[Other voices:] The life-altering effects of Shadow of the Beast.

Just seeing and hearing Shadow of the Beast inspired many people to change their lives for the ensuing decade.

This is a game I now own, on cartridge, but I never played it in my youth, and I have still never played it now, aside from checking to ensure that the cartridge was working when it arrived.

There is a difference here, between the generations, worth pointing out in brief.

I do not mean to ridicule her, but I recently saw the dating app profile of a rather obese woman shown holding a newborn baby in her arms —thus, we must naïvely assume she is a single mother, if we do not cynically assume she's married but looking for a supplemental relationship. She described herself as a massive fan of Skyrim and Baldur's Gate 3 —presumably because the kind of man she'd find attractive would (she imagines) find this confession attractive, also. To play Baldur's Gate 3 is an enterprise that consumes at least 100 hours. The estimate for Skyrim is approximately 350 hours. People who are "massive fans" of the genre may well spend more time than this.

The aesthetic effect that Shadow of the Beast had on so many members of my generation transpired in the blink of an eye: it was a game that almost nobody played for more than one hour —but an extremely motivated person could compel themselves to play it for three hours (per incarnation) at most. I can honestly say that unless my assessment of Buddhist philosophy proves false and I really am reincarnated as an entirely different person, there's no chance I'll be tempted to play it for 30 minutes inside this earthly prison of too perfect flesh or any other.

Inspiration burns so brightly, and for such a brief moment, while idiocy, smoldering dimly, can occupy a hundred hours or more.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the life-altering effects of Shadow of the Beast.

Original title: Atari ST vs Amiga: how I lost the war
Channel name: Learning Lorraine
LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYMNx0H5q5s

[Other voices:] Left wing women marrying right wing men… or else not getting married at all.

Nobody wants to blame marijuana, nobody wants to blame psychiatric medication… everyone wants to blame the internet… but, to be fair, this video is more sincere and more well-intentioned than 99 percent of what you're going to hear from the mainstream media.

Is it really any surprise that people who start smoking marijuana at age 16 (or —gasp— even earlier) put shockingly little effort into developing "face to face relationships"? Is it really any surprise that drug addicts put shockingly little effort into preparing for the duties and drudgeries of marriage? It is a surprise, because so many of us wanted to pretend that we could grow up as drug addicts and incongruously end up developing all the same qualities of character that can only result from sweat-drenched stridency and sandpaper-dry sobriety.

And you do realize that neither strident nor sober has positive connotations in our language, leaving aside entirely the connotations of sweat and sandpaper: in the process of invigilating the translation of my book (Blood in the Snow) into so many different languages, I discovered that this problem crosses quite a few borders (and this was an especially baffling problem in the Hebrew translation —i.e., one that still remains unpublished and incomplete). Vae victis and in vino veritas: misconceptions about happiness and how to attain it are implicitly expressed, like a barely audible drumbeat, a thousand times a day in the languages we use to think and speak.

People are either sincerely or insincerely surprised, now, because they have some personal history of pretending that this wouldn't be a problem, either for themselves or others —possibly for their own children —possibly for their own parents. People perceive me as unusually mentally sharp (and they say this to my face), people perceive me as having an unusually high sex drive (and they say this to my face), and people perceive me as unusually highly motivated to create and maintain friendships —but perhaps all of this is just the shadow cast by sobriety itself. The vast majority of people who surround me have developed through each and every stage of their lives with a serious drug dependency —even if all the drugs involved were legal— and they neither know how to socialize without it, nor even how to to live alone.

Virtue cannot be taught. Love cannot be learned.

Kokaiinijäävuori: Newfoundland, Kanada.

It isn't too hard to figure out how to say "Cocaine Iceberg" in Finnish: this was easier to translate than Blood in the Snow. ;-)

Amazingly, I do not see a single google search result for Kokaiinijäävuori prior to my upload of this video —whereas I am certainly not the first author of a book titled Verta Lumessa.  Nor, for that matter, am I the first author of a book titled The Future of an Illusion.  ;-)

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eEieBg1i5U

The Right Wing Has ADVANTAGES and DISADVANTAGES…

"There are ethical components to political reasoning…"

LINK: https://youtu.be/cP2STp38kjg

#vegan #vegans #veganism

The Right Wing is Anti-Racist: Metatron Visto Da Destra.

Recorded around 1:00 AM when I was too ripped up from the gym to fall asleep: I am finally making progress in terms of the sheer amount of weight I can lift, after many setbacks (many cases of coronavirus, many spinal injuries, etc.). Alas, I will have to revive my slogan from season one: if I look exhausted, it's because I am exhausted. ;-)

LINK: https://youtu.be/QMR1pCkzwLw

It's hard being vegan, BUT NOT BECAUSE OF THE FOOD.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4RGF4mNCA

Less than two minutes long: a synopsis would spoil the ending. ;-)

Comedy and/or/as Political Reality: "Russia's border doesn't end anywhere."

