withering and dying too much. But I take for extreme perversion of the case being made (it's actually been successfully implemented and carried out for millions of years...), as are attempts to substitute high-carb meals, e.g., any cake/bread/dough-thing/candy, with a low-carb version⸻wholly missing the point. You're feeding the wolf, the addict, deceiving your brain⸻it's nigh the same with artificial sweeteners (natural ones aught not be excluded: the stevia plant had one major sweetening chemical and the tens to the hundreds of derivatives⸻I assuredly do not want that amount of unresearched bioactives in my body).
The amount of people not: feeling better, experiencing major health benefits, having happier yet more bewildered doctors, are scarce or nonexistent. Given it's evolutionary history and anthropological findings, it should possible to ween some, say, 99.99% of all humans off of carbs, and get back to essentials, genetic abnormalities, mutations can, of course, make it unsuitable for some. Examples of elderly (>80⸺85 y) or middle-ageds abound, who have completely cut out or severely reduced up to 10 different medications for: hypertension, water-release, capillary perfusion/blood circulation, depression, anxiety, skin conditions, Crohn's, Alzheimer's, T1DM, T2DM, gout, bowel conditions, kidney stuff, appetite suppression, etc. Currently, there is not enough livestock to exclusively feed Earth's populace even inadequately. Nobody expects an overnight transition, but one over, say, 25⸺50 years is feasible.
1984
. But if you don't actively think, if you're comfortable, you'd at best agree (tacitly) and then go back to automaton mode, droning in this shit world.
Speaking of sustainability, according to vegans themselves, the average, let alone the median, of adherence for newly initiated is 1 year. The rest, whatever their reasons might be, visibly deteriorate, degrade, degenerate physically and mentally. Ample evidence of this exists on video-hosting sites. veg\S*ism is neither sustainable for humans, nor for the planet; and it's more tragic than humorous.
I would like to direct anybody interested in the discussion, argumentation, and refutation of claims most brought up the off to Peter Ballerstedt's YouTube channel.[27] He is a well-connected forage agronomist and is trying, and succeeding, in bringing together people from low-carb, animal producers/farmers, the wider public. The guests on his podcast are people most would never talk to, or see, unless you haunt cow-calf/grazing/forage conferences, and they provide valuable, indispensable even, information about soil, plants, ruminants, their interactions, dependencies, and so on. tl;dr, there isn't enough arable land on Earth to sustain whatever this hell is supposed to be called, there isn't enough usable water for continuing it, it's extremely damaging to the soil with restoration lasting into the decades, ruminants produce high-quality, highly-bio-available micronutrients and macronutrients in the form of meat, fat, and dairy, in proportions required by the human organism with the input of fucking grass. They also fertilize everything around. They also sequester more carbon than they excrete via burping and farting when managed properly. It's a win-win-win-win situation.
A requisite would be a goodfaith within the majority, if not all, and⸻, not everybody being on the same page⸻, but at least a good myriad of the period in change, of the period in exploitation reaching some level of knowledge, reading some 100 key books, something like that. To have enough wits about themselves to stop themselves and those immediate to them from reaching for utopias. The latter, lit. ancient Greek for 'no-place'. Wishful thinking by adult-sized toddlers. Embrace hardship, seek knowledge and multitude perspectives, help yourself and then others⸻but don't fuck it up for everybody (yourself included).
Society all too often is prisoners' dilemma with the caveat that you only postfactum, if at all, realize this. Defeating all prisoners' dilemmas, that is, of all goodfaith players, is intractably difficult and daunting, if at all possible. Nevertheless, one should strive toward perfection or excellence, if only to grasp slight improvement of the shared lot of humanity/local society.
