Software I Use

iw: 20210424
lu: 20220826

OS: Void Linux What Arch Linux purports to be⸻minimal, is more so achieved by Void. No systemd⸻need I say more? The bestest package system. Comes in both glibc and musl C standard library flavors. I'd used xubuntu for 1⸺2y ~2014, but had switched back to win7 due to constant issues, I hadn't then the tenacity to problemsolve, nor the time or willingness to learn to. 1⸺1.5y before switching, I'd fucked-, no, stabwoundfucked my installation by half-assedly, mischievously, unthoughtfully registry-editing, causing boot-up to last a measly 25'. Rummaging round there shortly before doing the deed, I deleted vast amounts superfluous records, which too little, too late fixed the issue. The 'fast', read 2', boot was back, yey..? Happy-go-lucky me chose to forgo decision and take the plunge of switching before variegate other ugliness sprang up. My first void install was with the Enlightenment DE, a.k.a. crashmedadDE, but in 2⸺3 months after reacquaintance with GNU/Linux, I did a reinstall without a DE, taking the suckless pill. Very happy with just about everything.

Shell: zsh Everything about it I love (Too strong a word? My firm discontentment with bash, and less so (da)sh necessitates a push toward one extremum.)⸻globbing, recursion, flags and modifiers, loop shorthands, modules, PCRE, options galore, emulate of all the major shells, arrays, PCRE!!!, and more. Read all ~210000 words or ~32000 80-width lines of the fucking documentation. Additional resources in no particular order: zsh refcard (useful although slightly outdated), grml, zsh mailing list, rayninfo zshtips.

Window manager: dwm Small, fast, stable, easily extensible; pairs well with slstatus, what I used, and setroot, both likewise. Ages ago I used herbstluftwm with conky, and dzen2; configuration of all of which was unnecessarily clunky, also bloat. I use the hide-vacant-tags, columns, push-no-master, smart-borders patches.

Terminal emulator: st Small, fast, stable, easily extensible. I use the ligatures, scrollback, and ringbuffer patches. Low input latency, memory usage. Does the job.

Text editor: kakoune Chronologically, omitting notepad.exe, Sublime Text was my first big boy text editor, used 2011⸺2021. Sane settings, sane keybindings (coming from Windows, that is); extremely easily and verily customizable; bundled with a package manager, that just werks, and packages abound. Present day, since the fucking closed-source aussie cunts don't offer statically linked or musl builds, I've had to give quite literally every text editor, found in my disto's repo, an honest shake, and quite a donkeydicksack more from github. Usually, when something runs smoothly, you don't have much to say, you are content (or you're in awe and exult, if it's actually good). When it don't just werks⸻big oof. A very non-exhaustive listing of shits: 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 as fuck, and bindings are for the M in S&M. vi(m): begrudgingly usable with mucho rebinding, reading, and head-scratching, alongside patience; learning everything, then shuffling and juggling configs and mappings to something familiar will durate coming from anything Window-y; exactly why emacs feels like it does. Even disregarding the many, for a user cryptic or unhelpful error messages, one can at least get some work done. zed, zsh's editor partnered with fast-syntax-highlighting is splendid for anything shell-related under 10kb, not involving here-strings. ed, acme, sam I'd put besides emacs. Why must keybindings differ so? vim is very obviously moribund as evidenced by the extended life-support proffered by neovim/lua. lite-xl is another Lua-based one, easy to write plugins for (probably more so than neovim, both use Lua) as well as much prettier and with sane-r default keybs. kakoune does everything I want of it, good choice of regex though not fully Perl-compatible; front-end is real nice, internals are kinda shit; sane defaults. helix is great, though I dislike the modal paradigm, and think it should be kept as simple as possible, rather than adding modes willy-nilly (at least 2 of its modes could be nixed by treading over its principle of not using alt as a modifer, which it explicitly does not want to use). Being integrated with tree-sitter, however, is a big plus for normies, but you can't write your own syntax files quickly and simply⸻you must use treeshitter; can't fiddle with functions and config as much either.

Pager: less There are exactly two pagers that predominate the GNU/Linux distros: more and less. All my reading is accomplished through it. It uses PCRE, render ANSI C escape code, is rebindable, and customizable; allows piping and editing. Probably my most used program, not counting the shell, terminal emulator, tabbed, and window manager.

File browser manager: noice Fast (C) and slightly extensible if you're into reinventing or improving existing code. Functionality is minimal, has more aesthetic qualities. Not bug-ridden or slow as ranger, nor as finicky as lf. Rarely do I use it or need a visual representation of files. clifm is like shell on HGH and roids for doing file stuff without obsolescing selection programs or find-type programs' (batch) execution option. Even more customizable than noice through rc files (ini) and shell scripts; it's also written in C.

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...

Media player: mpv Cosmic amount of settings, if you're into that shit. I'm not. Does the job out of the box though. Nice integration with yt-dlp and ffmpeg, relegating using shitty, 'modern' websites' JS players or browsers themselves as media players.

Internet browser: boredserf, vimb, elinks boredserf is a fork of surf, both using significantly less RAM and CPU than Firefox⸻all versions of which, namely normal/nightly/ESR⸻, I've had unaddressable issues with for over 1.5y as of the IW relating to scroll-jitter, tab-crashing, and privacy. Anyway, I'm very happy to have contacted Jon Bakke, who'd written a patch for content blocking, who after some back and forth with me got to forking surf. A few issues with it have already been addressed, the main one of blocking various first and third party types of content is working smoothly, and it is the closest thing to uBlock we'll be getting using WebKit2 as a relatively suckless internet browser. I think he may have abandoned it..? Anyway, with two small tweeks to the source, nothing throttles, lags, crashes, or freezes on my end, so it's quite nice, if I do say so myself. (And I do.) For surf, I had keybound surfraw (some of whose elvi are out of date, but most easily fixable) as an additional prompt, and used only the userscript patch to use 4chanX to make imageboards more usable. The lack of uBlockOrigin, can be partially compensated by wyebadblock supposedly, though I never got it to work. Additionally, sort -uing some big-ish lists of elements to hide (easylist, easyprivacy, fanboy-(social|annoyance|cookiemonster) antiadblockfilters, etc.), and append to the default stylesheet, one gets very good results (along with a big /etc/hosts file). elinks has the benefit of not being able to or having to display any modern web bullshit, looking the exact same way on every website (no to-n-fro css switching or fiddling), and being faster to load anything. For reference material, fora, and plain text reading and dumping, it reigns supreme.

PDF viewer: zathura, qpdfview The lightest one that's easily customizable, not an eyesore, and doesn't leak memory (glaring at you, katarakt). mupdf (memory-heavy, single-file, no xid), xpdf, xreader, apvlv can eat donkey dick. Currently giving zathura with tabbed a shot (since the --unique option of qpdfview requires dbus, which I do not want); It... has issues, being prone to lag like vimb, which is also undiagnosable, and thus requires a refresher of sort, usually selecting the same tab. Higher zoom is real slow; otherwise minimal and decent. Still though, had I larger screen and more comfortable setup, it'd've'n perfect. sioyek is great too, but doesn't have tabs.

Image viewer: sxiv, feh feh achieves a bit more than its competitors⸻as a background-setter, can sort according to image parameters, etc. like nearly 2y After awhiles, I've finally gotten round to sxiv, and I really like it. Regarding terminal graphics programs, chafa is the best (fastest, highest quality, on my machine, at least). I'd tried 3 others (1 forgotten)⸻tiv better than caca. I have nox versions for pretty much everything I use, ha-ha..

Torrent client: qbittorrent, transmission I can't remember my gripe with the every client my repo offers, so I'll just emit what I recall: qbittorrent suddenly started segfaulting in mid-2021 (worked in 2023 spring when transmission decided to stop working), though it was nearly perfect; rtorrent has abstruse keybindings, inexcusable performance, and usability, stability, and development issues. mabel and a few Go ones have popped up, but neither has the polish of these.

misc

Spritz reader: speedread When reading something inconsequential, or containing less than, say, 4000 words, with little-to-no valuable information or heavy sentences (uncommon and or long words, uncommon or weird wording and phrasing, among others), this tool allows express consumption, that is, reading. fltrdr, flinks, cfastread are a few of the better ones other there, the first two having some capabilities for aesthetics, and the last having no controls currently. Most, that I've tried from github, have issues, be it keybindings, bad design, overextension/scope creep. I wanted something that was similar to Balabolka's spritz reader, which introduced me to the idea first. In the end, I modified a good Perl script named speedread. Highly recommended for fodder articles.

HTML parser: pup Lovely tool. The virgin API vs. the Chad scrape and so on and so forth. Most my scripts for dealing with websites from the command line use it.

HTML reader: rdrview Built in C from Mozilla's Firefox's reader's code. Using a browser, put elinks here, it processes any .html file, extracting what it considers essential content, and opens result in browser. Or if you use a -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.

Doc prep: tectonic Since learning LaTeX in uni, I've used it for CV, diabetes logbook, personal dictionaries, documentation, letters, emails, one-time diary and magazine, and a few others. I'd initially used miktex, while on windows, and then texlive distributions of TeX. The former has the standard windows issues: ugly, shitty, but still usable, UI⸻dl, click some boxes, click install, and whoop, it's done. texlive required more manhandling and a weird way of working with it. On the other hand, tectonic is a one-off binary, it installs any packages as needed without any fuss (of which there was plenty with texline); never interrupts execution to prompt for the in 99.9% of cases unneeded user input.

Filtering: pcre2grep, rg grep sucks ass. POSIX sucks major donkey dick. Most often than not, otherwise would this list exist? Its BRE and ERE⸻why do these exist again, it's not 1979 anymore⸻, are clumsy and or insufficient for non-trivial queries. perl is actually part of many distributions, so why in the fuck is not PCRE the default?! Acquiring usable output with grep requires a slew of options, if not repeated calls, that is pipes, since the regex are shit. GNU sed and awk are single-use languages, have learning curves (in being different to most anything new for the past 30 years). Necessary evils at times, I'll give you that.
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.

File search: fd Vroom-vroom. Fast, sane regex. Fuck me, I despised GNU find. All said regarding rg more or less true of this too.

Fuzzy search: fzf, fzy Latter is smaller and faster and has better, saner matching. Former has had a feature creep since its inception. That said, the adjustable keybindings from outside the program, the preview-window, and bindable action, formatting, multiple selections and some other options allow creation of intricate shell scripts and integration with other terminal programs.

RSS parser: sfeed Small, easily extendable and customizable, cronable, supports various inputs and outputs. I made some keybinding adjustments, and two scripts, one for spritzing, and one for flite, both, as well as the default page open, get rdrview treatment. The UI is very nice, no need for another even more piping.

Font: Fira Code Not exactly software. I use it as my serif, sans serif, and monospaced fonts, that is, for literally everything. I used to, during my uni years, like very rounded sans serif fonts: Century Gothic, ITC Avant Garde Gothic, TeX Gyre Adventor, and Futura. These, however, hinder legibility at greater glyph throughtput and letter discrimination at a distance. The programming-specific ligatures are nice to look at.

On Appreciation

iw: 20210424
lu: 20210426

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.

One 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 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.

On Context

iw: 20210501
lu: 20210510

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.

What I Play

iw: 20210511
lu: 20230524

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 puzzlse; 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.

Nullpomino To quote, 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: realtime 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.

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction A few years back, I'd rekindled an addiction for a game I'd only ever played as a child with Hero Editor, and had watched others play 'normally'. RyuQuezacotl and MrLlama, two D2 speedrunners, I'd taken to watching for pretend companionship (not a parasocial relationship), not feeling alone. It was fun, but got rather repetitive, and unlike music, or reading, or any anything else really, it yielded no lasting benefit (eating has the lasting benefit of you living, say, whilst being miserable just increases likelihood of suicide), being like a short fling. A movie's plot you should be able recall fairly in a month's time, unlike any of the 7⸺20 streams, each often lengthier than the LotR trilo, yet ultimately transient, unremarkable, and hardly distinguishable from one another.
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 mod. 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.

Doom I really do not enjoy roaming around like retard searching for keycards, hidden passageways, ammo and health within uniformly textured, multi-storied, labyrinthine maps, but... Brutal Doom fucks, or slaps, as the kids say, or is nice, if we're doing preschool level 2000s English. Wholesale slaughter, and that shotgun is just, urgh cooms.

Cataclysm: Bright Nights I've been playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead on and off for 4 years. The main branch is a shitshow. And things have only been getting worse faster with time (as with everything associated with humans). You can't fix everything with json-based modding, so some anon from /vg/ forked it He keeps up with new commits, excludes everything not fun, accepts suggested commits, and is a really nice, cool dude. It's a roguelike, a turn-based, grid-based, procedurally-generated, slightly stat-heavy game with a very open world, offering various roads to the same item or goal. Win conditions by default are nil, in BN, unless it's changed, there is one. Setting a goal with a starting scenario is preferable and awards some satisfaction. I usually customize my experience to minmax points and become a martial arts tank, ending up with the same power fantasy almost every time. Given there's no right or wrong way to play, merely default settings, one can play any scenario, with whatever and however few or many items and/or monsters. You can even farm in the desert with nothing else alive, if you so want. Or you can build a 6000hp death train. Up to you.

On (My) Depression

iw: 20210512
lu: 20210514

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 is 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 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. Nah, mate, the state owns you. I've seen Lego blocks with more character, and less predictability the '''doctors''' and misc. staff there. It's almost as much a tragedy as the first 150 years of 'psychiatry', that somebody's subjective, unsubstantiated opinion about, in this case, purely subjective (and legal) matters, will get a pass as 'fact' to authorize serious drug-use and/or forced compliance through violence. Almost.

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 went 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 to 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 options. 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 an 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.

Saving Angel Syndrome a.k.a., putting all your eggs in a one (mostly purely hypothetical) basket, is fallacious thinking à la post hoc ergo propter hoc. I was victim to this, to myself really (does circumstance explicate you, or inform your (re-)actions?), for 1⸺3 years. I've never called it this, but the name came to me and it does seem suitable. A deus ex machina to solve poor little ol' you's predicament. A fictional plot device for your very real life. A person (An imago perhaps?), thing, event to delegate your salvation to, to do the heavy lifting, to offset your responsibilities, work, wish-fullfillment to.

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.

My Compositions

iw: 20210512
lu: 20230415

All music linked to in this article was composed by me, and is also licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. If you hear a guitar, then the piece is playable, and done by me (on a, like, 40⸺50cm cheapass 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 be 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.

1 s Can't remember motivation starting it, but its evolution was fueled by heeey, this could '(be (better|more (chaotic|complex|a?tonal|(dis|con)sonant))|have more tones)'. I consider it more than 90% finished, and the last 5⸺10% as everyone, who's ever created something and cares, knows are non-linear as fuck.

2.1 s This piece was my outlet for several things I wanted to try out, experimental for the most part, only the ending is very meh. Kindaslighta unfinished.

mmm s I usually don't do more than 2⸺3 voices, even my piano pieces that have 4 staves, usually don't all sound simultaneously. I wanted to do want my nigga Bach did back in the day on a weekly basis for a few years in the Leipzig's Thomaskirche. So I endeavored to compose a choral in three parts, based on the simple 6-tone melody of a children's song. The third part remains incomplete, with only 2⸺3 bars as intended. However, the rest is very serviceable, imo.

cwh s I call this the whole-half tango. In all parts is to be found the classic tango rhythm. Looking at the score would help here as only in the last is it actually heard unobstructed. The initial letter C was the the starting root, albeit, the wh scale can be considered as having either no root, or either four equivalent ones, or a 4-fold degenerate one. I'd thought up ways to modulate using some 4-fold degenerate chords into one of the neighboring two other whole-half scales, specifically the one with a half-tone to the next root. The dominant chord was suboptimal, but I'd love to hear better ones. There exist allowances of off-scale tones, but overall idea is kept to til the end.

lol1 s a.k.a., mobster-movie-car-chase-scene music; visually that what I hear. Only after I'd completed it, did I realize I'd made a small, but funny mistake: in having two different rhythms one has some choice in representation. I'd chosen poorly. But, I'll be damned, I'm not making it more proper, just to have it calculate the exact same note lengths. The melody and basslines could easily be expanded upon, but I decided to have it be a loop. Imagine it playing over the Wacky Races sped up.

b1 s I wanted a blues-y piano thing, and I think succeeded. Short, but sweet.

holiday-y ?

nunu 1.2 ?

unnamed1 ?

work2.7 Very unfinished, but this was around when birds started flying into each and every airplane engine.

For Milyan I'd been writing this for a long time, and at the very end, half-joking, half-serious I'd dedicated it to a then good friend, hence the name. I'm showcasing the recording on a lower speed without distortion, because the other one is aural holocaust, and I am ashamed at my impatience. Unfortunate the only surviving recordings are garbage.

For Ivana I.e., some pretty nobody.

For Klara s Felt inspired by this somewhat pretty med student working in the psych ward when the locked me up there. No feelings, just inspiration. Did the initial work in my head for guitar, but over it, esp. writing it out in MuseScore, I'd changed it to piano for note duration, and range, although it's still meant for guitar and still very much playable. Second movement. began as play with swing triplet ratio lengths, and somehow devolved into a pedal point experiment where chords lengths were exaggerated (bc. it could be played piano) and overly dramatic. And that in turn skipped several evolution cycles forward into probably my best counterpoint. Three undeserving to be accommodated under the same name movement's. Klara was touched somewhat, but didn't know what to say, her instinct was to negate all possible doctor-patient relations, so I left it at that.

?01 ?

?02 ?

?03 ?

5 s ?

BFP s Inspired by Mike Gordon's spin on the DOOM classic BFG Division. It was initially intended for piano, but stuff happened, and I went for DOOM toms..? If you didn't know percussion is divided into tuned (or toned? don't know what the exact name is)⸻like a tom, snare, chime⸻where the fundamental frequency is clearly audible; and such that have none such⸻like cymbals. Incomplete.

There are no nice things. s In '16⸺17, in the store, in the afternoon (not that I spent hours shelfshopping), I'd taken to humming this melody, which bore the lyrics of what ultimately become the lil' ol' title. The melody is lost to time, but the feel and tempo of the first bare kind of, may, perchance, perhaps, mayhaps be similar enough. Featured here.

0304 s Was pushed by the emotion resultant from 1⸺2 brief correspondences, that, lo and behold, crashed and burned, to frisbee my fedora in the musical ring. Once again. I had't composed in over a year and month, namely There are no nice things. from above; and have barely listened to music, trauma and 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 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 French 20. century jovial 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 my 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 key strokes for the latter.

Realizing You...

iw: 20210525

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.

Your 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 a 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.

Evanition from collective consciousness Both Nina Teicholz and, more technically and very deeply so, Gary Taubes, have massively contributed to uncovering the lies, ties, the billions of taxpayers' and industries' spent in advertising, 'studies', bribing and influencing, and elsewhere in this shindig.[17,18,19,20,21,22] Another big dick here is Tim Noakes, a South-African medical scientist and doctor, who has contributed greatly to sports science and African health. He got dunked into a shark tank over a tweet that caused no harm. His book with an independent journalist goes through his history and experiences with running and diet, the science of what he advocates and practices, and the court ordeal antebellum to its terminus.[23] A woman is blame for starting this shitshow⸻the match; but more so by avaricious, unscrupulous execs and lawyers⸻the tanker's worth of kerosene dumped atop the smolder. Belinda Fettke, whose husband was raked over the coals in Australia.[24,25] He'd stopped the progression of a specific kind of aggressive cancer within himself through carbohydrate removal and had thereby learned of many of the subsequent benefits thereof, had suggested the diet/nutritional advice to some of his patients (whose health afterwards improved significantly by stopped medication, forgoing amputations and surgeries he'd have to do, etc.) and some colleague shill taddled on him. She traces the plain, refined carbohydrate push to the Seventh-day Adventist sect of Christianity: Kellogg's, Ellen G. White, and all following big cereal and big food companies. Regarding Ancel Keys, and government-subsidized and -sponsored propaganda, other nations following the US without doing the work or asking the important questions, 'Mediterranean' diets, big seed oil and big nut, big cereal, big pharma, etc., read/watch Teicholz's book/movie, read all books by Taubes.[17,26] Read, read, read.

Why it works for the vast majority By which I mean 99.98% of humans, anecdotally, of course, from talks given watched, about DNA mutations and rare syndromes and diseases impairing protein and or lipid metabolisis. Well, if you can't digest protein, or have same rare mutation courtesy of your family prohibiting or hindering beta oxidation, then maybe not for you specifically. I know that there are 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.

Sustainability, etc. Putting aside that agenda-pushers⸻be it religdrones, 'activists' of any sort, member of any movement starting with a 'veg', corporate shills, and bribees⸻, have zero-to-no actual, substantive evidence supporting claims made (more strongly than we do). Inundation with predictable, pre-packaged propaganda⸻repetition of the same fallacies doesn't let me skip over them with eyes glazed, this ain't Orwell's 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.

Conclusion So, if humanity is to be bettered at the breakneck pace of a petrified snail in heat, then not in my lifetime, but perhaps in the next 100⸺200 years will agriculture as a method for 'feeding' humans (and other animals incompatible with plant matter), and unethically or immorally, pathologically, hypocritically, superciliously making money hand over fist be abrogated, reducing significantly (say, 4⸺9%?) percentage of negative anthropogenic effects on Earth through mass-scale: carbon sequestration, topsoil restoration, biodiversity promotion, and reinstantiation of intricate but non-fragile co-dependencies between ruminants, flora, fauna, and humans.

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.

On Aging

iw: 20230307

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.

What in the fuck are you on about, mate? Do not harry me, unkind sir. I shall get to it. So, what have I done in the past 4 odd years other than, you know, fucking aging and wasting muh potential? I got job in science where I hail from. It was and is shit: there are no avenues for success, there is nothing to look forward to. There is gray, corruption, flippantry, superciliousness, soviet bullshit. Countries that failed the transition (opposite the counter-examples of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania) are horrible in many a way. I am in unofficial leave, fucker does not want to fire me because there's barely any people as is, let along below the 45.

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. Updating, refining, editing necessary. Whole text is dog shite. lmao, yah, nah, cunt.
Ain't no fucking hurry since everything is ultimately meaningless tho. Yeah, sure, kid. Whatever floats your boat. It is rather strange being an observer in life, in one's own life, in your life. Camus's L'Étranger floater nonchalantly bys me. As does The Doors' Jim Morrison's chorus:

People are strange when you're a stranger.

On Valuation

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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 (in whose eyes?), so no⸻, they'd rapidly changed⸻devolved really⸻, in a year and change into a malfunctioning perversion of what I (thought I) was initially acquainted with and then came to know. Disgusting, repulsive even given my knowledge of them. So, I was thinking of their hypocrisy, see: they claim to be steadfast religious, however: their goals, motives, actions are always self-centered, self-ish, in goading others towards their goals rather than theirs, insidious, I know, often not to the desired effect, I reckon, but they're learning; they claim to (want to) be chaste, puerile, clean, pure⸻why not unmolested?⸻, but exhibit and or don't inhibit wanton sexual behavior and thoughts; (there was more, but I'll add when I remember it); then I thought of my claim that the (human) world runs on it, on hypocrisy if you don't wanna play the pronoun game after a bigass sentence.

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 Oh, I could never⸻never! between my babies fizzles out if/when they are or would be in physical and or mental agony, otherwise said, torture. When push comes to shove⸻and push always comes to shove⸻a parent would ask oneself questions like: who do I love least? who's done the least for me? for theirself? for society? who's the least accomplish? who's a KH, NEET virgin? who has least to live (for)? to aid in choosing, though that would work for developed children, not saying adults, 4-year-olds can have a distinct temperament, a bit later maybe even the silhouette of a personality, future permanent character traits. Still with me? Would the person above (woah, species dropping much?) sacrifice their reckless behavior, assume (strict) control, accept responsibility, admit fault and make amends with others and, most importantly, themselves? Trudging forward, what would they willingly sacrifice to have that remain true? Every life has a value, ask life insurers and Somalian piracy response teams; every property has a value, ask underwriters; and so on. These of course aren't absolute, and have in isolation from other answers (of the similar questions) little-to-no value. Relative to one another though, they, supposing truthfulness and charitability in answering and no mental illness or severely low IQ, paint the picture of the person. Depending on who the person is⸻how Big5/OCEAN (and their facets), amid other parameters, they are⸻it may also adumbrate who that person wants to be (for themselves), and or wants or needs to be for others, not necessarily who they are.

So, ask yourself, what do you value? How much do you value it? Put a price on it and update it monthly, or yearly, when critical. dew et.

On Coping

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What Initially I'd wanted to write about drugs. A paragraph and an askance gander later, I realized the title is unsuitable to my writing about more or less addiction. So I'd changed it. More niggling. Barely a sentence after, I realized that wasn't it either, and that what I was writing was neither magazine nor journal article-length pieces, neither was their quality ever passable. 'Writings' indeed, my dear. So then, what's is gon be? Well, coping, I guess. It is either adjacent or tied to or part of the former two. What is 'coping'? It is the nominalization of a verb I'll give a/my definition to; I'm not trying to be a smartass, pinky promise. Ahem:

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. Great confidence you have in yourself. Notice the action describes has no binary completion state, that is, it is an enduring process. It's either happening, or it isn't; rephrases: if it's happening, then you're not succeeding (in overcoming (something)).

Who Last time I checked⸻and I do check every year⸻male winged rats does ostensibly, visibly, immediately cope with with having their (very stupid) dancemoves eschewed by pigeonettes. On the opposite, as if, I can see the surprise condense in their beady black eyes. Every time that stupid look of What do you mean I'm not Patrick Swayze in 1987's blockbuster 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. Claiming you're human human again, Obongo? They 'lick their wounds', but that's different, and usually violent. Social animals may be ostracized within their group, pack, or banished. These member don't then give up to start: shrugging obligations to self and others; boozing; getting fat; slipping into (even more) irrelevance, incompetence and or inability. Mind you, I am woefully unprepared with even trivial knowledge about, say among much others, zooneurology and -psychology. Feel free to point me to whatever relevant. An example that comes to mind is of a mother (only!) mourning recently deceased children. Biology dictates the length of this period, of course, laying 400 eggs and getting 100 pancaked by a diver's foot, or boulder, or eaten, would really matter matter, neither would it for frequently bearing animals, nor would if for those who abandon they offspring soon after egg laying or birthing. A momma bear, elephant, or other big animal would for a much longer time mourn and abstain for the mating game. Because muh genes are stronger than muh feels with animals though, because time heals all wounds, it may not be next Tuesday, or next year, but the momma will get in on again. And humans are animals. Thinking about it, they're more bestial than ravenous, diseased dogs on the grand scale.

The rest The 'why' is perhaps given by the definition, but it'd help to consider a case where one doesn't cope with one's problem: does something, everything around start crumbling due to neglect? should it at all be considered one if nothing changes externally? what if not internally? Hmph, too close for comfort to what a problem and its resolution constitute. The 'how' holds majority shares. It is where fans (in the modern-day neutral connotation), fanatics, addicts, junkies can be made, where hobby horses and obsessions germinate, where shards can mend to remake a whole, or splint and shatter further apart. Coping is probably necessary. Not (requiring) coping implies overcoming of or dealing with the difficulty in question or utterly failing to engage with it. There are better and worse ways of coping depending on the person and their goals, desires. Having started to do so, it should be ever less often practiced by one, one should get back to one's life. Not stall.

Moi While I am addicted to caffeine⸻I take 1.5⸺2g every day (this is a white crystalline powder, like 99% of all chemical substances; not coffee), insisting that I'll get the withdrawal symptoms of, 1, slightly-below-migraine-tier headaches imperceptible during sleep only; and, 2, restless, troubled, short in duration, and hard to initiate sleep; though the dire former didn't occur that last two times I'd done a 48-hour test⸻, I don't get any noticeable bump in mood, or pleasure, or anything really, other than fucking water excretion (diuretics drain your bladder :|). I don't take it to feel better, or more often when I'm down. Likewise with masturbation, which I don't engage in often and especially not when depressed. I quit alcohol cold turkey April '17 or '18?, doesn't really matter, but back then I drank to have fun, however that may well have been my psyche masking it to protect my fragile ego. Sprinkle in myself going against what I'd said and practiced since starting drinking at 16, namely that I wouldn't imbibe alone, nor at home, nor with relatives, family. Towards the end, I guess, you could say Oh, don't be shy about it. I was coping..? A bottle of gin, 5⸺6 beers, 3 bottles of wine, bottle of vodka, ..., copin' was indeed happ'nin'. (EU bottles/units/standards: 1L, 50cL, 75cL, 1L, resp.) Currently I whip out harsh, premature judgments about others (taking up the indignant tone of a benevolent, sagacious, yet patronizing philosopher king, as recently ridiculed) and I whittle my way into 'rightdom' by conflating one of my alternatives ending up correct with that with that with the highest one always ending up correct (there was a website devoted this, people would bet money on events taking place or not with some probability, likely with some trick to distribute cash accordingly to winners and losers). What else? Dissociating as of recently, which is mostly the same as meditation, the way I'd practiced it. Back when I was fit, and I'd wanted to gain Bruce Lee levels of strength (not really, but I wanted strength, and he was inspiring), I didn't do handstand push-ups to cope with anything, I was having fun. Though I know it is what gets a lot of people through tougher times, why working out is a thing in prison. Other instances of coping therefrom, specifically isolation: cupping, cutting, meditating, working out.
People cope⸻ Well now... you don't flipping say.

On Masculinity

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Touchy is what males become on topic of masculinity when touching upon sexuality. Squeamish, often childish in their disgust and their applied blocking-out and coping methods. Others, but especially when its about theirs. This is why the prison shower rape scene in 1998's movie 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.

'Butt stuff' as it goes by in non-academic environments can be defined as anything done with the purpose of sexual gratification that somehow involves one's own or the other's... posterior. Rear end. Derrière. Behind. Rump. Stern. Seat. Bottom. Caboose. Fundament. Keister. Fanny (US). Buttocks. Tush(y). Boot(y). Bum. Bum-bum. Arse. Ass. Ayuss. Butt. I swear, I'm not procrastinating to forgo speaking about uncomfortables. I'm no ass man but few and far between are biologically unhardwired to appreciate a well-formed, however you may define it, ass. A brief or prolonged 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: can i get uuuuh triple biceps, extra extra sweat, a 7-foot girthy dick, a 64 abs (arranged in an 8x8 grid, ofc), and a squirt of general telepathy? kthxbai.

What is masculinity? A collection of qualities men on average exhibit more stronger than women on average do, if at all? During adolescence and yearly adulthood, when one male is 'with da bois' or with his female or submissive or receiving partner, he expresses more of these traits, in the former case as (friendly) competition, in the latter, ..? To be the best man they can be for them? May have stumbled into a wall with that one. To assure the other? I dunno, but nature is like this, so there must be a reason. Fine then. Be a horrible communicator, see if I care. But why you gotsa be homophobic? Ah, to the point. What of the ass does I fear? The fecal matter? Mostly yeah, I'd ask nature, why the fuck it decide the vaginal opening should be so close to the anal sphincter, I've had around 4 close calls of 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 :^)

Homophobia..? One's preference for anal sex on either end doesn't necessarily mean or require homophobia, or being disgusted, angered, 'triggered' somehow by the men who engage in sodomy, or even women who prefer it (?), mind you, not the act (solely), but the people. That is a cheap distraction, but one to be addressed. Another is this: okay, you like giving it, but would rather a knife in a stab wound than having your colon crème brûlèed? Flipping the roles diametrically alters the experience, it's not the difference between a sous-chef and a Chef de partie, there's little-to-no overlap. Plopping in a 9999-degree Celcius, Fahrenheit, your-preferred-unit-of-temperature, that is, attractive, bespoke female before you, instead of a bloke⸻, Nay, strike that. Whatever species, whatever (sub)race, whatver flutes your boot⸻with a tailored dong handcrafted by artisanal Venician sausage stuffers, designed by Leo da Vinci himself with the help of the *inhale* Jew Illuminati Rothschild Vanderbilt five-dimensional lizard space aliens clockwork gremlins⸻do you now accept this universe's most comfortable, sexually satisfying, tasty poopoopeepee? Uuuh, no. . ?

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.

So..? My answer to this question is also tied to a desire to die or rather to not exist. If you put a loaded not with blanks firearm in my hands, I'd carefully position it as the statistic for fatalities by bullet wounds is graphed in the Geo Stone book I'd read back in 2017⸺18, and pull the trigger. So, I've failed to answer the question, failed to discuss anything seriously. I need a accountability entity to keep me on track. Is men's perception of their masculinity remarkably fragile? I'd think so, but, again, I'm diffracting everything through my distorted ideals, myself. If you're going to break down a man, build him back up strong, or help him do that himself. You yourself decide what you value, in yourself, in men in general, in yourself set against others, there is not one truth. Your truth is shaped by your will, your goals. Don't know how women are made more feminine, or what femininity is exactly. Topic for another time.

I'll improve this in the future, bear with me.

Anime

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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 recorrespond 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.

(almost) always rewatchable

Tatami GalaxyS1, ONA, M 2-ish seasons. The movie futher explores and develops characters. It also has the gall to finish the main story. Plot-wise, it's not deep. Recursion with variation. Is the prettiest, wackiest/zaniest, exuberant-most. Tonally equivalent to the manga, from what I've seen (haven't read it). Wonderful combination of magical and mundane. Magic not like in Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons, My Little Pony. More like undulating fever dream. A zoetrope with vignettes of sobriety and the lesser drugs. Heart-warming, charming, eye-candy. Based on the 2004 novel by Tomihiko Morimi. Great writing, hits same notes, but both manga and anime include 1⸺2 more perceptions for an even greater impact.

Working!!S1, S2, S3, M The 'na-na-ne-ne?' scene is golden. I've watched it enough time to remember the bouts of laughter had. The show's about a high-schooler part-timing in a typical Japanese Denny's knock-off, and a few adults with no future life prospects. Rewatchable, funny, slightly relatable, almost sitcom-y. (Comfy..? Hate that word. Watch it fall in disuse upcoming 5 year. What I mean is: familiar, not ob- or subjectively hostile, depressing, annoying.) Funnies rather than development. The latter can be condensed to a single statement, mere binary change, for each character. All of which, if I recall correctly, are found in the wrap-up episode.
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

Baka And TestS1, S2 The only rewatchable for its non-aesthetic qualities. Which are wordplay, stereotypes, subversion, slapstick. In appealing to the too young or to those of different preferred style of humor they failed. All story or plot and all expositional scenes are boring, irrelevant in addition to ruining pacing of and taking time for jokes, gags, etc. Laugh-out-loud funnies for me in this one. Sitcom-like in that no growth occurs in any character and that although there is plot, it exists as an environment for the writers' intruments of humor to grow.

Despair SenseiS1, S2 Ongoing manga, 2 or 3 seasons of anime; very pretty. witty but culturally or contextually sensitive in what it draws inspiration from. Episodes offer no discussion, take no sides, merely show or load them upon our conveniently stereotyped or molded high-schoolers. Eccentric. Simple. Pretty. Style. Likeable characters too, all of 'em.

Kiss x SisS1, S2, OVA Raunch, middle- and high-school-tier low-brow content and humor. The music is toppest of notches and shelves. Had I phone, that ever rang, I'd be using this banger as a ringtone.

Panty & Stocking with GarterbeltS1 Crude, low-brow humor using language, visuals, and references⸻Looney Tunes on steroids, sexed up; a distinct style, neither Japanese, nor Eastern Asian; charm (subjective much?). At times very wholesome, also self-referential/self-aware/meta/4th-wall-break-y. Like a good Adult Swim show, with the animation chops of a good nip studio.

pauciannually rewatchable..?

Initial DS1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, OVA1 Although the bubble had already burst, the party killed dead, this anime has yet the craziness of the earlier 15 years, both culture- and anime-wise. Although we're following a high-schooler and young adults, there are no safe, that is, dead-on-arrival school shenanigans for primary schoolers. '80s and '90s nip car (sub)culture, great choice of music⸻literally rebranding an existing genre, and renationalizing it; also how much can we push remixing?⸻, and that's pretty much it. It's simple, but it delivers (tofu). The races were re-CGI'd in the later years and rereleased as single pieces, which looked mcuh better. This was one the first to use 3D. Didn't look upsettingly bad to me, neither upon rewatch.

Ping Pong the AnimationS1 Pretty: choice of palettes in scenes, non-use of gradients and shading, use of pastels (very luminous, 2/3s saturated colors), crispness or sharpness of motion, that is, animation duh, it's in the title, bro. Distinct: along with the already mentioned, grimaces, facial and corporeal contortions, use of different styles (or directors?). Tournament arc-type or competition story with end ruined by Confucianism or subtly preachy grandstanding suitable for 4⸺9-year-olds.

Afro SamuraiS1, M Distinctive artstyle, great action and tone. Just cool. The story was somewhat contrived, and music, although decent, should have been good à la chosen by Shinichirō Watanabe.

DorohedoroS1, S2 Slightly annoying one-dimensional characters without story revealed or explore (ongoing anime, because S2 in future..? or really slow? or just shit writing and not knowing what to do with story like Berzerk or One Piece or the rest. MILK THE DEAD HORSE, BABYYYYY). Very pretty, each frame a picture. Also, rare example of actual violence and somberness, and acceptance and adult themes.

almost rewatchable

Cowboy Bebop
Samurai Champloo
Space Dandy Same studio, same creator. Great: visuals, music; there is a style, it's distinctive, when compared with its peers and and all other anime; cohesive worlds. Vibrant, lived-in. What kills it (upon attempting rewatching): frustrating, unnecessary female characters with too much screen time, and lack of development. A very handsome snapshot or series of vignettes, nothing much grows from start to finish. In any of them. This is the toppest of the second tier (from the introduction) or the lowest of the third.

The Great PretenderS1 Vibrant, exotic, saturated, exaggerated palette, settings, scenery. Great angles and postioning (I want to write 'cinematographery' but there is no camerawork) or is it framing? Was cartoon-y, in the Loony Tunes way, whenever it could play a joke. Hence made me laugh quite a few times. Rare occasion of Japanese animators being mature in their topics. 4 sets of episodes tied under a grand narrative, character histories explored, and growths experienced, everything resolved at the end. Extremely rare example of finishing not only the story, but all stories. Can't speak for the weeb or middle-school demographics, but this would appeal to your average person. Like most heist, swindle, and con media, if the characters and or setting lack lustre, knowledge of how exactly it goes down ruins or can ruin second and so on consumptions. Although pretty and stylish, conveniently hiding information from the view to make grandiose reveals is contrived and quickly annoying.

HellsingS1, S2, S3, S4, S5 Okay for a single watch. Middle- and highschool me would've better enjoyed himself with this than 600+ episodes of Narr-uh-toh. Narrisch of me to have tolerate ~36% filler and fluff⸻that's >108h. Fucked up childhood and adolescence. Rather than reading (good) books, or practicing an instrument, or studying, I broke my fasts with stupid cartoons. Goyslop. Anyhoo, Hellsing is nice, but I'd not rewatch it. It again falls with the rest of animus in having insufferable, unrelatable, characters without development, arcs. Prima facie pretty constellations in character phase space, that ineluctably upon second gaze reveal themselves to be a chuunibyou's device.

Vampire Hunter DS1, S2, S3 Ya like gothic, dark, edgy stuff?

TrigunS1 Remember just about nothing. But given the trash I've watched and that I know exists, this is great. Just not rewatch-worthy. No development or plot (that I remember). Somebody had a cool character and colored him, Chronologically statically, in 26 episodes and called it a day. A very amateurish way to write a world and characters.

Sgt. FrogS1358 episodes, and I watched 'em all. I was 22⸺23? Humor is very slapstick- and trope-heavy. There is a linear slowdown felt if binge-watching. It becomes staler, jokes hit less often, and at the end you just want to see the 'end' of the story. Not rewatchable, I've tried once only. The ejermercational scenes and episodes failed first time around in being cringe-y, futher bloating, hurting pacing. Although targeting a young audience, teenagers and young adults can find something (different) to laugh at too. Though not early Spongebob levels. Single-use and running jokes and gags, too much reliance on the same sort of comedy. I did laugh watching it, so there's that.

DevilmanS1, S1' Nice for a single, I guess? The Netflix remake was comparatively great: had a distinct artstyle, action scenes were great (I remember many angles, that is, points of view, used), story was more comprehensible and complete.

Cyber City Oedo 808OVA Only recently learned of this. Detail, grit, gore. A nice dystopean future. 3 episodes, about 30' each. I'd've liked the world explored, more cases solved, even mundanes ones. The day-to-day. From the cool era of anime.

The Girl from the Other SideOVA From studio Wit, who have worked on a few commercial successes and one in all categories, the aforementioned The Great Pretender. Adaptation of an 11-volume manga of decent score in mal with a distinct artstyle: 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.

Franz Kafka's A Country DoctorM Just really pretty. Great linework.

Blue GiantM Overly optimistic, even idealistic movie based on a manga of the same name. Likely a condensate of many volumes. The style is very flashy, one can tell a lot effort when into effects and artifacts (like explosions, glares, lens flares, blitz and bling). The colors often oversaturate to evoke the some feel, say, warmth or cold, and this pendulates, but one palette there isn't. The lines are crisp and sharp, unlike most anime, and the action scenes are well-done, most of the playing (soloing) that is. And most of all the mangaka or the anime producer had the balls to include tragedy/loss, albeit arbitrary. The world is such after all. That it's about jazz and has nice (esp. compared to everything else out there) music composed and or licenced for it. Too few jazz memes, tho. That'd've made excluded too many normies, I guess, but you couldn't slip in the lick once..?

notable somehow

The Flowers of EvilS1 Liked the chromatic drabness, the art style. Plot and characters were annoying and or cringe-provoking. From what I recall. I didn't finish it.

Death Note
MonsterS1, S1 Both are good. Kind of like baby's first big-boy animu. The themes are more adult than those of more juvenile, puerile, scholastic or family ones of, say, My 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.

Wicked CityM Mature themes, 80s vibe, dark, nice art style. It takes itself bit too seriously, and often seems edgy just because the times allowed it. I'd've like it extended to a series, not serialized, with episodes of different cases. I don't see much a need for arcs, the world itself is pretty enough to look at. But not rewatchable. We miss you, 80s Jap animu.

Rosario and VampireS1, S2 Harem bullshit, but when I'd watched it I was everything was novel, so I'd found it rather funny. I was also daily putting away enough ethanol to be 3⸺5 times over the limit to legally chauffeur. Side note, it's always the story or the risk-averseness of the production studio or publisher which forces boring-ass, lame, cookie-cutter stories to exist; serialization rather than episodic structure. Because they all die quickly, so better not to invest. Pour one out for all the unfinanced animoos.

the rest

Hayao Miyazaki
Studio Ghibli Don't get me wrong, I'm no philistine. The detail and artwork are good; style is distinct but not much⸻better than 80s and 90s Disney movies, only with more grandients and linework, less bucket tool, no singing. Content- or plot-wise, I despise all their major works. They may, I'd guess, require a certain predisposition toward what is labelable as 'cute' from 2 to, say, 12. Or just a well-spent childhood? One with (good) cartoons?

Evangelion I despise this and any discussion of or around it. And it doesn't even look good.

Ghost in Taco Bell A passable watch, at best.

Akira Annoying for using a fucking kid. The tone, the 'vibe' of the visuals were good though. Got the cyberpunk train rolling for a handful years.
Berzerk is okay. I dislike space operas, mech(a)s, female trash, baby trash, kid trash, family trash.

Dragon Ball Speaking of going on multi-episode diatribes during a singular fight, this is the grand-daddy. Toonami introduced us, and I'm glad. I'd've'n before off had Ninja Scrolls ever aired there, but I can't negotiate the past. I'd watched the whole of it. Hasn't aged well, due to: 1, the whole's 42% filler episodes (some guy counted them and did the division); 2, 'flat character arcs'[1]; 3, the 'Piccolo effect'[2,3]; and that's just what comes to mind.

Ruroni Kenshin Was, as an ~13⸺15-year-old, cool. Now⸻slightly cringe-y due to characters having no arcs, being 0-dimensional in character space, and talking waaay too much. The movies were okay though, both live-action and toon. Another franchise where going along with the manga pacing-wise just ruins the whole. Where is this world, wherein people lecture to opponents or invisible audiences, held captive by bloodlust rather than speech?

Inuyasha Even when I was 7, 8, or 9, this annoyed me greatly. It too has many of the faults of above and below.

Naruto I'd watched maybe 3⸺4/5s of the original because in middle school. Even back then I said "Fuck this shit.". I'd watched the final Naruto-Sasuke battle compilation once everything was released. By then, though fighting was technically nice and impressed compared to the filler and even majority of fights, it was like drinking spoiled milk when slaked. Also, Bob-cut bro Lee was bestest guyfu. Scene where he dropped weights became a meme for the next 2 decades.

What Marxism Is to Me

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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.

What is Marxism?

It is an ideology, religion, cult created by Karl Marx. Yes, all three. 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 everpresent features. On these later.

Ideology The strived for ideals are: for (idustrial and or agricultural) workers (who produce physical goods with physical labor) to, 1, completely own the product of their labor; 2, to (equally) share ownership (and hence also decretionary power) of the property (land, machinery, tools) (used to create the products); 3, to be fully equal in outcome despite difference in input, no more, no less. These, they vehemently 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 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.

Religion Unlike other ideologies, it serves as a religion too. Unlike Islam, which is less a religion and more a system of systems for ruling (and subjugating) a people, peoples, and administering a state. (What 'religion' has rules or advice for waging war and social policy among others?) Features of religion found among Marxists or Marxism:
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.

Cult 1, the spiritual aspect with cults is even vaguer mess than with relgions, if at all present. At the whim of the leader, you could have done good or bad regardless of deeds. Extroverted and social people inhabit the lower rungs, whereas manic, desperate, psychopathic, power-hungry, introverted ones take up the highest.
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.

>We have shown that crowds do not reason, that they accept or reject ideas as a whole, that they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction, and that the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts. We have shown that crowds suitably influenced are ready to sacrifice themselves for the ideal with which they have been inspired. We have also seen that they only entertain violent and extreme sentiments, that in their case sympathy quickly becomes adoration, and antipathy almost as soon as it is aroused is transformed into hatred. These general indications furnish us already with a presentiment of the nature of the convictions of crowds. >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 ardour 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

Features

Scapegoating and Failure Forcing a biological impossibility onto a group, onto the world can be problematic. So what is one to do when things ineluctably derail? One loads one's, others', all sins, troubles, grievances onto an unlucky son of a gun. And they get a proper Old Testament treatment. Either from the rulers or the mob. A mob always exists within Marxism, you see. Angry people, one may have noticed growing up, are less merciful. Regardless of whether or not you really think that Kolya is to blame for: your boss's maltreatment of you; your shit remuneration; your lack of food, money, power, rights and or privileges; your being detained in a subarctic open face gold mine for a 8 years for saying a joke; were the opportunity to present itself, you'd more likely than not, given sufficient spiritual and corporeal weakening, compensate your wrath, hunger, sadness, impotence, and so on with a brutal trashing of poor ol' Kolya. Because it is always assumed that all members in good-faith toil for the good of the group, if not of all, and that, if heeding the precepts, they are without fault, all mistakes and or unexpected bad outcomes must be due to sabotage, in- or external. Because we don't live in an ideal world, let alone a whimsical fairy tale, discrepancies, errors, whoopsies, accidents occur. Kolyas are routinely sacrificed to account for any and all unmet goals.
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...

(Auto)Cannibalism and Terminal Expansionism Usually, that is, historically, scapegoats were punished harshly and unproductively, irredeemably, so as to not promote rehabilitation (as if they had done something wrong). They are effectively removed from society; from normal, human life. Soviet gulags and National Socialist concentration camps (among others) both had their share of scapegoats within. They just couldn't be as efficiently be burdened with the regime's now remote from them failures, but they could be with, say, Misha's decreased ore haul, spread of counter-revolutionary ideas which would decrease work ethic, or some other bullshit. Push people to the brink of destruction, their character, morals, principles laxen, if not vanish, more often than not. Why not throw Kolya under the bus for another rock of moldy bread? Okay, some Kolya's always getting short end of the stick⸻this means there is one less potential scapegoat, if he be removed. If only the loyal-most of the party remain, who should be responsible for things not going according to caprice, that is, plan? One can either, 1, (de jure) autocannibalize, in throwing a 'loyal', or just a good guy under the bus; or 2, expand the group of potential scapegoats. Both USSR and National Socialist Germany did both. For the latter, it was Jews at first, especially the ghettoed or unsuccessful ones, the the successful ones, then Gypsies, then physical invalids, mentally diseased, finally non-Aryans. Quite possibly, given the vagueness of what an Aryan legally and or actually constitute -s/-d, is/was widest net throwable. Expansion isn't cheap, but being your own parasite can't work out in the long run, so it's a balancing act. Because the goals are unattainable, the scapegoats only increase, until either more are let in, or none are left. Stagnation and or death of the ideology-religion-cult are predetermined. Violence toward the in-group increases stagnation; towards the out-group⸻revitalizes shortly, but accelerates stagnation rate. You eat yourself alive, or you spread yourself too thin. NatSoc Germany did the second for certain, and both it and the USSR banished some of their brightest and most capable.

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.