Is the Trinity a False Teaching?

Hi, to any Trinitarian Christians, Bible Scholars or Theologians out there reading this, I'd like to hear your thoughts with regards to the following 3 arguments. I fully encourage you to reach out to me via email.

The Trinity is incompatible with Omnipotence

1. Accept that God is omnipotent. Gen 18:14:

Genesis 18:14 Is any thing too hard for the LORD? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son.

2. Accept the Trinity. This is the idea that God is The Son. God is The Father. God is the Holy Spirit(or Holy Ghost). The Father is not The Son. The Son is not The Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not The Father.

3. You have asserted a limitation on God The Father's power that he cannot be God The Son. Similarly for The Holy Spirit. If God wills it, he can.

The counterpoint is from 2 Timothy 2:13

2 Timothy 2:13 If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.

Holds still, but as the Trinity is asserted in the Nicene Creed and not from Scripture, you cannot just say God the Father cannot deny God The Son- rather the argument must come from scripture that he cannot. You must present an argument from first principles that doesn't rely on the Trinity to defend the Trinity.

A compromised position on this, is that the Trinity does not describe God, but is the closest representation you have of him- but then a representation is just a model for understanding, and does not necessarily hold(let us make a comparison to the Bohr model of atomic structure which turned out to be an incorrect representation).

The Categorisation of sin

1. Mark 3:28 asserts that Jesus Christ came to say all sins shall be forgiven.

Mark 3:28 Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme:

2. Mark 3:29 asserts that Blasphemies against the Holy Spirit, shall not be forgiven.

Mark 3:29 But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation:

I will assert that Mark 3:29 is a clarifying point on one particular form of sin that will not be forgiven. That being blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit is God, this is a sin from the 3rd Commandment(Exodus 20:7).

Exodus 20:7 Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

Following from this, I will now assert that there is a categorisation of sin, where only one is unforgiveable. This goes against Catholic Doctrine, which asserts Mortal and Venal. The Catholic church defines grave sins rather widely, allowing any of the commandments being violated to be a mortal sin, equivalent in gravity to this unpardonable sin against The Holy Spirit.

Here Catholic Doctrine is in opposition to Mark 3:28, and thusly is false teaching. I do not know so much for other sects of Christianity, but if they assert an unusual categorisation of sin like this... then they are not in line with scripture, and are thus, false teachings.

The assertion of the Trinity being blasphemy against God, and thus Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit

1. Accepting the above argument that the Trinity is incompatible with Omnipotence

2. Accepting the above argument about the unpardonable sin of blasphemy(disrespect and insult)

3. Accept the notion that calling God weaker than he actually is, is a blasphemy(supported by Genesis 18:12-18:15)

Genesis 18:12 Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?

Genesis 18:13 And the LORD said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old?

Genesis 18:14 Is any thing too hard for the LORD? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son.

Genesis 18:15 Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not; for she was afraid. And he said, Nay; but thou didst laugh.

If you accept the above 3 premises, you accept that the Trinity, and all Churches stemming from the Nicene Creed that teach the Trinity commit blasphemy.

Conclusion

I have made an attempt to present from first principles why I do not believe the Trinity holds up to scrutiny when contrasted against Scripture. This position is heresy to the Christian Church, as it goes against the Nicene Creed, but the Nicene Creed is not the inspired word of God, and as such a proper follower of Christ follows scripture, and not doctrine. It's not a surprise this issues arises, the Nicene Creed itself is formed out of the original schisms of the Church, and is a result of political manipulation by multiple actors.

As a final note, one other core assumption here, that Trinitarians take for granted is the Divinity of the Holy Spirit, which itself comes from the Council of Constantinople(but this is an area I need to research myself more, so I present this as an assumption. It's an assumption that Trinitarians take for granted, so for the previous arguments it does not present a strong issue).

The Evils of Feminism

This example alone presents the issue of the 2nd and 3rd waves of Feminism- their increased focus on careers and equalling their Male counterparts in jobs... and in this they have been deceived by scientists and businessmen for a quick buck. This alone draws anger directed at those frauds- as they left these women misinformed and corrupted their desires towards more profits and more workers. This particular aspect is only worsening, as I have seen in the London tube plenty of misleading advertising in support of this.

One head of this hydra slain, and many more pop up.

The happiness of Women has decrease markedly. As women were more satisfied than men in 1970s, this has taken a sharp reversal as men nowadays are more satisfied. This aligns suspiciously well with the sexual liberation movement, and with second wave feminism- so now we will take a moment to discuss the waves of Feminism. The first wave, which I have no issue with, is about legal equality. The right to vote and such things like that- such legal points to make them as citizens, but not denying them their feminine qualities. Now second wave feminism brought the increase to equality brought to careers as women wanted equal payment for work, and wanting more legal preference regarding birth control and abortion- this aligns very well with the sexual liberation movement which brought about the spread of STDs, the use and proliferation of birth control. This spread of birth control has virally spread promiscuity, made cheating easier, normalised polygamy and made sex an incredibly casual act. Nowadays women tend to have "double digits" of body count and sexual engagements. So now this is the result of these two, and third wave feminism comes in with the Orwellian mantra of "Women are equal to men... but more equal than Men" as legal cases overwhelmingly prefer women, marriage settlements overwhelmingly prefer women- hypergamy has made all women prefer the top 1% of men and anything less is "settling", which once again corrodes the family values that once were so important to a nation.

Chop, chop, chop. More heads of the Hydra sliced- birth control causing casual sex and corroding long term relationships. The excessive inequalisation in favour of women, pulling off the blindfold of Justice, in favour of resources taken for Women.

And more heads of this Hydra present themselves. Lets talk about Birth Control some more. Firstly, there's natural birth control- no issues there. Then there's the condom- no issue there either. Then there's "The Pill", this is advertised as giving Women control, but in reality it strips control out of their hands, rendering them infertile after prolonged use, and throwing their hormones into the wilds- and so their physiology and their psychology suffers too with their hormones out of balance. Then you have Abortion- which I support as those who have to abort, are dysgneic anyway... It is again another lamb slain to the "sacredness" of a marriage.

All of this is even exploited by the Government, as marriage is a theological bond between a man and his wife- but the Government intervenes, bringing legality and asset splits that overwhelmingly prefer women into what should be a bond before God- not a bond before taxes.

The head of Birth Control slit. The head of the family jeers its eyes at us now- and we see several drops. A drop in the amount of sex men are having, a drop in the fertility rate of these countries where Feminism is rampant... and a drop in traditional values. In its most extreme case, with South Korea... a fertility rate of 0.7 children to each couple, this low fertility rate is economically enforced in 60 hour work weeks that those Feminist "career" women engage with. This same lack of time is present in dual income families in the west, often brought about due to the insane cost of living in those countries... so Children cannot be afforded, lest they lose their ability to engage in surrogate activities. Video games... Funko Pop collecting... etc. So now you have a nation that is shrinking, that is increasingly old, that is increasingly engaged in surrogate activities, that is increasingly unable to spend their money, increasingly time-starved and what do they do?

Of course the natural answer is to bring in immigrants. Now this addresses the issue of a decreasing fertility rate, but you have an unusual issue of these people often not speaking the same language or bringing useful skills... and more often than not their visas don't permit them to work so they expire and are forced to commit crime to bring in money- of course this is the worst case of immigrants. It is commonly said that German immigrants are highly sought after as their skills are among the best among many subjects. While not the focus here, this demonstrates how deeply Feminism's roots have coiled around society- how it fits within the larger picture of Europe's immigrant crisis.

Another head, and we see that Masculinity and Femininity are dead. What do I mean? Perhaps it is my opinion, perhaps it is the LGBTQ ideas being expressed everywhere... but Men are increasingly being told "to just be themselves" and "to be nice" which are the agreeable qualities found in the Feminine- while Women are increasingly told to "stand up for themselves against the patriarchy and oppression" which are the disagreeable and aggressive qualities found in Masculinity- so a reversal of roles. This is probably worsened by how Academia prefers an orderly mind, that is found in the Feminine mindset, so these Feminine cultural ideas proliferate and dominate in academia, as the culture seeks to be a monoculture.

Let us now see another head rearing from the broken families of a divorce- in fact... over 20% of American families are broken families with single parents- which are often a toxic slew of weaponised kids caught up in the war of their parents- and so they grow up with the "daddy issues" of an absent Father, the "mummy issues" of an overprotective mother, or often grow up with a myriad of anxieties and other mental illnesses that are found mostly in single parent households. What a tragedy for the next generation- and these issues are easily inherited to the next, so this will take at least 2 generations to fix, if not more. A tragedy that aligns with increasing record cases of mental illnesses.

So we've briefly mentioned hypergamy, lets give it the time it deserves. So it's no surprise women tend to marry and date upwards in social class. This means the top 20% of men. However overrepresentation of the top 1% of men in social media has corrupted the perception of top men- AND, equality in job opportunities and wages has also meant women seek a man who can provide more than they can financially- while at the same time using this same basis to complain about oppression or inequality. This is the death spiral of endless hypergamy mixed with endless equalising. As such they never settle, and become single for the rest of their lives.

The likelihood of cooperation in slaying this dragon, is unlikely. This is on the point of hyperstitions- that women believe all men are oppressors and sexist pigs, that men believe all women are whores or sluts... these are ideas that exist only when the other idea is believed by other people. As such you have an increasing divide being wedged and hammered in between the sexes which doesn't help anyone- and oh! What a loaded word that has become, the sexes! Corrupted by the transgende people who believe genitalia is irrelevant to sex, believing tha self-assigned identity is their womanhood or manhood. Utter crap and delusion.

I'll briefly mention here, that the "passport bros" who go overseas to find a woman in the face of this Hydra of issues plaguing both Men and Women, will face a different issue. This is the issue of interracial relationships. In the face of cultural barriers, do interracial relationships work more often than relationships in the same race? Often, they fail more- but I could not find studies on interracial as in different countries of origin, only on the more commonly thought idea of race by skin colour and physical attributes. But really, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise... the "hood" culture of black people in America is one that gives senseless violence all the time- it is no wonder a woman would value their safety over such a culture and such a relationship. Inversely is white men with asian women, as the beauty standard and culture of asian countries reveres the white skin- while white men tend to revere the tan skin- but whether that survives a language and cultural barrier... I don't know.

If you have sharp eyes, you will have seen a pattern. The EVIL of Feminism is in how all the heads of that hydra are preachers of death.

"'Life is only suffering' thus others of them speak, and they do not lie: so see to it that you cease to live! So see to it that the life that is only suffering ceases!

'Giving birth is laborious' - say others - 'why go on giving birth? One gives birth only to unhappy children!' And they too are preachers of death."

Thus spoke Zarathustra, and thus feminism is coated in the sticky zeal of antinatalism.

I hope with this, I have presented the many heads of Feminism, and the many evils of it. I would answer to this at a basic level, that Birth Control should be restricted- not altogether outlawed but restricted far more, that the appropriate balance of planned parenthood and casualness of sex is met. Apart from that, I do not know much what can be done to fix this; so much is so deeply rooted into the culture that it matches Rome's decadence in its failing years. There is far more depth here, as theology comes in too- why polygamy is terrible- why immigration is not as simple as "immigrants" as it's much more of a demographic and economic issue. Ultimately though, I condemn Feminism for its evil, and how deceptively evil it is in particular- they say Satan is a deceiver who deceived women, and what do we see here, but the deception of Women, and the ruinous action upon it.

Why Philosophy is not useful to most people

Firstly, I will say that as a goal, Philosophy tends towards the goal of Eudaimonia. That is, the everlasting, growing, blooming happiness that stays and can be nurtured throughout a life... through the life well-lived. Accomplishing this, many divisions and many camps and tribes form and batter their drums to this goal... but most end as noise and little else to that goal. As I see it, Philosophy falls into 5 main camps(in order of least useful to most):

Obvious

So the obvious philosophy, is just... obvious. Sometimes it can be forgotten, or ignored so reexamining it is occasionally useful... but if you're not stupid, this philosophy will not be useful to you. You'll ring these ideas, and find you hear nothing, as they are nothing.

Wrong

Next is philosophy that is plain wrong. This can happen in many ways. Logical sleight of hand in Dialectics(What sets up Hegels school of thought, as well as the groundwork for Naziism and Communism, in particular each of their manifestos), or often enough through fallacies. While even if it's wrong, it may serve to be useful to the person- so it's not enough to discard it entirely, but if you're critical you'll observe these errors and through judicious use of the Socratic method and careful questioning... you'll dig and find these ideas ring hollow.

Clever

Here lies long treatises and long tracts of text on some point or other with little application. One such example is discussion with regards to Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem which shows the incompleteness of axiomatic systems where there can be unprovably true or false statements, which provides an incomplete mathematical or logical system(the same for all axiomatic systems). Now if that doesn't sound useful to you, it's because for the most part it simply is not useful to you unless you dig into the minute details.

Additionally philology and semantic arguments follow from here. They may present a case that is very clever, smart and ultimately... do not add much to anyone's life. You will ring the idea, and find it makes an interesting and fanciful noise. A mystery that adds little to your life.

Metaphysical

Now we get to the realm of Kant, the realm of Jesus Christ, the realm of Theology and Pascal's wager and Plato's forms. They presuppose some quality beyond observation and sense and quite often align goodness or evil to these presuppositions- or create abstract concepts with no foundational reality to them such as sin. The primary issue with these is Pascal's wager applies infinitely to all possible belief systems, all possible faiths and all possible punishments, and as a result you have no logical game-theory-made foundation to establish a belief. Hume's guillotine comes into play too, as you can observe many facts such as "people can kill people", "murder happens", but until you present a moral fact such as "murder is evil" the guillotine does not fall. You cannot derive good or evil actions until the guillotine falls, but that requires the existence of a moral fact.

In the words of Stirner, they are phantasms of the mind. Perhaps useful to be aware of as others do genuinely believe in them with the fullness of their heart, but phantasms... spooks... all the same. These ideas, you ring, and all you hear is the knell and the Ghost.

Psychological

Lastly, we come to perhaps the most useful element of philosophy, which is reasoning about psychology. Of course, all of this comes second to *actual* psychological experiments and experimental evidence, but lacking that, it provides the best and most useful tools to accomplish this Eudaimonia. Tools for improving your health, your power, your expression, your creations, your views upon the world and the mind, and why all the previous forms of Philosophy trap people in the mirror realm. That said, even among Psychology, it can still enough be a glass palace... fancy words and a fancy palace of purest and untested glass.

The idea rung... The psyche collapses if the wisdom is not earned. It is in here that the proto-psychology of Carl Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche are most useful... but even then I find their answers lie at the heart of one action and that is creation. Creation is a satisfied expression of the person. Weak people cannot create as they cannot express in the form of power or violence. Loveless people cannot express in romance. Mentally ill people cannot express in the form of normalcy-- and here you have the importance of experience, novelty, an open-mind and the knife's edge of life. This capacity to expression is the capacity to creation, and the importance of power-- this fullness of experience is the peak of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs.

The blossoming tree of Eudaimonia, born out of roots entrenched in hell- half burnt, half scorched, half suffering. Born out of a canopy reaching to the firmament, the cosmos, the heavens- offering shade to all the creatures of the earth and all the wisdom within... and from its branches grows fruit. Creation.

If you enjoyed this post, I will point you towards my short pamphlet, Liber Vitae Affirmationis, as it expands upon my own personal view of the Psychological element of people.

Power Corrupts or does it?

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The opposite form of this is:

Weakness corrupts, and absolute weakness corrupts absolutely.

I'll say these are not mutually exclusive. Quite commonly the former leads to the second, as there is the common saying...

Good men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak mean create bad times. Bad times create good men.

In that quote, you can substitute good with powerful, and the meaning is preserved-- AND! It turns the dichotomy of the Master morality and the Slave morality as Nietzsche observes into a cycle. That Master morality is the morality of the noblemen, and slave morality the reaction to that, from the inability to express the self properly.

With Christianity, it is a religion for the Gentiles built upon the imitation of Christ-- that they could not be equals to the Jews or to the Romans, and so they denigrate the material world in favour of a spiritual world, and create the moral facts(out of the Parables and Gospels of Christ) that with Hume's Guillotine leads to what is considered good and evil. But this Good and Evil is plainly the good and evil palatable to slaves.

So why then, do dictatorships appear to corrupt and fail? Ideology? Structure? Bias? Consider also, that only recently, democracy came into full force with the Americans(a democracy is quite different from a republic). I pin this upon Conway's law about the hierarchy of an organisation(government) representing the hierarchy of its system(the political system). As a result, you have a system that depends upon one element, one party, one person... and as a consequence if that one person cultivates and structures the system in a terrible vision or ideal, such as the ideal of communism, it cultivates multiple generations of weakness... multiple generations of Dostoevsky's "Underground man"... the spiteful and sick men. So in this effect, dictatorship under a poor dictator corrupts the system and grows weakness in the people, and this weakness is the fundamental corruption and element of decay.

Consider China, the fundamental weakness of its citizens is present, and it will take a long time for a truly powerful and good man to wrestle control again of China- so much longer from so much worse their generations are- corrupted. While the instigator may not have had that corruption, may have had the virility, power and strength... the will to power, they certainly did not cultivate power in others. And then there's the competitive nature of humans, why share power? After all, it leaves you only to be challenged in your power. This open challenge present in both republics and democracies(Weimar Republic, Roman Republic et al) is the weakness(after all it only takes one man to cross the Rubicon) and its strength. It makes it very tricky to poison a system and poison the people.

As a result, this leads us to the following phrase: Power tends to poison the system, and absolute power poisons the system absolutely. A poisonous and hostile system, leads to weakness, and and absolutely poisoned system leads to an absolutely weak citizenry. Weakness corrupts, and absolute weakness corrupts absolutely.

There is a reason behind my use of the terms poison. The modern day dictators, are technocrats. They have poisoned the minds of many in social media-- poisoned not in terms of "content", "agenda" or some other politicised element, but even on the fundamental health of the people. Mental illness is rampant. Poor attention span is rampant. Now they are both the expressions of power- taking for themselves as the modern men of nobility, what they wish- the deliverers of perfect poison.

It is not like there is much you can do to exact Justice against them. To quote Pascal here:

Justice, might.—It is right that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed. Justice without might is helpless; might without justice is tyrannical. Justice without might is gainsaid, because there are always offenders; might without justice is condemned. We must then combine justice and might, and for this end make what is just strong, or what is strong just.

Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognised and is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice, because might has gainsaid justice, and has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.

And so what is Just, comes from what is Mighty. The powerful protect and cultivate their environment, and so what is Just in China particularly is what breeds weakness. Western civilisation in America, Britain, Western Europe is a Petri Dish of so many strains of weakness.

Expanding upon this, these elements of weakness, align with the "seven deadly sins". The very worst, are those who's hearts are hardened with Wrath and Envy... Jealousy. They see what good you attempt, what power you express, and they become as the Underground Man...

I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease...

Several Truths Regarding Success

Truth 1: People convince themselves not to do something

A lot of the time when it comes down to doing something, people convince themselves away from doing it on counts of risk, on counts of time, on counts of effort and difficulty. While all these points hold weight, they are typically massively overestimated and overblown.

As the most basic example of this, in an 8 hour day of work, people tend to only do 1-2 hours of "real" work, but often this "real" work isn't effective or successful work because it's terribly mismanaged in large corporations.

I would say about 95% of people fall into this category.

Truth 2: Actually finishing something

There is a common element about programmers... they start projects and do not finish them. The same is said of Game Developers, Artists, Musicians etc. While there's something to be said of starting a project for study, exercise or improvement of your skills... most people simply do not finish their projects.

I would say a further 90% of projects people do fall into this category.

Truth 3: Regarding quality of work

Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything is crap. Personally, my standards of quality are much higher so I'd be much more aggressive about this, and say 95% of everything is crap. As a result of this, you will also find success if you produce something of quality.

Truth 4: Regarding marketing of work

Most people don't know how to market themselves. Admittedly, I am the same so I cannot offer advice on how to market well- but I observe this fact, and this hurts a further 90% of projects.

Truth 5: Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle is the 80/20 rule. As a result, one can observe that 80% of the work is done for 20% of the effort. While this doesn't always hold, as a general point it holds. This also interacts interestingly with "value-action" gap, where announcing your plans and intentions tends to hurt your efforts on them as you get "social dopamine" from this. As a result of the final 20% of the work requiring 80% of the effort to reach that very high bar of quality... if you're running for that dopamine, you will suffer with regards to Truth 2.

I am generally of the opinion that this general statement holds true:

"Make a high quality work, make people who are interested aware of its existence somewhere during the last 10% of the work, and actually finish and deliver it... and it will succeed".

Truth 6: Matthew 25:29

Now this also entertains a final point regarding success. Success is typically iterative, each success rebounds with further bigger successes. Similarly each failure rebounds with bigger failures.

Conclusion and tangents

I label the above as truths. It's more apt to call them truisms. Regardless you can multiply these out to find out how many people will typically be successful. 0.05 * 0.1 * 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.005% of the population. As a fraction, that is 1/20000.

Now this is merely for a high quality, "good" work that succeeds. Now add a healthy dollop of creativity, and creativity is already one of those qualities that is typically doomed from the outset as nature's offshoot mutation in individual strategy that typically face-plants and fails.

An interesting idea would be to plot this against a population graph of the world and the geographic history of the world to see how this relates to the "great" people of history. There is also probably a cultural coefficient that worsens or improves certain nations. America for example, with its liberties and capitalist reward in line with the Matthew effect provides good reward to the good people.

This is also a point in the direction of the vast majority of people being leeches... but most living creatures are leeches in terms of how they acquire resources to live, so it's natural that it's a strategy for living for people.

Black Wind Books

Hello everyone, I'm proud to announce that my Book Shop is now open, and you're able to purchase books! For now there's only 1, which is a short pamphlet I have written, however I am working on bringing several public domain books up to modern typesetting standards, with very little frivolous commentary and the like.

You can see the book shop here

I will write about the technical details on my blog at a later point in time.

Further work is needed for several points:

- Shipping information set up to be emailed to customers(This point needs improvement, for now, if your order has been longer than ~20 days get in touch).

- Refactor the source code for a public release

- Provide alternative currency options(USD, EUR)

- More comprehensive test suite improvements

Additionally, if you have any books, zines or works that you'd like to see better typeset and widely available, get in touch! I'm open to collaborating on this!

Hail unto thee Yule Father

Yuletide is upon us.
The Wild hunt is upon us.
Hail!

Yule Father, Victory to thee.
Hail, O' Jodfadr!
Odin, Victory to thee.
Hail, O' Wotan!
Lord of the Earth, Victory to thee.
Hail, O' Lord of Gods!
God of Wisdom, Victory to thee.
Hail O' Lord of the Aesir!
Flaming eye, Victory to thee.
Hail O' Blind Lord!
Lord of the undead, Victory to thee.
Hail O' The ever booming!
Might Thuler, Victory to thee.
Hail O' Wanderer!
Victory to thee, Gungnir's  master!
Hail O' master of thought!
Master of mind, Victory to thee.
Hail O' the hanged one!
Spear-pierced, Victory to thee.
Hail O' runebearer!
Hail O' God of Frenzy!
Hail O' God of Wishes!
Hail O' Sleipnir's master!
Hail O' Father of the slain!

Hail O' High one!

Allfather, Victory to thee.

The Military Origin of our Awful Education

Prussia speaks in our education system still today, its cogs and gears click and clack as it churns and grinds more of that officer class of citizen so destined to act out their orders! Despite Prussia's death, its ghost haunts all education, and we have forsaken a purpose of education to the creative men of the world.

During the various Prussian wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, The German Warrior spirit of Prussia found themselves in need of plenty of officers- capable of following orders to the exact word. In this process, Prussian officer schools were formed, and their effectiveness was astounding for exacting order upon the Prussians. So incredible was its effectiveness, that it was taken by the Victorian British, by the Americans, and by most-other nations of Europe- and its application wasn't just to officers, but upon children too. It set them up effectively for the demanded, and well-salaried positions within industrial work- for it was a time of industrialisation!

But you'll see now, that the time for industrialisation is coming to some close. The people born from this education have hands for following orders, and those same hands are no longer as demanded. They are plentiful, thanks to our education, and they are replaceable, thanks to the birth of the AI Revolution. In doing and making a fancy out of this education system, we have become forgetful of the old education... the education as given to the Noble class of society, the education that served the purpose of power and the vitality of life. This education, was a mentorship.

Even as far ancient, as Alexander the Great-- the Macedonian was mentored by Aristotle. Even in our names... a John Smith. The surname of Smith, carries the work of that family... a blacksmith, as our fathers were in tradition the model for a mentor. They mentored on our capabilities as men, and they mentored on how to use our hands in creation and with direction. Sadly, both mentorships, from dedicated mentors and from our fathers are mostly gone in our day and age. The corrosion of the village, of the extended family, and finally of the central family... has resulted in many absent fathers, absent economically- and economically they provide their child to this Prussian Education System.

Despite this, one might recoil and ask "What is this devilry" about this education system- but yet it exists well, because it benefits most normal people, as most normal people do not have the spirit of creativity... even as a single kernel of corn that could grow into an earful. It is a gross exaggeration to exclaim "All people are creative", as it puts its curse... or blessing upon all people. It demands of them the capacity to create excellent and new ideas, within domains that have few new ideas. It ignores the upfront capital required for creativity... and so a great many creatives are homeless from their financial fires or frustrated of their ability to create. Those creatives who do not, clip their roots and reject all vitality in life... they numb themselves in sedatives like Games, Porn and Drugs... and those that are lucky enough to have the capital to create will find that new ideas are not always excellent ideas. The vast majority are terrible, and terrible ideas are rewarded in terror- as seen with the new idea of Communism.

So with this addressed, the Prussian Education System is beneficial to the vast majority of relatively normal people... but it leaves the creative few stuck. They do not gain an education that nurtures creativity, they are not rewarded for innovation, they are left often without direction to find their own vitality to their life, and often drink the poison of a bog... those sedatives I have mentioned. Their solution is found in the ancients, as Alexander the Great sought out mentorship from Aristotle... In my own life, I stumbled... I crawled and I drank plenty of that bog of sedatives, that was until I stumbled upon a mentor who took me in for some years and under him I learnt to sharpen my thought, critique, tongue and to give fire and action to hands that had previously been chained to great rusting balls of Iron. Despite this, I put caution- in learning from a mentor, we engage in the mimicry of him- and in my own mentor, he was exceptionally disagreeable and narcissistic.. it took some work on my own to clean this off... but that was a small cost to the lessons gained.

I say all this, yet I have no good advice, on how to find a Mentor. I know only that without a mentor... many Creatives will shrivel up and find their branches carry no leaves. It is certainly not easy, as all those capable of mentorship, are under the same system which degrades them. They have taken the word "mentor" and corrupted it in their institutions as a word, effectively as a sheepdog to keep sheep penned.

"When they give themselves out as wise, their little sayings and truths make me shiver: their wisdom often smells as if it came from the swamp: and indeed, I have heard the frog croak in it!

They are clever, they have cunning fingers: what is my simplicity compared with their diversity? Their fingers understand all threading and knitting and weaving: thus they weave the stockings of the spirit!

They are excellent clocks: only be careful to wind them up properly! Then they tell the hour without error and make a modest noise in doing so.

They also know how to play with loaded dice; and I found them playing so zealously that they were sweating." Thus spoke Zarathustra, and in this, you see how devious and capable scholars are. This playing with loaded dice is seen all too clearly in the Null Ritual, that statistical game of research paper to make their insignificant claims seem significant! It is seen too clearly in the reproducibility crisis plaguing Academia, yet it remains unaddressed.

We finally at the very end also come to an interesting point. This Creative lifestyle, favours Men... as Masculinity and the use and direction of power as serving the vitality of life helps creativity. This is not to say Women can't be creative, but that it favours a masculine mindset. Contrarily... the Prussian Education system favours women... evidenced in how boys cannot be boys when about school, as their youthful vigour is stamped out, preferring that anxious orderliness that plagues a Feminine mindset. In doing so, those men who succeed in such an education system, they possess that Feminine mindset, and perhaps that is why we do not see any expressions of vitality or power seen within this. Already, in preferring this feminine mindset and view about the world, we have corrupted masculinity, alienated Men, and left them stumbling in the dark as I was 10 years ago.

Grand Strategy: Or how not to wander and waste life

Grand Strategy. Your life is a fate. Do you have a fate? For many years I wandered aimlessly, through my schooling I had only tactics and it was not until I wandered into a mentor that I learnt strategy and planning. But even with strategy and planning it was not for any Grand Strategy. Any point to my life. Any sharpened blade by which everything hangs in the balance.

Lets rewind, a moment. Tactics, Strategy and Grand Strategy are three ideas that are commonly confused. The tactical man, has perfected his method, his ability to cope and deal with situations... but he has no eye for the future, he only has an eye for the here and now. The Strategic man, has an eye for the future, for a few months or a few years ahead- and many a family is led on the shoulders of the Strategic man as he is the head of any traditional family. He has a strategy for his family, the schooling and mentorship of his children, the qualities of a loving and perfect partner, and what is needed to sustain this from finances, work, visas and so on.

Now Grand Strategy... Nietzsche has in Thus Spoke Zarathustra the concept of Three Metamorphoses, and of the third, the metamorphosis to a child he puts forward the idea of creation as his highest goal. The creation of new virtues. The creation of a world in your will and your image. The creation of new and wonderful works and expressions of the vitality of life and all that affirms it in the face of the bleakness posed by God's corpse tossed into the Abyss.

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." This abyss, is the very coffin where all values have died in the consequences of the World Wars. What heroism has been sacrificed to it. And now, our tactics are to battle the very monsters that emerge, and our strategy, is to become as monsters. Our strategies are often vain. Money, for the sake of avarice. Fashion like naked emperors for the sake of impressions. Virtues for the smoke signals they choke with. Our strategy is in service to either our base beastly desires... or the desires of comfort of the Nietzschean Üntermensch.

This is not to devalue Tactics or Strategy. They are exceptionally important. It is instead to put value on the Grand Strategy of life, which few people have eyes for, and fewer people have that sacred Yes for. And even fewer, have retained the Hero within, that will lift out the Sword in the stone and put to the blade their very beliefs and virtues.

Let us consider the Grand Strategy of different parties around the world today. Napoleon Bonaparte is an excellent example- on his will alone he successfully ventured into Egypt on the idealism of his bookish inspiration of Alexander the Great. He strove to reclaim and reassert France as a major European power, challenging the very English at their own game in Europe. Then there is the case Julius Caesar with his Gaellic wars, venturing and claiming more of the Germanic lands, and of course crossing the Rubicon, against impossible odds to claim authority over the path of the Roman Empire. Of course there are modern examples of these Grand Strategists... Elon Musk with his eyes set upon Mars. Xi Jinping with his eyes set upon Chinese expansion and force projection. The names continue and all are examples of men with a Grand Strategy. Even the more ordinary men such as Jordan Peterson have made a Grand Strategy of their lives by speaking to the very hearts and souls of those creative forces at work within the Western world.

