This is my favorite weekend of the whole year, because everyone and their brother comes up to the lake: there are ten cars on every piece of property; dogs everywhere; the sounds of children playing; the pop of pellet guns being fired recreationally in the woods; tents pitched, campers chocked; fire pits blazing, the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers in the air. Yesterday, there was even a vintage World War II airplane doing faux strafing runs on the lake-- swooping way up to great heights, wing-over, then down again, skimming mere feet off the water, big plumes of smoke released to the cheers of the swimmers and fishermen nearby.

When I see data like this, it's no surprise to me. I'd be interested to see urban-to-rural charts. When I bought this property in 2016, the lake was an abandoned place during the week, only to liven up during weekends. Now? It's practically a small suburb, with cars parked on gravel driveways year 'round. Everyone has done what I've done: "Why not just move there permanently?" With the kind of growth the nearby city and surrounding area has been having, I wouldn't be surprised if in twenty years this area looked like an outer-ring Twin Cities suburb, for good and for bad.

In other news, I'm leaning towards building a new PC this fall. For architecture, it will be a toss-up between Intel's "Meteor Lake" and AMD's "Ryzen 7000"; for GPU, it will probably be an "RTX 4080", in spite of the disappointing TDP numbers. Of course, I could scrap this plan: similar to my plans for a "GR Supra", there is no practical purpose to it-- my daughter is getting braces soon, and I need to soon pay for a new deck as well. So we'll see... one interesting thing is, given my age and Lefty regulation the "Supra" would be the "car of forever", while due to economics a new computer would be the "PC of forever".

Finally, my son is really interested in the concept of "liminal spaces". A couple of days ago, he made a custom Minecraft texture back, so he could re-create "the backrooms":

Psychology is a wonderful thing. To start, read this article and ask yourself, "If I found out that a medical treatment not only didn't work and was in fact actively harmful, what would need to be going through my head for me to not only continue to push people to undergo it, but in a violent way, with intense rhetoric and measures to destroy the lives of the reticent?"

My best guess: people are frightened, and lashing out.

It's like buyer's remorse times one thousand, because it involves their health: the shots have turned out to be scarier than anyone could have imagined, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, and even more instances of paralysis, chronic illness, AIDS, miscarriages, birth deformities, and you-name-it. I once heard that "misery enjoys company": one hysterically pushing others to get the shots is a way of simultaneously living in a delusion that the shots were beneficial for that person, while also putting everyone else in the same boat.

Another psychological intrigue: the Left worships mediocrity. Why?

Gymnasts train their entire lives to reach the Olympics. It's the culmination of everything of which they've ever dreamed. There was a woman-- their star athlete, apparently-- who made an early mistake, couldn't handle the pressure, and literally abandoned her teammates during the competition. This is akin to a cowardly solider going AWOL in combat when he's supposed to be providing cover fire, and letting his squad mates get slaughtered.

Instead of acknowledging the obvious, this woman-- "Simone Biles"-- is being given a medal by Beijing Biden, and being put on the front of Wheaties boxes! It's very similar to how they erected murals and statues honoring "George Floyd", the violent multi-times felon who died of a Fentanyl overdose while resisting arrest after having passed counterfeit money at a store. Or "Megan Rapinoe", the purple-haired Lesbian who quite literally hates America, and doesn't hesitate to say so at every opportunity. Guess what? She gets a medal too! And who can forget the Left drooling over "Michael Avenatti", declaring the always-obvious fraud as Presidential material, and who is now sitting in prison?

These are some bizarre role models, to put it mildly. What's going on?

From the people on top, they are going for a Neo-Liberal "revolution"-- but first they need to weaken the existing societal edifice. Promoting hedonism and violence is a good way of destroying a culture's foundations. It's like Hitler's "strong individuals, strong families, strong society", in reverse. As for the every day Leftist, I have personal experience with this one: many Lefties who I have personally known, sometimes on a pretty intimate level-- close friends, family members, and so on-- have made poor life decisions, and can't deal with the guilt. Idolizing the lowest-of-the-low serves a dual-purpose: it lifts them up by comparison, while also providing an "escape hatch" for future poor decisions.

