There’s a lot I could complain about, but I’ll try to keep it short, because I want to focus on some more pleasant things instead. I could start with all the empty-headed progressives who insist that “this is the opportunity to start doing things better” or to “think about what’s really important in life”. It’s not an opportunity, it’s a disaster. Sometimes there’s just not a silver lining. We annihilated the global economy and plunged millions of people into hunger and poverty for nothing.
Children are going to die of hunger, because you were afraid of the flu, after you saw a video on Twitter of some fitness instructor/instagram model coughing in the hospital, or a crying nurse/narcissist (what’s the difference at this point?) who quit her job (on the first day she began working, but she doesn’t mention that). The least you could do is to own up to it and to acknowledge that this is all a terrible mistake, instead of crafting some narrative where your hysteria is actually going to help create a better world.
It’s an insult to pretend that this is somehow a perfect opportunity to tackle climate change or other progressive pet peeves. If you seriously need a virus to figure out you don’t need to fly to the other side of the world to attend a business meeting or that “family and caring about each other is what’s really important in life”, you should have been dropped into a volcano long ago.
Also, it’s blatant classism when progressives complain about “budget flights to sunny destinations” that can now be eliminated by making government aid to airlines dependent on eliminating those flights. Yes, average dumb proles people like to fly to Spain to lay in the sun, bourgeois progressives like to go backpacking in New Zealand to “find yourself” or take Ayahuasca in Costa Rica. I think every single one of our problems would be solved in we would simply organize a genocide against people who went backpacking in New Zealand.
As I have said before to people, I am a fatalist. Humans have the choice between adjusting to nature, or forcing nature to bend to our will. We’ve chosen the latter. Self-replicating genetic material emerged that kills people and we respond by locking people up inside their homes in an attempt to slow down its spread. Virologists and epidemiologists in academic ivory towers now decide whether you should keep the windows of your car open or closed.
Viruses tend to spread when there are too many weak people. Whether due to hunger, obesity, lack of exercise (like when the government prohibits you from going to the gym or your sport club), genetic problems, or old age, a sick population is one in which viruses will spread and become increasingly lethal. Either we end up sacrificing healthy people for sick people by ending all social contact and accept that this will become the “new normal” (this won’t be the last virus), or we bring an end to this ridiculous war against nature. A culture that sacrifices its youth for its elderly has embarked on collective suicide.
But if it wasn’t obvious yet, the purpose of this blog is not to solve the world’s problems, but to entertain a select group of people, including yours sincerely. I want to spend less time complaining about problems I have no influence on and more time thinking about stuff that makes me happy.
Where do I even start?
Art
Lately I’ve gained a greater appreciation for modern art and architecture. The reason is probably because it’s more focused on the expression of an individual’s own vision, instead of some collective cultural narrative. There are gems out there if you know what to look for, but it generally requires an entirely different state of mind to appreciate than more traditional art and architecture.
I’ve grown fond of Francesca Woodman recently. She became famous through her long-exposure shots of young women, including herself, that take on a ghostly appearance. Most of them seem to have been taken in abandoned buildings. I’ll share a few of my favorites.
I’m sure that some people will say that they don’t get it, that it’s too bleak, that it’s satanic, degenerate, anti-life and all the other stuff people tend to say about modern art. It’s the same thing they say about Marina Abramovic. All art is an attempt by mammals with oversized brains to cope with the human condition. Art is like therapy, but unlike therapy it actually works. When you don’t get it or don’t like it, consider yourself lucky. When it comes to Mrs Woodman, she didn’t grow old. The eyes give it away, don’t they?
<3<3<3
Music
We have done Witch House numerous times now. Go here if you want Witch House.
First some obvious marriage material.
One more honorable mention:
My other fav I’ve apparently never mentioned before is Poppy:
It’s in poor taste and shallow to be obsessed with money, so we rebel against it and bash that sort of mentality. That’s for example Fortunate Son, by Creedance Clearwater Revival. This is layer one irony: They sing about how some people are intrinsically superior and more important because of their wealthy families, so poor people like the singer needs to fight wars on their behalf. Poppy in this video, is being post-ironic: It looks like it’s ironic, but it’s not. We can almost hear her saying: “Oh you wanna save the world? How cute! Have fun living in your moldy tiny house eating dumpster-dived turnips. Yes, I’m wealthy and I’m perfectly happy about it, go eat your turnips.”