It is no easy thing to stake your life upon a Grand Strategy, and to morph both tactics and strategy in service of it. Nietzsche would title a man who has Grand Strategy as at least one of those with arrows of longing for the other shore... arrows of longing, striving for the lightning of the Übermensch. The myth of the hero. In that Heroism there's many forms it takes. I will point here to Thomas Carlye, the oft. overlooked philosopher of England and his conceptions of different kinds of Heros. The divine hero- that hero that is in stories and makes morals and values out of the men they surround. The Hero as prophet- such as the Lord Jesus, such as the Prophet Muhammad, such as the prophet Zoraster. Then there is of course the hero as poet- in the Greek sense of poetry! The poetry in creation of beautiful works! Such as Dante, or that of Mozart! The hero as priest, The hero a man of letters, and the hero as King... such expansion on The Hero drives home a globalised death we have dazed calmly into, and the many roads away from that death.

The hero is dead. "Alas I have known noble men who lost their highest hope. And henceforth they slandered all high hopes. Henceforth they lived impudently in brief pleasures and they hardly an aim beyond the day. 'Spirit is also sensual pleasure' - thus they spoke. Then the wings of their spirit broke: now it creeps around and it makes dirty what it feeds on. Once they thought of becoming heroes: now they are sensualists. The hero is to them an affliction and a terror. But, by my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject the hero in your soul! Keep holy your highest hope!" Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and I find here my Grand Strategy in a world bleeding dry all high hopes and all high men.

I find my future here is staked in giving to others what I have received. As I spoke at the start, I was a brash teenager with tactics and malice. I had programming skills and used them to impressionable and nefarious ends. In that, I learnt both skill, power and leadership from my old mentor. Perhaps the most disagreeable man of all disagreeable men I have met, and in him I learnt strategy. It was only upon the blade of strategy did I find and read Nietzsche, among other Philosophy- and learn writing, among other skills- to sharpen the edge of my strategy and soul and in them both I found my Grand Strategy to help more people become those high men- for the darkness of clouds folding over our lands is due to their deaths and the waste and misdirection of their skills.

Thusly, I speak to all those with the Hero in your heart... look upon the videos of this channel and consider them and learn from them. Look below, you'll find a link to a playlist of all these videos. Look below, you'll find a newsletter to learn for what comes next. And I speak to you here earnest and honest- that I stake this channel upon the cynical affirmation of life- to strip away delusion, but to affirm life in creation.

For creation is what makes life worth living, and the high man creates the tallest, and the most beautiful. I speak- nay- preach to the Hero of your Heart!

How Nietzsche isn't a Nihilist, but how his Übermensch addresses Nihilism

So many confuse Nietzsche as a Nihilist. They are WRONG. Nietzsche's predicted the abyss and destruction of values. The fall of Christian values in the twilight of the World Wars. In this prediction, he gave us the gift of overcoming ourselves. The Übermensch.

The lightning crackling from the dark clouds- he carries as a camel the burden of his virtue, he carries as a lion the ferocity against the 1001 scales of dead morals. He carries the childlike joy of creation. And in creation, he saves us from the heavy abyss of Nihilism, that corrodes all value.

So what is Nihilism? The rejection of religious and moral principles on the belief that life is meaningless. Just from a look at the philosophy of Nietzsche, he presents his own moral concepts, mainly the genealogy of morals. The Master morality as the morality of those more beast-like, virile and powerful men. This power extends so far as subjecting people to slavery... bonds for life. In response, almost out of spite, the contrarian morals of kindness, love, charity, sacrifice and martyrdom are presented. The morals of Christ's imitation are excellent examples, as they were subjugated under Roman dominance. And even further, Nietzsche plays in the sandbox of the metaphysical with his notion of the eternal recurrence that you will live out every decision of your life, over and over cyclically. Similar in concept to reincarnation in Eastern religions.

But in the 1880s, Nihilism was not yet a dominant issue, or belief. But that German Spirit of nationalism and warfare were quiet quakes in the ground. Nietzsche, the sharp and brilliant traveller of Europe recognised this, recognised the failing belief in Religion, recognised the failing belief in Governance, the failing belief in Monarchs... and saw the 20th century and the abyss of values and all the pain and death in its wake. He saw to WW1 and saw beyond that an abyss would exist, and be filled by those Nazis, Capitalists, Communists and all sorts of ideologues that carry on even to this day. And in this he devised the ultimate panacea to a man's problems in the face of such an upcoming calamity.

So what is this Übermensch? To understand it we'll read of Zarathustra. "Behold! I shall show you the Last Man.

'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the Last Man and blinks.

The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Last man, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.

'We have discovered happiness' say the Last Men and blink.

No herdsmen and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse." Thus spoke Zarathustra... And thus presents the foil to the Übermensch. The Last Man... the Üntermensch. Those who do not know a star, the heaviness of responsibility, morality, virtue or values... they have no gravity around them and no weight to their words. They live longest, and in long life, suffer a poor death, demented laying in a hospital bed. They have discovered happiness as a formula, and produce it in surplus... A Soma for their Brave New World. They have no concept of love, for they have never felt its warmth- no concept of creation for they never made their virtues, or their lives... merely followed the herd.

The Übermensch, is the foil to the Üntermensch. Nietzsche does not answer directly what the Übermensch is... instead preferring to riddle and show the many paths and tightropes across to the Übermensch. As Zarathustra speaks... "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going.

I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to downfall and an arrow of longing.

I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour and who then asks: Am I then a cheat? for he wants to perish.

I love him who throws golden words in advance of his deeds and always performs more than he promised: for he wills his own downfall.

I love all those who are like heavy drops falling singly from the dark cloud that hangs over mankind: they prophesy the coming of the lightning and as prophets they perish." And so on and so forth, Zarathustra spoke.

Seeing this, you can see quickly how many different paths there are to this mythical Übermensch. Zarathustra carries on about three metamorphoses of the spirit. The first, the camel, then a lion, and at last a child. To the camel, its embodiment is the strength and endurance of a weight-bearing spirit... the spirit of a star. "What is the heaviest thing, you heroes?

The weight bearing spirit takes upon itself all these heaviest things: like a camel hurrying laden into the desert"

And so the camel, with the spirit of a star, with the heaviest weight of things finds the abyss, the straw that breaks the camels back... both the lightest and heaviest of all... and so begins the second metamorphosis... "But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis occurs: the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert.

It seeks here its ultimate lord: it will be an enemy to him..."

"What is the great dragon which the spirit no longer wants to call lord and God? The great dragon is called 'Thou shalt'. But the spirit of the lion says 'I will!'". And in its defiance, the lion secures its freedom, its individualism, but still the heavy weight of the abyss lies upon him, for destroying a thousand years and thousand scales of the Dragon does not lend himself to creation... and so the final metamorphosis... to a child. "Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.

Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world." In such, one must reach that playful innocence of a child to create new values, to create in the manner of his own will. To create his own virtue. To create something beyond himself- beyond the internal. Indeed, Nietzsche had a true love of such people who would take such a journey, such goats who would climb the mountain to the highest peak, and like Heracles, to delve to the deepest depth... of the Underworld.

It is worth noting, that the Übermensch does not necessarily use Master or Slave morals... for Zarathustra speaks "I love him who chastises his God because he loves his God: for he must perish by the anger of his God"- a deep respect for those martyrs who embody the spirit of the Übermensch in death- and glimpse the flash of the Übermenschen lightning. Of all prophets in most religions, one could say they embody the spirit of the Übermensch, even Jesus Christ whom Nietzsche consider himself as Revelations' Antichrist.

And that is why Nietzsche is not a Nihilist- his belief in the Übermensch, the transvaluation of values. The metamorphoses of the spirit. The eternal recurrence and Amor Fati- all are potent cures against the waste of Nihilism. And Nietzsche's love of all those who make, even just the attempt... clears him of his misanthropy. In short, Nietzsche cared quite deeply and sensitively about the death of God, the abyss of values, and the chaos that would come in its wake- and presented the Übermensch as a foil against- potentially comparable at the highest level, to Plato's Philosopher King.

Mind the Gap: The disturbing reason we fall short

We fall short so often because of a simple principle. The intention-behaviour gap. In short, announcing our plans to others dooms our plans to failure.

Doesn't that seem a little bit odd? That announcing our plans makes us accountable to make those plans. No. In fact, the opposite happens. When we announce our plans, a lot of people praise us for the plan, and for the initial bit of progress. This already is a social reward for announcing a plan, but nothing of value has been produced yet. Even when we produce something of value and get praise for the little work we do, the Pareto Principle comes in as 20% of the work, yields 80% of the rewards- or at least generally... that last 20% of the rewards is invisible with the 80% of effort required to achieve it...

And so our plans grind to a halt. Accountability fades as those who would make us accountable forget our plans. This Pareto Principle, alongside the intention-behaviour gap is what makes accomplishing great things so difficult. It's a seemingly invisible force that propels lonely, private and introverted people towards great works- and what pulls braggart, public and extroverted people like an anchor to the water grave of their plans.

And as for the topic of accountability, is it even the case that others want to keep you accountable? In China, there is the notion of "The nail that sticks out the furthest, gets hit first". In Britain, there is "Poppy Syndrome", the tallest poppy is cut first. In other contexts it's called the "Crab Bucket". As one tries to achieve good or great things, jealousy, bitterness and resent pushes people into pulling them back down into their own miserable depths. Why would these people keep you accountable? And further on that, is it truly fair to put the responsibility of your action, your success and your will on another person? It is a great weight of demanding all the rewards, and none of the responsibilities that pushes people to have others keep them accountable.

So then, what can we do to topple the intention-behaviour gap? First and foremost, accepting responsibility for your actions and when you announce your works. You cannot see the rewards without the responsibility to your work. Secondly, understanding the Pareto Principle, and knowing the largest mountain is invisible to many, obscured in the horizon by the clouds of the heights. If you understand this, you'll understand you should announce your intentions, after the actions needed for those intentions are mostly or all complete. You get to eat your cake, the social recognition building towards the accomplishment, and keep it, the accomplishment itself. Thirdly, a deliberate approach to keeping your actions private, aimed, well-described intentions that are your intentions and yours alone.

Nietzsche states in Thus Spoke Zarathustra "If you have a virtue and it is your virtue, you have it in common with no one. To be sure, you want to call it by a name and caress it; you want to pull its ears and amuse yourself with it. And behold! Now you have its name in common with the people and have become of the people and the herd with your virtue!". Truly, if accomplishing your unknown intentions, is something good... something virtuous to you, then why then do you want to give it up and stain it? It is a rare gift, creativity and accomplishment, and it is a common crime to sell it off to the public.

More strictly, this intention-behaviour gap has the name of the value-action gap. That your values do not align with your actions. It is not hard to see this in the vast majority of people, even you dear viewer. Humans are hypocritical creatures- they clamour for freedom of speech, yet push for censorship and controlled speech. They clamour for the rights of criminals, yet ignore the privacy and violations against victims. They clamour for environmentally green policies to be pushed for, yet turn a blind eye to how China is the major dominating factor in pollution. This gap, can even be seen in the inconsistencies between people and who they criticise- to the point it is a projection of their insecurities, and a projection of their own Jungian shadow. The value-action gap is in a sense, the tangible results of a person who has not integrated their shadow- and a great many demons of their childhood pull at their emotional puppet strings.

The Problem of Stoicism

It's Learned Helplessness.

Firstly, lets understand what Stoicism is, and how it's expressed commonly. Stoicism is a philosophy of not taking actions about things you cannot control. Marcus Aurelius states it as "You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.".or some things, this is self-evident and plain, such as the weather. For some things this gets murky, such as how people view you. In some cases, you can take real action to reconcile offences made to others. Of course, the Stoic is often at odds with authenticity, as the authentic man, the absurd man, wails against the absurdity of life. Consider Sisyphus, the man eternally rolling a boulder to the peak, for it to roll back down. Nothing changes, and he has no control over the situation, yet he continues to attempt against it.

Sisyphus has not learned helplessness. Sisyphus has learned helpfulness in the face of impossible and impractical odds. In this regard, some might say Sisyphus should give up and be reasonable. Some might say he shouldn't. Life is absurd, and meaning can be given in attempting against that which won't change.

So considering this, and considering a hypothetical variant of Sisyphus, lets call him Alphus, who rolls a boulder in a situation almost identical to Sisyphus, but an invisible probability exists that he will finish his task with a definite end.

Now Stoics in Alphus' position will find themselves blind to this probability, and knowing the impracticality and impossibility of it, will give up. They believe they have no control of it, and have reasoned through Stoic Philosophy not to tie themselves up emotionally or in action to the task.

The Stoic has learned helplessness in the face of difficult odds. In some Stoics, I see Stoicism as an after-thought to laziness and incapability. Many "Redpill" and "Blackpill" people push Stoicism to divorce action from emotion in men, and to reason them against action.

Now, while I think Stoicism is indeed valuable on the point of recognising that you shouldn't try too hard against matters out of your control, it depends on a good reason, a good mind and good senses to know what is beyond your control.

Feynman says "The first Principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool". Indeed, many Stoics have good hearts and good wills, but I do not believe they all share good minds and good senses as I have seen some stout hearts just give up.

And this giving up, this learned helplessness is a poison that afflicts and corrodes everything a Stoic touches if he cannot tell what he does or does not control. But, if he does see what he can control, it is a focus that amplifies all his efforts towards actions of his will.

When you see Stoicism pushed as hard as it is into the mainstream, it makes me think some dark work is at force to pacify men those good-willed men with learned helplessness, if they surpass the sedatives that are Drugs, Games and TV.

Nostalgia.

A creeping thought- A creeping image that flashes in our daydreams. A time of childhood, of simplicity, of the past.

Why then have we romanticised this past? Why then have we made demons out of this past? Why then do we sleep with our demons?

The Romanticisation happens for many reasons.

- Constructed memories... that we remember our past wrong.

- Survivorship bias... that we prefer thinking about the good in the past. What is negative is forgotten.

- Simplicity. Our childhood had simplicity. College years had simple foods and simple survival.

Flirting with the past like this. Our chants and memories give it a strength. A power over our mind. A preference towards the past. A preference against change.

Demons possess a lot of power. Negative and positive. The price of Nostalgia, is the faustian bargain that we have forgotten most of what is terrible in nostalgia.

So we fight against change. We fight against novelty.

I think of Tarkovsky's Stalker.

What is hard may never win. I think too... Emotional rawness is a root of Nostalgia. We never forget our first love. Our first betrayal. Our first guilt.

We have grown hard, and so what plucked our deepest heart strings has silenced.

So tinged is Nostalgia in Melancholy.

In a world eclipsed in more and more loneliness... melancholy mellows a lonely soul with daydreams of nostalgia.

Of childhood innocence, friends and playing.

So tinged is Nostalgia in Novelty.

In a world eclipsed in a routine of doom and gloom... we have forgotten the childhood joy of what is new.

Without novelty, a world without nostalgia chokes.

He who has few pictures of deepest Nostalgia, has a life poorly spent.

He who's Nostalgia casts a wide net, has caught his soul.

Experienced tinged with nostalgia, remind us Life's novelty... and the loss of innocence that follows Death.

Why I Write

Human have ever strived to remove biology from logic, the logical man- but man is more than his logic, but he is his biology too.

In a way, this is to say, I write to contend with my logic, for what is a dualistic and calculative view of the world but that of the machine man.

I believe we desire to not be machine, cog, gear, pawn or king- though this is wishful thinking to rub a lamp and ask for idyllics.

I write because I am tortured by my irrationality. How everything and nothing can be compromised.

Within compromise exists noxious duality that disgusts the blackbird- I flutter as a bird to the better berry.

The berry of chaos- that dionysian spirit that I consume the fruit, and make it fruit less in the nature of Apollo.

To petrify its beauty within the failed confines of language. Is there any beauty in language? Or is it a beauty within lyrical composition? To be a bardic storyteller?

Truly even the red rust of time renders all machine men to the discarded waste- but what of the inauthentic self?

Where truly is the authentic self? Sunk under a myriad realities and pragmatisms as the titanic wreck?

For what a writer is, is futile biologic- a revolting mess of internal hypocrisy, wit, whimsy and the mute symbolism of a muse.

What muse? The amusing muse of bemusement at what decreptitude we find ourselves in?

Truly I tell you, that even those who produced the inspired word of God, found the inspired word of a muse.

And with her bought inspiration, conjured fantastical phantasms that are as fleeting as the notes of an organ.

I write, as it's the enterprise of bought inspiration- perhaps I may sell you ideas.

Ideas that spark a flame. The dull flame of desire choked by all the darkness, ash and misery.

A darkness matched only by the blackbirds feathers. It's departing wings sputtering what heavenly sounds only peace may buy.

But the cost of peace, is sold inspiration- and the cost of war is bought inspiration.

To declare war upon a world sunk and shallow- and in buying inspiration- we buy at the cost of our shadow like poor old Peter Schlemihl!

We become enemies to ourselves in befriending the Devil- for the details of inspiration are ratified in a contract, and inspiration bought by the gold sack of Fortunatus.

And in private confession, we can right wrongs- as priest and prayer together.

To give up writing, and depart as white doves upon dover.

To write is a shameful occupation, borne as a choking phoenix, drowning in ash.

A shameful occupation of devouring the dove and blackbird, and in their venomous duality, choking.

What chokes, cannot breathe, cannot drown, cannot focus and cannot flutter- thrashed and trashed.

The cost of irrationality and poor dying biology.

Ultimate convenience, symptom of sickness

Ultimate convenience is symptomatic of the underground man. Only in inconvenient convenience, and convenient inconvenience do we convene with that spirit of lightning- Übermensch- to carve our own path towards convenience or inconvenience. In that, we balance upon a stake's point as convenience and inconvenience are both sicknesses of the underground man. They will only ever be the virtues of utopia and her sunset-stretched shadow of dystopia. That in convenience, virility dries up, and will wilts away, and in choking inconvenience apathy begins to grip at our feet as we sink deeper into the swamp, lulled deeper by the will o' wisp whispering false conveniences of submission.

The poison pragmatist puts one foot in the grave with his ideal utilitarianism, a blanket ghost of convenience. The apathetic authoritarian puts one foot in the grave with his ideal inconveniences. Both feet sink deeply into the mud that mires convenience- you cannot escape politicks without convenience and inconvenience and their desired design.

Uncloaked, so many conveniences beget inconveniences that hack and slash at the blood and virility of a nation- as an example, the money sink that is the car-dependent nation of America. Pragmatic poison that renders the car a compulsory convenience.

A convenience of inconvenience- such as human interaction, a fabled inconvenience to many, striked out in favour of the better convenience of loneliness and systematic destruction of social ties and bonds has been bought in falsifying a convenience as inconvenience, for nature is an excellent designer. This convenience of inconvenience and its rarer brotherly inconvenient convenience underlies our population, as what is pure inconvenience becomes hard and brittle, like the dead cracking oak. What is pure convenience is soft and pliable to ease its disintegration. Only a perfect conference of convenience and inconvenience, produces something soft and tough, as a grown sapling shaping to the course of the wind.

In this too, shaping others on this is infeasible without weaponising the wind to warp wisemen to your desires, and in doing, petrifying them in the shape of your perfect propaganda, your perfect hatred, your perfect silence- this petrification of a glass canopy darkening the floor and crushing what youthful ideas could emerge. Only such petrifying propaganda, superstitions and hyperstitions could set these seeds.

Always those two, the Underground man and the Üntermenschen man glare upon what embodies life, virtue, virility- always seeking with perfect convenience and inconvenience to shape it and petrify it, so that Eden exists as petrified paradise, forever frozen and burning with the dull flame of desire that embodies all inconvenience and convenience.

Understand what designs convenience and inconvenience, and what its winds strip you of, and you'll understand the social canopy and rooted issues that plague you. The creeping western catastrophe is one of designed convenenience and its tremors are felt in the mental state, hyperstitions of its people, grating sexual frustrations, political unrest and in the sinking quality and cost of life.

An invisible cost of convenience is an invisible hand shaken with Faust.

The long unsent letter, addressed to a friend

To have friends is to dance with the Ghosts - not just the Ghost of their friend, but the Ghost of themselves. In friendship, our past intermingles with theirs, as two streams to a river. And in that river, is the capacity to crash and corrode as titanics upon the rocks of life; and the capacity for stillness- to dry, to ripple in the cool pleasant rain. For moss lingers by water, acidic or alkaline, nature's red waste- and in this desert, the twilight of Ghosts dance like will o' wisps. The river licks the pebbles and morning's chill mist rises as a graveyard, settling dew upon the leaves- nourishing what once was dead as it leaves leaf- brushed aside in the morning work.

To have met as friends, we became strangers to ourselves, strangers to our friend - as no man steps in the same river twice- once warm, once cold, once dry, once overflowing and now drenched and dried of that river's stream.

To have lost a friend, and dwell upon them- we dance in the music of friendship- others deaf see us insane. In brief sanity, we dance with Ghosts of friendship. To this, wine was past brewed to taste romance of lost youth, paradise, dreams and sunsets as the rain falls.

In this experience as friends, strangers, dancers, jesters with the Golden laugh, Archers aiming with longing for the other shore...

I salute that ephemeral Ghost. Dedicated to my friend... for a long time, and for longer times to come.

Aaron

Dominance of Deficiency

"Deficiency will be dominant where aesthetic doesn't exist" - Unknown

There is a similar quote. "Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create bad times. Bad times create strong men.". This cyclical nature, shows the defining characteristic of Good times, which is the decay of aesthetic. A decay in aesthetic, produces weak men.

Let us take what someone considers Beautiful as an example. What is Beautiful inherits some qualities of truth, truism and some form of evaluation of the object as Beautiful. Beauty, is determined a goodness, and ugliness is determined an evilness- and its in this same way that the warping of Beauty, is the warping of Good and Evil. The Warping of Good and Evil, makes Ugly things appear Good to evil people.

Of course this adheres strongly to the notions of Good and Evil. What is beautiful and ugly is not 1:1 with what is good and evil. Nor is it what is truth... but in every Beauty there is a truism... and in truisms, there is deep value and nourishment to the spirit.

Now our lips are sealed by Orwellian language. Some things that destroy the vitality of humans, their health in decay, is determined good and beautiful. Nowhere is this more clear than in "fat shaming". While I condemn shame, and especially the feelings of being ashamed as it is a denial of my virtue(and what is my virtue, but mine alone, and in uttering it, I defile it)- shame is an emotion of the herd. Both the Sheep and Goats herd about and feel shame, and are ashamed- most often they shame those pale individuals... criminals to their aesthetic sensibilities, and these pale individuals grow pale as their health and vitality is choked, their life is choked, they wither, paler and paler. These pale individuals are bridges forward to the noble man, the aesthetic man, but these bridges are burnt, and their ropes rotten-- they have sacrificed the hero within themselves, ashamed, and grown even to shame the hero in others.

The pale criminals- criminals to their herd, marked in black, tried, and deficiency was dominant. Their aesthetic no longer exists, and they adopt the herd's aesthetic... if it can be called an aesthetic. They grew tired of life, of the creation of values by evaluation, and evaluating beauty- and have fallen as the first men to the last men into comfort, decay and dominance.

It is no surprise that this is the case. To be a sheep, to graze among grass is a simple and routine death. Now to be a Goat, is to graze in the lighter air, among the mountains and valleys where grass is thin and Nature's beauty is upon the horizon. To take upon your head these Goat Horns, and lock heads with those of the Goatherd, towards their aesthetic, their desires, their beauty.

In nature the vast majority of the animal kingdom are parasites. Over 50% of all animals. Even among humans, I would not be surprised to say the vast majority of humans are parasites within their societies, leeches bleeding those pale criminal dry... until their exhaustion is society's exhaustion. Until the nobles take cover in the twilight, and the pale ones are pale bones... and the parasites leech among themselves.

Good Aesthetics, creates Dionysian men. Dionysian, destroy order and aesthetic. The absence of aesthetic, creates Apollonian men. Apollonian men create restructure and order the world to their aesthetics... and so the cycle of rain continues to wash away all ugliness and beauty.

My name is Oyzmandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

Begone parasites. You are not bridges to the lightning.

Welcome twilight. Your beauty rebuilds bridges to the lightning.

Begone deficiency. Your dominance is Dionysian, and Apollo struggles even now to find arrows to the other shore.

Welcome Aesthetic. Your beauty unwarped, holds truisms to nourish those pale and frail.

Hotlinking

What is it?

Hotlinking is where you reference a resource that is not on your webserver. For webdevelopers this ends up looking like

<img src="http://otherwebsite.com/pictures/pic.png" alt="pic" />

Whereas one that doesn't hotlink would be

By relative file path
<img src="/Pictures/pic.png" alt="pic" />

By absolute file path
<img src="/Pictures/pic.png" alt="pic" />

By URL
<img src="http://myWebsite.com/Pictures/pic.png" alt="pic" />

Why is it disliked

The reason this is generally looked down upon, is because every time you hotlink, the clientside makes a request to the hotlinked site. As an example, if you have a huge list of hotlinked images from 140 sites, each time you view the page with that huge list of hotlinked images, the browser makes 140 requests to all those sites to retrieve those images, which eats into the bandwidth of all those sites. If any of those requests end up very slow, this causes the page to load all the images slower with some rendering quickly from the request completing quickly, and some rendering slowly from the request completing slowly.

Additionally, if any of these sites are compromised and the images graffiti'd, the graffiti on these images, renders in your site.

On top of wasting bandwidth, you run into image link "rotting" which in my experience, rots a lot quicker than linking to top level URLs(i.e. linking to https://risingthumb.xyz as opposed to https://risingthumb.xyz/about as the about directory is more likely to move than the top level / directory). This means some of these requests will complete to the site, but will return a 404.

On top of this, if you're a website owner who can manage and configure their webserver, you can configure your webserver to return data that is chunkier in a compressed format. As an example for Apache2 in your enabled site you can add lines that look like:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
# or compress by file type extension
<files *.wasm>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</files>

This is provided by mod_filter. If you run an apache2 webserver, worth a look.

Note this works for Apache2. Your webserver of choice(nginx, lighttpd, rchttp etc might or might not have support for this).

Why is it not talked about anymore?

The reason hotlinking isn't talked about anymore, is that most frontend webdevelopers actively embrace it, as they hotlink a lot of javascript from external sources... making requests for them. As they are not involved in the "webpacking" process, or optimising html/videos/images/javascript bundles for web consumption most of these webdevelopers are ignorant of this.

Additionally, most of these servers are hosted in western countries, which connect well to western users. Developers are often some of the most technologically-dependent people, so pay for and have faster internet speeds than your average joe. This means slow requests aren't felt as much by them. Additionally, they don't live in any infrastructures where internet sucks and data has to be used and preserved.

Furthermore, if requests are slow for external sites, but fast for the handful of sites most requests are made(and cached) between... like Google, YouTube... etc. Well, call me a conspiracy theorist, but it's in their interest for smaller sites to be squashed by slower requests elsewhere, but quick requests to them, so their embeded material gets used, and trackers(see tracking pixels) included when using their embeds to get a more complete and cohesive dataset about web use.

What can I do about this?

You can do a few things:

- Stop hotlinking to other sites.

- Embed/hotlink only to sites you want to choke out, dislike, disrespect etc. Doing this strengthens the association of hotlinking as an action of disrespect.

- Avoid pulling javascript from other sources, but pack it together. I believe this is default behaviour for Angular as it uses Webpack(and React?), but I don't know for certain.

- Download all the images you want from other sites, locally host them on your own site. What if they change often? Then cache them regularly. Use cronjobs for caching them.

- Look into your webserver settings to see if there's tools for compressing the responses you send back to users.

The disadvantages of hotlinking can be compared slightly to the disadvantages of dynamic linking- as when things move, it breaks, and as in dynamic linking, performance degrades when pulling in these dynamically linked libs(where it isn't when it's all statically linked into one binary).

Determining your Issue

Bonkers

The way you view the world is very likely downright bonkers. Absurd and delusional. I can see that you want to improve, but people who read posts like this think cutting off the internet is the way to improve. You likely did this a few months ago leaving and came back online. Did that fix your issues... symptoms? No, because the internet isn't The issue. It's a distraction, escape and cope from The issue. I'm not naming it as I don't know it for you, but you're a smart guy if you got here, think on it. Your issue is The issue. Let me give an analogy for how you'll work out The issue.

A person with dietary issues from drinking too many sugary drinks. Takes medicine for it. The medicine causes them to have brutal headaches. They then take more medicine for it. This new medicine causes them to have irritable bowels. These irritable bowels creates an agoraphobia from not being near toilets. A sequence of copes, creating copes to distance themselves from The issue. When it's figured out, assessed and sorted, all these symptoms disappear. The symptoms are not The issue. It's a tangled ball of yarn, and you're lost in the labyrinth, unable to see the threads for the yarn, that you may weave the life you want- instead it knots, chafes and burns at what's dear to you.

Via Negativa

In theology Via Negativa is understanding God, by what he isn't. If you don't know your issue in the same way we don't know God, we can begin to understand them by what they aren't. Apply this, find your issue, and then you'll be able to figure out your issues and make proper fixes against them.

As for what those fixes are. Well, just do the fixes. You're smart enough, and if you truly want something, you'll do it. We're all addicted to our true wants, and our surface wants, the want for candy, often ignores the addiction to our want for feeling good. Tackle why you want to feel good, why you want to feel and why you want, and the whole chain becomes transparent- in transparency you can make a good decision.

Herd Wants and Ego's wants

It's worth considering, the joys of the herd's wants are older than the joys of the ego's wants- the elders hold wisdom... but I'm sure we've all heard our Grandmother say some downright bonkers things. Man must overcome himself and his herd- for they are another arrow pointed for the joyous cliffs at the end of the bridge.

The Burden of Life birthed by Lamenting Death.

Lament

Oh my dear Brothers, that we shall die is to live. But whether we live life, or life lives us- or that we live death, and die to life... death is only an end, of our means.

Memento Mori, the old saying of Latin. Remember you will die. When your death weighs upon you, as it upon the Camel of Zarathustra's 1st metamorphosis, you stray and steer. You search for comforts to this end. And the end of this, is a discomfort, the denial of life.

How is it a denial of life? There are first those who ascribe negative value to life. Who preach antinatalism. They deny pleasures of the flesh- sex and reproduction is one pleasure, the creation and raising of a child is another pleasure. Creation, a primal pleasure- as in God's Genesis, in our regenesis. We cry, and wiggle- we decry and sizzle in the boiling hot coals of life's suffering.

Life is suffering. And to suffer, is to live my friends.

It is some comfort to say at the end, there is a shining beacon found in the afterlife. In Valhalla for the virtuous warrior. In Heaven for the virtuous imitator of Christ, graced by Christ. All of these are a denial of life, by an affirmation of the afterlife. An affirmation beyond the veil of death. That there is no basis to believe or disbelieve- that Pascal in the self-same wager that affirms and slays his God as believer, has condemned to the herds of other idols. That God competes in the abyss of all other Gods, even those to whom Goodness is Evil to Christians.