When Vladimir Putin first said this, he immediately followed it up with the clarification, "That was a joke." [Source = BBC.]

At a televised event (dare I say, "a junket"?) a nine year old boy answered a question about the country's furthest borders (or "limits") with the answer that Russia's borders ended at the Bering Strait —please allow to me point out that this would be a prime candidate for Trump's policy of renaming everything "America", if Donald Trump ever happened to look at that part of a map. Vitus Bering was a Russian navy officer, although neither born nor raised in Russia. We may certainly imagine that Trump might decide that "The Straits of America" has a more poetic sound to it. "The Trump Strait" is a name already taken, apparently.

It is quite possible that this was a joke Putin had told before, and it is possible he rehearsed it for this occasion, but —spontaneously or not— he interrupted the boy's answer to say some words to the effect that, "No no, Russia's border doesn't end anywhere at all." Again, there may or may not be a bit more of an abstract sense of "limits" (and "limitlessness") intended by the original Russian phrase —an inference, on my part, based entirely on what I've seen in English.

This is now commonly stated propaganda in the Russian newspapers, although it is a propaganda statement with its own sense of irony and intrigue. It is a catchphrase that can be used to point out the absurdity of Russian expansion, rather than its inevitability —or perhaps a combination of the two —suggesting that it is absurd and inevitable in equal measure.

Snopes dug up a different history of the catchphrase, dating to October of 2023, long after the geography quiz junket of 2016, but also long enough ago to be forgotten today:

[Vladimir Putin:] You know, this was said for the first time in a conversation with one of the former Presidents of the United States, when he was looking at a map of the Russian Federation at my home in Ogaryovo; it certainly was a joke.

We all know this, but I would like to repeat: Russia remains the largest country in the world by area. On a more serious note, this primarily makes sense at the civilisational level. Our compatriots live [around the world] in large numbers; the Russian world is of a global nature; Russian is one of the official languages of the United Nations. In Latin America alone – I recently met with their parliamentarians – there are 300,000 Russians living there. They are everywhere: in Asia, in Africa, in Europe and certainly in North America.

So, again, speaking seriously, as a civilisation, Russia has no borders, just like other civilisations have no borders either. Take India or China; look how many representatives of China, or how many representatives of India live in other countries. Various civilisations overlap and interact with each other. And it would be great if this interaction was natural and friendly, aimed at strengthening this balance.

[Source = Snopes]

My nihilism certainly extends to (and repudiates) nationalism, but this rarely comes up in conversation: the idea of a universal civilization is in the same category as hot ice or a square circle —or, for that matter, inclusive snobbery.

The significance of a civilization can be inferred from whatever it excludes: if you can't get into the opera house wearing sandals, you're uncivilized, and it either is or represents civilization. If the sober exclude the addicts, or the vegans exclude the carnivores, etc. etc.

Civilization is editorial in nature: your magazine is only as good as the articles you refuse to publish. And your civilization —as a whole— is just as bad as whoever and whatever you make excuses for (as the magazine may be judged by its worst article, column, or even cartoon).

Burning Down the Universities: A Modest Proposal for Education Reform.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO0GA2yi9yE

The Nihilist Philosophy of Education.

Either you do the reading or you don't, either you're able to understand it or you're not: the authoritarian aspects of the university system don't help with either one —nor even with verifying how much you've learned afterwards.

LINK: https://youtu.be/w0Z_AaHHCRY

Truths too terrible to tell: à-bas-le-ciel.

This was a reply to a comment on the livestream titled, Sparta: Socialism in Principle, Aristocracy in Practice —Plutarch Gaiden 3.5

There's a kind of stunned silence that people manage to sustain for a lifetime: the vast majority of people absolutely cannot deal with the reality of what they see on the page —and they retreat into some kind of excuse-making mentality that is quite alien to me (i.e., this is some kind of reflex or instinct I do not have).

I have heard Muslims and Ex-Muslims talk about this (more rarely, Scientologists), namely: an instinct to slip into a kind of reverie rather than deal with the brutal reality of JUST HOW STUPID AND EVIL the "sacred text" is that you're staring at —and just how stupid and evil your own friends and relatives must be (possibly also university professors, etc.) to make excuses for it.

I am both adored and despised for discussing so many topics that the majority of members of my audience can't handle: I can absolutely guarantee that NOBODY is going to discuss this with me.  It's harder for (modern, English-speaking) people to deal with than all the delusions and demons I've slayed before.  And I remind you: it is incredibly difficult (e.g.) for women to recognize that they've inflicted brain damage on their own children by taking drugs during pregnancy (to give just one example out of hundreds of "truths too terrible to tell" that have been told on à-bas-le-ciel).