Also, old Poppy is extremely surreal. Modern numetal Poppy is comparatively boring, which leads me to another thing I need to explain. A lot of people complain that Poppy and Mars Argo were both being abused by Titanic Sinclair. The same thing happened to Alice Glass from Crystal Castles, by Ethan Kath. The problem that people don’t comprehend is that you can’t have the good without the bad.
Titanic Sinclair is a modern day Andy Warhol, he is the real creative genius behind these artists. I get the impression that Poppy barely understands Poppy. She seems to think that it’s being random and surreal, rather than a critical reflection on the concept of fame.
Sinclair is also clearly mentally ill, Poppy complains that he would manipulate her by threatening suicide. Society tries to marginalize people like that, especially when they’re male, but these are the people who are responsible for creating your culture. Good artists, are not nice, friendly, stable people. In life we have to accept the good with the bad.
This video is basically the equivalent of a Windows 98 Acid trip. It’s very eclectic, which is typical of poor art, combining things that don’t belong together. However, she’s aware of that and does it anyway. It’s thus intentionally alienating.
“No you’re just old it’s an egirl ripoff”
That’s like, your opinion man.
I don’t think I’ve ever shared this one before, the anthem of the narcissist:
Save it for when you’re manic.
I think I’ve covered Chelsea Wolfe before a few times now, but the new album is really really really good, for reasons I’ll explain.
To start with, there’s music that’s going to hit you differently if you’ve had a high dose of psychedelics, versus if you haven’t. Consider the Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. Before I “got” it I thought it was rather boring normiecore. When I listened to it on LSD, I “got” it. The fingerprints of LSD are all over it and it’s well known that they took ridiculous amounts of LSD to write their music. Something similar is going on with this song:
I really think you’re going to appreciate this one more if you’ve ever had a high dose of mushrooms.
Second, the music videos intentionally embrace an Americana aesthetic. Take this one for example:
And this one:
What’s going on here is the aestheticization of smalltown America. The reason that’s interesting is because on a cursory look, smalltown America is not pretty, it’s fake and banal.
Americans portray themselves as devout Christians, but it’s a very shallow facade, almost as fake as the Roman columns of their McMansions. We all know the nation started out as a rebellion against a monarch, in an era when people in Europe thought of monarchs as meant to reign over us by the grace of God.
So what this type of music does is that it shows the American surface aesthetics of devout Christianity, while implicitly signaling the Luciferian American attitude of hyperindividualism and rebellion against authority and social norms on which America is actually founded. King Dude has been doing something very similar for a while now, as has Colter Wall, although Colter Wall is more subtle about it.
ASMR
I need some ASMR for when I’m depressed, anxious or stressed out. What works best for me is simply footage of a car driving in the rain, on a dark cloudy day. For me it’s not a sexual thing, hearing girly whispering voices just annoys me. Rather it seems to be a way for my brain to deal with overstimulation. On a cloudy rainy day I would love to just sit somewhere outside. Most of these type of videos have excessively loud noise, what I seek out is basically a background hum. So far, I’ve found just one guy who gets it exactly right for me:
This one right here is a work of genius, because it slowly turns dark:
I saved the best for the last
There’s an artist who is pretty explicit about the fact that his real message is concealed somewhere between different layers of irony. That artist is jreg. This deserves an explanation. Basically jreg is a young guy who makes videos in defense of political extremism. Not left or right wing extremism, but extremism itself, regardless of variety. That’s how he got a platform. You need a somewhat consistent theme to gather an audience and have the algorithms know what to do with your material. Jreg ended up figuring out how to play that game, so he got to the point where you end up with a self-sustaining communtiy and the rest is history.