Oh friends, the bells toll each hour. One toll to your booth, the repentance of your sins. Oh God! I cannot see any more graves! I cannot see people pay in life, for their death. Show me something good, something joyous.

That deaths is an end, the idleness of our bodies. The eternal sunday. God rested. We rested. And we never wake. It is the end of a week's creation. The end of a life's creation. Our children, our family, our friends weep. All our creation... and all creation wept.

It is a lament, that death is the primal fear, the basis of denial in our life- so struck dumb with stress, terror, nightmares of the night's mares that come to reap what was sown.

Burden

That we create our vision of death, is a creation of the burdens. Of the Camel. Of the desire to hold all our responsibility and life upon our back- and in such a simple creation, we weep, lament, and are crushed under them. Unlike Sisyphus, we take no joy in the boulder of life- and deny it. Is there an object to it? Or is it a phantasm of the mind? That haunts our every step with the sickly black tar that coats and crushes everything deep to the depth- that the Camel may bear no more. Painted black.

I see my burdens painted black, and see no light at the end. That there is death is a corrosion to all Good, all Evil and all Creation. Death is entropy, an ends, and our wills and woulds are a means to this ends- baked, burnt or bastardised.

All philosophy comes down to the question. Why live? As Camus said "the only philosophical question of any significance is the question of suicide". That we live in an absurdity, that we take our burdens in both hands, and roll it up the hill- knowing Gravity, knowing Entropy, knowing the world is a mocking jester at every turn.

But even the heavy jester creates joy out of the decks of tragedy, cards of comedy... birth of a dancing star. With such burdens, they can leap with joy and light-footed and heavy with life and vitality.

Steer clear of these preachers of death, and find bridges to the Übermensch my Brothers. That your lives might be your virtue, and your highest hope kept holy. Memento Mori. Your highest hope is the creation of your second life. The life beyond your death. The creation beyond your life. What passes down your legacy and life, your tribe and world. Seven generations of thick skin have begotten you, and you are their highest hope kept holy- will you defile it in death, or honour in holy life?

Reading and Writing - Beauty and ugliness

All great people Read. All great people write. All great people are literate... or are they?

All people read

That everyone can learn to read will ruin in the long run not only writing, but thinking too.

You can read, how else would you read this blog post. But a question of literacy is raised. Most people do not read a single book in the year. What they read? Harry Potter, or some 600 pages of inane nonsense. Of these, they are circus-goers and bread-munchers, who speak loudly but are functionally illiterate. If most occasions of what they needed to read were changed for symbols, they would be just as literate... and in many cases that happens, with no smoking and stop signs.

What do I mean by functionally illiterate? This is what Nietzsche means by ruining not only writing, but thinking too. They read, and have no legs to swim deeply into the depths of what is read-- the depths are not on the pages, nor in the symbols, but in the meanings of symbols- in the interpretations of the word.

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

Here too, we can see what it means for good reading. A good word, is one like a mountain, running with water, frolicking with deer, burrows of Rabbits and depth comparable to nature, without commanding attention all the time. It strikes, in parables, fables, myths, legends- in the stories of our ancients. But what does it mean, writing in blood?

Writing in blood

What is written in blood, is written from sweat, from toil, from labour, from experience. Ideals from this, rung, ring hollow- but ideals written that are written in ink... they ring, and the glass shatters, piercing the veil of fog put before your eyes. This is to say, the untested idea, the untested wisdom is a burden of glass that teetering shatters when your path is waylaid- and from the jagged cuts upon your flesh, you'll find your blood, and your life. And from your life... your blood. From your blood... your writings.

Think on your blood... and you'll find your writings.

To be learned by heart, requires a writing style that can be summed up like lightning from the dark cloud- that its words carry the heavy weight of those heavy drops raining from the firmament... and in learning, in ringing the bells and testing the wisdom it's truisms are unveiled.

Prussian Education

So why is it, most people can read. Function and factory work, factory work demands higher abstractions, and the functions need filling- this stems all the way from Prussia. Prussia had need for German Spirit, and in filling their ranks with German Spirit ironically crushed not only their enemies but their spirit too. That education of officers, robbing from the senses, into the abstractions of the ideas and the glass palace. All pretty and beautiful and untested. Speech and echoes, in a trembling palace of beauty... but a single hammer and all will fall.

It did not take long for the hammer to cock, and gunpowder to light, and the World went to war... Wotan... German spirit put to rest, or resting in its insidious corrupting influence in schools today.

The Victorians, the Americans... all fell under the German Spell cast by Wotan God of Frenzy... Germanic raids upon all young minds. That reading now has become a terror that inflicts functional illiteracy! What social conditioning!

As if Alduous Huxley in his Brave New World was only ringing the bell for our Brave New World!

Blood

Classical bloody writings, are found in the Gospels, the lived word of Christ. An idol, tested and rung- it's knell heard a century ago... but it's well full of blood. Taste it, and you'll find its lessons, but take care. All blood wants to reign supreme, blood is the lifeforce of the virtues, and each virtue wants to be the supreme virtue. THE Virtue. In Christ, the Golden Rule.

It is not an easy thing to drink of foreign blood, and it is not an easy thing to wash your hands of native blood- when in Rome, do as the Romans do, as Pontius Pilate did.

The point of this: drink in foreign works- ring their bells and see most shatter! Untested wisdom, is their terror of the functionally illiterate masses! That it ruins thinking too. Of writing? In shortness, and in blood.

Word as Will

Will

Everyday in our lives, we say "I could read that book.". We say to our friends, "We should play some videogames sometimes!". Even most recently to me, on a forum, some folks were talking about playing some games as a gaming night. "Hey guys we should play some games sometime." Are you seeing a pattern here?

Would. Could. Should.

There is no will.

Will, is the life force that brings ideas to fruition. That brings us forward. The goalsetter of life. Whatever form will takes, the Will to power? The Will to truth? The will to have a good time with friends? The will to waste away? All of these are wills of people, and they all happen.

Word

It is no surprise then, that the origin of the English word, word, stems from the Norse word "Wyrd", which translates to destiny. Your words, establish your fate. Your destiny. Your future. Without a will, your habits, your default way of acting, is your will- and to many this is a will to death, a will for life to live them, and to be swept in the current of the times and the herds.

Odin himself foresaw his death at the hands of Ragnarok, and in seeing this- he turned to the depths of the World Tree. He sunk to its deepest root, conversed with mimir and suffered and bled for days, to the torment of himself, to the torment of his very life- this God of frenzy! So he could sip of the waters of wisdom, and learn the words that could change his destiny- change his fated death at the end of the world.

And just as the past is our fate. We have suffered too- if we could go back, we could say things differently. We all have our regrets and our words, and our words have been willed, and our wills have sowed regrets.

Knowing what to will is difficult. Nietzsche excellently observed the abyss of values to which we sink now.

Stories

The story I just told you, of Odin's attempt to change his fate by learning the words- underpins the importance of words. The virtue and power in them, and how destiny is interlinked with them.

But there is a problem with stories.

We don't all share the same stories anymore. No common hero myth. No common virtues. No common ideas of good and evil. No common Gods. We've all been divided, conquered, divided, conquered- again as conquered peoples. So it is down to us to become the Gods, to become our stories, to find our heroes and our virtues- so that they may knot and chafe and that we might will something beautiful into creation.

But willing, with our words comes against the obstacle of itself.

Language

He who controls language, controls the speaker. He who controls speakers, controls rhetoric. He who controls rhetoric, controls politics, education, writing, reading, ideas, criticism and in all ways... power.

This is one of the principle points of George Orwell's seminal work, 1984. Newspeak is a language full of missing words, missing ideas, missing notions, and ways of expression. As a result, speaking of these ideas became clunky. Jargon. Obscure. A joke.

I do not subscribe to the views of the political left- but observing the way language is. Eggshells, clunky expressions as to not offend anyone, holy words that will render you digitally crucified. Even religion, in all of its holiness could not have better zealots, as taking God's name in vain, will not bind you to a cross.

X marks the spot. Dig, and there will be treasure. But X has the burdens. Dig, and bear the cross.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the point is this. Your words, are powerful if used correctly. Avoid English modal words like coulds and shoulds, and will what you want into being. Will it by words. Sow the Golden Seeds of your future.

On the tripartite of Humanity

O' Declared it so- from the sickly tree of Christianity... "God is Dead and we have killed him!". Or so it is said, that following it, God is dead- With it truth is dead, With it science is dead. How can that be, for such an axiomatic system of symbols to result in a dead truth? It depends on the metaphysical, or its lack. To believe in the metaphysical... the tripartite of humanity- Of a worldly spirit that inhabits men! Nay, not a religious spirit- as Jung duly notes on our deepest fears. Allayed and departed Ulysses ventures and projects his own wrath upon the world. That spirit that make men whole! To believe in it, is to believe in some meaning, some truth! Without it, it all falls into subjectivity depraved upon subjectivity. Observe those who believe solely in the Duality of Mankind; His mind separate from his body, observe how unto each they give special emphasis upon their mind- Max Stirner with his utter rejection of all metaphysical manifestations that might prey upon him, but he too is preyed upon the spirit of freedom and individualism. "I think, therefore I am", only some of the time- does this imply a lack of thought destroys your existence? A philosophy predicated on the physical, justified by Titan slayers of Old and New slay and lay old titans to rest- and in their stead a spiritless world, deprived of beauty and meaning and falsified with measurements of mind or body. Machiavellian, Hedonistic, Egoistic and Individualistic philosophies stem from this obsession with the physical.

Let us return once more to the question of duality of mankind, this can be a duality of spirit and mind. To do this, you put no measurement upon the body and the material- an eastern tradition, and a tradition that leaves the mand languishing upon its self-inflicted deprivation. A stoic sadism. The duality of spirit and body- but then you put no measurement upon your mind. You reject the autonomy of thinking and leave it to the Gods above and below, to blow the ship of Theseus. With no mind to think, you reject autonomy over your body and revert to nature- an unnaturally life-denying approach as you can both transcend nature in that Übermenschian spirit, or descend into your darkest nature- lusting into a Hedonist fervor. So then we return to the body and mind- but a body and mind without a spirit is one full of what Stirner would consider spooks. "Truth, Morals, Gods, Beauty", what spooks leave a mind and body haunted by the modernist and post-modern hauntings of Nihilism and Existentialism and leave so many wrought with inner turmoil! Their spirit lies in the labyrinth of the mind, the Shadow and its self-actualisation! What a tragedy that might befall people. Alas poor Candide, I barely new thee.

Then we come to singularities of men. That you may only be a spirit. Life-denying in its very essence! You would reject our world, the only world you have solid proof for it lays before all your senses in every waking moment- through your body you know this, yet you reject the body, and you reject the world. In service of pure spirit. Pure spiritlessness. The singularity of the mind is trivial, a mind relies upon a body to even exist- how else biologically can your world change? How else can understandings of science, built on the house of cards that is theories, hypotheses and axioms that even Gödel refutes their completeness give you sustenance if you have no spirit to subject yourself to those truths, or no body to observe them? It is a contradiction. Finally singularity of the body- that we are nothing but machines and cellular automate. Pascal's wager should be sufficient to argue against the atoms in the void argument- if we are, then we aren't losing anything either way, and if we aren't we lose a very great deal in the metaphysical and the physical.

To what degree is Spirit, Spirit? In so far as Nature, that unconscious guardian of all that is beautiful and right in our world- in so far as Art that unconscious exploration of the deeper ravines of our mind's aesthetics- in so far as God, that being we espouse motive and structure to our world from. Even Virgil presented these 3 elements in the 7th Circle.

Dearest, our worldy antidote is in our very fibers yet you recoil knowing it may make sense within your mentally structured notion of the unconscious! Your dreams! Your psychology and resentments! All contribute to that aesthetic that is spirit. Those who resent this, languish, failing, brooding, with a deep hatred for our world as their mind and body fail to sustain each other. Fail to sustain their process towards Plato's Philosopher King, master of all 3 dominions! So much has been lost...

Holy mother, why do you weep so?

Nietzsche and philosophical destruction

Ah yes, the modern classical works of Nietzsche. Woe to any idea he sank his teeth into, that may be the subject of what one man may say in a paragraph what many say in a book... or not at all. Nietzsche is of a modern class of philosophers, spawned from the Enlightenment. Their entire Socratic dialogue dives into the destruction of philosophies- take Voltaire as a common example with poor old Candide! Is this the best of all possible worlds? If it's the only world of all possible worlds, then trivially yes. If it's not, then likely not- as such it flounders around a moral chaos around.

It is a mysterious individual who Übermensch, promotes der Übermenschen society mein schlatz? Denn wir fahren gegen engelland?- but alas even the English see naught beyond the ends of their noses, as their society collapses in complete rejection of Nazi Germany. Full of Untermenschen children, as are all such western wastes. It is a deep grievance that Nietzschean work desiring an Übermenschen society, creates the thesis of the Übermenschen society, and its more successful Untermenschen society that works on an ideal comparable to Huxleys somatic work. Woe to the misanthrope and his misinterpreted words! In setting Dionysus and Apollo at war, cutlass and sabre once more! Alas, some men are Odin switched like my dearest brother locked behind the metaphysics of words, Mr John Savage.

Kierkegaard's Foul Choice

Jesus Christ's Golden Rule and Kant's Categorical Imperative are flawed in design. These systems roughly say "Treat others how you'd want rational people to treat you", however if you systematise the treatment of others into conditional logic, such as "If the person is fat, disrespect them. Otherwise, respect them" you can from this very simply justify the killing fields of Cambodia- as such theological understandings of following the word of God, Kierkegaard's "Or"... following the ethical life is undermined, and what you have left is the requirement of religious faith! In the Book of Job, Job's friends try to justify Job's diseases and sickness as a sign from God for him being evil- but such theological understandings of God don't follow. As they say, God acts in mysterious ways, requiring faith, and unto this faith Abraham when he was about to sacrifice Isaac is one of the original leaders of great faithfulness. Thus, we can discard the Categorical Imperative as it is a theological approach to God- a theological approach that breaks down under scripture. Jesus' Golden Rule doesn't quite break down, as Mathew 7:12 states "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.". This applies it in a universal approach, but this universality of treatment itself also suffers issues, as how would one define universal treatment? Kicking a perfectly able man, is quite different from kicking a child- and the context too will never be perfectly equal and perfectly universal just by the very nature of the world.

It is simple to say Religious Faith is difficult, it discards universal morality as demonstrated in Abraham's Sacrifice, and it discards reasoning about God. The ethical man deriving his ethics from scripture- but even in this it suffers. Consider Pascal's Wager, that fallacious terrible wager, it embeds assumptions about God, his goodness and the domain of the metaphysical, but inside of it there is no way to prove that version of the metaphysical is true- what makes it more true than the Norse Gods? The Hindu Gods? The countably infinite number of various metaphysical entities, domains and results? It is from this, you have no grounds to your stake, yet you must make it- lest you take Kierkegaard's "Either". His Aesthetic approach to life, that dark, twisted and malign view of the world.

Under the Aesthetic is all views of the world material- slave morality, master morality, Übermenschen outlooks, Hedonism- even the irrational and emotion-driven artistic approaches of Clockwork Orange's Alex. When the ethics are discarded, all that remains is power, and power sets justice. When the ethics are discarded this justice can be of a particular opinion good, bad or neutral- but you have no grounds to assert this if you draw your ethics from scripture. Let us now address an alternative to scripture for our ethics. Darwin's approach is that universal morality descends from some element in our biology. Stealing and murder are generally condemned across all nations as antisocial behaviours, but then doesn't this serve the hedonistic approach of a group? Hedonism being the minimisation of pains, and the maximisation of pleasures. Yes, it seems that our universal morality this way is just an extension of aesthetics as applied to groups. This goes so far as to Nietzsche's genealogy of morals... the Slave and Master- all aesthetic, though I would argue morality goes back much further than the Slave and Masters he points at with the Romans and Christians.

The Aesthetic! Or the Religious Zealot! And no grounds to make either choice. If you refuse, we know plenty well you are an Aesthetic man, a hedonistic man who is uncomfortable with the knowledge of how ethics and morality are as Stirner would call it "Phantasms of the mind". Indeed, you are an ego unto itself and you must act on a choice, a choice that is entirely irrational no matter how you would split it. And those crushed by this realisation, those fence-sitters pulled back to their proper sphere, they would flirt with Nihilism, Absurdism, Existentialism- all these refusals of embracing the aesthetic or embracing the faith. Their crushing realisation that they feel from the sickly ambrosia of Internet, leaves a waxing spirit.

As much as I believe in the existence of one God, the Christian God- I do not deny I lack absolute unthinking faith. Though my aesthetic faith of Jesus, perhaps I'll be granted paradise- the aesthetics of my life being something I mold day by day in accordance to my shifting tastes, as I adopt and discard values that suit me better. Let us not forget Original Sin presents us knowledge from which to divorce our heartstrings from The Lord- what a foul choice you have to make, I do not envy your position dear reader, above a sea of fog...

Workout and Diet plans

Relevant information about me

Age: 23, Height: 175cm, Neck: 39cm, Waist: 85cm, Hip: 87cm, Wrist: 16cm, Forearm: 22cm, Weight: 58.5kg.

Using Covert Bailey Method, I am currently on 18.3% body fat. I intend to get this to 15% body fat at least, and preferably down closer to 10%. Additionally my BMI is 19.6. The goal isn't weight loss, but body fat loss. Weight loss may actually be a negative, as building up some muscle, in particular for my arms.

Current workout plan

• 4km+ run. Increasing this to failure for weekend runs. Intend to increase to a Marathon eventually.
• Crunches to failure
• Squats to failure
• 2 sets of Pushups to failure
• 3 sets of dead hangs to failure
• 3 sets of Assisted(resistance bands) pull-ups to failure(idea is to ween off the assistance and move to proper pullups once I can do 3-4 of them)
• Plank to 2mins or failure
• Sideways plank left and right sides to 2mins or failures

The idea here, is the aerobic exercise will constitute most of the body fat loss, this is doubly true on days where I do intermittent fasting. As I currently cannot do a single pull-up, a lot of my exercise goals are built around that, focusing on improving upper body strength, in particular core strength as core strength is especially important for pull-ups. Other "unexplained" elements are to cover the majority of the body.

Idea is to eventually remove Dead hangs in favour of pull-ups. I may also add in some weight training of some variety. This is designed to avoid the "Gym", as travel for that will consume a lot of time.

Current Diet plan

Note when I mention fast, that is a water fast. I haven't looked much into the distinction between dry and water fasts.

• 3 non-consecutive days a week of intermittent fasting. If they are consecutive, the body adapts to this, and lowers metabolic rate, as a result.
• 48 hours prolonged fast. Covers 2 days.
• 2 Days of eating normally. Normally being, including carbohydrates.
• Post-workout drink for normal and intermittent fast days being a "Mini" Gironda Shake, of 3-6 raw eggs, milk and a banana to cover most nutrients, provide a bunch of calories, provide dietary fibre.
• If it's an intermittent-fast day, eat an only-meat meal.
• If it's a regular day, eat some carbohydrates to replenish glycogen stores for intermittent fasting.
• Get raw meat from butchers. In particular organ meats, especially livers. This isn't to be eaten raw(yet...), however livers contain a lot of useful nutrients. It's also more cost-efficient compared to supermarkets.
• Absolutely no Gluten. See Reference 1 for a paper on how gluten promotes mental illnesses.
• Change from whole milk to raw milk, once I have a driving license to go and pick some up from local dairy farms. This isn't advisable for people with compromised immune systems, but the bacteria is useful for those with functional immune systems.
• Remove fluoride from Toothpaste. Non-trivial amounts are consumed by the body damaging it as a neurotoxin. Use a non-fluoride toothpaste. See reference 2.
• Get a water filter to remove fluoride, oestradiol and all sorts of harmful chemicals in water. See reference 3.
• Remove any foods that clearly "add sugars".
• Remove anything with Caffeine.

References

Academic Science and its problems

Let us begin this by refreshing what is the scientific method. The scientific method is where one makes an observation or question. Follows this with research into the topic. Following this with a hypothesis, and following that with an experiment to test the hypothesis. Data is then analyzed and the conclusions are then reported. The value of the conclusions is based on whether the data and the conclusions made from it can be replicated.

The first issue here is replicability. Somewhere in the region of ~70%[1] of all studies made are simply not replicated. This 70% covers the set of both, attempted replications where the replication doesn't find the same result as well as simply not attempting them. Then there are a lot of studies which simply aren't replicated. This alone is pretty damning. Let us ask then, what is needed for a result to be deemed significant? Statistically, the result must be incredibly unlikely. This is referred to as a P value. However P Values can be hacked by a method called "P-Hacking"[2]. A number of methods exist, the most common is multiplying the number of dependent variables you measure with a small sample size(this means one of the values are, by coincidence likely to produce a significant result that is down to coincidence).

The reason why P-hacking is done is pretty obvious. Scientific journals want to publish significant results, not replication results or insignificant results. They also want to publish novel research. As a result, there is little funding in replication(cherry picked replication as was done by cigarette companies is one avenue for funding), also because a lot of journals simply do not accept replication papers.

This first problem is called the reproducibility problem. It's such a big problem that over the last decade scientists have been trying to tackle it. The point of reproducing results is because P-Hacking can be done without malicious intent(increasing dependent variables is rarely malicious. Similarly, a small sample size is often a pragmatic problem of not having the means for a larger one). If you cannot reproduce the results, the P-Hacked results aren't in fact significant, as by Occam's razor it is much more likely coincidental.

The second issue that's arising is a case of paper quality. The paper on tortured phrases is an example[3]. This is mainly a problem of padding papers, and being relatively deceptive. This indicative of a poor peer review process regarding scientific journals. Despite this, the solution is self-evident. Improve the peer review process, but with such quantity of papers it's not the easiest. This problem will only get worse as AI(the tortured phrase of AI is Counterfeit Consciousness :^)) advances with regards to creating sensible papers. This will get worse without question due to the presence of GPT-3 produced by OpenAI(deceptively named, as it's not Open at all) being able to produce coherent fictions. Another issue presented is simply citing non-existent scientific papers. I only see a solution where it is tied to some technology like Google Scholar being able to tackle this, but even that would be flawed due to the rate of link rot being dangerously fast for the 21st century(to the point, the internet could be called a dementiated brain of knowledge).

Presented are two major issues in academic science today. It is the reason that a lot of papers aren't replicated, are trash. Those which aren't replicated are dubious until replicated(and even replications can have issues). The presence of external factors muddy the waters. People want to get good degrees, acquire more research funding and do decent science... but all this is at the cost of the integrity of the scientific world.

As a side note, I should mention the scientific cult. These are people who regard an unreplicated study to be fact and set in stone, and will defer to them for the more extreme arguments made. This effects even scientific citation as papers less likely to be true are cited more[4]. In fact, people with an overbearing dependency upon scientific studies that haven't been replicated often have an agenda.

As a result of this, the papers I would typically find more trustworthy are those by engineering companies, as quite often they are written with an intent of setting forward a new technology and convincing people it should be used more widely. An example of this would be the Valve paper on Signed Distance Functions[5]. This is because the claims are much more likely to be refuted and challenged by other engineering companies, and by people involved in the scientific world as these are typically well regarded and well known companies who can make their research well known(The darker side naturally, is when they use this to push an agenda as cigarette companies have done).

Tools for notetaking

Over the last 5 years I have done a fair bit of note taking. Lets go through the different tools I have used.

- None

- Pen and notebook

- Pen and scrap paper

- TiddlyWiki

- Emacs Orgmode

- Zettlr

- Joplin

- Plain text files

- Vimwiki

As one might plainly observe, I have used a number of them. Lets go through them one at a time. Firstly no notetaking is mostly silly, though from it I and occasionally taking no notes about things, I know very well that not everything needs to be noted. In this regard, Lectures for example I rarely write notes and instead spend time understanding the content of the lecture. This may also be helped by the fact my profession is Software Development, so I get to practice what I learn. It may also help that I have an interest, or am already aware of a fair amount of it.

Next is Pen and Notebook. This work alright, but is a linear form of notetaking where it is linear in the time axis. As a result, finding particular notes is difficult. Where this shines is in the case of learning your notes by writing them. It's not a particularly useful method.

Next is Pen and scrap paper. This is... Alright it's shit. I only do this for incredibly temporary notes. You probably also do this... right?

TiddlyWiki is the first note taking application I actually spent a bit of time. It is a single HTML document with all the JS and CSS inside it. I am a fan of it, but I don't personally use it. A single HTML file and having to redownload it and overwrite your current one is a bit of a janky system for keeping notes, but the main benefit of it is that it's incredibly portable. I don't personally use it, as the minor annoyances of it being a HTML file outweigh the benefits of it being portable. Portability is something we'll discuss a bit later.

Next we have Emacs Orgmode. Now this is simply brilliant... if you like Emacs. Personally Emacs did not click with me. I grasp why it's nice, but I do not grasp how to use it well and even after putting in some time to use it with Doom Emacs, I still did not like it. The fact it integrates note taking, note exporting, tasks, calendars and a lot of other features really well into one application makes it a recommendation to investigate if you can understand Emacs and its quirks. I would also advise against the default bindings in emacs, as using Alt is a sure fire way to RSI.

Next is Zettlr. Zettlr is a markdown editor with LaTeX support and citation support as well so for academics it is likely a good option. The fact it creates the files in a pure way means they are also relatively portable, so you aren't locked in. The actual usability of the application isn't quite there though, as I couldn't organise notes quite the way I wanted to on the sidebar, or move notes around- though I suspect this is an issue WRT to my Window Manager and Zettlr as in the documentation this should be possible. Even still, I would say Zettlr is worth a look. I also believe it is an Electron application but I may be mistaken, so it has a performance tax.

Another note taking application I had a brief look at was Joplin. It seems promising but I didn't stick with it, and the way it does syncing seems to recommend locking yourself into a particular ecosystem. Even so, what's there does impress me. It can also take snippets of websites for notes, though I'd rather leave that to a dedicated screenshotting tool.

Plain text files are also an option. The benefit of this is obvious, any text editor can be used. The negative of this is also obvious, you lose a lot of formatting, and easy linking around, and tend to have build your notes in a hierarchical format following the directory structure which isn't too useful.

Finally, what I personally use is Vimwiki. This is a somewhat personal choice as I use vim quite a lot. I can navigate the directory structure using NERDTree, and edit files easily using vim. I also get linking for free within the application, get all my bindings and plugins for vim alongside it so I can easily format files in a breeze. It is also just using vim, so I get the benefit of it being incredibly lightweight. Moving between files and folders is easy in the default mode, I can assign a word to be linked in the current directory so creating new links is very quick and snappy. It also has functionality for keeping a daily log(another concept I think is quite worthwhile, but for different reasons and a discussion separate from Notetaking).

Now I will take a brief discussion on syncing notes. There is a few methods for syncing notes I have experimented with. I sync them across platform for Mobile, my home Linux machine and I will likely consider extending it to my Windows work machine, so I can make software development notes and snippets.

Firstly is the classical rsync. This requires a server of some kind to be running in order for that to work well, it also requires the command(noteworthy as windows and phones don't have this by default). Secondly is git. This is worth considering, but requires you make your work public unless you use either a private Git repo with an SSH key(bit of a pain), or accept making your notes public. Thirdly is syncthing, where your folder syncs across the local network when changes are detected. These changes going to systems that also use Syncthing. I currently use syncthing and haven't had problems with it so far.

All of the methods noted so far are FOSS. I will now take a brief walk down the wilted park of proprietary solutions. Your mileage will vary with this.

For synchronising you have the expected, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and probably some other services of that nature. For tools you have Notion(Can't tell if it's FOSS or not), Obsidian, Evernote, Google docs and other such tools.

I'm not a fan of the proprietary solution as notetaking is somewhat personal, and changing your tools and methods to make it easier or navigate it easier is worthwhile considering. A proprietary tool doesn't make changing easy, as it locks you into its ecosystem.

Pman : Manual pages, formatting, roff and PDFs

Not to be confused with pacman. Its a short script I wrote in order to view man pages in my pdf client. Wait, what's a man page I hear you ask?

man ls

This command, "man" will read a roff file and format it appropiately so you can read it. A roff file, is just a plaintext file formatted in a nice way. How nice? Every change in formatting in your text is a line, but this isn't an article about roff. The thing about roff to know, is it was used in the old UNIX days and that man pages are written in them.

The script "pman" in question is this:

#!/bin/sh
man -Tpdf "$@"   zathura - ;

The flag "-T" informs Troff what to convert the troff document into. "pdf" tells us to conver the Troff document to a pdf(I presume by converting to PS, then to PDF, but I may be incorrect). We must then pipe it into a pdf reader, in this case I use zathura as that's my preferred PDF reader.

Other options can be used for -T, including html, ps and dvi(not that you'd want to use the latter 2). HTML and PDF options are useful to me, as it means man pages can be printed or uploaded to the internet as a reference. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if using this, is how most manual pages are done on the web!

Some points to clear up before I move on, and some alternative tools to mention. Firstly, Groff? Troff? Roff? Roff is the original, followed by Troff, followed By Groff(GNU Roff). The differences are minor between them, since they are just continuations and developments upon what was laid down previously. In fact, it's arguable that Roff laid the foundation for programs such as Donald Knuth's TeX program that is used widely in academia.

The alternative tool is "info" another GNU program. I am not a fan of it, as it's effectively a full on TUI for reading and searching manuals, as opposed to a simpler CLI that "man" is. Within emacs, I am aware of a program known as "W.O. Man" which stands for "Without Man", which is another program for reading manual pages.

Do you want to learn more about the "man" command in zathura? Run this:

man -Tpdf man   zathura -;

pass

What is pass? It's just a password manager. It works by using gpg encrypted files which are your passwords. This means they are encrypted and safe. It's also a password manager that is offline, so that means you have no issues with hosting it. You can if you would like, host your gpg encrypted passwords in a git repository, or in the cloud, or on an online machine so you can get them using rsync or some other file transfer tool.

There's a number of commands I will share here.

pass init passwordStoreName

This lets you initialise a password store. A password store is just a place for your passwords to be stored hence the name. This is where gpg-encryption comes in, as all the passwords are encrypted using your gpg password. There is technically more involved that you can find out using `man pass`, as pass is really just a very nice and convenient frontend for gpg.

pass add passwordName

This lets you add a password under that password name. When you do it, you'll be prompted for a password. Unless I am adding a password that I already know, I usually do not use this, as the next command is far more useful.

pass generate passwordName 20

This lets you generate a cryptographically strong password for the password named passwordName that is 20 characters long. It's fairly obvious why this is good, because it means you don't use the same password for each online service, nor have to remember them.

pass ls

This gives you a list of all password names in the password store.

Now you know all the password names(not their values) in your password store, now you need to acquire a password? Simple.

pass passwordName

This will prompt you for your gpg password, and if successful in decryption, give you the password. There is more you can do with this command that is beyond the scope of this article, such as multiple password stores, and using more than one gpg key for your password encryption. There's even OTP(One Time Passwords, the timed 6 character codes) that you can use with it.