For the past, almost exactly four years, when my (planned) life had collapsed sorta conclusively, when I gave up on competing, on the rat race, on ambition, on society; I have been living Camus's The Stranger
's eponymous character's life, as if. My role in my life is more often passive than not. I try not to react, not to feel, but to observe, to note, to pass the damn time. Side note: I had had this though at the beginning of my depression, that at the end, after having stayed busy and isolated from thoughts of self and world, from feeling, I will have living almost exclusively vicariously, and I will have 'passed the time' where time equals my life's length, that that could have been my epitaph, ha. It is arguable whether he had made conscious attempts towards this, at being passive (consciously, that is, actively being passive, lol, I can not into language), whether it was his normal state of being (little-to-nothing of his past), whether he was a sociopath, whether he was (just) sequentially misfortunate. Given the author, I take it to be a chain of misluck: mother dies, small spat with employer, separation with/from female, intimate (as in 'fucky-wucky') friend, being seen, being heat sensitive, et cetera, et cetera.
Refocusing on me, why do I do it? My reluctance in participation in society, in association with other has to do with my failure to teach others, to bring them to a higher level, as perceived by me, to be of use. Adlerian psychology claims that what brings most happiness is the perception of being of use others. I shrink in writing and reading that.
A shoulder tick I do not possess awakens.
I feel unwell.
I itch.
That aside⸻that is, wholly ignoring that for the sake of my mental health, just skipping to the third...
This is no essay, is not thoughtful, nor thorough. About 15±3 years since my voluntary perusal of porn on tv or 4chan or the wider internet have passed, so nearly a generation has passed for our beloved pornstars too. They have either: retired officially (those of Ron Jeremy's age); or have commit suicide (August Ames, there were two more though); or seen their 15 minutes of fame (Mia Khalifa talking American footy); married (into money, lmao) and retired (Britney Beth) (other just do not retire from the industry, like, ever, like Johnney Sins and his wife or the Italian stud, Rocco S(t)iffredi); got MMA'd (Christy Mack); and so on. A great many of those have who had tried making it, have given up, fucked off from the West or East coast to the literally corn middle, and gotten a local job in their bleakly propositioned, sub-1k-population 'city'. Only now they permanently look rather unnatural, under they lay under the blade again. They have met and worked with (much) people, if even mildly successful, may have seen exotic or at least fancy locations, expensive houses, or may have just been facefucked for 20 minutes for 200 dollaridoos in a derelict in New Jersey, they may have put away enough dosh for an investment, or may have just barely made ends meet in the Bay Area. Belle Delphine was making a mill a month for basically nothing in return for a year, then did something and then nothing again for 1.5 years, and other similar simp stories, where barely-legals and 20-somethings making obscene amount of money for minimal effort and (some) loss of face, abound. Rachel Cook, a model, whose name was branded on my brain when I first laid my peepers on her 14⸺16-year-old face and then body in a Sears catalog around 2010-ish. Likewise, Taylor Hill for the same breed, but who grew chunky and fell out of fashion with most lads.
I have: read some books, learned some languages, gained some knowledge, acquainted myself intimately with one person, who fucked me over (arguably my fault for not heeding the signs, not thinking enough), and shallowly with a less than 5 others. I am not young anymore. I do not consider myself young. I did not then. The stagnation in and of my life. Everyday life of the working joe or just of a statistically normal adult human of a non-third-world country is unexciting, unnovel, uninteresting, mediocre, mundane. Bad, but not too-too. I feel a numbing inertia of the day-to-day. I am repeating myself more often or am not having novel thoughts, I think. I more frequently feel unwell, unlike years prior, when this was both more intense and more sporadic (the depression curve is flattened over the rest of life, yey? integrate to kill, pls).
Unless in my next turning, at around 40-something, something 180s, I can see myself just buying any old firearm any-fucking-how from any-fucking-who and shooting myself, no will, no note, no preparation, no requirements, just off to La La Land.
Right, aging. Having lost what I initially intended to write about, and having not jotted down notes, and having talked about grills and suicide.
Ain't no fucking hurry since everything is ultimately meaningless tho. L'Étranger
floater nonchalantly bys me. As does The Doors' Jim Morrison's chorus:
People are strange when you're a stranger.