So, why should you care? Well, what makes these videos interesting is the fact that there’s a running red line through his video’s that he has been suicidal for a while. This isn’t a joke either, it really seems that his creativity is a product of being bipolar. I think this is really interesting because there’s a strong overlap between young men who adhere to extremist ideas and young men who are severely depressed. In practice a lot of his stuff is going to be very therapeutic for a lot of young men, in a way that mainstream TV shows before the Internet era could never be.
His videos would have resonated with me in a way ten years ago that they don’t today, because yours sincerely now is a bit too old for political extremism and now has constant access to psychedelics and cannabis without having to fear his parents finding out about it, but I’m going to post two of the best and most hilarious ones here nonetheless:
If 2020 had its own anthem, it would be this.
Surreal enough for a honorable mention.
Video games
I have mentioned Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead a few times now, if you still haven’t given it a shot you’re beyond redemption by now. Today we’re going to cover simulation games that I used to play a lot when I was young. I need to start with two very similar games that I used to play as a teenager and still occasionally play for a bit. They are as following:
-Speculation
-Wall Street Raider
“What the fuck is that ugly atrocity, this looks like filling in my tax forms but less fun!”
Yes I know. Hear me out. Human beings play games, to prepare for the real world. That’s why children spend so much time playing. Young dogs hold play-fights with each other, adult dogs barely do that. I’m bored of most of the games I played as a child, but this right here is a game with real-world relevance. At some point in your life you’ll (hopefully) have sufficient savings to want to start investing in the stock market, so that you can eventually stop working altogether.
“I just buy index funds, some dude on Reddit taught me that you can’t beat the market”
Jump off a cliff. Seriously. If you really can’t see the SP 500 is in a bubble caused primarily by a small number of tech companies with ridiculous valuations, I can’t help you.
“Everything is going to collapse, buy gold/silver/bitcoin!”
Go back to Zerohedge, I can’t help you.
Where were we. If you want to beat the market, a good place to start out is The Little Book that Beats the Market. If you avoid any of your money ending up in ridiculous tech/biotech bubbles and follow some very simple principles, you’ll do better than the SP 500.
Now the thing is, you’re not just going to yolo 50k into the market, unless you’re an idiot. This is the sort of stuff you want to toy with, gain an intuitive understanding of. I can recommend playing Wall Street Raider and its spinoff, Speculator. And this isn’t just a learning experience. It’s really fun and the guy who made it has a really nice humorous cynical understanding of how capitalism functions, having worked in the belly of the beast for decades himself. I went ahead and purchased it.
I know that some of you want to overthrow capitalism and implement utopia, or expect that it won’t matter anymore because the methane clathrates will be released within the next few years, but personally I would already be quite happy if I could simply stop working at a young age.
One more thing. If you read /r/wallstreetbets and take anything you see there seriously, may God have mercy on your soul.
Creatures 3
I have to keep this short, but that won’t allow me to do justice to it. Creatures 3 is a very old game, that had the most detailed simulation of genetics of any game out there. There’s still nothing out there that comes quite close to how Creatures 3 simulates the genetic makeup of the animals it simulates. You could splice together creatures of two different species and most of the time they would die, but sometimes you would have abominations that would live for a few hours. You could have healthy looking animals born, they would die at birth and you could use fan-created tools to analyze the genome and discover that a mutation broke one gene that’s necessary for life. There was also a primitive brain and the personality of a creature largely depended on the genome.
There are other old simulation games I need to mention too. These games were created during the days when the only people with a personal computer were intelligent and curious novelty-seekers with an interest in the world they live in, so this is when interesting games were being developed. There is Simlife, where you design plants and animals yourself and need to create a functional ecosystem. There is also Simearth, where you essentially need to guide evolution. These games can be played for free online in your browser but you can expect to run into bugs, you may be better off downloading them.
Another game I need to mention is Shadow President. It’s the only game I’ve encountered that tries to simulate ruling a major nation during the post-world war II era that I consider genuinely fun. There are other games out there, but they end up expecting you to micro-manage budgets, as if anyone cares about that sort of stuff. Clearly what we want to be doing is overthrowing foreign governments and imposing economic blockades, you know, the fun stuff.
This will have to do for now. Hope you have fun.
Nice list, will you be making a follow up soon?