A demonstration use is listed below.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

shopt -s nullglob globstar

typeit=0
if [[ $1 == "--type" ]]; then
	typeit=1
	shift
fi

prefix=${PASSWORD_STORE_DIR-~/.password-store}
password_files=( "$prefix"/**/*.gpg )
password_files=( "${password_files[@]#"$prefix"/}" )
password_files=( "${password_files[@]%.gpg}" )

password=$(printf '%s\n' "${password_files[@]}"   dmenu "$@")

[[ -n $password ]]   exit

if [[ $typeit -eq 0 ]]; then
	pass show -c "$password" 2>/dev/null
else
	pass show "$password"   { IFS= read -r pass; printf %s "$pass"; }  
		xdotool type --clearmodifiers --file -
fi

For reference, dmenu is a suckless utility. This script is not my own, but is zx2c4's script I am using as an example.

This script takes the list of passwords, lets you select one in the interface created by dmenu, and when you select one, copies it to the clipboard so you can paste it in the respective password box for any account you need to log into. I also have this mapped to a keybind in DWM, "Mod+Shift+P", so any time I need a password, I can get it("Mod+P" is used for pausing music which I do more frequently than I get passwords).

As you can see, it follows the UNIX philosophy pretty well, making it very useful as a password manager. It dodges the issues of contemporary online password managers that are centralised and very much so freedom-restricting, leveraging the passwords to make money from the end users. The fact it's gpg-encrypted means it's also good to use with cloud storage solutions. Overall, it's a tool oft-overlooked by people.

The best medication

German Romanticism, was a direct result of the Enlightenment, where everything was being reduced to rationalism and logic and a denial of emotions across the full range(pain, pleasure, love, lust, envy, pride, happiness etc). This German Romanticism is responsible in part for the philosophical views of Nietzsche, Stirner and a lot of other German philosophers(and a lot of German works like Beethoven's 5th, Wagner's Operas e.t.c.)- which usually focused on the concepts of self-actualisation or the Übermensch. This concept of self-actualisation, if one studies Jungian Psychology, requires incorporating the shadow of your ego(everything you bury deep down in your subconscious), which for most people is extremely difficult, so instead you just get modern short-sighted attempts at it by using Maslow's Hierarchy of needs instead(therapay and medication too if it doesn't work well enough).

Tou should look at yourself and ask what you're hiding from yourself- but teasing that out is very hard as noted above on Jungian Psychology. My general purpose recommendation is to attempt to read some philosophy(since philosophy is effectively a prequel to psychology). It'll give you both knowledge on different value systems, and give you tools towards being your own therapist(you know yourself best, so why shouldn't you be your best therapist?).

60 Second Dungeon, a Ludum Dare 51 Game

For Ludum Dare 51, I made a game. It's largely inspired by "the world's hardest game", a flash game from my youth. The main change is a 10 second timer on levels, and a points system. Credits to Visha for helping with the sprites!

Elden Ring Review

Elden Ring is a flawed game. It's very good in its own respects, but it stands as a flawed game that could have been so much better. That said, it still stands out above most of the competition anyway in the open world genre, which makes it alone great.

I will outline here, that Elden Ring is an Action RPG in an open world. It does not do much in quests, and it does not allow much in the aspect of roleplaying. This is fine if you expect this, but I imagine some people will go in expecting a relatively tame open world RPG with Dark Souls combat. Skyrim's quests with Dark Soul's Combat is what I think some people would be expecting.

Singing its praises

Elden Ring is the best Open World game I have played so far. It is also still so far away from being a great game, it is merely a good game. The problems outlined below are my main gripes with it, however keep in mind that this game was a thoroughly great experience and probably the best choice for a game to play, for someone new to the Soul's series. You'll probably get between 60 and 130 hours of gameplay in your first playthrough depending on how you play it, so on a pure value point, it's a good offering.

Problem 1: The mini dungeons

Elden Ring has a lot of its side content in the form of mini dungeons. These come in 6 forms. There are mineshafts, where the structure and geometry is similar between them all. Especially in the case of elevator shafts where you will always know where the secrets get placed. There are caves, which are almost identical to mineshafts with the absence of wood, lanterns and the like. There are catacombs which are usually interesting puzzles to open a boss door with enemies littered around. There are underground graves, which are effectively larger catacombs where each section is a puzzle about progression rather than about opening a boss door. There are ruins, where the surface aspect of a ruin is usually trash mobs, and they always have stairs down(often hidden in some way) to a boss fight or just straight to a treasure chest. Then there are Rises(Magic towers) where they are more of a puzzle about observing the surrounding environment to access or acquire access to the rise.

In all these aspects, only the Rises don't have boss fights. Almost all of the above follow a repeated structure, which means it devalues the differences between them as they all end up feeling the same. This is also an issue exacerbated by somewhat poor enemy variety, but that's a separate problem. The fact each of these has to have a reward, also ruins part of the appeal of it, and the psychological draw to exploration. Part of the psychology of dopamine, is that more dopamine is released when the actual trigger for it doesn't follow a consistent pattern. A comparison I'd make here is to the Fallout or to Skyrim's worlds. Not every location has to have unique loot, or unique challenges. It's just the presence of some, that elevates all of them and makes them all feel different.

All of this said, this problem is almost laughably minor in the face of other open world games. The 70th identical tomb with drauger or identical cave in Skyrim- the identical dungeons of Breath of the Wild. It's certainly better.

Additionally, this is broken up by "Legacy Dungeons" which are large dungeons that completely blow the side content out of the water in terms of quality.

There are other bits of side content, like abandoned towers, abandoned villages, abandoned castles and the like which do a better job in this regard and wandering mausoleums. I'd consider each of these to be relatively distinctly different and unique, but their uniqueness likely comes down to not being overused as opposed to the above cases.

By the 20th hour this becomes noticeable. By the 40th hour I started getting tired of it. I still continued doing this to get close to 100%. In any New Game+ runs I do, I'll probably skip this side content as I consider it in a similar class to filler in TV Series.

Problem 2: Enemy Variety

Elden Ring's problem with enemy variety is significant, that it also extends to Bosses. The same Boss ends up reused(Godskin Apostle, Magma Wyrm, Dragons), and some minibosses end up significantly reused(such as Crucible Knight, Ulcerated Tree Spirit, Erdtree avatar). This also extends to the "trash" mobs, such as Gargoyles and "Soldier of Godrick" reskins. This issue is nowhere nearly as bad as Skyrim's humans reskinned, and Breath of the Wild's differently coloured goblins... but it remains a problem. In the case of bosses, it makes some hard fought victories shallow. One case is in the Magma Wyrm as a boss at the end of the climb into the Altus Plateau. This was big and with some flair. Then you find him again in the Volcanic area, and it ends up being a nothing fight and devalues your previous fight against him.

Problem 3: Questlines where the next step is unexplained

Some of Elden Ring's Questlines are terribly unexplained. This is worsened by them being obtusely progression sensitive, and by their dialogue not pointing out the next step for them.

Some of them are better explained(Volcano Manor-adjacent quests, Irene's questline) and some are terribly explained(Warrior Jar Alexander and Sorceress Sellen). I appreciate this requiring a little more thought, but they could have taken pointers from Morrowind, in the rumours, notes that you can find in the world, and just saying directions and distinct landmarks in their dialogue. This is a system that is pretty much copied and pasted from Dark Souls and related games, and in those it works due to the relatively linear nature of them.

Problem 4: Solo invasions are Opt-In and not Opt-Out

I didn't encounter any PvP due to no solo invasions. Every previous Souls game has featured solo invasions. This has also negatively affected the Co-Op community as Co-Op with friends outside of bosses means you are invasion eligible, but due to the small number of these players, invasions end up occuring frequently to these players as opposed to being unique events in older souls games. Additionally, Solo invasions are faked with scripted NPC invasions, which means realising this is the case is unlikely to new players.

There is an Opt-In method, but it's easy to overlook and forget, called the Taunter's Tongue. It would have been possible to change it to an Opt-Out method, called the Coward's Tongue in a very soulsy style, and ensure people get some experience with invasions. The only reason this is the case in my opinion, is to appeal to a larger demographic, but it waters down the experience.

Problem 5: Poison swamps

Miyazaki really likes his Poison Swamps. So he made the Aeonian Swamp, Caelid, Lake of Rot, Haligtree and made a fair bit of side content poison swamps too. It gets tired, and a bit annoying having to dash through an area to reach the next nearby grace just because you're in the 10th Poison Swamp area. It also devalues hardfought encounters and setpieces in these poison swamps(Lake of Rot is an example where when you reach it, you're annoyed about it rather than surprised about it due to experience in the Aeonian Swamp and many catacombs before).

Problem 6: A HORRIBLE PC Port

From Soft are mainly a console developer, so their games are aimed for consoles. That said, I'd expect a PC Port to target the standard interface(Mouse and Keyboard) appropriately. Instead, the map key isn't rebindable, default binds are attrocious(arrow keys to switch items). Dodge rolling, sprinting and backstepping are all bound to the same key, you can't bind items to certain hotkeys, and the D-Pad style interface for items remains the same and is generally problematic on PC.

These issues also go further. Map can only be moved by movement keys, not mouse which s just stupid. Default in-game key prompts are controller buttons, not PC buttons(which should just be detected anyway, not set in a settings menu. I have enough development experience to say this is possible and easily so). The Inventory is less featureful, lacking a filter option(that is present in controller) making fin ing newly picked up items a tedious and difficult chore as you have to search each tab of your inventory for what item it is and where it is, which is painful when you have many items.

Additionally, I reckon some builds would be straight up difficult by how fiddly they are. Builds that find themselves using lots of consumables mid-combat, builds that involve switching both primary and secondary weapons would also be very difficult due to how fiddly changing weapons and dual handing them is. Add on top of ashes of war, and the PC Control Scheme is frankly half-assed.

A half-assed default control scheme, where some comments on reddit and the steam discussions point out previous Souls entries had a better default scheme, even if still problematic in their own ways, was a terrible first experience that marred the entire game with a legitmate frustration of the controls in addition to the natural difficulty of the game.

THIS VERY PROBLEM ALONE, MAKES ME NOT RECOMMEND THIS TO ANYONE WHO PLAYS EXCLUSIVELY PC WITHOUT HE MUSCLE MEMORY FOR CONTROLLERS, AND WITHOUT THE TIME TO FIGURE OUT BETTER BINDS OVER MANY HOURS OF GAMEPLAY. AVOID THIS GAME UNLESS YOU CAN DEAL WITH THIS, OTHERWISE YOU WILL HAVE AN UTTERLY MISERABLE TIME.

Aspects of no experience

As I mentioned, there's aspects in this game I have no experience in. It's easy enough to complete the game without using sorceries or incantations. As a result I have no experience with those, and there's a wide selection of those tools. Then there's PvP, which I have heard has issues with laggy netcode, but again haven't used as I'm not a casual using Co-Op for bosses and completely forgot about the Taunter's Tongue until discussing invasions after I beat the game, meaning no PvP.

Conclusion

As outlined above. Elden Ring has its issues. It also is a good game. Far better than its competitors in the genre. The biggest problem it has, is a bad PC port, followed by repetitive side content, but its repetitions are far less egregious than competitors in the genre. Questlines are problematic to 100% gamers or gamers who enjoy lore and dialogue.

It's a good game, but not a great game, and certainly not a flawless game as some gamers make it out to be.

Field archery is better than Olympic Archery

I was recently shown Field Archery in a video by Lindybeige. Honestly, it turns archery into much more of a game, than it does a sport- but for that I think it's cooler. It also matches up much more with the Robin Hood or medieval combat idea of what archery is.

But then this begs the question of the difference between a sport and a game. I would argue the main distinguishing factor is a sport is a game that can be played competitively. Probably disagrees with common logic, but a lot of Sports TV Networks consider both Chess and Poker to be sports, which by the fallacy of Appealing to Authority(and because I do think they both are sports despite this), I'll say this can be extended to competitive games.

In the case of field archery, it's much closer to a game, as the exact rules change from organisation to organisation, and the circumstances surrounding the game are always different.

What do you live for?

I won't pretend to be the only person to think I have asked this, as almost every teenager in existence has asked it. The answer is likely simple for most people. I live because not to would cause untold suffering to all those around me.

It's simple question I don't have an answer to. Do you think I'd have an answer, after thousands of years of Philosophers pontificating, debating and propagandising? Of course not, I live because I must, but lets point the abstractions out.

The first is that of a higher power. You live not for an afterlife, but to serve some higher power or some higher purpose which is all well and good. Just don't consider the possibility that higher power is malign and malicious. But finding that higher purpose plugs into the same question of what is that higher purpose? You only have the texts written by deeply flawed authors long dead, men of the flesh like you and I. "If we have no higher purpose, then what is the point?"

The second is the allure of the afterlife, regardless of what afterlife reincarnation, eternal life, immortality of the soul, heaven, hell and Limbo or just suckling as a Vampire. Whatever afterlife, it mandates good conduct in line with the precepts of your religion, and your deeply flawed human interpretations of yourself or the same trust in men of the cloth to wax lyrical of what conduct is needed. To appropriate a word of Stirner's this belies a spook, an abstract concept with no basis in reality. You live to avoid sin, of which you cannot demonstrate, to be rewarded with the afterlife you cannot demonstrate in order to avoid eternal torment you cannot demonstrate for the good grace of God, both of which you cannot demonstrate.

Then there is another case, the will to dominate, the will steered by ambition and Human Hubris to conquer; so that your actions go down in history and all those generations after you have your name on their lips and with bated breath say: "He was the man who completed his Funko Pop Collection!". I know it is trite to say this as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Rick and Morty have made it their only comedy material to repeat that it is Human Hubris to think you mean anything in the wider context, by zooming out a little bit to the cosmic scale and articulating how meaningless and insignificant you are. It truly demonstrates the inconsequential nature of accomplishment but to hell with it many try to accomplish this. Do you think you are immortal to the second death, when your name will never be uttered again, after your gravestone liquefies and your bones melt under nuclear hellfire?

But I do not say any of this to sneer at the faithful or the ambitious. You'll observe I have said all of this scrutinising their beliefs, but making no moral judgement of it because... Who am I to make a moral judgement of the faithful? I live because I must. I have been approaching this all from a secular angle as I consider myself to be a non-theist- which I have to derail on a tanget to talk about Atheism as they speak with the same fervour in total belief of the absence, as opposed to the absence of belief of a non-theist.

These Atheists betray themselves as one of The Hollow Faithless. Hollow in their soul as they are Hollow in their skull. It would be reductionist to say all the Hollow Faithless are Atheists, as they even exist among men of the cloth. Consider the ultimate punishment is ETERNAL TORMENT, yet despite this it is not enough to stop some committing Mortal Sin which is defined under Catholocism which I have stolen without questioning of the eternal editor wars of the Leftist front of Wikipedia as being met by the following conditions:

• Its subject matter must be grave. (The term "grave sin" is used at times to indicate grave matter, and at times to indicate mortal sin. But it always remains true that the following two conditions are requisite for mortal sin.)
• It must be committed with full knowledge (and awareness) of the sinful action and the gravity of the offense.
• It must be committed with deliberate and complete consent.

It goes without saying, that a great many Catholics, imperfect in their mind as imperfect are their binds go in complete denial of this, disobeying the law of God in favour of what. Chasing the Dragon? Do I need to echo a million self-help Gurus to reiterate that getting it off until all that remains is the bloody meat stump from suicidal autoerotic asphyxiation probably isn't good for you? It goes without saying this wilful hedonism presents the first of the Hollow Faithless. The CONSOOMER, who will repeatedly open his wallet on the next purchase repeating the mantra that his ideology of choice will justify and idealise; a modern 21st century ideal of individualism, or collectivism. Equality in consumption or selfish gorging upon the endless tap of 0s and 1s.

Then there is a second kind, the desperate who will follow relentlessly some golden or shit-stained idol, a zealous paragon of empty ideals which will be sold for exactly £299 and you can get it with 1 day delivery from Amazon Crime. These are those left without a mentor to guide them to a rockbottom set of unbreakable morals at the bottom of a Beer. Those without a religion who will follow any cult to substitute, even the true religious cult of the organised religion of Ned Flander's kid diddlers to the bottom of the cliff of Mothers who spout "If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you follow them?".

The worst of these are those who have made science their cult. It is a factual statistic that 99% of all science is wrong, as the science of the institute of barf by professor bean has demonstrated clearly in a 3 month research paper. The science is clear that basing your entire ideology on something mutable by definition is flawed. It is so easy to forget that it was once good science to say your humours are out of balance, that you must let this leech suck all the bloody zealotry from your body, and do no scrutiny upon this science for it must be unquestioned, just as the headlines of new science propagandised by the media for the blank stares of faked emotional drones to use to defenestrate those who would dare question and conspire in the mushroom circle of flat earth theory. To have made a religion out of science, it is an absolute travesty to have seen this become the substitution given form by the fedora touting atheist with neckbearded abandon.

So at the end of all this, what do I live for? Unceremoniously, I will say I do not know with any precision worthwhile. It used to be as a teenager I was enthusiastic about games development but one of the seven deadly sins, Sloth has left me with apathy- and I bitterly see what games do to people, myself and those I respect; turned into automatons. All this isn't to say there aren't games which touch the soul, as among them I can count games that have affected me: Hyper Light Drifter, Myst, Cruelty Squad and Candy Crush are among them. Similarly in movies, Blade Runner, Casablanca and Sex and the City 2. I live because I must, and that must leaves among the Hollow Faithless who turns to contentment and not fulfilment, even as much as I see it as important, but in this respect I acknowledge the cosmic insignificance of it all and deem it irrelevant because it's not within my sphere of influence. Affecting those within my sphere of influence is a much more worthwhile goal even if this asks for simplicity in living. I have considered many different philosophies that tend to this goal. Nietzsche's Ubermensch, Stirner's Egoism, Marcus' Stoicism, Kaczynski's log cabinism, Joe Biden's Dementia; they all seem to point towards simplicity in living as the best method of living. Sometimes, when you fill a vacuum it still sucks.

At the end of it all, it would be a tragedy to be left wanting.

Games I should play in 2022

This is just a list of games I should get around to playing/completing in 2022. The syntax for this page will have boxes where a cross marks what I've played and gotten around to.

• [x] Myst
• [x] Dusk
• [X] Monster Hunter Rise(Played, need to play some HR Hub before I mark this complete)
• [X] Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate
• [_] Dark Souls III
• [_] Rain World
• [_] Rise of the Triad
• [X] Various Quake Mappacks(Alkaline, xmasjam2, 2021 quake remaster maps)
• [X] Get a feel for some more DOOM Mods
• [_] Mod Fallout New Vegas and have another playthrough
• [_] Complete Final Fantasy Tactics(Got up to Act 2 before stopping for a while)
• [_] Valkyrie Profile
• [_] Deus Ex
• [_] Hexen
• [_] Heretic
• [_] Hexen 2
• [_] Shadow Warrior
• [_] Star Wars KOTOR II
• [_] Star Wars Dark Forces
• [_] HROT(when more episodes release)
• [_] Amid Evil
• [_] Fallout 1
• [_] Fallout 2
• [_] Darksiders 1
• [_] Caves of Qud(played before, just wnat to play with the new features)
• [X] Nethack(Summer Ascension attempts?)
• [_] Neo Scavenger Modded
• [X] Battleblock Theater
• [_] Dishonored
• [_] Dishonored 2
• [X] Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II
• [_] Champions of Norrath
• [_] Champions of Norrath Return to Arms
• [_] Darwinia
• [X] Project Zomboid
• [X] Long Dark
• [_] Gris
• [_] Sublevel Zero Redux
• [_] Resolutiion
• [_] Morbid: The Seven Acolytes
• [_] Overload

Hero/Villain Dynamics in the 21st Century

On the 14th of september I observed a data leak of the Epik Domain Registrar. What makes this leak interesting to me, is the reason given. First I will talk on the point of Security though...

HOW DO YOU FUCK UP SECURITY SO BADLY? Unhashed plaintext passwords are not a standard. It is absolutely terrible OPSEC. There were a few which are hashed in MD5 which is outdated and lots of rainbow tables are available for reversing that. Additionally, the entire /home/ and /root/ directories of one of their core servers are available, along with a lot of sensitive information. Fortunately credit card details aren't included among those details, but since they OPSEC was so poor, I would not be too surprised if these hacktivists responsible did leak those credit card details later on.

So onto the reasoning given. The CEO of the Company, Rob Monster, a Christian Libertarian is likened to a Nazi in the included textfile for the leak. A Christian Libertarian is about as far from a Nazi as you can get aside from their relatively traditionalist religious beliefs. Additionally, the leak seems to imply that those who use Epik as a registrar are associated with the alt-right or conspiracy theorists. I disagree. Epik has simply stood their ground in not removing domains that do not violate their terms of service over the whims of a mob. As such, this provides a lot of interest to those who dislike the tyranny of the masses.

On the topic of standing their ground, Epik refused to take down 8chan until threatened by a company called Voxitility to remove technical support to Epik for their stance. As a result, Epik was forced to take 8chan down, however the lengths to which they stood for the essential freedoms of democracy, namely freedom of expression, speech and belief make it a very nice domain to be on. Unfortunately, their poor security puts me on the look for another politically neutral domain registrar to use.

So why do I bring up the Villain and Hero Dynamics in the title? Because I think this is a case of those dynamics at play. By the hacktivists lumping all users of Epik into the Villain group of the Alt-Right, they have effectively removed all substance. Due to the past nature of Hacktivists and Anonymous they take on the mantle of "Hero", as they were certainly looked up to by impressionable people. As such by leaking the data on political arguments that don't hold up to scrutiny. If anything, they are villains in their own right by inciting doxxing of people, which is a criminal offence in some nations(HK, China) and is plainly seen as bad as the next logical step is violence and abuse of these personal informations.

I question if this is actually "Anonymous" as they have been long since dead for a decade, ever since the phone became mainstream. It is also because this action plays exactly towards giving more control and information for political vigilantes and zealots, which frequently justifies the removal of freedoms as observed by many terrorist actions. It could fairly be argued that this is a CIA or FBI operation to push towards increasingly polarised individuals, under threat of censorship by technocrats... though why a group funded by the tax dollars of a democracy is pushing for more technocratic control is weird. Perhaps a work-around. They can't be authoritarian, but they can be authority over the technocrats. This is all theorising of course, I don't see any evidence of any form other than the circumstantial claim of "Anonymous" which is often only invoked when politically convenient these days.

It's also odd, because this strikes a parallel with what I have been seeing more and more in the Western Political hemisphere. This "we vs them" attitude. We are the hero of our view of the world, they are the villain of this world. It is an incredibly naive outlook on our world, as different systems operate better for different people. This can be plainly seen in the Philippines where the West cherry pick Duterte's speeches to demonise him, while Filipinos continue to support him regardless of the Western outlook because he tackles issues present in SEA, especially given the rising tensions between China and other South-East Asian Countries. Americans find that Democracy works best, and a number of the socialist countries(which do not label themselves as such to avoid association with Communists).

This outlook is problematic and dangerous, and too many people believe that a differing opinion renders you a villain and in absolute opposition. This is the opposite of "tolerance". It makes me truly and utterly angry and furious that such a naive outlook of the world is acted upon in activism to the complete and utter neglect of neutral third parties to the point that those third parties are incorrectly associated with beliefs they do not stand for and are wronged over and over.

What's worse, is there are a myriad of valid and understandable reasons. Financial Incentive? Understood. Despise the CEO or the Company? Understandable, if justified further. Despise Liberty, freedom and any values of Democracy? Understood. Truly want the neutral third parties to suffer? Understandable, if odd and pushing those third parties to fight you.

Anyway, if people reading this are aware of any Politically Neutral and Secure domain registrars, please do let me know. I would like to improve my Operational Security. For now I stand on Epik. The consequence of being possibly doxxed, is acceptable if a little disturbing, for the gain of my essential freedoms being upheld.

Immutable data being used for mass murder at scale

If we've been looking at the pattern of data misuse, this shouldn't really come as a surprise as dark and sad as it is. The worst aspect is that this regards immutable biometric data. What has happened is that amidst the US Retreat from Afghanistan, a lot of biometric data[1] has been left in the hands of the Taliban, so they can easily identify, target and cull, kill or torture any people who were allied with the Americans[2]. Although it's a plain betrayal of the Americans to their allies. It's also a plain example of bad info-sec.

I mentioned before that it's a pattern. Originally in Nazi Germany, census information was used for rounding up Jews. The issue here is it's not particularly immutable, and not perfect targeting information. This is akin to using crime statistics of different races and locations to position and prepare Police in various areas of a city for most effectiveness(pragmatic, even if not uniform or particulary fair). The issue expands, when one sees that corporations sell data for a profit, and this data is used for murder[3]. This issue includes anonymised data as seen rather recently by Christian Gayhunters hunting Gay Christians[4] in their midst, and finding data that points to a bishop being gay(circumstantially of course. I didn't look further to see if they had direct evidence to substantiate their claims).

Although in the case for the Afghans, this immutable data was likely given for their Visa program(which the Americans clearly didn't follow through on) although this is just conjecture as I don't know the details. What's more pressing is when this will be applied to commercially obtained biometric data. I do expect the next logical step in data abuses to be from commercially sold biometric data, or "legally" obtained by intelligence agencies in their country. Commercially sold? Yes. People go out of their way to willingly provide their identifying data simply to know their ancestry... except it's not really their ancestry. It's just a pie chart of percentages showing how much race mixing has happened(in a quite literal sense here. It gives a percentage of how much you originate from some country and how much with another country).

It's ultimately rather demoralising to see another in a series of data abuses, especially as a lot of it is avoidable.

Printing with netcat

I recently discovered thanks to this blog[1] that you can print with netcat. This was impressive to me, but even still, it doesn't completely solve the problem. Instead it moves it from handling the data for printing on the client's side to handling it on the printer's side.

These issues will arise when you try to print a pdf(pdf is a particularly complex file format. More explanation and discussion can be found here[2]). As such, because there's a long precedent in supporting it, it's best to conver a PDF to Postscript(otherwise the printer will spend a long time processing the file, or just fail because like I said, it's a complex file format).

The command for printing if people are interested is `nc printerIP 9100 < document.ps`. Suffice to say, this was a very interesting read. Thanks Retrohacker!

P.S. In the example provided, where pdf is the proposed alternative, I disagree. I think Gemini is the current viable alternative. I don't think it's in a position where network effects multiply, so the only adopters are technology enthusiasts(and even then it's relatively close in structure to HTML in the mid 90s).

License Laundering

Extend, Embrace, Extinguish.

This is a quote oft. used in reference to Microsoft. Yes, that Microsoft, the producers of such bad software as Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Microsoft Teams, Skype and owner of Mojang, Developer for Minecraft, and owner of Github.

It has been for some time that Microsoft has been suspiciously buddy-buddy with Open Source Software. To the point it was acceptable, but as usual you cannot trust a corporation with anything you value. Please note, I refer to Open Source Software which is typically exploited by Corporations and typically use poor licenses with no protections such as the MIT and BSD Licenses, that simply request the license reproduced verbatim. Free Software on the otherhand places value in Copyleft ideals- turning Copyright on its head and demanding the work be produced in public if the GPL is used.

So recently, Github announced a project they had been working on. Github CoPilot. Initially I paid it little attention, "Huh, it's autocomplete for Code? That's neat, and will render a lot of the easily and mass produced work of web developers redundant". Dig a little deeper, and you'll see this is a big turning point for Copyleft.

Why is it a big turning point? The Data that Github used is all[1] public repositories. This is ignoring licenses. For some Licenses, it is easier to satisfy, like the MIT License or BSD License, but others by their nature is very hard if impossible to be satisfied by a corporation. Such licenses include the GPLv3, GPLv2, AGPL and Apache Licenses, as they all have conditional use. A study was produced on this by Github(naturally this produces a possibility of bias)[2]. What strikes me as interesting is this Quote taken from the results.

"For most of GitHub Copilot's suggestions, our automatic filter didn’t find any significant overlap with the code used for training. But it did bring 473 cases to our attention. Removing the first bucket (cases that look very similar to other cases) left me with 185 suggestions. Of these, 144 got sorted out in buckets 2 - 4. This left 41 cases in the last bucket, the “recitations”, in the meaning of the term I have in mind."

"That corresponds to 1 recitation event every 10 user weeks (95% confidence interval: 7 - 13 weeks, using a Poisson test)."

This presents two things. Firstly it does recite the training data frequently enough that this the legal case must be brought up. Secondly, the recitations are on all the various licenses, even those that can't be licensed.

An additional note, not mentioned in Github's study is the possibility of both misattribution and incorrect Licensing[3]. This means that copyright infringement will occur, and even when the CoPilot produces a license that can be satisfied, you have no guarantee that it *actually* is satisfied. The weight of copyright infringement lies additionally with the developer too. This is a tool provided, it is up to the developer to properly license their work.

As such, the legal problem I will lay out is this. GPL License must be applied if a GPL-Licensed work is modified. Github CoPilot produces work with the GPL Licensed work in the data set. As such, the first argument is that any data set with GPL-Licensed work in it, is both, using it and modifying it. The second argument is that, if Github CoPilot produces a work that is a verbatim copy of another licensed work, is it subject to that licensed work's conditions?

The latter point is complicated by the presence of "Generic Solutions", this typically occurs within algorithm design, as a solution is generic and already coined, for example the Dijkstra's algorithm. Even a verbatim copy of code is very unlikely to hold up with copyright due to the frequency that problem crops up and the number of optimised solutions and implementations for it.

The reason this is a particularly noteworthy event is because there is no prior legal precedence. So the result of this, will be the precedent for furture similar cases. If it falls out of favour, a term called "Licensing Laundering" where GPL Licensed work could be laundered by the use of a tool like Google CoPilot to be a license compatible and usable for use in industry. This defeats the virility of GPLv3 and AGPL, and makes necessary a new License to handle this new corner case, and renders all prior code under GPLv3 and AGPL possible to launder and use by big corporations. If it holds that Github is in breach of copyright on many licenses, then there is nothing to worry about.

As side points, I feel I should mention that the GPT-3 which is the AI produced by OpenAI which is not Open, is effectively purchased and owned by Microsoft[4].This adds some credibility to the idea that this was the extend step. The embrace step was to purchase Github and with it come to acquire all the publicly available and licensable code. They then extend by purchasing exclusive license of GPT-3 by the For-Profit and non-open company OpenAI[5]. The extinguish step is to extinguish restrictive licenses and come into possession of a great quantity of code that is as free as public domain. In effect, getting a huge amount of free code. It also extinguishes bad programmers, but to me that is no loss at all.

Extend... Embrace... Extinguish. As one could probably expect, I am personally against this form of License Laundering, as it would have disasterous effects on Free Software. But lets not kid ourselves, the problem of Machine Learning algorithms overfitting to their training data was eventually going to crop up sometime... I suppose now.

Who games on Linux? #4 Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart

Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart is a mod of a Doom Mod where you race. It's a lot like Mario Kart 64.

Game Info

- Name: Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart(Abbreviated SRB2)

- Genre: Multiplayer Racing

- Demo: N/A. Free game

- Linux: Exists, but support will vary

Thoughts

It's a lot of fun. The technical shortcomings of the DOOM Engine are evident in extreme circumstances(like when the camera tilts up or down too much), but other than that, the only other technical shortcomings is on some maps like Sub-Zero Peak Zone where going off the path into deep snow renders the kart improperly.

As a multiplayer game it performs very well. As a modded game it performs very well, though it could benefit with a more integrated modding scene I.E. with either an integrated or a simple modding system. As it stands, it's just downloading a .pk3 file, placing it in the addons folder and playing the game. On startup, you need to enable all the relevant addons. In this regard there should be an easier way to enable the addons you use on startupt(I suspect there is, and I'm just unaware of it, as some default .pk3 files are used in the base game but considered "addons"). For multiplayer it's click and play. The client downloads all the relevant .pk3 files from the host. This does suffer an issue though, a server with many addons results in a lot of time spent for clients in the downloading of these addons. Beyond that there's no issue.

For Arch users, I had a few issues getting it to run. The publicly maintained aur package "srb2kart" has issues compiling due to an included header being wrong.

#include "SDL_mixer.h"

Not being found. To fix this, you will have to compile it from source. I'll list my steps below.

git clone https://github.com/STJr/Kart-Public.git   # Get the source code and dependencies as normal
yay -S srb2kart-data
pacman -Syu sdl2 sdl2_mixer
vim Kart-Public/src/sdl/mixer_sound.c               # We need to change an include header

in mixer_sound.c change

#include "SDL_mixer.h"

on line 31 to

#include <SDL2/SDL_mixer.h>

Build the game as normal

cd ../../
make -C src/ LINUX64=1                              # If using 32 bit linux the command should be LINUX=1
./bin/Linux64/Release/lsdl2srb2kart                 # If using 32 bit linux, use the Linux dir

After these build instructions have been followed you can have fun. These build instructions are needed for me running under Arch Linux, so your mileage may vary.

It also seems to have dedicated servers. I might host one :^)

Online Communities

I have decided to write this because I feel that a major flaw in a lot of social media is the problem of communities. A community is quite simple a group of people sharing attitudes and interests in common. Sure, something utterly meaningless can be this common interest, memes, an E-Celebrity- however these communities often seem exploited to some end.

Memes can be forced, and E-Celebrities only want a community for a paycheck. A recent example is the backlash to this.

In some cases, communities have huge sweeping fundamental differences, that it's hard to really call it a community. One such example is the Linux community. Effectively the only common element among them is the quality of using the Linux Kernel. Init systems differ, package managers differ, desktop environment, window managers, text editors, utilities like ls and dir. All these different elements differ. As a result, of only sharing one common interest, this community is massively fragmented.

This fragmentation is in many ways good as it's invoking the very freedom of expression so critical to these freedom-promoting projects.

In situations with little fragmentation, you see an issue in this regard. The Anime community is one such example as a great majority of Anime is uniformly bad, that there's not really much to be fragmented on. This naturally means all Anime tends towards exaggeration rather than reality. Movies are another example. You especially see this in individuals and brands elevated and deified by the masses, such as Elon Musk, and plenty of E-Celebrities.

Then again, this fragmentation and lack of fragmentation is also partly platform-driven. Within the chatrooms the only method of disapproval is a text message, and the only "algorithm" is the most recent message. Within forums disapproval is presented with points. The same is done in Reddit and YouTube, where the algorithm is done away with from bump-based recency-based systems to complex mysterious systems.

As a result, it's pretty well known that these platforms thrive on a lack of fragmentation. A lack of fragmentation is a status quo. A status quo is predictable. If the actions line up with the predictions, the predictions can be monetised. If they can be monetised, they will eventually be monetised. As a result, the data is sold as a means of targeting and predicting.

This fragmentation and lack of fragmentation is seen in culture too. The fragmented groups are usually a response with a cultural basis. GNU is a cultural response to the proprietary UNIX systems. Punks and Anarchists are a cultural response to the two-party political status quo. The groups with a lack of fragmentation are usually the status quo groups. Windows is one example. Two-party systems are another(though that's a matter of game theory).

This post is to point out that communities have a context, and can be fragmented. That fragmented communities invoke freedoms more, and as a result of demanding and establishing their rights and freedoms, are in actuality more free. It's also to point out that the lack of fragmentation, is driven by the context of the platform, and this lack of fragmentation is frequently exploited to make a quick buck off predictable echochambers.

In some respects, I feel sad about it. Regardless, the benefits of a *good* community shouldn't be understated. You get new ideas, new information and material and emotional benefits as a result.

As a final addendum to this, some people define communities to be people who live near each other, or have met before. This is a poor definition in my opinion, but there is a discernable difference in value between online friends and friends you have met before, and a lot of it comes down to game theory and the social behaviour of Humans. In the former, a prisoner's dilemma plays out, where a betrayal is often massively rewarding as there are no further interactions. In the latter, it is a Human desire and interest to be socialising. In my opinion it is a massive disservice to the full abilities of a Human if they are reducded down to plain text, but that disservice brings its context, and often rears its ugly head especially on platforms like Twitter is small character counts that result in curt, dismissive responses to appeal to an international audience. I may write a bit later about the difference in value of a friend that exists only online, and a friend you have known in reality.

YANChan.xyz

YANChan.xyz is an imageboard for discussion of a bunch of topics. For now topics include, art, videos, games, technology and random.

It is available on the large web at YANChan.xyz

Why is it a thing?

Facebook, twitter and most forums are like-based. This brings about issues of content circulation being algorithm-based and often reinforces uniform agreement and echochambers.

Some forums, and imageboards are bump-based. This means things that see a bunch of discussion are seen more. This means both, agreement isn't needed. In addition imageboards are anonymous by default with opt-in verifiable identities. This promotes discussion on touchy topics, and makes criticism easier to dish out without any significant fear of censorship other than by platform owners(myself).

The issue imageboards suffer from is at scale, they become shocking and provocative as that is what gets discussion. At a small scale for a small community these issues aren't present.

The issues forums also face is down to a lack of anonymity. In convincing a person of an argument, the ethos, pathos and logos are to be considered. Logos being the logical reasoning. Pathos being the emotional string-tugging, and ethos being the credibility and reputation of a person. Forums are commonly filled with pathos and ethos-based arguments, as arguments are easily attributed to a person, so emotions are at risk, and credibility and reputation is also at risk.

As such, I deem the best social media solution is a bump-based system at a small scale.

Go hang out and make some posts if you want. :^)

EDIT: I have since closed this site down, since it wasn't used much

The problem with Bitcoin

Bitcoin has been skyrocketting in price recently, so I thought I'd write a little about its problems. First an introduction to what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is a blockchain that records transactions in a trustless manner. As a result, anyone can download the entire blockchain and view it and all transactions that have occured between all wallets. How a blockchain is constructed? In Bitcoin's case, it uses a proof of work system. Proof of work is the idea that, by adding something to a blockchain it's very hard to find a hash with specific qualities(In Bitcoin's case this is the number of leading 0s in the hash value). Finding some value to add to this block to find this hash is computationally expensive and to this day, there exists no better method than just going through possible inputs and just searching for a valid result. Once a valid result is found, the miner who mined that block gets some reward.

The purpose of mining is to put work into a blockchain and blocks. The blockchain with the most work put in, is the accepted blockchain, which is where the theoretical 51% attack exists. If a person owns more than 51% of the computational power for mining blocks for a blockchain, they effectively set the accepted blockchain. These blocks are fixed size, and store a list of transactions to add to the blockchain. Additionally, there is incentive for miners to prioritise certain transactions for the block based on the transaction fees that people can pay to miners. I have linked a video for further understanding if my explanation fails to satisfy people.

Now that we have established how Bitcoin works, let us walk through the issues it has.

Issue 1: Fixed Block Sizes

This issue is simple. Bitcoin's blocks have fixed sizes. There have been proposals to increase this fixed size, as well have it dynamically increase over time. To establish why this is an issue, it effectively bottlenecks transactions. Only 1MB worth of transactions can be transacted for each block in the network. This massively restricts how many transactions can be made when compared to fiat equivalents like paper cash, gold or paypal. It's quite a simple problem to state, but the solution isn't clear.

Fixing this for Bitcoin would be difficult in my opinion. The fix as I see it, is a more dynamic solution that changes according to transaction demand. Even with this solution in place, it only guards against surges in transaction demand, but it doesn't fix the core issue. That issue being block size transaction limits, as the blocks sizes would likely need to be clamped to reasonable ranges still, as to allow people to keep running their own node for the network.

Issue 2: Proof of Work

Proof of work is a solution, but it has a few issues. The first being that the electricity put forward isn't of much use to people in society. It's only useful to the people in the set of people who have put work into that network. I will say this is a moralfag opinion, but considering the nature of current worldwide electricity and global warming, I think it must be stated.

There are other issues too, the problem chosen by Bitcoin for their proof of work system is hashing. This can be effectively handled by GPUs and ASIC machines, but this poses a supply problem to legitmate consumers needing that hardware. This also makes it less egalitarian, as through no fault of the poor, they can't establish their own stake in the network very well(effectively filtering those who can't afford good GPUs or ASICs which cost thousands of dollars).

The final issue with proof of work exists only in theory. I have mentioned it earlier, but a 51% attack could theoretically occur. This is described as when a person owns 51% of the computational power of the network. This is a problem because if a person owns more than 51% of the computational power of the network they can run the hashing algorithms faster than others. This continues to be a problem, as you can then validate correct blocks, and even validate incorrect blocks. As the standard blockchain used is the chain with the most work put into it, this invalidates the standard blockchain.

Issue 3: Privacy

This comes in two flavours. Personal and Systemic privacy. I will discuss the personal case first. Almost all places to purchase cryptocurrency with money require ID. This means that the addresses of Bitcoin wallets and who owns them can be known, and the transactions made can be monitored. The amount of money they have in Bitcoin can also be known. This presents a bunch of issues, firstly that Governments can have a greater deal of information to monitor and regulate the flow of money in the network(far more than they can with cash or with a credit card). In reality, Bitcoin is pretty much the wet dream for any authoritarian Government, as the flow of cash and transactions can be traced, and the owners of that cash can be traced.

This is bad because people know how much you have in Bitcoin. This is also bad because your transaction history is full and public, so anyone can find out that you purchased contraband like weed or other things of the such. It also makes it much easier to tax when everything is so transparent. For this, Bitcoin's blockchain is not fully trustless.

In the personal case, you're affected as this information is transparent and easily regulated by a central authority(your government). In the systemic case, you're affected as it imposes regulations and relates your address with your identity.

This entire problem isn't solved still, but is much better assessed by cryptocurrencies such as Monero and other "privacycoins"

Conclusion

A lot of people invest in Bitcoin simply because others invested in it. Bitcoin has technical issues that are far from solved that even other cryptocurrencies handle and solve better than this. I will list the coins that I think are worth watching. Ethereum as it generalises the blockchain to contracts. Monero as it provides much better privacy. Cardano as it avoids issues of proof of work by using proof of stake. There are others that have higher transaction volume like Litecoin.

Ultimately, I expect Bitcoin to be dumped eventually in favour of technically superior cryptocurrencies that have more merit and qualities.

Tech Portfolio

Hey guys, I set up a tech portfolio to show off my projects. It's on the HTTPS web.

:^)

The modern web is bloated

This will be a short blog post, explaining in detail why I think the modern web is bloated.

The problems

Website sizes. Alright settle down zoomers, with your gigabig chungus internet speeds. A lot of people still have very slow internet speeds that cannot handle over a megabyte of network activity. I can sympathise with the webdev that has to add ads or trackers on account of their employer's demands, however I will go on record saying that these 2 points are particular areas where the web speeds throttle. You have lots of useless Javascript getting loaded, and uncompressed ads and pictures that aren't even properly resized, among other issues. It's a MESS, and it's precisely why I use Brave Browser(it filters most of this shit but not all).

Processor speeds. You know how you use useless Javascript to add ads that contribute nothing to your website? Yeah? Well they have to do their processing somewhere, so they do it on your CPU. Each browser handles this slightly differently so performance differs between them(As an example Vivaldi and Qutebrowser are slower than Brave in this respect). However, the problem here is that if an i486 can run doom, it should be able to run your website, and for the VAST MAJORITY of websites this would almost definitely not be the case. Remember, a lot of people also don't have the processor needed to handle these websites. Raspberry Pis and low-resource machines(which are getting more and more common due to the internet of things) get utterly destroyed by the processor requirements.

Anti-features. The original point of HTTP is a Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, and the original point of HTML is a Hyper Text Markup Language. People think that on these 2 points, it's fine to manipulate the document all over the place. This is an example of anti-features, as an example, when I search something on google and click the first link, and find it's trash. I will back out to the list of links, and click the 2nd link, but OH NO WAIT, Anti-features, engage! It props a little window under that link with "Also searched" and a bunch of shit I didn't want to click. On this point, it's also very hard to copy and paste content properly. Quite simply people implement dynamic shit, and I theorise it's front-end idiots because they think that all they can do to justify their job is to keep making it flashier and more dynamic. NO, that's how you piss me off. Another point on this, is websites that override the natural scrolling system, into some vomit-inducing motion-sick mess.

Accessibility. This one's simple, firstly, FAR TOO MANY WEBSITES ARE SCREEN-READER UNFRIENDLY. Holy fuck! How did we even get to the point that presenting fucking text, is too much for a screen reader? Quite simple how: because people use HTML(structure and content) as a way to force style. You should only do the minimal required structuring for the sake of style. Another point on accessibility is far too many people think low contrast, gray text with light gray background is good, and it's hard to read.

Implementability. This one's simple, the standard for HTML is insanely complex now, that only 3(maybe more?) viable web engines exist for rendering HTML pages(okay, yes there's more out there, but they are unusable for any site more complex than an imageboard or a normal forum). I'll list them now, Webkit, Gecko, and Chromium. First off, just fucking cut out Webkit, it's lagged behind quite a bit. Gecko and Chromium are the only 2 engines worth using on a modern internet, and that's why almost all web browsers use them(As an aside, I said yes there's more engines, Lynx and w3m both use their own engines but they only display text in a terminal, and usually it's utterly broken for most sites on the same basis as the screen-readers being broken. It's a pretty good way to tell if it's broken though).

The solutions

Stop writing shitty websites, that pull a thousand JS dependencies through a convoluted CDN to deliver anti-features to people and consume their bandwidth, mobile data and processor speeds(the last 3 points are also responsible for major mobile phone drain). Write your HTML, write your CSS, and write your PHP or CGI. This is how it was meant to be done, and this is the way that will stand the test of time, rather than outdated laggy glitchy Javashit. Of course, most people won't adopt this method as most people use shit like Medium or Wordpress or God-Forbid some other trash like it, to make websites/articles.

I'll also point out other protocol alternatives. Both aren't viable commercially, but for hobbyists they may be of interest. Gopher which is pretty much plaintext with restrictions of 80 column width without word wrapping, and a directory link structure. This is pretty outdated, and the flaws in it are assessed by Gemini which handles word wrapping and uses a markdown-like format. The protocol(read PROTOCOL, not the text format) is close to being frozen if it's not already, and that's actually a good thing. It means that people will be able to make clients and servers for gemini for years to come in the future, in a short time span AND as the text format, and it means it's relatively inextensible so people won't be able to extend the protocol with useless shite(as has happened with HTTP). Also look at IRC, that chat protocol is so simple that it has stood the test of time FAR BETTER than any proprietary or extended protocol.

There's pretty much no easy clean solution. One is to stop using HTTP and the other is to enforce good practice of HTTP(ironic how few people follow good practice because of how advertising has made the modern web terrible). Also here's a game to try. Take a webpage that is obviously bloated and convert it into a website with HTML, some limited CSS, and the images that are useful, and see how much faster it is on bandwidth compared to the original. What? It's 10x+ faster than the original? UNBELIEVABLE! SHOCKING! TERRIFIC! Now go and put those gains into practice on your live sites.

RSS ported to work again

Hey. I got the RSS feed to work with my Gemini blog now. This means that between my Gemini and HTTP pages, you should be able to subscribe to my feed. I will probably update my index with this information.

I will provide informations on my script, even though it's shit. It's just chaining cats, echos, seds and tail and head commands.

I'll post sources later on. For now, I will need to use it a bit to do some testing to understand what flaws it currently has.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
     Lost Carcosa
- The King In Yellow

Richard Stallman Situation

Richard Stallman resigned from his post in both MIT and the FSF. The basis of this were statements he made that were in generally poor taste regarding child sex. Poor taste because of the recent events with the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal. Recepients of Epstein money and Epstein prostitutes included other people at MIT, but not Richard. As a result, MIT wanted this deal over as soon as possible.

Despite all this, Richard made points against Jeffrey that the public at large misconstrued as him making a defense of Epstein due to his semantic discussion over child sex laws. I think Stallman's opinions on child sex laws are pretty stupid, but the full extent of it is variable. 17 year old woman presenting themselves as entirely willing for sex is labelled as sexual assault, much the same way that a savage raping a 10 year old child is, and it's on those 2 points that one can see that sexual assault covers a large umbrella of events and is entirely a poor description in many ways. This same argument can be applied to many other umbrella terms such as security, freedom and privacy.

Do not mistake my support of Richard Stallman in the current circumstances, as a support of his opinions. Although I see the issue presented, it's just legal jargon. The main discussions are on expansion of the meaning of Sexual assault, which is primarily a discussion of semantics and other legal pedantry, and a discussion on whether a child can be an entirely willing sex participant. I hold the belief that they can't mainly because although they will typically have an understanding of what sex is, but they won't have an understanding of the full consequences of sex in the form of STDs, psychological issues and mental issues. There's a reason a lot of prostitutes end up having "Daddy problems". Richard Stallman argued at one point that sex before age of consent wouldn't cause issues if it wasn't coerced or imposed, although since his resignation he withdrew that opinion on basis that he had personal discussion with others and learnt it does have an effect. I would take a moment to remind people that playing devils advocate and discussing policy is not an endorsement of the actions a person discusses. Thus, claims of pedophilia simply don't hold.

Other points commonly brought up against him include him asking women out on dates straight up without any foreplay or any other bullshit. Most denied, and some use this as ammunition against Stallman to claim he is a sexual deviant. Stallman didn't make multiple requests to people, he simply moved on as he grasps consent. As a result of both sides being entirely respectful of the other's consent or absent consent, I am completely uncaring of this point. Some claim it's sexism. I claim it's stupid, and a plain false point of sexism.

Among other points include his opinions on Eugenics. Stallman has gone on record saying that a fetus should be aborted if it has Down Syndrome. I agree. The majority of Doctors agree. Mild genetic illnesses is where arguments of eugenics are harder to justify, including deafness and blindness as technology has improved rapidly. In the extreme cases though I agree and the less extreme cases I do not think it should be aborted. Still, this is a question left to the context. Women abort perfectly healthy fetuses simply because they cannot sustain another child in a stable family and that's a perfectly respectable reasoning, and as such, I see no reason why arguments of Eugenics given the appropiate context, and absent of politics or religion should be discussed. I say absent, because most religions are pro-life, and because some politics place preference for some particular genetics, such as the Nazis and Aryans. Personally, I'm indifferent, and it's especially a non-problem in the case of Stallman as he has gone on saying that he won't have Children. This is the point that Stallman is ableist. It can be argued, but you must hold the same argument consistency towards all abortion cases and medical advice by Doctors and that is simply ridiculous to hold. Thus I think it doesn't hold.

The only other remarkable point brought up is apparent transphobia. This argument simply does not hold. Stallman has made a proposal for more gender neutral use of Spanish(those who know Spanish will know there are Masculine and Feminine words). He has also applied his discussion of language to gender neutrality making the claim that "they" shouldn't be used, and other words should be used, on the basis of ambiguity as they is often used in a plural situation. It does not strike me as a claim with any supporting evidence, so I see it as plain false.

I will remark shortly on the reason for this post. Richard Stallman is back on the FSF board. There are people who would prefer to see him gone from the FSF despite his absence for a year and a half. I am not one of those people, as I am generally agreeable to policies, principles and ideals that lead to liberty and independence- and Richard Stallman fights for these ideals and principles within the Software environment. From the basis above, I see him as entirely reasonable and well thought and deserving of respect for his unyielding principles. Sure, sometimes his arguments make stupid conclusions, but firstly stupid conclusions aren't endorsements, stupid conclusions are intentions, and stupid conclusions are part of every person's right to be wrong.

It's also why Richard Stallman is involved with Software, and not with policy. Completely ignoring that a lot of the participants in politics are either declawed animals, or two-faced acting in corporate interests.

Of note, there are two letters. A support letter and an open letter against the FSF. The latter wants all the board members to resign or be cast out. The former asks for the current situation to stay the same.

I support Richard Stallman, and Libre Software; I most definitely do not support unchecked demonisations of reasonable people, or mob-defined digital witch hunts, spurred by the curt and mean-spirited twitter or other social media hurricane.

I have signed my name(Aaron Leonard) on the support letter, as an act of support for free software, and proper discussion form. I have linked below the two letters, one in support of RMS, and the other against him. Look into the discussion yourself if you would like.

Do not mistake my support of RMS as a support of sexism, transphobia, sexual assault, or pedophilia. It isn't, and I abhor all of them. I simply do not see how the accusations stand, and judge most them as false. The only thing Stallman is guilty of, is playing Devil's Advocate too much, and making statements in poor taste.

Who games on Linux? #2 Loop Hero

Loop Hero is a tower defense Idle game with some RPG systems.

Game info

- Name: Loop Hero

- Genre: Hybrid of card games, roguelite, city builder and idle clicker genres

- Demo: It has a demo on Steam

- Linux: It has a native Linux build. Works well

Thoughts

Earlier this week I picked up Loop Hero after hearing about it from HexDSL. This is an incredibly interesting game both to play and from a design perspective. I'm rarely a fan of idle clicker games or city builder games, and don't play many card games, but this just hits the sweet spot. The way the game works, is that there is a loop of tiles, and you go around. There's a day timer, and a number of completed loops. The latter counter scaling the equipment strength and enemy strength, and the former is for tile triggers to occur.

When you fight enemies you have a chance to get a card(from a deck you build, so you can make card synergies), and you have a chance to get equipment. The equipment has plain statistics like health, defense E.T.C. but it also has more interesting statistics like vampirism, counter and evade among other interesting statistics that can be used to make a character build stronger. The fights play out in an idle format, but you can't completely idle as you need to be swapping out armour and also placing tiles.

When you place tiles, you usually get resources. Tiles can also change if specific tiles are next to other specific tiles, and as a result you need to think about what kinds of tiles you want on your board. They also have placement rules, so that has to be thought about- and they usually have an effect on neighbouring tiles.

It's a really interesting dynamic of building a character, placing tiles that spawn enemies you want, or create dynamics with other tiles you want.

The game also doesn't asphyxiate itself in introduction of content and interesting content too. There's plenty here to play, and there's plenty of card synergies. This is one of the things that free-to-play games rightfully do, as they do need to make an income.

I also haven't mentioned much about resources. Resources are taken to your home camp so you can build it up in a "clash of clans" style home base, where after each expedition, you gain more resources- or providing resources for your next expeditions. This plays into the roguelite aspect as you can gain new cards for your deck- however this resource management also plays into the gameplay in expeditions. Whenever you die, you take 30% of your resources back to base. Whenever you retreat back to base anywhere in the loop, you take 60% of your resources back to base. Whenever you're on your home camp, or the boss of that expedition has been summoned(bosses are summoned by placing enough tiles) you can take all of them back with you- so you have this dynamic of risk-reward... should I do one more loop, or make it back with what I've got?

It's a marvel in design showing what happens when you thoughtfully take the best elements of different genres and put them together to make an entertaining, relatively chill experience. The best bit is that it's not brain-numbingly boring as is a common experience I have with either city-builder or idle-clicker games.

On other notes, the art style is very nicely done using the Commodore-64 colour scheme and excellent art- giving the game a nice and bleak aesthetic fitting for the narrative. The narrative, as I've played so far, doesn't seem to be anything big or interesting. I guess it's like the classic Carmack saying "Story in a Game is like Story in a Porn Movie: It's expected to be there, but not very important". Music and Sound design isn't really anything spectacular. It loops nicely and doesn't grate on your ears, but that's after playing for 5 hours. I wonder how much longer it will be before the music gets annoying, as it is just looping music.

Anyway, this game runs well on Linux, and is a blast to play. Go check it out if you haven't already as there's a demo for it.

Final Information

- Played Version: V1.012

- Linux Compatibility: Native

- Hours Played: 5.6 hours

- Will I return to it: Yes(I haven't completed it at time of writing), and yes if more content is added

Who games on Linux? #3 NERTS! Online

NERTS! Online is an online multiplayer Solitaire game by Zachtronics that is free and a lot of fun.

Game Info

- Name: NERTS! Online

- Genre: Solitaire style Card Game

- Demo: It's a free game N/A

- Linux: Native Linux build

Thoughts

Free game from Zachtronics. A lot of fun, like most of their games.

It runs without issues. The only 2 issues I faced are as follows. With DWM, if you use a border for your windows it doesn't fullscreen properly, leaving a blank window. Easily fixed by toggling borders. The other issue is fundamental in the way the game does networking, as it seems to use TCP-Networking. Any lag experienced by you or the host will effect you negatively resulting in late "clicks" and the game feeling unresponsive. If the players live in the same country this won't be an issue but if they are foreign and your latency is aroudn 300ms you will feel it.

As for the gameplay, it is wonderful. Easily picked up as most players know Solitaire. The UI isn't cluttered, so you can easily jump into a game, or change settings. The main differences is how it does scoring and the NERTS pile. The NERTS pile is a selection of face down cards that have to be revealed one by one, and used one by one, in order to reveal the NERTS button. Hitting the NERTS button ends the round, and for each player with cards on the NERTS pile they get -2 points. You score +1 point for each card you place in the "points" stacks in the middle, which is very much like the 4 suit stacks in Solitaire.

As for your individual gameplay, it's like a more constrained solitaire, where you only have 6-4 usable piles, and a shuffle deck and play it like regular solitaire. The difference is in how scoring is done, so hitting NERTS quickly is rewarded, but you can play normally and optimise on score.

It's a lot of fun, I highly recommend it to anyone.

Mass Surveillance at scale has resulted in murder

I recently read some interesting articles about how the Surveillance facilitated by Software Developers has had catastrophic consequences.

But I just want to step back and ask... How did it get to this point in the first place? That advertising technologies have now been used as intelligence that is used for more than just psychological manipulation of the masses. It's used as an attack vector on individuals.

Sure you can make the claim "gotta keep bread on the table", but in doing so you are complicit in the murder to some degree. By your use of such technology you support a bad status quo, no matter if it's simply a more networkable option or more functionally useful option. You are complicit by supporting such a status quo, and providing power to that network.

Your software choices have moral and ethical consequences. If not on an individual level, at the very least on a systematic level. This can also be seen in the 2 choices that the "alt" political groups seem to take, when censored on mass centralised data collection mediums. They move to another mass centralised data collection medium that appeals specifically to that audience(*ahem* in what is effectively a self-masturbatory echo chamber) or move to federated choices where both censorship and network is more decentralised.

Regardless of your software choices, this rabbit hole goes deeper when we consider how thoroughly drenched in poison the current state of the modern Web is, rife with trackers, poorly sized autoplaying and bandwidth-hogging trash advertisements that pay for their existence by bribing morally and creatively bankrupt scum to abuse advertisements. No matter, it's the default financial language of the current sad state of social media probably supported by how powerful data is for targeting(as has resulted in the sad state of targeting individuals by purchasing data).

Data is a deadlier but stronger financial weapon. You own the data? You basically own easily mined statistics that can be weaponised against your users by doing psychological operations on them with targeted advertisements, and physical operations on them by injuring their way of life. It should not be treated as lightly as it currently is.

And yet developers continue to treat it lightly, in all these shit dead-end startups and dead-end companies that will go belly-up and as collateral damage the needlessly added tables of the uncaring "I just want to put bread on the table" developers.

Hell, you've already suffered collateral damage by leaked passwords, as a lot of sites ignore basic security notions such as storing salted hashes of passwords(regular hashes are unsuited due to the existence of rainbow tables).

It's an abysmal state of affairs. Naturally, I wouldn't be too surprised if anti-citizen military groups such as the NSA, CIA, GCHQ or SIS have already weaponised tools based on these mass data surveillance piggy banks. It'd be foolish not to think so, as only a decade ago, the Snowden leaks proved that the NSA and related "Glowies"(a satirical name for abbreviated security groups, originating from the schizophrenic mind of Terry Davis) were well ahead of the trend with their tools.

How far ahead of the trend are they? Well the reason the WannaCry ransomware attack is a big deal is because of the NSA hoarding a stash of zero-days that affected most Windows Operating Systems under the sun in a thoroughly devastating way.

I've rambled a bit. I doubt this is the first time data collection methods have resulted in actual death, it's part of the intelligence gathering objective that most spy agencies have-- an objective made significantly easier by the devastating commercialisation of data gathering.

I will make an assumption that you, dear reader use data-gathering software and as a result are complicit in such activities. Windows, Twitter, Discord, Faceberg and a helluva lot of trash media exists. Want alternatives? Linux, Mastodon, Rocket.chat/Qtox/Mumble/IRC. I have no alternative for Faceberg as it's utterly useless and if you use it, you should feel a deep contempt for your younger and current self for using it.

I would also say in general *ANY* social media with the capacity for like systems or similar systems should be seriously considered, as it allows for a poorly thought-out sensationalist argument with significant social indicators for which side is "winning" or "losing" defeating the very point of arguing which is as a method of contrasting and discussing ideas through a person with completely different experiences and containing different knowledges in their gray matter.

As this article holds some speculation I will leave a classy quote from the great Terry Pratchett. Just remember your hands are stained with the gore of your choices.

Some think this is paranoia, but it isn't. Paranoids only think everyone is out to get them. Wizards know it.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Book)

This is a book I read recently. By recently, I mean I ordered a paperback of it, and when it arrived, consumed all 260 pages of this wonderful fiction in 2 days. The only fault I have is regarding the ending being as I feel, quite rushed, although that only particularly affects the last 20 pages of the story. The rest was wonderful to read.

The story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille a person born who has no odour but has the most capable nose at smelling scents and deconstructing and constructing new combinations of scents. This is of note because very few books(fiction or non-fiction... implying that non-fiction should even do it) have invoked the sense of smell so much and so thoroughly throughout. It's quite honestly very interesting and engaging simply because of how it's a master class in the old "adage" for literature writing "Show don't tell".

It goes through the entire life of the person, from birth all the way to death, and all his actions in between. Consisting and delivering a selection of feelings ranging from disgust at the warped eroticism that is present, alongside a misanthropy for human behaviours and motives. It takes place in the middle of the 18th century, so you do see an interesting interpretation of pre-revolution France. It also does align relatively well with expectation, so worries about how difficult it is to be properly immersed aren't too hard to fix.

I won't spoil anything here, but Patrick Süskind delivers a truly brilliant narrative fiction throughout this book, and I would urge anyone who enjoys fiction that truly does "Show" how a huge variety of objects and things smell, and their relations to human behaviours and the other collection of senses. It was a wonderful 2 days I spent immersed in the book.

Also as a note for people reading, I didn't watch the movie version of it. I may or may not watch it... if I do, it's unlikely I'll post back here about it unless it's something worth talking about. I find personally, the vast majority of Movies don't really do much for me. They have to cover too much in too little ground, and this is made painfully obvious by anyone watching Bladerunner and comparing it against its source material "Do androids dream of electric sheep", although Bladerunner stands up on its own legs for its own merits.

I'll also note here, I read a translation of the book translated by John E. Woods into English from its original German. Doesn't mean too much, but if you do read it or acquire it through some means, make sure you get a decent translation.

It's a good fiction and a good time. I recommend it.

The iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

If we are to discuss the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, we must first discuss it with 1 iteration. The idea in a single iteration, is that you and another convict have 2 choices available and there 4 possible outcomes. For simplicity, we will name the prisoner's Cain and Abel, and the options Betray and Cooperate. If Cain betrays, and abel cooperates, Cain gets free and Abel serves for 3 years. If Cain betrays, and abel betrays they both serve 2 years. If Cain cooperates and Abel cooperates, then they both serve a year. I will present this with the below tree.

Cain             Abel
--------------------------+
          /--> Cooperates   C=1, A=1
Cooperates                 
          \--> Betrays      C=3, A=0
                           
     /-------> Cooperates   C=0, A=3
Betray                     
     \-------> Betrays      C=2, A=2
--------------------------+

It's from the above, we can see that in both outcomes, Cain gets a lower score(lower=better in this instance) by betraying. If he Cooperated, and Abel Cooperated, he could've gotten 0 time. If he betrayed and Abel betrayed, he would've gotten 3 time. As Betrayal is the best option, it's what is referred to as a dominating strategy if taken from a purely rational perspective. Of course, usually the situation would be a more complex moral and ethical problem(like the trolley problem), and the context for who is who does come up, but this is beyond the point of this discussion.

Introduction to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

In the iterated prisoner's dilemma, we play this game multiple times, with both Cain and Abel being able to remember all the outcomes from before. The final outcome being the sum score of all iterations. If Cain and Abel always Cooperate this is how the scores will look. In this I will be playing up to iteration 3, you are free to extend it yourself:

i   Cain   Abel
--+------+-----
0   1      1
1   2      2
2   3      3

As we can see, they both end up with 3. Now lets compare this with always betraying.

i   Cain   Abel
--+------+-----
0   2      2
1   4      4
2   6      6

As we can clearly see, in an iterated prisoner's dilemma it pays to be nice. However, note what happens when one always cooperates and one always betrays.

i   Cain   Abel
--+------+-----
0   0      3
1   0      6
2   0      9

It appears that blind optimism that your oponent will always cooperate is faulty. Thus we can conclude a few things about behaving in an iterated dilemma.

• It should be Nice
• It should Retaliate

There are several more complex strategies a person can apply. Tit-For-Tat(Tip-For-Tap is what it was originally called), there is also Tit-For-Tat with forgiveness, Tit-For-Two-Tat and Grim Trigger. All 4 of these are under the same umbrella of "Trigger Strategies" where if a certain Trigger is observed, they change behaviour. The simplest to demonstrate is Grim Trigger. Cain will demonstrate, and on iteration 2 Abel will betray and Cain will continue to betray for the rest of the game even if Abel cooperates after.

i   Cain   Abel
--+------+-----
0   1      1
1   2      2
2   4      2    <= Abel Betrays
3   6      4
4   6      7    <= Abel cooperates, Note that Cain still betrays
5   8      9    <= Abel returns to betraying, Cain continues betraying

You will observe 2 things about Grim Trigger. Between 2 people, if one betrays and the Grim Trigger is triggered, then that one shouldn't Cooperate because, if we recall, it's a choice of adding 3 or adding 2 to their own score. I will now demonstrate Tit-For-Tat. The Strategy of Tit-For-Tat is simple. Initially Cooperate, and then repeat your partner's last move. We will repeat the above game, with both Cain and Abel playing by Tit-For-Tat, except on the 3rd iteration I will make Abel betray, to demonstrate its behaviour.

i   Cain   Abel
--+------+-----
0   1      1
1   2      2
2   5      2    <= Abel Betrays
3   5      5    <= Cain betrays, Abel Cooperates
4   8      5    <= Cain Cooperates, Abel Betrays

We will observe that a "Sort-of" loop or pattern begins to emerge when two tit-for-tat players are faced against each other. It's from this, we can see if it was just an honest mistake or if it was a genuine attack, it ends up going back and force doing neither side any good(they both gain 3 score over 2 iterations, compared with always cooperating which would gain 2 score over 2 iterations).

This leads us to the 3rd principle in the iterated dilemma

• It should be Nice
• It should Retaliate
• It should be Forgiving

The way we introduce this forgiveness can vary. Some people choose to model this with a random percent chance that if a Tit-For-Tat player would retaliate, they would choose to forgive and cooperate. Others simply model it as Tit-For-Two-Tat. That is, 2 betrayals must be made for them to begin betraying. These simply break the cycle of betrayal, replacing it with more cooperation, but they fare poorly against always betraying.

There is a 4th principle.

• Being non-envious, but that should seem to be fairly obvious. Short-sighted gain for long-term loss isn't good in the iterated prisoner's dilemma.

This can be demonstrated with suspicious tit-for-tat, where they start out betraying. You can work through it yourself, but you will see that the action of betrayal on the first move is enough to trigger bad responses. 2 Of this against itself is bad, and against a tit-for-tat player it will loop.

Damnant quod non intellegunt

From the above one would think that Tit-For-Tat is the optimal strategy, however if we introduce a population with all units following their own strategy and facing off against each other, we will see it isn't always the optimal strategy. I won't cover this in this here because this is more in-depth and detailed, however look at the references section if you want to see more information. For such a tournament, for the 20th anniversay, a Southamptom team proved that although Tit-For-Tat worked and is robust, it is not always the optimal strategy. How? They... colluded. The rules of the dilemma disallow communication, and the different strategies employed by that team, allowed for a ten turn song and dance to be communication(One can think of this much like binary, where Betrayals are 1 and Cooperations are 0. You could also probably embed some kind of communication this way now that I think about it). Regardless, despite beating Tit-For-Tat, and being an illegal action, they technically prove it's not always the optimal strategy thus, I come to a 5th key principle.

• Communication is of utmost importance(Damnant quod non intellegunt, they condemn what they do not understand)

What I have listed above will probably strike a reader as relatively obvious and stemming from first principles, however I think it's worth remembering the benefits of what I have listed, with Tit-For-Tat. I would argue that for robustness, it tends to help to follow Tit-For-Tat in your actions, and to communicate, and this is exactly what we don't see in the modern world unfortunately. The breakdown of communication ironically enough by communication devices. Perhaps that is a discussion for another time, about how Social Control from Social Media tends to lead people to follow poor strategies. I would argue the strategies followed by the masses these days are based on some envy-based triggers, with these measurements of how liked or disliked a person or their comments are.

Because this topic is non-trivial there are many more strategies, such as Win-Stay, Lose-Shift, and gradual tit-for-tat. I have thus provided references. I hope this brief look at Game Theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma has been of use to some people.

P.S.

It's worth noting also, the final iteration for a given game is the single iteration of the dilemma. This is worthwhile considering. There is also a continuous iterated prisoner's dilemma where it is not a discrete yes or no, but instead more complicated as a p rson can contribute as much as they want.

R ferences:

Who games on Linux? #1: DOOM 2

DOOM 2 is a 1995 game by id Software that develops upon what DOOM originally did, adding more levels and enemies to the FPS mix they created.

Game info

- Name: DOOM 2

- Genre: Boomer Shooter

- Games most like it in my experience: DOOM, Blood

- Demo: None to my knowledge. Just pirate it(Yikes!), or buy it on Steam.

- Linux: Use a source port

Thoughts

It's a fun game, but some levels are a slog. My worst nightmare in this game is a line of chaingunners ready to ruin my day. The level in particular I found a challenge was "The Catacombs" as it does exactly that. Chaingunners and Revenants all around you. Another enemy that sucks is the Arch Vile but mainly because it covers your face with fire. Lost Souls get more annoying with the pain elementals spawning them, but it all adds up to the overall experience and priorities you set.

On the note of modding, I did mod this game to play with Brutal Doom. It made it a bit of a more satisfying experience. I also played with hardware rendering at a low resolution upscaled without texture filtering for that crunchy pixelated feel. It's quite fun. Also I played on Ultraviolence difficulty(Nightmare, from what I hear, is a joke difficulty that targets the extremest players).

There's not very much to say about it that hasn't been covered elsewhere before. Some levels are very clearly experimental. "Barrel's O' Fun" is another experimental pain in the ass. Another of these experimental pains is The Chasm. Now the Chasm isn't all bad, but with the fast movement of DOOM and thing platforms to move on, and lots of Cacodemons it's a bit of a pain in the ass.

Overall the game follows a similar downard trend to how I felt in Doom 1. The first episode was great fun, the second was alright, the third was okay and the final one is a bit of a slog. In this case, the third and fourth cases are swapped around. One of the levels that really impressed me from the final episode was "The Living End".

Some levels are a bit of a Key and Switch hunt. One example being "The Spirit World" where you have to shoot a specific uninteresting wall for progressiont o be possible.

As for difficulty, apart from levels that used a lot of Chaingunners, I didn't find it too hard. The first 2 levels of Doom's episode 4 were by far harder than the levels in Doom 2.

My final verdict is that it's fun, but becomes a slog towards the end with less interesting levels. I imagine community-made maps are better. DOOM 1 had better levels overall in my opinion. Similarly it'll entertain you for a good 5 or so hours, unless you try to 100% the game, or unless you mod the game to play more community-made maps.

Answering the question of "Who Games on Linux?" here, "I do".

Final information

- Played Version: N/A. Used GZDoom and Brutal Doom

- Linux Compatibility: Use a Doom source port with Linux support(GZDoom)

- Hours played: 5 hours

- Will I return to it: The ID Software levels? Unlikely. For mods, probably.

Browser choices

There's a lot of browsers available for browsing the modern web. You could probably take something deprecated and outdated and still be able to browse it(selected sites with simple HTML and probably no HTTPS) like netscape navigator. Now in my time on the internet I've used a few browsers, lets roll and see 'em:

• Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Chromium
• Vivaldi
• Opera
• Microsoft Edge
• Internet Explorer
• Brave Browser
• Surf
• Lynx
• w3m
• Qutebrowser

That's quite a number of browsers. A bunch are unusable for the modern web as far as I'm concerned due to significant flaws. Lynx, W3M are examples as they aren't graphical, they are terminal browsers(which is fine if the same site could be viewed in a screen reader... unfortunately the vast majority can't be viewed in a screen reader).

Now lets go through them one by one. Firefox. It does a lot well, but has become effectively controlled opposition in the pockets of the Google monopoly. Sure, it's "technically" not a monopoly, but the vast majority still use the Chromium engine for rendering. Firefox has its own rendering engine, Gecko, and a bunch of forks coming from it such as GNU Icecat. Unfortunately all the forks have issues of either small development teams, development teams that don't support privacy or user choice, or just being plain outdated(GNU Icecat for example is miles behind the current Firefox version).

Oh also Mozilla these days tends to squander money on social causes than on development. "Software developers" my ass.

Right Firefox is pretty crap. Good we've come to that conclusion. Next up Google Chrome. I won't waste your time, Google is collecting your data to selectively advertise more effectively. NEXT!

Chromium. Now this is interesting... well not Chromium specifically, it has the same problems as Google Chrome, but its forks "Ungoogled Chromium". Unfortunately, forks based on ungoogld chromium tend to have the same issues as Firefox forks. I won't elaborate too much, but it still implicitly supports the Google browser engine monopoly.

As a quick tangent, lets ask "Why is there a browser engine monopoly?". It's quite simple really, the specification for HTML and the HTTP/HTTPS and related technologies is insanely big. Sadly, a great amount of this is fueled exclusively by commercial interests. The faster the advertising internet is killed, the better our lives will be.

A couple notable mentions. Opera used to be alright. It got acquired by a Chinese Company and went to shit. Vivaldi is actually really good. It's feature-rich and while not doing quite enough for privacy that can be forgiven for pushing the frontier. Unfortunately, it consumes a pretty silly amount of RAM.

Surf uses the QTWebEngine, and is somehow slower than Qutebrowser which we'll come to later. It also has no tabs out of the box or adblocking. Pretty shit, but at least the codebase is small so changes can be easily made.

Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge... I won't even get into these. Needless to say the former is deprecated and nobody targets it anymore, and the latter is just bootleg Google Chrome that also phones home to Microsoft.

This leaves me with Brave Browser to discuss. For the average person, I will generally say Brave Browser is the best option out of the box. It has financial incentives like its BAT if you want to subject yourself to advertising trash, although that's just a way to gather more personal information if you try to use it at all. Oh and not all of your "Content Creators" will receive a cent of your BAT if you "Tip" them. It'll all probably go right back to the developers. The financial incentives and privacy does seem a bit shady to me, but as the only browser with SANE defaults that requires no configuration out of the box, this is what I'd recommend to the "Normies".

This leaves me with the last browser to talk about. Qutebrowser. Qutebrowser as the name suggests use the QTWebEngine, but it also has configuration files you can write, and is bindable so custom behaviours can be made. These configurations mean you can have vertical tabs, custom per-site CSS, global CSS, colour schemes, and can also pipe the URL or get the user to pick an <a> element as input to some script you have. As a result, I can pipe youtube videos into MPV, or into youtube-dl, or my own custom scripts which I can use to download entire channels, playlists or musics without any issue. This extensibility makes it quite expressive as someone who supports at the very least the extensibility portion of the unix philosophy.

Now someone will ask "What about Privacy". It doesn't phone home apart from when it crashes(in which situation you'll be asked to send a bug report). There are other elements to privacy such as trackers, but even without javascript tracking is possible(recently favicons have been used as a way to track people). However, the vast majority of trackers are in the same box as adverts and this is where the next point comes in.

"What about adblocking?". Qutebrowser used to be pretty lacking in this area, but recently it has improved leaps and bounds, because Brave released their adblocker to be used in other browsers. It also includes blocking based on their own custom "/etc/hosts" file, and with the new Brave adblocking, it's actually usable in more dynamic sitiuations. Combined it becomes very useful and very powerful.

It also supports a great amount of the HTTPS/HTTP/HTML spec. WASM for example is included(though WASM as a technology I still find questionable as it's very much like Flash). It's also very fast(Not the fastest, but certainly not as slow or RAM-heavy as alternatives like Vivaldi).

Qutebrowser is very similar to Vim, with vim-like bindings and behaviours too, 3 modes being control mode for your commands, insert for inserting text, and pass-through for when you need to be able to pass through all input to the browser(so no escaping out of pass-through except via a binding you set).

This all said, not everything is good about Qutebrowser. One point of contention is that it uses Python for quite a bit of the browser. Debatable how good that is as Python is interpretted and hilariously slow as a language(way worse than other interpretted languages like Javascript).

Anyway, if you read this, I suggest Brave Browser as your browser of choice UNLESS you aren't afraid of configuration. If you aren't, then use Qutebrowser, as you get all the benefits of Brave with the benefits of extensibility and configuration.

Impressionism and Games

This is a short blog post, that I hope may illuminate to some people why I prefer some games over others.

The objectivity and academic study involved in game design exists. It's respectable, definitely, however I can't help but feel that from these objective outlooks, something is lost. I also can't help but feel these objective outlooks are designed purely to get the most bang for your buck. Not every game needs to get the most bang for your book- and in this article I hope to elaborate on impressionism and how it relates to games and their game feel.

One of my favourite games as of recently would have to be Teleglitch. I learnt about it some time ago watching Israel Blargh. It's a truly fascinating procedurally generated game, where the layouts are random, but the modules are pieced together. I tried to explore what makes it good through my clone of it: Quiver. Naturally, what makes it good is a hard to describe emotion and constant feeling of being cornered, low on ammunition and with a very low liklihood of survival. A classic "You are all alone and fucked" scenario.

Now impressionism, is a genre of Music that isn't focused on the specific chord progressions or melodies of the music, but rather focuses more on the feeling of music. Clair De Lune is one such example of this music, and it nails a hollow sort of lonely feeling. Impressionis, doesn't just apply to Music though, there have been impressionistc classical art pieces where the use of colours and shapes have been used to convey a specific emotion.

Now, when I play games, or consume any art for that matter; one of the most important elements is that it can strum the strings of emotion. One of the common emotions felt in games is feeling badass and to be fair, this is common because so many games give out a power fantasy. This is usually easily achieved with mechanics that feel good, with extra polish to make the reward pay off. Of course, this has it's pitfalls as the wrong fantasies can be indulged- fantasies of finance by Greed often promoted in modern games. I don't blame the Developers for this, it's an appreciable artform itself psychologically manipulating a person to feel specific emotions. I also don't blame the players, psychological manipulation is incredibly strong, especially against willing participants. Now I say psychological manipulation and that's because it's used for good and for bad. The bad is covered in far too much detail by the far too many failings of modern AAA game developers(to some extent I think it's a coping mechanism created by a huge team. Huge risks multiply across the development team, and bread comes first). Of course the good is that a game can capture a specific feeling or emotion(and in some cases, multiple of them, multiplying the effect of the game).

Two common examples of games that do this well are Cave Story and Undertale. Their emotional content is plucked from well-woven mechanics and narrative storytelling.

I'll give a few more examples, Space Beast Terror Fright, a game that almost perfectly captures the feeling of being doomed with all odds against you like in the movie "Aliens" is one such example of indulging both the power fantasy and fear. You don't know quite what you're going up against, but when you beat it, you feel incredible.

I'll tie this back around. A lot of the greatest games are simple, as they have a specific emotion they seek to capture, and an audience that is perceptive to that emotion will enjoy it thoroughly if it does it well. RPG Players enjoy strings of emotions by mechanics woven with narratives. Boomer Shooter players enjoy feeling like a badass, with a light sprinkling of flavour emotions. Roguelite players like the random roll of badass and crushing defeat(this is pretty varying depending on how much variation exists in the power curve. Teleglitch has very little, Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon have a lot). Portal is also much like the RPGs where it mixes narrative and mechanical storytelling.

So I'll leave this with what I think should be done in most games. There's often the claim of polish being said. Now I would take that a step further and say that polish should be prioritised. General polish doesn't matter as much(it will be experienced, but it won't be as distinct), but polish in the areas of greatest emotion will go a long way. You need to make the rewards and punishments truly distinct and aligned properly with the emotions of your game. It's also for this reason I would say you should focus on achieving one or two emotions really well. Stringing them together is non-trivial and requires a lot of storytelling(as is the case in one-hit wonders like Undertale and Cave Story). Also there's a huge variety of emotions, and a lot are mostly untapped. Confusion and comedy are 2 examples that aren't tapped very much, the former best demonstrated in dream-like games such as Yume Nikki, and the latter best demonstrated in games like The Stanley Parable.

Hope this short article about impressionism in games was of help to some people. As usual, these are my opinions, yours are wrong, but mail me if you have some anyway.

Who games on Linux? #0: HROT

HROT is a boomer shooter taking after the same style as Chasm: The Rift. It is an enjoyable FPS with the brown aesthetic of Soviet Czechoslovakia. It is also software rendered, giving it a unique appearance.

Game info

- Name: HROT

- Genre: Boomer Shooter

- Games most like it in my experience: Quake, Dusk

- Demo: It has a demo on Steam, go play it. It uses V0.2.9

- Linux: It works. Needs an additional commandline to run with audio. Command line argument is

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="openal32=b" %command%

Thoughts

This weekend, I purchased and completed all of Episode 1 of HROT. A fascinating game that nails the boomer shooter genre pretty well- despite some issues. I will say firstly, it runs well under Linux, but with the Software Renderer you do run into some framerate issues every now and then. I don't know if there will be a Linux-only version in the future, I certainly do hope there will be one as it will be very interesting.

Anyway the issues I found with the game? Firstly, the sound effects. A great deal of the sound effects aren't suitably meaty. Secondly, the "Super Shotgun"(I say in quotes as I don't know its proper name in the game), is great, but it has an issue with the model where it violates the Pauli Exclusion Principle. It also is a bit too strong in the game, which leaves the normal shotgun retired by the time you get it unless you run low on ammunition(which doesn't happen for your bread and butter Shotgun ammo).

Now that I listed my gripes with the game, lets get into what's weird that may irritate some people. Firstly, it's very brown. Really brown. This isn't an issue to me, but it may be an issue to people who the constant monotone brownness of everything isn't interesting. Despite this, brownness which some may think is a parody of Quake, I think it's for the purposes of aesthetic and ambience, setting the game as very brutalistic much like the architecture of the same name. Oh and god-damn! That's a lot of sewer levels or levels with sewers.

In fact, the 2 games this reminds me most of, are STALKER and Quake, but the movement is not at all Quake-like. There's no bunny hopping or rocket jumping or anything hyper fast of the sort. It's all relatively toned down. The STALKER influences are definitely from its russian influences. I say Russian influences, but from what I am aware, the game is set in 1980s Socialist Czechoslovakia. The tones throughout the game hint at some external event that changed things within the slavic sphere of influence(Likely chernobyl in this game's case), but it certainly makes a good parody of the Czech politics of the 1980s.

Moving on, the secrets are good. I didn't 100% each level, but there'll be plenty here for people to play. Some enemies in my opinion saw too little use or didn't seem to do very much in the way of attacks: the Pedros, little walking pig-like spitters weren't seen very often, but seemed pretty cool(I think there's more rats than Pedros in the entire game). There's also the Gas Mask Horse which saw only 3 appearances. 2 in the Castle and one in the final level. One of those in the castle will literally drown, so there's just 2. Regardless, this is just a minor gripe with regards to some enemies not being used enough and some being used a lot. 3 are pretty simple, you got shotgunners, SMG/Pistol users and a fatass police offers. The latter is almost definitely just a copy of the Ogre from Quake but the rest are pretty good.

The maps are also very well made. I only had to go door hunting a few times after I acquired a key, to find where it was used, that's the only issue there. It's certainly not like in some maps of Blood or DOOM 2 where it devolves into a switch/key hunt.

There's also a motorbike. I'd like to see a motorbike sequence, as in its current state it's not really usable. Maybe we'll get one in E2 or E3, who knows.

As a software developer myself, I will also note something of interest about this game. It uses its own engine written in Pascal, with both software rendering and openGL rendering available as options(though the openGL options looks ugly at the moment due to texture filtering). This is a fun curiosity as you don't see many games using Pascal or any non-C-based engine these days.

The selection of weapons are alright, nothing spectacular or lame. It's the arsenal you'd expect from any boomer shooter to be fair. You have a sickle(Not as a Dusk throwback, but because of the Sickle and Hammer). You have pistol which you can upgrade to be akimbo. You have an SMG, Pump-action shotgun, Doubled Barrelled shotgun, rocket launcher, grenades, land-mines, lightning gun and some other weird BFG-like gun. The latter I didn't get until the last boss and didn't use it. The lightning gun is like Quake's Lightning gun and is suitably badass. Land-mines are pretty mediocre, didn't use them much. Kind of mirrors my use of similar mines in Half-Life. Also Grenades are bound to right click. Weird change, I did accidentally trigger it a few times, but it's alright.

My final verdict on this is that it's a fun game. Certainly a change of pace from your classical highly polished boomer shooters like Ion Fury, or Amid Evil. It's quite inspiring actually, making me want to return to my game Quiver and rework the entire thing to be a Quake-Style variant of Teleglitch. It will certainly keep you entertained in its current state for a few hours. Give it a year or less, and it'll probably entertain you for a good 10 or so hours. I suppose Teleglitch also has a similarly brown aesthetic.

I'll leave this short issue of "Who Games on Linux?" here, answering that question with "I do".

Final information

- Played Version: V0.3.0

- Linux Compatibility: Proton-5.21-GE-1

- Hours played: 2.6 hours

- Will I return to it: Very likely if I don't forget

2007, the year the internet went to shit

2007 is 14 years ago now. 14 years ago, things have gotten so much worse. One could go so far to say that Humans are a treacherous race betraying themselves every day...

There's a relatively common joke floating around that 2007 is the year the Internet went to shit. I don't personally know what year it went to shit, but I will list the events of 2007 that mark why this could be seen to be the case:

- 1st Generation of IPhone

- FoxNews does its first report on 4chan

- Tumblr is founded

- Facebook allows non-college emails to register

- Twitter explodes in popularity after SXSW Festival marketing campaign

- Big Bang Theory debuts

I'll cover each in some detail. Firstly the 1st generation of IPhone. Relatively speaking from a hardware standpoint it was revolutionary as it pushed smart phones as the frontier of media consumption and use. It also made it incredibly simple to use. As a result it opens the floodgates for idiots to access the internet. There's also the fact that Apple does this all off the back of child labour, but don't worry too much about that. Any competitive technology company violates human rights in innumerable ways, and advocates them in western marketing scams like the eternal corporate hypocrites they are.

Secondly Fox News doing its report on 4chan. I am relatively surprised they even did reports on what is effectively a generic internet forum. Regardless, this just opens the floodgates for edgy kids to pollute the threads and posts. I would generally say this wasn't as bad as 2016 and the few years leading up to where a lot of message-sharing sites became vitriolic with political nonsense. Left vs Right and "Us vs Them"-isms are only deserving labels for people who have no sense of nuance.

Thirdly Tumblr is founded. I think this explains itself, but it sets itself up as an area for degeneracy. This can quite simply be seen from the Tumblr porn ban. I am not pro-censorship, I am certainly pro-autonomy; as such I believe it's Tumblr's right to determine what content they allow and disallow on their site. The fallout of their decision shows just how degenerate the Tumblr userbase is. Naturally of course, a great deal of these degenerates migrated to Twitter- arguably worse due to the use of curt messages and spamming "^" messages in the form of retweets and likes. Remember that "^" was considered bad practice and disrespectful on old forums as it would both, clog up the thread and contribute nothing.

Fourthly, Facebook allowing non-college emails to register. Read into Cambridge Analytica yourself. I won't elaborate here.

Twitter exploding in popularity. Now this one might need some description. Firstly, 140 characters is far too few to adequately communicate. Human communication is by nature incredibly messy and hard to get right, and no matter what string of words you put together somebody else will pattern match that string to mean something you didn't intend. There's also the nature of threads being non-linear, which makes it very hard to go through and see what the discussion leads to. Also the fact it rewards "Slam Dunking" people with witty curt responses makes that a standard behaviour on Twitter.

Finally, Big Bang Theory debuts. I put this one here as I would generally say this is what has normalised and popularised "Geek" Culture. Geek culture is quite distinct from nerd culture, being that it tends to focus on shallow elements, commonly revolving around some brand a person consumes. Nerd culture is quite simply a love of learning to a relatively autistic extreme. One can see, that one answer is a hedonistic answer. One is a poetic worldview(poetry originates from the Greek Word "To Create/Make/Produce"), so one creates. I will also mention that there is a 3rd point being the ascetic answer, which is by nature a reaction to hedonism. Often times though it's a circlejerk, one ascetic culture is that of veganism.

Anyway, I leave this short article off as just me looking back at 2007, as possibly a year the internet went wrong. In general though, it has gone wrong mainly due to commercial interests. A decade ago, you could find hobbyists using Google Search but it has gotten harder with time, as the commercial and advertised answer is more important. The bottom line is more important.

Think about it for a moment, that the medium of information exchange that so many people rely upon, are built on obtuse AI Algorithms that in the case of Neural Networked Algorithms, even the designers don't fully understand- and that they are trained as such to push the commercial interests and commercial informations over the useful information(I would also think this goes along with the concept of Intellectual Property being a scam. A lot of great works today exist only because people disrespect the idea of "Intellectual Property", because knowledge is not a zero-sum game. Sharing knowledge is in Human Interests). There are a number of other events that have taken place that could be pointed to. The use of Wikipedia is a de-facto expert over actual experts for example. The use and advertisement in search engines. The numerous privacy violations by the NSA, GCHQ and other "National Defense" groups(This is ignoring that by nature privacy is a pretty vacuous term on its own, and needs elaboration to be useful. The strong form of the "Nothing to Hide Argument" shows this).

"Some people think this is paranoia, but it isn't. Paranoids only think everyone is out to get them. Wizards know it." - Terry Pratchet

Unix philosophy and writing scripts

The Unix philosophy is a design philosophy for programming and scripting. I will list its rules here, but one can do more reading themselves on this if you want. The reason the Unix philosophy is even relevant today, is because it makes the standard scripting experience on any GNU/Linux system(Linux being a Kernel, GNU standing for GNU's Not Unix, and both are inspired heavily by Unix).

• Rule 1: Modularity. Write simple programs with clean interfaces
• Rule 2: Clarity. Don't be a smartass
• Rule 3: Composition. Write programs that can be composed into bigger programs
• Rule 4: Seperation. Seperate interfaces from their engines.
• Rule 5: Simplicity. Add complexity only where needed(Complex algorithms or data structures are often buggy)
• Rule 6: Parsimony. Write a big program when it's clear it can't be decomposed cleanly(Relevant for highly coupled programs like Games)
• Rule 7: Transparency. Design with visibility in mind. Don't needlessly obfuscate.
• Rule 8: Robustness. Logically follows from simplcity and transparency
• Rule 9: Representation. Make the data "smart" not the program. Smarter programs are buggier
• Rule 10: Least surprise. It should make sense
• Rule 11: Silence. It shouldn't say anything if there's nothing noteworthy
• Rule 12: Repair. Fail loudly and quickly
• Rule 13: Economy of time. Programmer time is costly, Machine time isn't(real-time systems often drop this as real-time requires high performance)
• Rule 14: Generation. Write programs to write programs so constant involvement isn't necessary
• Rule 15: Optimization. Prototype before polishing, how else can you know what to optimize?
• Rule 16: Diversity. There is no true way, only true frauds
• Rule 17: Extensibility. Make programs easily extended in future

Some of these are obvious. Some not so obvious and some are rather specific. It's worth noting that these principles can be applied to systems that aren't Unix-Like but it may be harder. Anyway, the focus of this blog will be on simplicity, clarity and modularity. I will discuss how to write a decent shell script.

Writing shell scripts

Your shell scripts will begin with the line

#!/usr/bin/sh

What this shebang does, is it tells the script, which shell to run. sh, is usually symbolically linked to bash, but maybe to some other shell like zsh or fish. It's good practice to use sh rather than bash unless you use bash features in which case you would use the shebang #!/usr/bin/bash. Other shebangs are available for other scripting languages, but today I will focus on shell scripting.

To help demonstrate this, I will be using my blog writing script to show how I write a shell script.

# Variables
blogdir="content/blog/";
rssfile="../html/content/rss.xml"
year="2021"

Lines beginning with a hashtag are comments. Lines with a word followed by an equals(NO SPACE BETWEEN THE =) will be a variable. You will observe I used a semi-colon. In shell scripting it's good practice to end lines of code with a semi colon. There are cases where it has a useful meaning, but I won't discuss them here.

echo "Enter a blog title"; read -r blogtitle;
blogtitle=`echo "$blogtitle"   sed "s/ /_/g"`
blogtitle="$blogtitle.gmi"
st -e nvim "$blogdir$year/$blogtitle";

Here I call the program echo. echo can take a number of flags, but I don't use them. You can look these flags up in a terminal by typing man echo. For this, in this line, I echo to the user to enter a title, then I call the program read, with the -r flag and a variable name that will be used. This allows me to get user input straight from the terminal. I could use dmenu or some other program if I wanted to, but I chose not to.

The second line introduces three new concepts, a pipe and the backticks `. I will cover pipes and variables first.

echo $blogtitle;   sed "s/ /_/g"

At first, I call echo. The $ means a variable. You can then type a name after the $ to mean a specific variable, in this case blogtitle, which was previously set by our read. The standard output of this program is piped into sed. Piping is a way of passing the output of a program as the input to another program. The program sed is a stream editor, so it allows me to modify streams of data and output them. The string I pass into it is how I want to modify it, it's pretty similar to Regex.

"s/ /_/g". The s means substitute. the / means to go to the next part of the parameter. So I will be substituting spaces. The 2nd / means to look at what I will substitute it with, _. the final / and character tells me I want to apply it globally to the stream, and not for the first instance. As a result, this will replace all space characters with underscores(useful for writing files without pesky spaces!). sed is a pretty useful and complex program, look at the man page by typing man sed to find out what it does.

Just from this small demonstration you can begin to see how the rules of composition, modularity and seperation are all being used here. Each of these programs handles their own logic as a black box, and we care only for the output to compose the outputs together as a program.

Now lets look at the backticks. What this does, is allow us to evaluate the contents in the backticks, and assign its output to a variable. As such, the blogtitle has been assigned to be itself but with spaces substituted for underscores.

We can then assign it to have a file extension by just using the variable in a string, as "$blogtitle.gmi". I then call st which is my terminal emulator to create a new terminal with neovim so I can write the article. A note about quotation marks. backticks(`) are for evaluating commandline expressions. Strings(") are where you can use variables and text and assign it accordingly, and single quotes (') do not allow the use of variables, and are pure text. These 3 quotation marks make it relatively easy to use variables appropiately.

I won't go through in detail the rest, but you can get the idea of how it is useful. I will write the rest of the program below and point out other noteworthy lines.

#!/bin/sh

# Variables
blogdir="content/blog/";
rssfile="../html/content/rss.xml"
year="2021"

# Read the name of the blog and make a file and write it
echo "Enter a blog title"; read -r blogtitle;
blogtitle=`echo "$blogtitle"   sed "s/ /_/g"`
blogtitle="$blogtitle.gmi"
st -e nvim "$blogdir$year/$blogtitle";

# Recreate the blog directory
yourTitle=`head "$blogdir$year/$blogtitle" -n 1   sed "s/# //g"`
head "$blogdir/blog.gmi" -n 6 > "head.t"
echo "=>$year/$blogtitle $yourTitle" > "link.t"
tail "$blogdir/blog.gmi" -n +7 > "tail.t"
cat "head.t" "link.t" "tail.t" > $blogdir/blog.gmi

# Now we set it up for RSS

cat "$blogdir$year/$blogtitle"   sed -z "s/\n/<br \/>/g" > "rss.txt"
echo "]]></description></item>" >> "rss.txt"
echo "<item><title>$yourTitle</title><description><![CDATA[" > "rssA.txt"
cat "rss.txt" >> "rssA.txt"
rm "rss.txt";
mv "rssA.txt" "rss.txt"

head -n 10 "$rssfile" > "head.t"
tail -n +10 "$rssfile" > "tail.t"
cat "head.t" "rss.txt" "tail.t" > "$rssfile"

# Clean up temp files
rm "head.t" "link.t" "tail.t" "rss.txt"

The comments for it explain it well. The > character means to write to a file. This overwrites everything in it. The >> characters means to append to a file so it writes it at the end. All of the above is me writing to temporary files and composing a structure from which to use and then putting them back together.

You will observe a number of programs not mentioned before. Firstly is cat. cat takes a number of flags, but it allows me to just output the contents of a file. Some programs have flags for taking file input though.

rm, removes files or directories, useful for deleting these temporary files. mv moves a file or directory to a new location or just renames them. head takes the first n lines of a file. tail takes the last n lines of a file.

All the above programs can be read and understood better by READING THE MANUAL. There is a co mon saying called RTFM which stands or Read the fucking manual. Quite simply, a lot of the flags you need for a program are listed there.

This has been a brief look at shell scripting. If you understand variable assignment, command execution and the programs you use in it, it's very easy to compose complex nuanced scripts and behaviours from simple and dumb programs.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. A lot of the Unix Philosophy is mainly relevat to writing small C programs to be used in shell scripts as I've demonstrated above. This is just us taking advantage of a system using the unix philosophy. As such a system like Windows can't take advantage of these ideas as much because it wasn't designed with this philosophy in mind. Also for large or highly coupled programs it also tends to fall apart, so it's not always applicable.

And remember, there's never one true way to write scripts or programs universally. It's up to you to determine the best way from your current knowledge and experience.

Stories page

I have now added a stories page to my website. My intention here is to use it as a page to host stories... obviously? Anyway, the content you will find there is content I have rights to put there, either directly from the author, or by nature of it being Creative Commons or Public Domain... or by nature of me holding the rights to it.

If you want to submit your stories, feel free to, but keep in mind that by doing so you allow me permission to use it following CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. That's not for all people, just for me so that I can have rights to put it up on this site without any commercial application of it, and so that I can format it appropiately as it will be relatively close to plain text.

So far I have uploaded one of my own stories, as well as one of the short stories I have enjoyed by H.P. Lovecraft.

P.S. I will start signing at the end of these articles the date it was written. This is more so I have a semblence of time passing between each article.

Automating Tmux for fun and profit

First what is a MUX? A MUX is a shorthand for Multiplexer which is used for selecting data commonly in electronics. TMUX is a Terminal Multiplexer. This means it selects Terminals to act on, as well as managing them into panes so you can easily access them. They also save the terminals in sessions, sessions can be thought of like your workspace. This means it can be used for really a lot of things actually. I use it for hosting servers without forking the process or for having processes run in the background in a tmux session rather than in a window(typically this is done with ncurses based applications as they display in your terminal). Another advantage is you can use it with vim or neovim(probably emacs too), so you can create a workspace for doing your text editing activities. In this I will provide examples of some scripts I have written using tmux, as well as some advantages. I won't be going over common keybinds and how to use tmux as a user, so if you're a newb to tmux, take some time to look for examples of using it. If you use tiling window managers, but haven't used tmux, you will feel right at home with tmux.

Running programs in the background

One of the TUI(Terminal User Interface) applications I enjoy thoroughly is cmus(A music player written in C and NCurses). There's a lot of reasons to like cmus, it's easy to use, it can be used on a network, it can be controlled remotely with cmus-remote(which I use with my keybindings), however for all these advantages, it's not a daemon so it doesn't run in the background. A different music player like mpd might be suitable for this, but I chose to stick with cmus and write a script with tmux. Below is the script

tmux has-session -t cmus 2>/dev/null
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
        tmux new-session -d -s cmus \; \
                send-keys 'cmus' C-m\;
fi
tmux attach-session -t cmus

What this does it firstly checks if it has a session named cmus, and writes the result to to /dev/null. I then do a check on the result of the last command's output ($? is a mysterious variable that is the output of the last command you wrote). I check it's not 0, a 0 would mean it has a session and I should attach to it. If it's not a 0, I create this session. The -d flag being to detach after creating it. The -s flag being the session name. You will observe I split this over multiple lines, when a tmux session is made I can send it keys, with send-keys. So I tell it to stard cmus, and C-m(This enters). This starts a Tmux session with cmus running in it, detached. The final line is to attach to the session cmus(you can omit this if you want to manually attach to the session. I keep it because I use this with a keybind of mine to bring cmus up when I want to listen to music).

Read the above example, and you will learn that the first advantage of tmux is being able to run, detach and attach sessions, as well as send arbitrary key inputs to run commands accordingly. I would use this to run scripts in your $PATH.

Managing windows

But what if you want to have windows? I will ignore this for vim, because this has windows by default, you can look that up yourself, and you will find out about it, but some applications you want to do windows. For a short time I used to use a task manager called taskwarrior for doing todo lists(I don't anymore, I use a physical journal, but the code I wrote is still applicable here).

tmux has-session -t tasks 2>/dev/null
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
        tmux new-session -d -s tasks \; \
                send-keys 'while true;do clear; task priority limit:3;sleep 5;done' C-m\; \
                split-window -v -p 75 \; \
                split-window -h -p 30 \; \
                send-keys 'while true;do clear; task burndown.daily;sleep 5;done' C-m\; \
                select-pane -t 1 \;
fi
tmux attach-session -t tasks

What I did in the cmus example is repeated here and built upon. I run some commands in a loop(could be replaced with a script or executable of your choice. Maybe a crypto price watcher by curling rate.sx?). So I split the window vertically by 75%, then I split the window horizontally by 30%. This will now select the 1st pane as where you handle inputs, while the 2nd pane and 0th panes are handling your scripts. What this allows is running a lot of different applications in a very specific window layout(almost like a tiling window manager...?).

I have exhausted my supply for tmux examples that I wish to demonstrate, but you can see that if you make a script with a case statement for different tmux layouts this could be useful for some people. I will personally recommend looking at the man page for tmux to see more ways this can be used, because I have barely scratched the surface.

Anyway, other uses include when you ssh into a remote server. Why? Because if you lose connection, your terminal state isn't saved normally, however if you lose connection in a tmux session, you can just reconnect and reattach to the tmux session to pickup where you were before.

I hope these examples have illuminated why I would suggest using tmux for automating your workspaces. In some cases it's not worth this effort, but for others it is. I will let you dear reader, determine what is and isn't worth the effort to apply tmux in.

Fully replaced with gemini

Hi all reading this. I have fully replaced my HTTP website with its Gemini equivalent. I still use my normal Stylesheets, but what you will read on this site is now almost perfectly mirrored with the Gemini site(except for the plaintext being a little bit obtuse due to using HTML). I have also got a mini-log thing, where I will post small logs or updates. I still need to think through how to set up my RSS feeds. I will probably set one up for the blog and one for the mini log. I may also include a log for the UTC News archive, but I am not sure if I will or not yet. I say that because the shell scripting for that is messy. It works!... but it's messy.

I may do a video or two on Gemini. How to set up your Gemini Pod... Client options... how to mirror it to HTTP as well. I have included a link so you can see how I went about porting it to HTML. It's really just a script looping over all files, and awking the hell out of it. These scripts are licensed under MIT License... so go nuts. Cheers for sharing them in the Gemini Mailing List Martin.

I am also considering doing some tutorial videos on Godot. Mainly videos where the purpose is breadth and speed. We shall see though.

Ultimately, I am very happy with this new system I have created. Pretty much as I said before, I only need to set up an RSS system. I think the way I may do it, is just to write a script which puts it at the top of the RSS feed... Perhaps... We shall see.

Gemini: Antidote to the modern advertiser web

In short, I think Gemini is a better alternative to HTTPS for document exchange. For web applications I hold that HTTPS is better, but web applications are usually not about document or information exchange, at least not useful documents or informations.

I may do some more videos on Gemini, I don't know.

Happy New Year!

This is just going to be a short blog post detailing some basic information of what I'm up to. I'm currently in my 3rd and final year of Computer Science at University. My intentions going forward to continue to put a lot of my efforts towards focusing on completing this with a relatively good grade. I'm aiming to get a First Class Degree, but if I fail, it's relatively likely I'll just get a 2.1/2.2 degree. Regardless, I have been working on my dissertation which will hopefully have an end product being a playable game for people to play. I am also hoping I will make another short playable game at the start of February made in a week or so, but you know well enough by now how my plans go seeing the current status of Quiver. There is a very real possibility that I repurpose a lot of what I have in that to making a "Boomer Shooter" interpretation of the Game "Teleglitch". We will see though.

I am also considering creating some tutorials focused on the Godot game engine. I suspect I could probably create a fair amount of useful tutorials for Godot, as it's relatively easy to use, and I feel it is better for a lot of game development than Unity or Unreal which are both typically overkill unless you have a very good reason to use them.

Anyway, here's hoping this year is a better year than this previous year. I don't have anything interesting to say about lockdown or Coronavirus.

Software ACE. Is your software shit?

To answer the question, it is elementary my dear Watson. Of course it is, but today I shall cover the accessibility points, but there are far more points at play here.

Software applications are used everywhere. As such, for such a wide demographic, a great deal of software is remarkably terrible. Irredeemably so. A lot of people suffer from colourblindness, poor sight, deafness and dyslexia, and these are all relatively common problems that have. Also a pointer here, even though I'm deaf this isn't about pity this is about establishing a basic accessibility test to tell what is and isn't shit software. Complexities exist, some software is harder to make accessible than others, like Games, but some are incredibly easy, like terminal applications or websites to the point that there is simply *no valid excuse except for the desire to be shuffled into the land of dead software*.

The accessibility configuration evaluation

Colours

A great deal of the population are colourblind, and this comes in a number of forms. At it's worst it is shades of black and white, so prepare for the worst. Any widespread software that is inaccessible under 2 colours, is automatically trash.

If it requires more than 2 colours, it mandates iconography, and its lack is poor design. Iconography should be used anyway, as it's useful for those of poor sight.

Colour contrast

This effects those with poor sight. Poor contrast means you have to strain your eyes to even read the text. Far too many websites have this issue, don't add yours to trash. There are 2 solutions for this, a high contrast mode(fine tuned or toggled, who cares), or just make it high contrast to begin with.

Fonts

This one is simple. Dyslexic people have a hard time reading. What to do? Allow dyslexia-friendly fonts. No font choices means it's automatically trash. Also some character are identical under some fonts, for example l and I. No font choice? In the bin you go.

Font size

This one is also simple, effecting those with poor sight. Narrow fonts, or fonts with incredibly small point size with no zoom-in functionality get thrown into the toilet where it belongs along with the software it labels.

Text to voice readers

This one is rather specific, mainly for those with poor sight. The nature of the modern web makes screen readers impossibly useless for these poor buggers, as HTML has been perverted long ago to construct bloated and bad structures to support styles and not to support contents. Even nethack, a game from the 1980s has a text to voice reader. If your software can't handle it, or export to it, it goes where it belongs. In the skip.

Audio playing in Left or Right ear, or not equal to both

This ones particularly pisses me the fuck off being deaf. When audio only plays in the left or the right ear, it makes it completely useless to listen to. This usually doesn't effect software, but it sometimes can. There are cases where not having it equal is important, but most don't stand to scrutiny. Unequal or playing in one ear? It gets shoved up your rear.

Subtitles

This comes in 2 flavours. Lack of subtitles, and poor subtitling. For the lack of subtitles, all I can say is it shouldn't be lacking, as it's simple and easy work. As for poor subtitling see what I said about bad fonts and font sizes and colour contrasts. A lot of work fails in this regard.

Configuration

A lot of these issues are fixed easily by adding configuration options. Some are fixed by using the software for its intended purpose(HTTPS is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol, not a PDF creator, so stop fucking using it like photoshop you toddlers).

Score

If your software meets 2 or more of these "Throw it in the bin" criterion, it is fucking trash, and you should fix it, or fix yourself a gun to paint your wall crimson.

If it meets less than or equal, good stuff. Fix the issues, and your software might suck a little bit less. It will never not suck though, that's the nature of all software.

Also a final note, I have personally broken quite a number of points on this list. A great deal of my own software violates these tests, so the natural conclusion is my software shit. My response? Of course it is, all software is shit, some is just less shit than others.

Site is now better on Mobile

Short blog post. I have slightly modified my Gemini to HTML script to include a meta tag that makes pages scale properly on mobile devices. I *think* I have also applied this same change to the UTC news archive so it should be easier to read on a mobile device.

I'll also leave at the bottom that my priorities with this site will be first and foremost towards being readable on desktop platforms as that's where people who generally aren't braindead are as Phones are effectively time-wasting novelties that contribute nothing of worth.

I have set up a Git Server

Just a short blog post to say that I have set up a Git Server and will be using it. This is convenient as it will mean I can begin to step away from using GitHub. That's not because I have issues with GitHub, it's wonderfully useful for the vast majority of people. It's more that I would rather my Git Repositories be decentralised, especially the repositories I consider important.

I will probably set some up to be public, and likely set up the stagit utility so a nice static website frontend can exist for people to look through.

It was remarkably easy to set up a Git Server. Makes me wonder why I put it off...

Gemini

Gemini is a modern protocol that doesn't set out to replace either Gopher or HTTP. I have started using Gemini, and from how simple it is, and from my uses of this Website, I will probably start using Gemini more.

One of the motivations behind this is that I despise the commercialisation of the big internet. Multimedia shit everywhere quite frankly. That's not to say I won't continue using this website, I have the tools set up so maintaining a gemini capsule and maintaining a website will both be done. I am likely to start putting content that only exists on my gemini capsule.

There will also be content that only exists on this site too. Primarily multimedia content, such as web exports for games I make.

I also have a gopherhole that pretty much just redirects to my gemini capsule and http site.

Want to see what I've made with it so far? Go to gemini://risingthumb.xyz in any gemini-supported browser. Want my recommendations for which Gemini browsers to use? Use Lagrange for a graphical experience, or amfora for a terminal experience.

Oh, it's also much easier to make and maintain a gemini capsule than either a gopherhole or website. It's just markdown with a couple bits and pieces extra

Blog now Mirrored on Gemini! Also other details!

This should be the first blog that's mirrored on both this website and on my Gemini Capsule. I have also written a short script so I can do minilogs whenever I feel like it as well. The former, the blog, will be for more focused and well written up content- usually with an aim of describing or explaining something or venting very heavily about some piece of trash.

As for the other details? I'm going to be supporting the Gemini project much more. Gopher had its issues, and as much as I wanted to support it, it had critical issues in its conception. Namely the way it tried to link files together without MIME types. Gemini seems to me a reimagining of Gopher in a modern way that's suitable for use by almost everyone. I will talk now about what it offers, and what it doesn't.

What it offers

Gemini is basically the web had it not taken some irredeemable mistakes and become a commerce platform rather than an information platform. I will refer to the Gemini and Gopher spaces as the small web and the HTTP web as the big web for the remainder of this article. In the big web, invasive Javascripting is more than a standard. It's an expectation, and this is not good quite simply as it's a huge invasion of privacy, and quite often supports dark patterns(anti-patterns?) that support commerce. I have nothing against commerce, it's an important requirement for a functioning society and civilisation, but the effects of commerce and information, as well as the utility of psychology in order to manipulate people has led us to the current situation.

It's also a problem that a person cannot sit and write a web browser. I will freely challenge anyone reading this post to create their own web browser that meets a good amount of the standards that the W3C set out. However, a Gopher or Gemini browser is much easier due to it being a text-based protocol. This means it is relatively information dense. The only structuring required, is textual structure. It also has support for UTF-8, meaning that foreign, non-English speaking countries can use it without too much issue. Additionally, this means it is also more accessible than the modern web, as it can be used with screen readers(relatively trivial to implement for pure text. The hard part is shifted from parsing to the phonetics).

Any BASTARD who will cry about multimedia content being lost doesn't see their application in psychology. Quite simply, it's well employed and well known that the appearance of things can be used to manipulate people into behaving in certain ways, and this appearance is facilitated by multimedia content. Examples include, but are not limited to, colour theory with button colours, design theory with buttons(button they want you to press looks like one. Button they don't want you to press doesn't look like one), default opt-in to emails, and so on. You can easily keep listing off more of these dark patterns for manipulating people. I won't bore you with the details.

Interaction isn't lost. CGI is offered, just as it is with HTTP. There's not much to say here, other than the lunacy that is how nobody remembers what CGI is... Sometimes it depresses me greatly how little people remember of their past.

It is also designed to be simple. Simply elegant.

And for the Crypto-Crazed, it uses SSL like HTTPS, except these are self-signed certificates, and there is a good argument for self-signed certificates. I won't go into why it's a good thing or a bad thing, as there's arguments either way, but it's a net positive it uses SSL by default instead of HTTP which doesn't. The real discussion here is about certificate authorities versus self-signed certificates.

Did I mention it's low-network cost, incredibly easy to set up, incredibly easy to maintain, and incredibly easy to browse? I probably didn't, but these factors all add up. If you want to try it in a relatively Neocities-style way, look at the site https://gemlog.blue.

What it doesn't offer

Javascripting. Tracking. Privacy invasion. Automatic opt-in to view multimedia content. Psychological manipulation through appreciable abuse of CSS.

The modern web is trash. Put it in the bin and get some help.

The Pessimist's Why

I believe every pessimist is responsible for asking a question along the lines of:

Why did you do that?

Why bother with that?

Why? It seems so useless.

Why bother when X situation?

These questions can also come in a similar form of "what's the point of..." but sometimes that can be a case of seeking genuine understanding. Now to elaborate on this...

The pessimist's why I believe stems partly from Apathy granted by the collapse of their value structures(usually due to some event or nihilism). Now nihilism alone isn't a bad concept. In fact, in some ways it's an empowering concept but it's a hurdle to almost every man, once they consider the question of why they should bother living. If they are unable to answer it, and their value systems collapse, they have to either construct their own new value system to replace this, or they will likely try to fill this void with some other content. Content by means of consumerism typically- which is in its very nature an entirely insatiable beast if granted its wishes. It's worth noting not all consumerism is bad, but for the sake of nullifying how they have no reason or values to sustain their life it is inherently a void to distract them from developing a new value structure to continue with life.

Building on this, I would like to propose one such event which can bring this. The Duning-Kruger effect- when a person is learning a new subject they will often reach a peak of confidence if left unchecked. If left unchecked, they will be given a stark and crushing realisation in the Valley of Despair that can make them reconsider why they bothered with it. And naturally this question can lead into a person's insecurities and sap their joy of a subject. Or bring them to reconsider the subject to learn. Lets take a look at this ourselves shall we?

What do you see in there friend? A discussion of topics, a sharing of ideals and opinions. One man shows off his recent creative endeavours in programming, another with a whiskey in hand and bags beneath his eyes.

Elaborate on this, what is it they are talking about? One of them is talking in excitement on the language he has learnt, the tools and the trade. He seems rejuvinated by this presentation- given meaning by how his work has improved his life- in a small way but a non-significant way. His will-to-power bringing him to make a creative effort in his work; Yes, and the other pray-tell friend how does he respond?

His eyes seem glazen and uninterested, a thousand yard stare broken only by the dehydrating blinks of those dry bagged eyes. Enervated, he stops the young lad and asks him a question of monotone importance. "What's the point of this? I could just buy someone else's?"- what more than the flagellation of that poor sod's espirit; crumpled- What's the point do I hear that right? The pessimistic why? The driving nail of broken values compensated with material. A compensation for a debt of energy and will. No more! No more! I can't bear to see such a horrific sight spun by the looms of pessimism!

But what am I talking of here, The pessimistic why! Why do I bother to write this very piece to talk about this? Because of my values. Because I choose in the face of no belief to adopt and construct a set of values sufficient and rejuvinating; a set that I follow through day by day in the construction of a fairer and improved ego. Not that empty glass of self-asserted woes and pities by those pessimists!

Enough? Enough! I hope at this curve you see the pit of despair and zealous consumerism that a pessimistic why causes- on your own and your comrades; a systematic eradication of those lively values that gave you a will! Go out and construct something, and in the question of "Why?", an answer remains: To accomplish the full spectacle of my values. VALUES! Beyond comprehension of a Nihilist- espeically one that has yoten them out their broken glass.

Quiver Version 0.3!

Quiver version 0.3 is out! This update features the following:

- Some slight polish to Mines modules

- Overhauled enemy AI

- Now there is 5 levels that are relatively balanced with their loot and enemy content

- Rifle added

- Inventory overhaul

- Complete removal of throwing and other poor design choices

The above changes are now featured in the current binaries of the game, and the web version. Go play it! In addition, I am now looking for feedback on the current status of this game. If you feel you have something to say about it, let me know!

As for optimisation, it runs on a Thinkpad T420 acceptably. The plan log mentions GLES2 consideration, and this is why. On a T420, a laptop that is GPU-absent, the framerate is around 50FPS which is acceptable but not to my standard of good. For most modern desktop, especially those which are featured with GPUs and even the newer Intel Graphics. It used to run much much worse on account of excessive Light2D usage and unoptimised use of baked lighting.

I do not intend to return to the multi-layering system I developed partly in the last post.

As for future developments. What remains for me to implement is mostly a matter of content, which is not something I am strongly good at(I actually find it boring). This is the primary reason all the levels still use Mines Modules. To address this, each week I will create at minimum 5 modules for a new area. I could probably do it all in 4 days if I made a strong effort to get all the modules done, but we shall see if I push that hard to that effect.

Full plan log

* System for handling full auto guns in place
* Fully automatic rifle added
* Explodead now explode if you get near them(Like creepers from Minecraft huh)
* Rundead now leap at you instead
* Turrets have been added
* Modified various zombie sprites to be obvious which was it's facing
* Set the item and enemy generation to guesswork values
* Extended the game to 5 levels(Each level still needs to be given a custom look though)
* Added death statistics for singleplayer

+ AI rotation has been fixed. Now randomised on spawn.
+ Fixed some broken item pickups in deathmatch
+ Fixed a bug with bullets treating game as networked when it isn't
+ Fixed issue with inventory info sizing and scaling incorrectly at different resolutions

Maybe change the particle system to be CPU-based instead of GPU-based for wider support(GLES2 vs GLES3)

Pausing development on Quiver

Hi. I'm pausing development on my game Quiver for some time. There's a possibility I will return to it to continue working on it. The reasoning behind why I am pausing my work on this is because I want to study, learn and work about some other "stuff". I will list what this "stuff" is now.

- Using C with the SDL2 Library to make basic 2D game engines.

- Using C with OpenGL3 to make basic 3D game engines.

- Using Qodot, Trenchbroom and Godot to make 3D games.

- Ctag, an ncurses music tagger

- University studies beginning soon

This is a fair quantity and variety of "stuff". A person may ask why I am taking an interest to C when it comes to games development. The reasoning is that it is exceptionally portable, and avoids the pitfalls I feel with Java's Object Orientated Programming. I may adapt to use C++ instead of C at some point but we will see if I do. It is unlikely the first 2 points will manifest into anything I can show in a short period of time. This will also give me a significant appreciation for game engine development, as opposed to game development. The 3rd I may or may not have something to show on that as well, it ultimately depends on how reasonable Godot is as a 3D game engine.

It's unlikely I'll say when I return to work on Quiver, but if I choose not to, I will write a post-mortem and likely release the source code and assets for it on GitHub.

Quiver .Plan 4

I didn't accomplish as much programming work within the Godot game this week which is unfortunate but C'est la vie. Below is this weeks .plan file, and a gif of an effect I accomplished. I am also going to begin putting some time into learning the C programming language beyond a beginner's level. This is mainly because it is an extremely portable language, an extremely terse language and it has direct utility for me on a Linux System for directly modifying my system and writing utilities. It also give me a good basis for learning C++ which the backend of Godot uses and may help me in the Industry if I choose to go that way.

Amount of work I got done on the game was low this week because I spent some of the week doing some trite stuff.

* Modified UI to show HP and AMMO for current gun at bottom
* Modified inventory to only allow 1 of each weapon. Extra weapons just picks up the ammo
* Completely removed the throwing feature. It added nothing to the game
* Made acquired weapons light up in inventory
* Made Title Screen flame effect inspired by DOOM PSX
* Completely removed the dropping feature. It added nothing to the game
* Completely removed the moving of items in the inventory. Instead we now have weapons in specific slots

+ Adjusted Line of sight offset to be much better and to not have gaps
+ Teleporter render layer is now correct
+ Lore terminal without existing file won't crash
+ Lore terminal checks if file exists before trying it

Singleplayer Death Statistics

Binaries have not been provided for this week's update. They will be provided next week along with some bigger changes.

Quiver Fluid Fog of War Effect

This blog post is a textual version of my video on the same topic. You can find that here.

This effect is taken directly from Teleglitch, though I did not refer to any of their code to achieve it. Teleglitch's code is available if you look through its files.

To achieve this I create a Node2D and give it a Sprite child with the sprite I want to use. I then give the Node2D a Polygon2D and create this polygon which will be where the fog of war is casted from. It is recommended to cover the whole sprite, as we will use an offset to give it the motion we see. We then add this Node2D to a group called walls. We attach a script to it with the following text.

extends Node2D


func getPool():
	var vecsCurr = $Polygon2D.polygon
	var vecs = []
	for vec in vecsCurr:
		vecs.append(global_position + vec.rotated(global_rotation))
	return vecs

What this script does, is define a function called getPool() which we can call to get an array of the global positions of the vectors with their rotation properly accounted for. We save this scene as Wall.tscn

We create a new scene called LightCaster.tscn which will be where the light is cast from, and attach a script with the following text.

extends Node2D


var vectorObjects = []
const offset  = 10

func _draw():
	for vectorObject in vectorObjects:
		var importantVectors = []
		for vector in vectorObject:
			var offsetVector = (vector - get_global_mouse_position()).normalized()* offset
			importantVectors.append(vector + offsetVector)
			importantVectors.append((vector-get_global_mouse_position()).normalized()*1600+vector)
		var important = Geometry.convex_hull_2d(PoolVector2Array(importantVectors))
		draw_colored_polygon(important, Color.black)

func _ready():
	var walls = get_tree().get_nodes_in_group("walls")
	for wall in walls:
		vectorObjects.append(wall.getPool())

func _process(delta):
	if Input.is_action_pressed("mouseClick"):
		update()

The function _draw() is called whenever update() is called, and in this draw function we handle the drawing of the Fog Of War as this is an additive method. By additive method, I mean that we draw the shadows on top of everything. The function _process(delta) can be replaced in your code, as what is key is that you call update() somewhere. You will notice towards the top we have an empty array named vectorObjects. What we do with this is in the _ready() function that is called when the node enters the tree, we get all the vectorArrays of all the walls. For your game, this may cause an issue with memory if you have too many walls, so you could create a timer to get all the relevant arrays of vectors within however many units of your central point.

We shall now discuss the _draw() function, repeated below.

const offset  = 10

func _draw():
	for vectorObject in vectorObjects:
		var importantVectors = []
		for vector in vectorObject:
			var offsetVector = (vector - get_global_mouse_position()).normalized()* offset
			importantVectors.append(vector + offsetVector)
			importantVectors.append((vector-get_global_mouse_position()).normalized()*1600+vector)
		var important = Geometry.convex_hull_2d(PoolVector2Array(importantVectors))
		draw_colored_polygon(important, Color.black)

What this does is loop over vectorObject in vectorObjects. Remember that vectorObject is just an array of Vectors. We then create a new empty array which will store all vectors we use for drawing the coloured polygon on top of everything. We then loop over every vector in vectorObject and add the vector that has been offset slightly, and the vector that has been extrapolated far out of the screen. We use get_global_mouse_position() as our central point here, but any Vector2 will work just as well. Normalization is where we take a vector and change it to have a scalar value of 1 but an unchanged angle. As a result, it effectively gives us the direction which we can multiply by. We next use a function Godot provides called convex_hull_2d. Explaining the convex hull algorithm is outside of the scope of this text, but effectively what it does is get the minimum points required to draw a line from point to point to capture all points within. With this, we then draw a black coloured polygon with the points returned from this function.

That's how you achieve a fluid fog of war effect without relying on Light2D or anything else.

Quiver/Hellaglitch Version 0.2

Firstly, the name of the game has changed from Hellaglitch to Quiver. I elaborate later on why.

Quiver version 0.2 is out, featuring a railgun, shotgun, networked multiplayer deathmatching, and a deathmatch map, among other numerous improvements, including sound effects.

The name of the game has changed from Hellaglitch to Quiver as it is a shorter name, a more memorable name, a more fitting name, and as for name collisions with other media, only collides with an obscure DOS game that is a DOOM(1993) clone to my knowledge.

Next week I intend to begin work on my worst aspect of any game development, namely "marketing". Of this, I intend to set up an itch.io page, work on small development log videos demonstrating and explaining different effects to have educational value, and set up a mail list. As for game content, next week I will work on adding the 4th weapon, the Rifle, adjust the zombies to leap at the player, and time-willing, create a new AI capable of shooting at the player. The latter shouldn't be too difficult as a result of my data-oriented programming method.

This week's plan file is listed below.

Sometimes you have a week where you try to solve a complex design and implementation problem, and you realise exactly why the current standards for this is what they are. Namely the design problem of a seamless multi-floor top-down level. The current approach I see used a lot is to split it up into multiple levels which isn't seamless, but solves a lot of problems, and allows level developers not to work within the constraints of the world(this brings issues for networking, hence why I don't use it). Another solution is teleportation, which would in theory work, but would be very jarring and probably liable to be buggy. I suspect this is just a core problem of top-down games. Games such as Hyper Light Drifter and Hotline Miami solve this exactly in the ways I just listed. As for implementation issues which are more technical, one has to consider collisions, lighting and rendering on all layers- and since this will feature multiplayer deathmatch, how to consider, but also the graphical "pop-in" from handling multiple layers. I suppose an explanation of my solution may be in order.

All notable entities which will change layers have a layer variable. When they collide with a height trigger, that layer changes to what the height trigger is set to. The game will render and handle player collisions for all things on the current player's layer, the layer above and the layer below. This range of 3 instead of 1 is to prevent things getting stuck inside of each other when passing through a height trigger. You would also need to consider any baked lights that have to bake their lights prior to gameplay, as well as how players interact with items and enemies, as well as spawning mechanics for layers. In short, it's possible but my cost-benefit analysis of this problem suggests it is not a problem worth working on. It is effectively a feature creep at this point. This level design space is also sufficiently well explored within 3D games.

I have left my solution within my code in case I choose to explore this problem at a later date.

* Proper addition of a layering system with heights and render layers. Means we can add triggers to change layers and render only relevant layers
* Layering system created with proper adjustment for the light baking. It recalculates all lights when layer changes
* Layering trigger. Can now switch floors
* Instead of lots of sprites, now just render a repeat texture in a polygon. Texture alignment is still important here though
* Redid the main menu. No longer looks terrible
* Added volume slider
* Added proper sound effect system for sounds that are created in the world on the fly
* Extended volume slider to also handle music and sound effects
* Main menu title graphic
* Added shotgun and shotgun ammo
* Created deathmatch map
* Added sound effects for railgun, pistol, shotgun when firing

+ Now only use 1 Light2D ever. Should probably use the profiler to see how costly this is, since I'm aware Light2Ds in Godot bring with them a performance cost.
+ Massive optimization of all walls. No longer constantly calculating distance to player
+ Lighting animation effect fixed. Light animations are now possible without lag
+ Lighting no longer recalcuates all lights when layer changes. Instead it generates and saves its baked light and only renders when allowed.
+ Fixed bakedlights using occluders
+ Discovered a massively easier and more efficient method for handling floors by repeating textures within a 2D polygon. Massive reduction in nodes, still compatible with using sprites
+ Clear inventory on death multiplayer

Lore Terminal without an existing file will crash.
Singleplayer Death Statistics
Refactor all code to align with my code style standard
Teleporter render layer inocrrect

Helleglitch Plan 2

Next week I will release Version 0.2.

Major improvements across the board. No binaries this week. I will make a binary for next week. Next week will see more features added.

* Multiplayer deathmatch. Players have properly synced positions and rotations
* Mutliplayer deathmatch weapon firing is properly done.
* Items have interact indicator
* Lore Terminals have interact indicator
* Lighting can now have animation effects, so changing light size and RGBA colour. Strobe effect put in
* Death system for singleplayer has been added
* Multiplayer lobby created
* Deathmatch synchronised start has been created.
* Deathmatch scoring and kill messages
* Deathmatch death and respawn system set up
* Deathmatch game timer
* Deathmatch scoreboard, and death information set up
* Deathmatch end of game timer, that goes back to the lobby for more games
* Spawnpoint for guaranteed items. Can be set to respawn after a time, or not respawn at all
* Added railgun with railgun ammo and glow effects

+ Map system has been fixed. The background was preventing it before
+ Tutorial Teleporter fixed
+ Multiplayer disconnection has been fixed
+ Map system ported for deathmatch. Player spawns set up
+ LOS System ported for multiplayer deathmatches
+ Player drop system ported
+ Player throw system ported
+ Fixed Baked Lighting ignoring walls after hitting an interactable object
+ Deathmatch no longer has terminal screen at start
+ Many yielded idle frames have been removed and replaced with signals
+ Explosive barrels now explode nearby other explosive barrels
+ Deathmatch input in pause screen fixed
+ Fixed deathmatch double damage bug
+ Fixed issue with lobby being unable to joing after game ends
+ Major crash involving the Line of sight and Light Occluders fixed. This is MAJOR because this was a crash which provided no error logs or report

Lore Terminal without an existing file will crash.
Singleplayer Death Statistics
Lighting animation effects cause lag. Look into it. Suspect it's because of a lot of draw calls. Suspect it'll be fixed if square wave used to minimise draw calls
Refactor all code to align with my code style standard
For sound effects, consider making unique ONHIT and ONKILL soundeffect by making it bassier.

Helleglitch 0.1 (XRAY)

I've been working on a game in the Godot engine called Helleglitch. Check out the page I made about it here.

Below lists this week's .plan file regarding the game.

RisingThumb .plan file for week ending 28/07/2020

This week has been satisfactory. I have practically quadrupled if not quintupled my work output, by adhering to a simple plan of avoiding social media and social interactions during the weekdays. This isn't much of a surprise to me considering social media drains time. I might ultimately suffer for taking this approach, but I think ultimately it's the correct approach as I current see very few benefits from social media. It's a worse form of media compared to classical text, playing games, videos or just movies. The details ultimately aren't important here. Prior to this point in the game's development the game saw only an elementary loot and AI system, a single AI and a level generation system and a buggy lighting system. I still need to produce a lot more game assets however, which will not be very enjoyable task. The design of a .plan file is * for implemented features, + for fixed bugs, and no prefix for bugs that have been noted.

* Items can now be thrown. They bounce. Their velocities and damages are derived from stack size
* Telepathic Mapping stim has been added
* Loot Tables and loot generation has been properly introduced. Uses predetermined in data loot tables for that level
* AI Dictionary has been added. Many AI can be used. Each using a source scene to determine the AI script
* AI Tables and AI generation has been properly introduced. Uses predetermined in data AI tables for the level.
* Explosives have been added. Explosive barrels and Explosive Zombies are in now. Explosive weapons? Stims exploding on throw?
* Particle system properly added. Particles are now independant of their creator, so multiple can be used
* Crude Glitch shader used. Acts as a fake screen shake, so 2 birds with one stone
* Made rundead and explodead textures
* Zombie main body textures have been implemented
* Lore text system implemented. Needs triggers though
* Lore system trigger implemented. Used currently in Tutorial. Should be extended for random lore texts depending on floor?
* Tutorial has been added(With the tutorial texts)
* CPU-Based Line of Sight Shadow casting for relevant walls within 200 units has been added
* Light2D has been mostly removed with the exception of the player's light. Replaced with baking the lights. Done because Light2D is horribly inefficient. Ends up with ~50-60FPS on a browser. I blame Light2D.

+ Fixed issues with explosives not using the proper values
+ Slight efficiency optimisation with main body textures. Preloaded prior to use
+ Reload can be spammed.
+ LOS shadow should
+ Left click in Terminals triggering an item use
+ Tutorial Teleporter needs to be fixed

Items, Lore terminals need indicator that they can be interacted with.
Lore Terminal without an existing file will crash.
Baked Lighting has some issues with large sizes.

Moved my system to Linux

I have gotten around to moving my main system over to Linux. I am running Arch Linux, with default config files provided by Luke's LARBS project. I have modified a fair amount of the configs provided in the mean time, moving from its default music player to cmus.

I have also gotten Aseprite, Godot, Steam and Discord setup as well. With regards to both Discord and Steam, they don't play the nicest with DWM but they play well enough. I will need to make adjustments to a few batch scripts I was using previously to batch export source aseprite files, however that should be a quick fix.

I have also set up a proper game design document for the project I have chosen to title The Bermuda Theory, primarily based on its location. I will probably talk more about its development later on, especially with respect to its level generation, as Godot's Scene system makes procedural generation by means of chunks or modules particularly easy and incredibly powerful due to the tree-based nature of it.

Website Slight Remake

I have remade components of this website and improved how I handle a lot of things on it. Lets talk about them.

- Firstly, you'll have noticed I now I have drop down menus as my headers that take you to relevant pages. I have chosen to do this, as it achieves a good balance of simplicity and minimalism, limits what media will be rendered for the end-user to make sure it's not a bloated obese page, and to achieve the accessibility of most information of content easily found and within only 2 clicks of links.

- I have created an extendable system for HTML Includes in files. This was because, I want to include some information on every(most) page, such as the Headers. This should allow me to streamline the inclusion of content. This isn't relevant to the end-user as it I do not waste time or resources computing this on the client-side with Javascript, or the Server-Side with its equivalents. For this, I chose to write a shell script to preprocess all HTML files and handle includes as relevant. You can find these include marks in the source HTML still, as comments.

- A planned increase in information where relevant for particular pages, and a plan for some new pages. I am considering pages for recommended reading and viewing, with some elaboration on WHY it is recommended. I also plan on adding a page for other websites worthy of note. These would be friends because I'm biased to support them, and people I found to create and include content of a highly educational nature.

Website plan and future posts

This will be a short post. I am planning to greatly reduce the frequency of my blog posts on account of the content. This means, unless I think the post has some merit or use to other people, I will not be posting here. It will also mean the frequency of status updates or even any .plan files will be very low.

On this note of status. I have been experimenting with 3D in Godot and come to understand it is capable, though I can't judge just how capable yet, as I have done no benchmarking. I have studied a bit about how to use Blender, and how to use Trenchbroom, and how to use Qodot. As a result, I may work on producing some form of quake-like game or experiment.

I have also begun my studies for the third and probably final year at University to get a degree, which means the dedicated time for my projects will likely go down.

I am probably going to write a bit about my workflow for Godot 3D games since it seems unusual. Certainly non-standard. As for the website, the archival project is still in the works. I have created the main page for it, but I have yet to gather the individual content for the archive.

Thanks for reading.

Want a free shirt kids?

I will recommend people participate in this, not to spam open source repositories, but because there's no system in place for checking if you just make a new github repository and make 4 valid but lame pull requests. It's literally a free shirt.

It's interesting that free shirts is an incentive that people will use to spam public FOSS repositories. I have my suspicions on what it should be considered. I would consider it(alongside Google Summer of Code) a mildly effective distributed denial of service attack. Distributed in many people making low quality pull requests. Denial of service by preventing quality pull requests being seen, discussed and merged. It may also deny service to the use of issues. For Free Open Source Software hosted over Github, this is not good. For hacker culture it sets a concerningly low bar, especially as hacker culture is commonly intrinsically motivated as opposed to extrinsically motivated by rewards. I will not be surprised if some genuine pull request gets marked as spam and invalid simply due to this spike.

Talking more on why this is interesting. By a search, we can see in a single day, over a thousand related issues have been made. I am expecting that some of these developers are unaware of where and why this surge in traffic has been experienced. The HTML Standard is subject to these troubles as well as the website for phpMyAdmin.

Now for the real meat and potatoes of this. This event proves that any corporation with the capital can initiate such an event and likely get away with it. In the case of digitalocean it is not strongly targeted towards any particular repository except those who willingly participate with a "digitalocean" issue tag. For political, or financial purposes, a company or corporation could very well target a specific set of repositories denying them service, at least over Github. How useful is this? Consider that one could target an essential service or nearly essential service that powers a lot of websites such as openssl. Although a fork exists call libressl, if this was timed appropiately, the backlash and fallout would not be insignificant. While I do not think it is the specific interests of any companies to behave in such a manner, I pose the example to demonstrate how it could be used as an attack on a particular repository.

So now I will present the solutions and fixes that remain available. Firstly I shall acknowledge that Digital Ocean are aware this is a problem, but their solution is akin to shrugging off the problem(as we have established, this is a denial of service problem).

- The first solution is one for an organisation such as Github, as Digital Ocean are reliant on their API. Simply deny them use of the API. This will by extension deny them the measures required to validate and invalidate whether a person is owed a reward, and would be a major problem for them to solve. The issue with this, is that it sets a dangerous precedent as such behaviour is not(to my knowledge) covered within the Github terms of service.

- The other option is to move away from Github and towards a different way of hosting git repositories. Either by owning and hosting a git server, or by using one of the many community made git services such as Gitlab. This is also not thoroughly effective, as Github is widely used as opposed to its alternatives. Such a change is similar to why the Linux kernel sees few new developers as the discussions take place within mailing lists.

- It is NOT a fix to email and complain about this to Digital Ocean. They have already expressed and established the extent to which they will go. Perhaps emailing Github may render a change, although it's unlikely.

- If you were considering making a low quality pull request, I would suggest you just make a public repository and cheat the 4 pull requests as their systems for checking and verifying and their bar for quality seems low.

At the very least, it must be said. From my perspective this has been the best joke I've seen in the last week. Some people were even making Pull requests on the 30th of September over this. This does prove however that Git in general is vulnerable to denial of service by poor or low quality pull requests.

UTC The Empire Archival

This post requires an introduction, and as such I hope to do it well here. UTC or better known as The UNKNOWN [?] Trading Company, is a group of players that originate from Counter Strike(1.6 I believe) that moved on to play Minecraft and then eventually in 2012 settled on a Minecraft Server called MineZ. MineZ is basically DayZ if it was ported to Minecraft and wasn't as buggy as DayZ. In concept it is a very cool idea, and it generally works better for the casual player. The UNKNOWN [?] Trading Company, as the name suggests set out to do Trade Runs in the south. In doing so, they developed tactics and a unique culture and community unlike anything else on the server at the time, a lot of this spearheaded by the Directoire(Directors) of the clan. How I came to be involved with them was in the Summer of 2016. I stuck around for a good four years and I enjoyed a lot of my time with the UTC. Nowadays, I'm no longer in their discord out of choice(on account of it being a major distraction for me), but I am still very active on the UTC Subreddit.

Project

The project in question here is a full archive of all News Articles. When I was new to UTC and still sometimes to this day, I like to look at the older News Articles as you can gain some insights into the formation of the clan. It also wasn't impossible either. In 2018 I had attempted something similar though my efforts were cut short by the lack of a proper website to host the contents, and my lack of knowledge of external APIs to gather the Subreddit data for these news articles.

Another part of the motivation is my desire to become competent with Shell Scripting, and other glue tools like sed. It's my opinion that a developer doesn't need to overcomplicate anything, and can just use Shell Scripts or other Scripts(See Python or Javascript) to handle generation of blog pages or other typicaly "complicated" tasks.

On my main page under the extra information, you will find a direct link to the full archive. In this list you will find both an archive link to the markdown text converted to HTML, as well as a full URL link to the original reddit post. The motivation for this being that subreddits can get taken down or quarantined(and given the sometimes dicey nature of content on the subreddit, this isn't at all impossible), though I will say it is unlikely given it has only some 200 Subscribers.

You can find this full script yourself if you wish to generate this yourself. It is uncommented, but only 15 lines long so you should be able to understand it. The link to this code is here. As the observant Shell Scripter will note, it is indeed a POSIX compliant Shell Script, which means it can be run in other Shells besides Bash. The observant Shell Scripter will also note 3 depedencies. wget, which if you don't have just stop reading this and evaluate your life decisions, jq, which is a JSON parser that can be used in the Shell, and Markdown. Markdown just converts text in markdown format to its corresponding HTML format. It's very useful for this specific case of archiving every single News Article and retaining the formatting used- though it's doesn't cover the Reddit Markdown Specification which contains slightly more features than the regular Markdown Specification. An example of this can be found in the first issue, with the tiny text. My solution was... it was too minor to be worth any time, and barely affects readability of the news anyway.

As for jq... One major performance improvement in this script remains. I could use Streams instead of parsing the whole file which would be much more efficient and effective. The reason this wasn't done is because the documentation for parsing JSON with streams is difficult to read and understand for jq, however as the file size of the JSON is very small, it only takes about 20 seconds for the parsing in the script, and variable time for the wget operation. If you have a better solution, feel free to send me the source code of your better shell script to my email aaronleonard@risingthumb.xyz. Also feel free to send me suggestions there too.

Final notes

This is just to show that a static website can be used as a full archival system for a regular clan newspaper posted on the subreddit. One might ask "Hey, does that really count as you need to be there to actually run the code?". To affirm this, just set up a cronjob to once a week or so update the archive.

The most likely way this script will break, is if the API I am doing wget requests to breaks. If that happens, the saving grace is that the parsing will almost definitely fail and the script will just not run

So if you own a site(or even a github.io site), I highly recommend experimenting with using Shell Scripts for managing that site, and using either FTP or GIT to update it. There's plenty of ways to automate execution of Shell Scripts, git and ftp. For a personal site like this, it's more than enough to handle all changing aspects like this.

Tools, and Linux Information

I have expanded the "Linux, Programs and Tools" information with greatly expanded detail, including my specific hardware. Also if any readers have a request for any of my config files, let me know. I can provide them. I don't provide them by default as that incurs a maintenance cost.

With regards to Quiver, I am still working on it, and have made significant changes but you will see them later this week.

The UNKNOWN [?] Archival Project

In a short span of time, collosal quantities of data and information has been lost. This extends to everything. Great civilizations, our past way of life, and the way of life of our ancestors. The cultural and symbolic icons. A great deal of this information and data has been lost. In recent history, even as recent as 40 years ago, a huge amount of data has been lost. Software on Floppy Disks, as the hardware is not designed to last so long. Discussions over platforms such as Usenet, BBS Boards and Forums. Even many old social media platforms have gone extinct. It would be a shame to lose such a great quantity and great quality of this information and data, but even the task of archival carries a cost of storage. The storage medium, and the gathering of this data. I believe it is the responsibility of each person to at least attempt to archive something, or to contribute to other archives. Without this attempt for archival... Future historians, scholars, or even just interested and fascinated individuals will be disappointed by our lack of effort in any form of archiival.

With this said, I am setting out to find and archive as much relevant and important information with regards to the UNKNOWN [?] Clan. I have already begun this project in a smaller manner, but this blog post will discuss the technology, software and plan for all this archival.

The technology

It is worth taking a moment first to evaluate the technology. The vast majority of data and information relevant to the UNKOWN [?] Clan takes the form of binary data, and this binary data can take the form of text information, text information on Forums or Reddit, or even on older platforms such as Raidcall, Skype and Discord. As such it is important to establish a set of 4 conditions that will be used to evaluate if some data or information is worthwhile preserving in this archive.

- Relatively public information. Elaborating on this, I refer to information that can be gathered within its different forms by a member of the UNKNOWN [?] Clan.

- Non-confidential information(or information scrubbed of confidential detail). This is to protect all involved parties, as well as to respect the privacy of the Clan.

- Originating, or relating to the UNKNOWN [?] Clan. This would simply be about deeming the origin and relation of any information in this archive.

- Deemed to hold merit. This is a necessity due to time and storage constraints, and so that certain information can prioritised for archival.

Elaborating on this, I will take a moment to discuss the future-proofing of this technology. I will use APIs where relevant, and I will attempt to use data forms that will likely be around for a great period of time. Of this form is plain HTML files, plain Media files, and so on. I will avoid using any Database software, and a lot of the data will be formatted and archived using some Shell Scripts, primarily in POSIX-Compliant Shell, but possibly some in Bash. I will also provide the raw data and information files zipped for people to download and make personal backups of. The greatest vulnerability in all this is its centralisation on this server, and to tackle that, a lot of the data will be mirrored with my physical machine. This should render this archive future-proof(save for abandonment of File Standards, or loss of software to read the Files), and destruction-resistant(save for nobody making personal backups and damage to the main server and my main machine.)

Arguably the biggest issue overall will be one of permission, respect of intellectual property and copyright, as well as giving credit and acknowledging the copyright of the individuals involved.

Current Priority for Archival

- Chronology, events, important members and information relating to pre-2012 UNKNOWN [?] Clan. THIS IS THE HIGHEST PRIORITY AS THERE IS A SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE WITH RECORDS OF THESE EVENTS. Firsthand accounts of events and information, files, and ANY media related to this is of very high importance, as not many records exist for this time period.

- The Empire News. Mostly complete, needs .zip to be made of all individual news.

- List and archive of notable texts with regards to the UNKNOWN [?] Clan. This will include the various training manuals, as well as books and notable essays.

- List of The Empire Images of the Year hopefully with firsthand accounts from the image source, and context.

- If time allows, reformat the training manuals books and notable essays into 2 alternatives. Plaintext, and LaTeX.

- If storage allows, a catalog of distinct and notable Videos relating to the UNKNOWN [?] Clan.

How you can help

- Send me any files and medias relating to any major or minor events.

- If you have a firsthand account of a notable event, feel free to send me it.

- Download and hold onto any .zip files relating to this, to protect the archive from destruction.

-If you want to support my efforts, feel free to donate. The main home, or the about me page of this website will feature this information. Your support goes directly into improving the hardware of the server.

Social Media is Garbage(but you already knew that already)

There really isn't much to say. I have for a long time now, deactivated my Facebook account, Twitter Account and deleted my Reddit Account. I still have a LinkedIn account I should get around to deleting sometime. The only Social Medias I use is Discord as its functionality as a Chat Application is quite good and useful, though I have made a video covering why it is pretty awful(I have found a good client to use for this. Cordless). I also use YouTube but only in the most restricted sense, I just use its RSS feeds and Newsboat for the channels I care for. Regardless, I feel the need to bring up the reasons for why not to use Social Media. It's an industry where the commodity is your attention and data, and it's sold to the highest bidder(advertisers). They employ a great deal of psychological tricks to keep you hooked in to consuming useless impossible to apply and amateurish content. You also have very limited control over what you see. Quite simply in one phrase.

Social Media is not freedom respecting.

Leave it and you'll gain the benefits of a non-user who doesn't compulsively check Social Media. Focus for projects and tasks that matter to you. Boredom to motivate you to consume meaningful, useful or engaging media. A greater appreciation for social contact and discussions with real people. The "Boomer" takes on Social Media aren't wrong, they are just not brainwashed and zucced. A point on privacy should be noted, as none of these respect your privacy, however a lot of people prefer convenience over privacy, and are all too willing to give up freedoms and rights in exchange for legalese outlawing actions made by people who inadvertently offend them(and invoke their rights of freedom). A person who claims no freedoms, and submits; they all deserve to have it taken from it.

Just remind yourself, Social Media isn't freedom respecting, and aim to get out of those terrible places. Save your self-pity over wasted time, for other users. They'll need it. Imageboards and forums service as a better alternative to social media, as they are freedom-respecting and generally privacy-respecting.

But you already knew all this!

New Website Look

The website has a new look. I have also gone ahead and updated a lot of the materials there too. Have a look around if you want. Basically anything that I thought was objectively garbage or quite useless I removed from the site. I might make an extra HTML file for extra information, since there's quite a bit of information I want to port over from the old site.

I also have a new email server set up on my VPS. Send me mail!

Also about the old blog posts, I will have a look through them and see if there's any worth transcribing over to this blog. If there's none, I will leave them buried, since most of them were not worthwhile to me, and likely to anyone.

As for the game I'm making, I've completed the overall Level Generation algorithm. Now I need to make some items, get dead-ends sorted out, get an adapting AI sorted and then I'll just need some UI for Inventory. I plan to have like 4-5 items for this minimal build just to see what it's like.

I might make posts on Reddit about this game continuing from minimal build onwards, and I will also likely discuss Design issues. I am building on top of the basis given by Teleglitch, and want to expand on it, but also solve its Design Issues. There were a selection I observed in Teleglitch: How it didn't respect player's time, How the difficulty curve was insane, How it was inaccessable in a lot of ways, and How the time to death is very quick. The tutorial it provides I find to be lacking especially in regards to very important information such as the value of armour against bullets.

More Site Stuff

I did a bit more modification to the website. I tried out a selection of colour schemes, and settled on this one. I also embraced 2 lines of Javascript for the randomised banner for the main page. In the past it used to be that clicking the banner did something, but I think I'll just leave it there for the aesthetic of it.

Happenings

A week ago I said I would do some videos. I... haven't. In the meanwhile, I have been using Godot. I have now decided that each week I will release a build of Bermuda Glitch.

In other news, I have also made a 4chan client for browsing threads and posts without images.

If you haven't subscribed to my YouTube channel, I recommend going and doing that, since I will be doing a few videos next week.

Gopher

Gopher seems to me a very viable and very capable protocol for serving information over the internet. There's still a lot of very good reasons to use HTTP and HTTPS over Gopher, however I'd like to recommend anyone who knows about Gopher to check it out. No trackers, no ads, nothing of that sort. It's just plaintext that can be browsed, and ways to include files. It reminds me a bit of BBS boards with how ASCII-dependant it is. I'd like to think it also supports Unicode(UTF-8) however I have not tried or looked into it.

Those interested in browsing gopherspace, and you're using chrome(or similar browser), try using the Burrow addon[1]. The reason you have to use an addon is because most modern web browsers no longer support the Gopher Protocol. For the optimal experience, I recommend using a terminal and using the "lynx" browser. I don't believe w3m works, but I may be wrong.

For those interested in setting up a Gopherhole, it's easier than setting up a website! It effectively just serves plaintext and files. Information can be found here[2]. Literally anyone on a Linux or Unix system can set up and run a gopherhole, even off of their own PC. I imagine you might be able to make it work on a Windows System. Especially with all the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" stuff, but I am not educated on that.

Go forward! Make a gopherhole! Browse the Gopherspace! Reject terrible standards!

References:

Git Repositories

I have changed the layout of the site slightly once again. I have also added Git Repositories that you can find under the Extra Information section.

I also accidentally messed up some files to do with blogging hence the date discrepancy for them.

EDIT: I have removed this for now. I may add it back later.

Generating Changelogs With Git Log

Git has a command called git log. With it, you can get Hash, date, author, tag and commit message data, and probably more. I wrote a short bash script to take my git log and write it to a changelog.md as well as commiting it with the changes made prior. You can find this under my github profile under the name "CommitChangelogs"

Exporting lots of aseprite files

I made a quick video showcasing Aseprite's exporting capabilities and talking about how I batch export a lot of .aseprite files. I mainly use this so I can touch up sprites then just run it so I don't have to open each file manually to export it. As such, probably useful to game developers, particularly in connecting the programmer and artist sides of the development coin better(So a programmer doesn't have to reimport files, and an artist doesn't need a developer to update pictures).

Exams Finished

My exams have finished. All of them were 24 hour Open Book exams so by their nature they were quite easy to do. Regardless, this isn't much of a post anyway. So I will bring this post back around to a few topics.

Firstly, I have set up my Dotfiles to use git and GNU Stow for easy deployment across my Desktop and Thinkpad. This isn't such a big deal, however I have some personal data stored in that git repo, that I am considering seperating it out into a few repositories. One for DWM/DWMBlocks/DMenu/ST source code, One for my shell scripts, and a few for more general applications I that don't contain personal information.

Secondly, I have also opted to use sftp for no particular reason over rsync for putting files on website's file directory. As of current, I leave this password protected, however I think I will probably change this soon enough.

Thirdly, I am considering completely removing the GitRepos stuff on this website, as it adds another element to consider when using this Site with projects. This is just because I have don't have a satisfactory setup for handling my projects. What is satisfactory you ask? Something that has a low maintenance cost and a low project-setup cost, and easy for an end user to use. What I had currently set up did not satisfy either property to me.

Also, I want it to be mirrored across Gitlab, Github and a personal Git site. The only reason for this is to make it usable regardless of preferred git platform.

In regards to game development, I have done nothing there, but this will change next week, as I will have very little to occupy my time other than reading a bit, Terraria and more system modification.

Finally, in regards to video uploads, I haven't found anything I wanted to talk about so I haven't talked about anything. I will probably do a few new videos. I have in mind the following topics:

University and why it's a waste for the common person(Targetted at Americans, with EU as a subtarget)

Godot non-tile based module-based random dungeon generation.

A video targetting the attitudes of a lot of people in Tech(masterhackers, tooSmartTooLearn, AppleCultists, WindowsNormies, LinuxEvangelists)

A short series on Websites, Web hosts, Domains and setting up a simple static blog with shell script.

A brief video on Tmux as a power tool.

A final video talking about MineZ and why it died.

If any of these videos would be of PARTICULAR INTEREST TO YOU, let me know. I would rather make videos that interest the common person. Email me or just DM me if you have my contacts.

Email and Taskwarrior

I've properly set up neomutt so I can actually send and receive email now. That's a small thing. On another note, I've been learning a little bit of TMUX(Terminal Multiplexer), and now I have modified my setup so cmus is detatched and running in the background. I have also combined DMenu, and a script using Tmux to bring up a menu of taskwarrior(3 Panels effectively, 1 for burndown daily chart, 1 for most urgent tasks and 1 for interaction using taskwarrior).

I might make a video on taskwarrior if I find it to be very useful. We will see if I get substantial use out of it.