In the subway today I was meditating slash resting my eyes since I'd been pushing 22 hours, intrusive thoughts be gone, yet inadvertently I held on to one, namely that I was right in my initial thoughts and assumptions more or less about the person, and that thinking with your lizard brain or your cock⸻which, I'll remind you, is an indelible member of any (male) lizard, lmao. Anyway, I'm no longer mad/angry/something-negative at the person, who turned out to be shit, and probably maybe always was?⸻that'd contradict my belief that anybody can do better by themselves and others (
That led me to recounting my considerations of hypothetical trade-offs, that nonetheless force the answering party (here me) to (re-)order their values and priorities. For example, (assume) you are a parent with more than one child, you must choose one to die, not horribly, and neither would you be executioner, nor spectator, but one has to go somehow in the very-very near future. The classic of
So, ask yourself, what do you value? How much do you value it? Put a price on it and update it monthly, yearly, when critical. dew et. And if you value everything or nothing, then you've a greater problem on your hands than temporal profligation.
cope intr. v. 1. to deal effectively with something, especially if difficult
I knicked this from Wiktionary. Mine would have very similar: without the adjective and with a usage note that the indirect object may be left omit.
Dirty Dancing
..?. They disco don do duh dext dirty dove disposed (or not) do descry duh dancing debasement. My debilitated dalliteration aside, I don't think animals engage with coping in the same way as we humans do.
People cope⸻
American History X
was so powerful. I could have in poor taste for cheap male rape joke said 'forceful', but I didn't! I recently had told a person, that I couldn't spontaneously articulate why I'd rather be stabwoundfucked rather than buttfucked. See, grievous corporeal harm and potential maiming (maimage could've'n a cool word :| but we can't have nice things after all) isn't most peep's cup of tea: most aren't the Ss in extreme S&M, though theirs is consensual and sexually gratifying, not a shoddy either-or (if you're of the , say, ~98⸺99% of heterosexual pubescent or adult males, I'd venture to say), and neither are they apotemnophilics. I can't speak for any other male with certainty, can only grasp at the straws puncturing the slightly opaque, inhomogenous tangle that is the collection of all my thoughts and opinions, preferences and experiences, that I can consciously arrive at.
Yeah, looks nice. (Reeeeeeeeeeeeal niccce.)
. (Never you mind the double entendre with 'stuff' collective noun and verb.) The weaker of women probably get turned on from time to time by looking at a hunk, their conception of what one is, or has:
Whoops, wrong hole.
back when sex was still a thing. Perhaps the feeling of tightness, (greater) constriction is the appeal? But men don't want pornography⸻, I don't and never did watch pornography imagining I'm the phallused phallasing bedfellow (lmao, literally), and imagining the feeling, no it's mostly just visual stimulation⸻Grug see booba, Grug peepee hard.
This shallow prattle can't substitute discussing the question of why you'd prefer being on the receiving end of a wounding instrument and being there penetrated to gently having your fudge packed, or if you prefer dysphemisms, getting your shit pushed in. While Toto's Africa sets the scene :^)
aliens clockwork gremlins⸻do you now accept this universe's most comfortable, sexually satisfying, tasty poopoopeepee?
Struck me just now: I'd been conceiving a foreign, perfunctorily malevolent, nondescript human. A loved one, had I any⸻, say, a past friend of lover with the then relationship intact being the perpetrator would invariably push me towards 'butt stuff', slightly, that is I reckon not enough to make me choose otherwise. Were they also the ones to do the other act as well, fucking or pegging, nothing would have changed significantly, for me at least. Would one have lost an imagined, a desired anal virginity? There's the old adage of It's okay if the balls don't touch.
. It parodies insecure men questioning others online whether a single discrete sexual encounter of exaggerated intensity or not turns them (irrevocably) into homosexuals. I think the take-home from it is that one should feel confident with what one does and is doing and that your opinion is most important, others' could at best inform yours.
I'll improve this in the future, bear with me.
Somewhere on this site, I briefly argue (or state?) good art should be reexperience-able. Lemme expand that: rewatchable every period. I'll be divvying 'em up as follows: rewatchable every ~1, ~5, or billions (undeserving of a second chance) of years. I barely watch to its end. I rarely enjoy myself with the majority of post '00s anime or the nascent years. The batshit years were great, but that died with cool, wild Japan. In corporate, safe, governmental hell Japan, you watch your goyslop or you watch nothing. The cultural stagnation post-bubble-burst is very evident. Getting railed by the Amis in WW2 allowed one cultural progression, overcoming, even led to a postbellum boom. Then overreaction to (minor) financial and political strife led to it being transformed into a giant state of and for elders. Not even wholly referring to low birth-rates, the youth culturally have progressed, or just moved 5 rather than 25 years from their parents' positions.