Changing gears again, my final psychological topic for the day: there is a fellow with whom I've been working on a project outside of work. He's phenomenal to collaborate with, and does top-drawer work-- but oftentimes it seems like we are communicating "past each other". After a full year of cooperation, I finally figured out what's going on: He's a Myers-Briggs "P", not a "J". All along I had misunderstood his personality, which was causing the often off-kilter interactions!

When I am studying some concept, imagine the body of knowledge as a cubed chunk of clay. New to the subject, I deal with the full width at one end first, as I haven't yet identified what's true or not, what's relevant and what isn't. As I progress in my learning, I whittle away the chunks along the sides-- driving in triangular fashion towards a fine point at the end, which is my ultimate conclusion regarding the subject. Imagine the "final state" looking like a triangle, versus the square with which I'd begun.

My inclination is to drive towards conclusions. As I hew chunks away, I don't need to continually re-evaluate them: I already did it. If things go on for too long and I sense I'm not making rapid-enough progress, or that I'm "spinning my wheels", I get antsy. My goal is to strive for finality.

I once had a friend and co-worker who was my first up-close exposure to a pretty serious "P". He could never make up his mind about anything! Infamously, he spent eighteen months trying to pick out an Android phone, and in the end wound up not even getting one. He was that way with everything. He was the complete opposite of me: his inclination was to drive away from conclusions! Every time he would sense that he was hewing away and approaching the fine decision point, he would throw all of his work overboard, and re-evaluate everything from the wide end of the cube again.

A "J" will get anxious if a conclusion is not being reached, and will want to accelerate the hewing process. A "P" will get anxious when a conclusion is being reached, and will want to blow everything wide open again.

I'd assumed the fellow with whom I've been working was a "J", in part due to his profession, and also in part because he's found the supply chain disruptions to be very stressful: "He's schedule-oriented, and when it gets messed up, he becomes upset." Instead, I had it all wrong: he gets stressed because he doesn't like planning much at all, and the supply chain stuff is forcing him to do so! And when he needs a decision from me but is constantly bringing options we'd already discarded back into the conversation right as things are close to being decided, it's simply another example of my former co-worker and the Android phone.

None of this is a criticism, it's simply me now understanding things better, so that I can manage the relationship in a smoother way. Psychology!

A Zero Hedge writer described this as "must watch" material, and I'm inclined to agree. This segment is one in a long line of recent examples of Tucker Carlson being at his very best.

On a mostly related note, I've been observing that Cultural Marxism-- strike that, radical Leftism at large-- seems to be tottering on its last legs. Here is Paul Joseph Watson digging into this topic as it pertains to Hollywood. Let's hope video games come next.

After recent cultural events such as the "transgender" bans regarding sports, the superb and long overdue "Roe vs. Wade" shellacking, and the New York "gun laws" getting shot down (har har), among other things, it makes me think there is hope yet!

Video gaming is a shadow of itself, and has been for years. Most genres are essentially dead: they may have modern entries, but those titles have completely lost the charm and atmosphere of their forebears. Play "Tekken 3" and "Tekken 7" back-to-back, for instance.

But there are a couple of genres which buck the trend, and are healthier than ever. Any genre which, by definition, is trying to mimic reality, is better in the modern era. The FIFA games on the Mega Drive may have their charms, but play "Pro Evolution Soccer 2021" and compare them. Similarly, compare "Test Drive" on the Amiga to "Gran Turismo 7".

Through sheer happenstance, the other genre which is better today than it's ever been, is the JRPG. They still have "real" music, mostly; they still have elaborate story telling; they still get decent budgets, and use modern game tech; and they still aim to create a strong sense of ambience; they all let you play with Japanese voice acting; they still emphasize exploration plus dungeon crawling. And best of all? Zero Cultural Marxism! They are untouched, and untainted.

If you take the window from a few years ago to a year into the future, these are your choices:

• Dragon Quest XI (Intro).
• Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (Preview).
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Preview).
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Preview).
• Star Ocean: The Divine Force (Preview).
• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (Preview).
• Final Fantasy XVI (Preview).

And this is just a partial list. If there is a nitpick, it's that the genre is leaning too heavily into orchestra music: nothing here even remotely approaches the legendary JRPG soundtracks from the 90s, such as from "Phantasy Star II" or "Final Fantasy VII"-- or even Japanese action RPGs, such as "Ys Book I & II" on PC Engine. But it's still decent music, especially compared to most of the rest of the contemporary industry.

How to get established in a contemporary career:

• Be a woman.
• Wear no makeup. Get unappealing hair cuts.
• Get a college degree. Doesn't matter which, you'll get hired anyway.
• Communicate in corporate speak cliches.
• Be either an atheist, or a faux-Christian who doesn't actually follow any of God's law.
• Espouse extreme left-of-center political views on The Twatter.
• Be either an indifferent daycare mother, or aggressively anti-kids.
• Own a dog. Talk about it like it's a human child.
• Need to like to travel, test wine, and binge Leftist nonsense on Netflix.
• Must post pictures of food on Pinterest.
• Either be single, or in non-committal or revolving door relationships.

It's amazing how easy it was to come up with this list. There are veritable and inexhaustible armies of people like this, and they are almost completely interchangeable. They have identical countenances, totally copy and paste world views, and the exact same hobbies. It's like they are churned out of test tubes in a factory somewhere.

I haven't been in the dating pool for twenty years. But if I were a young man again, I would find this situation disappointing. A lot of these women are mentally sharp, intellectually-inclined, and are in fact quite pretty, even if they try to make themselves not so. Theoretically, they should be prime mate material. Unfortunately, they went to university and got brainwashed by Marxist professors.

At least I'm doing my part with my own daughter: she is very much onboard with the centrality of God's role in her life, and is looking forward to raising her own beautiful children. She has lots of ideas about how to be entrepreneurial on the farm, or in other ways. I am seeing lots of strong, young men at Mass every weekend-- in our rural community, I don't think it will be difficult for her to find a wonderful provider and partner. She will be a a phenomenal mother and wife for one of these men.

Almost every day I am astonished at how effeminate modern men look. Hardly anyone talks about how plummeting Testosterone levels have caused grave imbalances in world politics and societies, so I am compelled to remind everyone once in awhile.

This doesn't make any of these men "bad people"-- not even remotely! There's nothing intrinsically wrong with having low Testosterone. But Estrogen equals harmonization; Testosterone equals assertiveness. When you have too much of one or the other, the world goes out of whack. Right now, we're swimming in Estrogen, so there is not enough pushback against typically effeminate values, like huge governments obsessed with "safety" and busy-bodiness.

This morning I was on the "xbox.com" home page, and saw a banner image for a Formula 1 game. Take a look at those guys! In the 1980s, they would have been in the bottom five percent of T levels across all men. Today? They are average.

For comparison's sake, take a look at Ayrton Senna when he was alive. Pay close attention to the shape his nose, his brow ridge, and the texture of his skin in particular. And he was hardly a He-Man of his day either, I could find far more extreme examples-- but I wanted to stick within Formula 1.



Incidentally, I'm a good point of contrast. I took thirty seconds moments ago and snapped a picture of myself via the bathroom mirror. This is what the typical "Gen X'er" looks like. Like Senna, I'm hardly Arnold Schwarzenegger. Lots of the contractors I worked with over this past year were significantly more masculine looking than me.

But even in my "geeky nerd, professional programmer" case, the difference in hair texture, skin texture, brow ridge, size plus shape of nose, and in my case jawline as well, is astonishing.



Once again, this isn't to say that I'm somehow "better" than young men today, or any of that nonsense. All I'm pointing is the difference-- and when you roll up the net behaviors of men today versus in decades past, you can see the world increasingly skidding out of control in one direction.

I wrote here about how Cultural Marxism is not long for this world, and about how it's silly to boycott a company based on the actions of just a few employees. I was right on the first count, but wrong on the second. This article relays how CEOs have finally had enough: "If you want to take politics into work, then here is your severance package, and goodbye." I'm correct: Cultural Marxism is on the way out. Even Netflix is reforming! However, the article also explains that the reason for this sudden pushback is largely due to the bottom line: i.e., boycotts. CEOs saw that happened to Disney trying to groom kids, and said "Holy smokes."

This quote from a whiney "The Athletic" writer is emblematic of why these radical Left-wing employees need to just be let go: "What about Black Lives Matter? Is that a social cause? Who will write about athlete protests? What about trans athletes in sports?" Pure sophistry, and this person knows it: cover those issues as objective news events, equally interviewing people on both ideas, to present a holistic, well-rounded summary, so that reader can make up their own minds.

In other news, it'd be funny if Lazio also acquired Lucas Torreira: they would have two short dudes running around the center of the park! And finally, I didn't follow up on my Steam Deck pre-order back when, because I'm waiting for a more powerful version, where I can get PlayStation 5-level graphics via image reconstruction, just at the lower resolution of the handheld screen. Sounds like such a thing may already be in the works. My thought is that I can replace my entire PC with a device like that, docking it to do my finances and for other productivity purposes, then undocking it when I want to play games.

I mentioned in this post that I bought a PlayStation VR unit, and I've been exploring various games for it. Last night I started "Skyrim VR", and I have a lot to say about it.

To get the negative out of the way, I don't think lengthy RPGs as a genre work well with virtual reality headsets. Motion sickness isn't even the primary issue: it's just not comfortable to have a box strapped to your face, with rubber around your eyes, a cord draped around your neck, being totally unaware of the real-life room around you, being basically unable to interact with family members in any kind of meaningful way, fumbling to figure out where you'd set your drink, needing to consume that drink via a straw-- which takes further pre-planning-- and so forth.

But now, to the positive: in VR, the cart sequence at the beginning of the game was absolutely mind blowing. For the millions who have played some iteration of "Skyrim" or another, you will recall that your character is sitting on a wooden bench, alongside some also-sitting NPCs, all being driven to your executions. During this ride, the characters are chatting: one is a brave heroic type resigned to his fate; another is a cowardly thief; yet another is a mute-yet-referred-to hero, with a gag in his mouth.

Now picture this familiar opening, but with stereoscopic 3D: you are in the freaking cart, looking around with your actual head, just like you'd do in real life, taking in the interactions of those around you. A father shepherds his child into the house as the cart passes, the curious child begging him to be allowed to watch. I felt embarrassed to look at those curious onlookers, just like I'd be in real life.

VR takes a scene like this from ho-hum and mostly forgettable to unbelievable levels of immersion.

Unfortunately, as soon as the actual gameplay starts, the title essentially falls apart, for the reasons I state above. When you are forced to suddenly dive into the "meat and potatoes" of a deep, complex, largely menu-driven RPG, where you're staring at reams of text, mentally processing character stats and making equipment decisions, the whole VR headset thing becomes a real drag: you'd rather just play on the TV at that point.

This leads me to a game idea: why not distill the essence of what makes the opening cart ride so memorable, and make an entire title out of just that? Perhaps it could take place in a small city, at night, with a super atmospheric chip music soundtrack, and you'd spend your time sitting in bars, listening to banter for hints, or on subways people watching for clues? Then you'd take what you've learned, and use the incoming PSVR2's 3D controllers to go down decrepit rat-filled alleys, lifting trash can lids based on some clue, or shifting paintings to the side in bug-filled motels, looking for a hinted-at hidden safe?

It could be like that old "Sherlock Holmes" game on 3DO, but all in real-time versus pre-recorded FMV.

The only area where the "Skyrim" cart ride falls down is in the circa-2009 character models and textures. But that won't be an issue with a PlayStation 5 driving the proceedings: the world could use cutting-edge graphics technology, but its scope could be kept to a small, water-tight game world primarily for budget purposes, but also for performance reasons.

As "Astro Bot Rescue Mission" and, conversely, "Minecraft" and "Skyrim" have all clearly taught me, bolting VR onto an existing game concept has limited appeal: it's novel for a few minutes, but gets old quick. Where VR headsets really shine is in experiences designed just for them. The kind of game I describe above would be boring on a TV-- but in VR, all of the emotion of being in the game world could make it a life-long, unforgettable experience, if it was done right.

I had a follow-up appointment with a cardiologist today related to this-- he was baffled as to why they even sent me to him: "I have a next step for: go home and play some soccer." His rationale: "You're a young guy, who has never experienced any chest pain. Your heart motion was completely normal during the stress test. You're out playing soccer every day. You broke the treadmill during the test. You have normal blood pressure. You do not have a family history of heart issues. When I put all of the pieces together, I struggle to see how your stress test could be called 'abnormal'."

Bought a cheap, like-new "PlayStation VR" bundle off of eBay. Post-strabismus surgery, my son can actually see stereoscopic 3D now, and 130 USD for a PSVR set, with a couple of games included, seemed like an awesome entry-level way into the world of headsets.

Wanting it connected in a communal area, I pulled the old PlayStation 4 Pro out of my closet, got it all patched up, and hooked the PSVR up to that. It's a super well-made product, from its cool sliding processing box, to the way the heavy-duty cabling works.

The only thing we had time to play on it yesterday was "Minecraft VR"-- and it was well worth the money, just for that one experience. The PSVR resolution isn't fantastic, but it's past the "good enough" bar for sure-- and the stereoscopic effect in a game like "Minecraft" is extraordinarily immersive.

I also have a demo disc along with copies of "Skyrim VR" and "Astro Bot Rescue Mission". I will probably try those out tonight. I do get pretty woozy from free-roaming games with rotatable cameras, so I'll probably settle more on fixed-perspective titles. My son, by contrast, gets no motion sickness at all.

PSVR2 will be very interesting, on two fronts: first, the resolution is going to essentially look crystal clear due to the headset's resolution; second, the game engines themselves will be much more impressive, with the PS5's added horsepower driving them.

Had yet another server hard drive fail today, spent the afternoon building the backup web server into an updated condition. Good part is that I only lost one blog post, and no reviews.

I've been talking for quite some time on this blog about how I think we'll very soon hit the "GPU of forever", because the constraint on improvements to game graphics won't be technology any more, but rather budget. Already we can see that the huge "triple-A" publishers are having to consolidate just to stay profitable, with games that now cost two to three hundred million USD to make.

What I hadn't considered is that economic factors may ultimately prove to be the constraint on the hardware side too. Here is Richard Leadbetter explaining how the cost-per-transistor ratio is rapidly becoming static-- meaning that to keep making more powerful platforms, those platforms will need to keep getting more and more expensive from an MSRP perspective.

Given all of this, I think this next set of PC GPUs is it: a 300 watt, 100 teraflops RTX 4090 is the ceiling, because continuing to grow transistor count will be beyond the elasticity curve of consumer demand-- and way beyond sustainable game budgets. For perspective, the "Matrix Awakening" tech demo cost tens of millions of dollars and had a team of over a hundred people-- and it wasn't even a game, and it wasn't even remotely approaching what something like an RTX 4090 could do!

As for the consoles, I think we're one set of proprietary video game systems from the final one. And from a mobile perspective, the DLSS-powered "Switch Pro" will probably be the handheld of forever.

In other news, I got out of Dodge just at the right time: the city I moved from-- Robbinsdale-- saw one of the largest jumps in violent crimes in 2021, across the whole state! I knew that all of the flags, yard signs, the libtard mayor and city council members, and all of the rest of it would have real world consequences-- and I was right. Now I'm in what is essentially an all-white, Christian, anarcho-capitalist ethno-state: it's clean, violence-free, beautiful, and with the warmest people I've ever met.

Finally, I've been practicing my football skills extensively of late, and at age forty I'm at the highest level of technical ability in my entire life. I played the sport at a competitive traveling level from ages six to seventeen-- so the fact that my technical skills are beyond that threshold isn't just an idle statement. I can't even imagine how much more advanced my tactical knowledge is at this stage of having followed the upper-most echelons of the game for so long.

As always, it's poor diet decisions holding me back: I eat like rubbish! