Cocaine Iceberg: Newfoundland.

 

Okay, just this once, I'm gonna say it:

SHARE THE LINK WITH ALL YOUR FRIENDS.

LINK: https://youtu.be/wi-UD3Cr8Fk

Plutarch 02: Romulus and the Rape Culture of Rome.

If the title is too shocking for you, keep in mind: they don't exactly call it "the arranged marriage of the Sabine women."

LINK: https://youtu.be/rDGURRn5kV0

Lindsay Clancy: Antidepressants Don't Work.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7pEjjuYKBY

What Melissa had to say FIVE YEARS AGO today.

Really bizarre listening to this again today.

(It's a monologue from Melissa: aside from one sentence in the intro, I'm not a part of the video.)

LINK: https://youtu.be/hXZk6MAGy9A

Uploaded September 4th, 2021 —and today is September 5th, 2026.

Micro-Fame: all of the disadvantages of fame, none of the advantages.

Leave it to the U.S. Department of Justice to bury the lead in reporting a story like this: Farhan Jami will spend 46 months in prison after setting fire to a car… https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/new-york-man-sentenced-prison-possessing-incendiary-device-he-ignited-near-victims

…the car in question having been parked in the front driveway of a "Twitch Streamer", i.e., a woman who records and uploads herself while playing video games in revealing attire.

I am sure it stretches the limits of credulity for you to imagine, dear reader, that this woman chooses to live under the name JustFoxii.

There are some women who are so beautiful that they effortlessly receive more male attention than they can manage their whole lives long: it is significant to observe that JustFoxii here is not one of them. She is a woman who is, instead, putting in a huge amount of effort to create a barely-convincing illusion of natural beauty. If I met her at the gym, I would honestly consider her to be Hoyle's Rules ugly, with or without that makeup on.

Alas, ugliness is no defense against the savage instincts of intellectually unsophisticated men: Farhan Jami drove 700 miles, lit this fire, and then --exhausted-- fell asleep in his own car immediately afterward, just to express his jealousy after discovering that this woman had a boyfriend. His defense lawyer attempted to make this seem reasonable by claiming that Farhan had sent her a significant amount of money and then, in retrospect, after the existence of the boyfriend was revealed, regarded this transaction as a scam. https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/butler-county/monroe/man-who-tried-to-bomb-car-in-monroe-was-jilted-by-woman-he-met-on-internet-attorney-says

Gone are the days when such a man might be expected to write a poem, I suppose.

I would remind you: unbeknownst to me, Melissa gave Abhishek our home address so that he could send gifts to her. Melissa was hoping to receive lavish gifts from him, although not strictly speaking (quid pro quo) in exchange for the nude photographs and videos she'd been sending to him. She got a Kindle Paperwhite out of it. And, yes, at various times, she had the paranoid fear that Abhishek would somehow use his knowledge of her address to harm her. Of course, he could have used his knowledge of the address to harm me. He didn't.

Nobody with a brain wants fame: whatever it is you want to accomplish, fame is either an obstacle separating you from it or an unintentional consequence along the way. Fame does not enable the accomplishment of anything —not even the playing of video games.

I have talked about this with some of the local comedians: if what they want to do is write comedy, etc., this whole business of becoming famous (on the internet or in real life) is a massively counterproductive digression from the task at hand. It may really prevent you from doing the very thing you'd imagined you'd become famous for.

However, what the internet offers most people is not fame, but micro-fame: a situation in which they suffer all the disadvantages of fame with none of the advantages. That was my situation before I'd met Melissa, and now, again, after we have parted company.

The world begins with you and ends with you as well: instinct, evolution, nihilism.

[A reply to a message sent in from a member of the audience.]

Well, I've got bad news for you: (1) you're insane and (2) you're probably always going to be insane.

There's absolutely no advice I can offer that would help you.

Human beings are "the creation of" evolution: you need to deal with the implications of evolution as a biological process over millions of years.

And you have to see the uncomfortable reality of human beings living in apartments and animals living in zoos within that million-year-spanning context.

Whatever you imagine ancient philosophers would say on the subject doesn't matter much at all, does it?  That's just something you've made up in your own mind to suit your own interests --even if (paradoxically) it is merely in your interest to make yourself feel guilty about aspects of your own instincts that you cannot control.

The world's history begins again with you: every man's birth is the year zero --and there is nothing Anaximander or Aristotle could say that would help you with your struggles against human nature in any way whatsoever --not even if an archaeologist could now dig up a (heretofore unknown) text that answered precisely the question you've been asking me.

You can hate yourself for being an animal (for being a product of millions of years of evolution) or you can learn to make the most of it: you're an animal, but this doesn't mean you're limited to being an animal only.  You can be far more than a mere animal, but the "more" that you accomplish (through self-discipline and the creative use of your imagination) doesn't make you any less of an animal than a marmoset or a mandrill.

You are not a fictional angel: you are not a fictional character from an ancient (and idiotic) text.  You are not a soul trapped in a body made of flesh, nor are you a good person trapped inside a bad one.  There is no rational core surrounded by irrational impulses: everything you despise as an instinct is who and what you really are.

You cannot become some philosopher's ideal of what human nature could be or should be: you will never be half-man and half-hallowed-abstraction --you will always be entirely a man and entirely an animal.  Entirely: not half of one and half of the other.  In your own experience, in one lifetime, you will exhaust the remit of human nature and exhaust the remit of animal nature as well, leaving nothing undone or unknown in the remainder.

In this sense, the world begins with you and ends with you as well.

The divine mystery is human laziness: where people stop thinking, stop living, stop learning --beyond that unmarked barrier is god --and his power consists entirely of your ignorance, your lack of curiosity.  The more diffident you are the more sacred this world seems: your unthinking conformity to the accumulated idiocy of past generations is the consecration of that darkness --and my nihilism deconsecrates the world with an unwelcome dawn --a dazzling and discomforting light.

Plutarch 01: Virtue is Not Virtue, Therefore it is Called Virtue.

THESEUS. Episode 01 of a series on Plutarch's Lives, reading the whole thing, from start to finish. And quite possibly by the end I'll be fluent in Finnish. (For totally unrelated reasons, I AM CURRENTLY LEARNING FINNISH.) #ancientgreece #ancientrome #ancientgreek #ancientlatin #classics #booktube #bookreview

Social Media Addiction Doesn't Exist, You Do.

No intro, no outro, just real talk. ;-)

LINK: https://youtu.be/yL0ru5KQbCY

Drama arises from possibilities, stated openly, tragedy from the lack thereof.

This was also uploaded to my "bad writing" channel, From Ink to Inc., under the slightly more provocative title, House of the Dragon (Season 3) WAS TRASH: How Not Why.

LINK: https://youtu.be/aDpKStRyMIo

LINK: https://youtu.be/Em94yEZjk-Q 

House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 8 (S03E08). #hotd #asoiaf #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

Diet, exercise, sex and language education: learning by instinct, calling it science.

This was uploaded to my other channel ("The Monolingual Polyglot") under the slightly more provocative title, The Polyglot Scam: "Days and Words." ‪@daysandwords‬

LINK: https://youtu.be/rZvC6SoC3Ys (à-bas-le-ciel)

LINK: https://youtu.be/KpcBUSWs9fo (Eisel Mazard: Monolingual Polyglot)