Problems with low and uncertain wages for all levels of creatives don't bode well for neither creativity, nor art. The industry suits have decided on a menu, and it's going to be schlock, schlock, and moar schlock, so long as easily attainable, cheap, merchandise-procuring (via legal guardian) viewership persists. We lay in the bed, that we reap and sow, collectively. That is, one suffers most often indirectly others' bad taste. Why? Because We live in a society...
Lastly, the categories aren't set in stone. I know what I've watched and what I'd re-watch. Hammering that out into structured plaintext ain't easy. It's a process, so bare with. My 3 below roughly correspond to the chief three ones: repeated/repeatable/repeat-worthy, good/decent/finished, bad/unfinished. Anyone's ratings of media within these categories, I would argue, should more form a geometric, not arithmetic, series, on average. Assuming a 1⸺10-scale, 2 5 9 should correspond to these these with ratios being 0.4 0.56 (or 2.5 1.8). In my world, a 7 is redoable and a 6⸺6.5 rarely is.
Greatest of all time three openings as well: combo of all; don't mind the fourth, not canon! Feel-good incarnate. Happy suicide/i-want-to-fucking-die music. Upbeat is shortselling it; high-energy (particle physics?) like deku or this levels
Samurai Champloo
Space Dandy
The Great Pretender
. Adaptation of an 11-volume manga of decent score in mal with a distinct art style: pastel, fairy tales-y, or at least early (80s, 90s) Disney color schemes and linework (albeit it much better). Very pretty. The cutesificaition (facial expression exaggeration, juvenility, foleying in all scenes with child as focus, presentation of wonder and fascination), done to target childen, is annoying and detract the visual art.
MonsterMy Neighbors the Yamadas
or shounen ones like of, say, Naruto
. Problems? Pacing just offhand flatlines after the first half of either, and both become a chore to watch, consume until their increasingly unsatisfactory ending. Unrewatchable.
Studio Ghibli
Berzerk is okay. I dislike space operas, mech(a)s, female trash, baby trash, kid trash, family trash.
Half-inspired by this James Lindsay talk, and half by my desire to refine and concrete my thoughts on the matter, I'll present my framework of Marxism. Firstly, to define or at least make clear terms. The main one use more so as an umbrella for all derivative ideologies and movements, than as the set of ideas espoused by Marx, or alleged or argued by others that he espoused. Elsewhere on the site, I use 'left' as noun or adjective halfwise as a derogatory slant for Marx- -ists and -ism, and halfwise in the proper historic meaning denoting (radical) change. My tone should clearly point to one of either. Likewise, 'right', as an adjective, is (stubbornly, without acknowledging context) sticking to what had worked in the past; what (under past conditions) is stable, promoting (somebody's) commonweal.
It is an ideology, religion, cult created by Karl Marx. The the last was neither his intention, nor his doing, but, so of that he is not guilty. Yes, all three two. Engels helped with the first. I've honestly never heard anyone good- nor badmouth the guy. I'm content to think he was a lonely, who found a (wicked) companion in the former. One who mooched off and perverted his ideas, his Taschengeld, not once picking up the bill, and who threw him under the bus when finished with him. It and all⸻and I can't stress this enough⸻it's decescendents and derivatives, have but two (2) everpresent features. On these later.
argue bitch and moan, would bring about heaven on Earth. Or, to not using religious wording, would make human society a utopia (a no-place). Er⸻, that may not be it either. Would be optimal, most beneficial for the sanct few in power? For the workers? For all? Moving goalposts, of course. Getting there is the hard (read 'impossible') part. It is fundamentally undemocratic, that is, unrepresentative, if not coerced, despotic, violent; and it instills an oligarchic, authoritarian plutocracy. Even if that weren't the case, and history has yet to excrete a counterexample, it is as James Lindsay says (regarding how to get from Communism to the final, heaven stage):
Communism doesn't know how.
1, seldom wavering, unsupported belief in biological and or physical impossibilities (full 'equality', 'carbon neutrality', (pseudo-)'sustainability',⸻and I quote these because their meanings for Marxists prevaricate significantly from their historical, since they also started editing dictionaries to gaslight others, dictionary ones) in the face of not one but multitude confuting arguments and evidence is prime symptom of an adherent to or member of a religion.
2, like any other centralized religion, 'good', orthodox behavior is rewarded indirectly (I want to say intransitively, but there be no non-grammarical sense) or directly. That is, one feels contentness either, 2.1, about having done something according to the precepts, or, 2.2, because of a leader-manager-rallyer's (the equivalent of a priest, pastor, guru, imam, rabbi) commendation, public or private regardless of deeds. These too are the figures who can and will absolve your 'sins' for that, which under Catholicism goes by 'indulgences'. If you're haggling for your moral standing, you dun goofed, son.
2, leaving one, or trying to, or try to change it, 'fix' it, will get you others' scorn under the baleful gaze of the leader(s) (if not lawsuits and harassment for decades à la Scientology). Most religions you can leave, no questions asked, and never be bothered.
Theists don't usually regard themselves as such. Guillible, naïve, shleeping members of cults don't consider themselves as anything close to cultists. That is, the term for a member depends on whether you are part of the in- or the out-group. This is not the case for ideologies often, if you take away pejoratives and slurs. A practicing Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu would call it a 'faith' rather than a 'religion'. The semantic distance between the terms for cults is much greater. Scientologists literally label themselves saviors of humankind. Similarly did so the Heaven's-Gate-ists and the Aum-Shinrikyo-ists.
My offhand distinction between relgions and cults would have to lay in the possible ulterior motives of leaders and or power-holders, and in the discrepancies between goals and means to achieve these. My second such would be communal discretion: even in religious countries like America, Russia, Brazil, over 90% of believers of the major religion, can plumbly distinguish à la I-know-it-when-I-see-it a cult from a religion. Perhaps I'll wrap up these two section with an extended quote and two, short, poignant ones:
When these convictions are closely examined, whether at epochs marked by fervent religious faith, or by great political upheavals such as those of the last century, it is apparent that they always assume a peculiar form which I cannot better define than by giving it the name of a religious sentiment.
This sentiment has very simple characteristics, such as worship of a being supposed superior, fear of the power with which the being is credited, blind submission to its commands, inability to discuss its dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted. Whether such a sentiment apply to an invisible God, to a wooden or stone idol, to a hero or to a political conception, provided that it presents the preceding characteristics, its essence always remains religious. The supernatural and the miraculous are found to be present to the same extent. Crowds unconsciously accord a mysterious power to the political formula or the victorious leader that for the moment arouses their enthusiasm.
A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.
Intolerance and fanaticism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardor proceeded from the same source.
The convictions of crowds assume those characteristics of blind submission, fierce intolerance, and the need of violent propaganda which are inherent in the religious sentiment, and it is for this reason that it may be said that all their beliefs have a religious form. The hero acclaimed by a crowd is a veritable god for that crowd. Napoleon was such a god for fifteen years, and a divinity never had more fervent worshippers or sent men to their death with greater ease. The Christian and Pagan Gods never exercised a more absolute empire over the minds that had fallen under their sway.
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
Gustave Le Bon
Being an instrument of the present, an army deals mainly with the possible. Its leaders do not rely on miracles. Even when animated by fervent faith, they are open to compromise. They reckon with the possibility of defeat and know how to surrender. On the other hand, the leader of a mass movement has an overwhelming contempt for the present—for all its stubborn facts and perplexities, even those of geography and the weather. He relies on miracles. His hatred of the present (his nihilism) comes to the fore when the situation becomes desperate. He destroys his country and his people rather than surrender.
...
When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered:
No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.
...
Again, like an ideal deity, the ideal devil is omnipotent and omnipresent. When Hitler was asked whether he was not attributing rather too much importance to the Jews, he exclaimed:
No, no, no! …It is impossible to exaggerate the formidable quality of the Jew as an enemy.Every difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil, and every success is a triumph over his evil plotting.
...
Even in the case of a just grievance, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than from the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice—in other words from self-contempt. When we feel superior to our tormentors, we are likely to despise them, even pity them, but not hate them. That the relation between grievance and hatred is not simple and direct is also seen from the fact that the released hatred is not always directed against those who wronged us. Often, when we are wronged by one person, we turn our hatred on a wholly unrelated person or group. Russians, bullied by Stalin’s secret police, are easily inflamed against capitalist warmongers;” Germans, aggrieved by the Versailles treaty, avenged themselves by exterminating Jews; Zulus, oppressed by Boers, butcher Hindus; white trash, exploited by Dixiecrats, lynch Blacks.
The True Believer
Eric Hoffer
The various theoreticians, (for one, Herbert Marcuse heavily implied in in his writings), acknowledge it as a process, not as an attainable goal despite speaking of it as such. This 'feature' is closely tied to its failing in any and all endeavors in the human severe not tied to power and wealth acumination in the hands of the wordy, feisty gnostics, and slaughter and torture of millions of innocents. Because it's an interminable process, constant fodder is needed to keep it going, alive, which leads me to...
Lastly, there is no such thing as a 'far right'. And there cannot be. All extremists are 'left' of center, they want change. I'd bet my nutsack that those, who call themself very or extremely conservative, do not advocate for going back to stone age. Because that'd presupose the existance of an 'extremer' 'right' pining for the days before tools, or fire, or tribal hierarchy and or organisation.
Also, envision around every one group quotation marks, indicating that this is how the inhumanely-acting, crime-commiting opressors; movements' mouthpiece/s, or just the in-group majority labeled these. National socialists were shit, but they at least cared deeply about the the law.[1,2] Thisneedn't be, as it most often isn't, or rather wasn't, accurate to reality. Lastly, forget not that these are non-exclusive and may overlap.
| Title | Author |
|---|---|
| Historical Accounting | |
| The Gulag Archipelago | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
| The Psychology of Totalitarianism | Mattias Desmet |
| The Perfect Police State | Geoffrey Cain |
| Liberal Fascism | Jonah Goldberg |
| Unmasked | Andy Ngo |
| We Have Been Harmonized | Kai Strittmatter, Ruth Martin (tr.) |
| The Infernal Library | Daniel Kalder |
| Stasiland | Anna Funder |
| Industrial Society and Its Future | Theodore J. Kaczynski |
| Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism | Amanda Montell |
| Race Marxism | James A. Lindsay |
| Omnipotent Government | Ludwig von Mises |
| The Big Lie | Dinesh D'Souza |
| The Cultural Revolution | Frank Dikötter |
| The Psychology of Revolution | Gustave Le Bon |
| King Leopold's Ghost | Adam Hochschild |
| Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 | Katja Hoyer |
| Who Are China's Walking Dead? | Kay Rubacek |
| Socialism | Kristian Niemietz |
| Surveillance State | Josh Chin, Liza Lin |
| The Enemy Within | David Horowitz |
| The Girl with Seven Names | Hyeonseo Lee, David John |
| A River in Darkness | Masaji Ishikawa, Risa Kobayashi (tr.), Martin Brown (tr.) |
| The True Believer | Eric Hoffer |
| Memoirs | |
| Man's Search for Meaning | Viktor Frankl |
| A Woman in Berlin | Marta Hillers |
| Dresden | Frederick Taylor |
| Escape from Camp 14 | Blaine Harden |
| While Time Remains | Yeonmi Park |
| We Uyghurs Have No Say | Ilham Tohti |
| Smashed in the USSR | Caroline Walton, Ivan Petrov |
| Chinese Girl in the Ghetto | Ying Ma |
| Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949 | Siegfried Knappe |
| Fiction Inspired By | |
| Kolyma Tales | Varlam Shalamov |
| I Must Betray You | Ruta Sepetys |
| Darkness at Noon | Arthur Koestler |
| The Reader | Bernhard Schlink |
| Fatherland | Robert Harris |
| What | Who | When | Where | Scapegoats, Out-groups, and or Victims | Murders |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marxism | Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels | 1848 | Germany | capitalists, bourgeoisie | 1.4e8 |
| Socialism | Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels | 1848 | Germany | capitalists, bourgeoisie, kulaks, the (more) wealthy, prosperous, successful, landowning | |
| Communism | Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels | 1848 | Germany | capitalists, bourgeoisie, kulaks, the (more) wealthy, prosperous, successful, landowning | |
| Bolshevism | Vladimir Lenin | 1903 | Russia | bourgeoisie, tzarists, imperialists, royalists, mensheviks, monarchists (?), aristocrats | ? |
| Menshevism | Julius Martov | 1903 | Russia | bourgeoisie, ? | ? |
| Leninism | Vladimir Lenin | 1917 | Russia | bourgeoisie, kulaks, the wealthy/prosperous/successful/landowning | ? |
| Maoism | Mao Zedong | 1950s–60s | China, Russia | bourgeoisie, factionalists, counter-revolutionaries, reactionaries, 5 Black Categories, royalists, rightists, revisionists, Red Guard, Black Guard, landowners, bad elements, capitalists, anti-socialists, imperialists, spies, kulaks | 5e8 |
| Khmer Nationalism | Pol Pot | 1970s | Cambodia | Cambodia's previous military and political leadership, business leaders, journalists, students, doctors, lawyers, Buddhists, Chams, Thais, Muslims, Chinese Cambodians, Christian Cambodians, intellectuals, Vietnamese Cambodians | 1.7e6 |
| Troktskyism | Leon Trotsky | 1917 | Russia | ? | <1e5 |
| Stalinism | Joseph Stalin | 1927 | Russia | factionalists, traitors, trotkyists, everybody not X enough, ? | ?e6 |
| Proto-fascism | Woodrow Wilson | 1910s | US | non-patriots (?) | ? |
| Fascism | Giovanni Gentile | 1920s | Italy | prospering European states | ? |
| National Socialism | Adolf Hitler (?) | 1930s | Germany | Jews, Roma(ni)/gypsies, physical and mental invalids, non-Aryans | 6e6 |
| Juche | Kim Il-sung | 1970s | North Korea | nearly not exactly ideologically aligned and playing along, that is, everybody (..?) | 3.5e6 |
| Progressivism | Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt | ???? | US | ? | ? |
| Neo-progressivism | ? | ???? | US | ? | ? |
| Neo-liberalism | ? | ???? | US | ? | ? |
| Anti-capitalism | capitalists | ???? | US | ? | ? |
| Anti-fascism | facists | ???? | US | ? | ? |
| Deconstruction | Jacques Derrida | 1967 | France | order, rigidity, hierarchy, boundaries, categories | ? |
| Globalism | ? | ???? | US | ? | ? |
| Anti-racism | ? | ? | US | racists | ? |
| Anti-colonialism | Ho Chi Minh | 1920s | Vietnam | colonialists, (meddling? all?) foreigners, imperialists | ? |
| Multiculturalism | ? | ???? | ? | nationalists, ethostatists, ethonationalists | ? |
| Paternalism (?) Maternalism (?) |
? | ???? | ? | ? | ? |
| Radicalism (?) | Saul Alinsky (?) | ???? | ? | ? | ? |
| Feminism | Andrea Dworkin | 1990s | US | patriarchists? | ? |
| Colonialism | ? | ? | ? | natives | xxe6 |
| Environmentalism | ? | ???? | US | motorists, big oil, industrialism | ? |
| Ecofacism | Grant, Theodore Kaczynski, Devi | ???? | US | industrialists, big tech | ? |
| Activism | ? | ???? | US | ? (a thing at all) | ? |
| Vegetarianism | ? | ???? | US | big cow (?) | xe7 |
| Veganism | ? | ???? | US | big ? | ? |
| (Social?) Darwinism | Kropotkin (?) | 1900s | ? | ? | ? |
| Totalitarianism | ? | ???? | ? | ? (more a feature than a thing) | ? |
| Corporatism | ? | 1850s | Italy | ? | ? |
| Syndicalism | ? | 1900s | Italy | ? | ? |
| Critical Theory | Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer | 1930s | Germany | the (more) wealthy, powerful | ? |
| Queer Theory | ? | 1980s | ? | the (more) wealthy, powerful, normal | ? |
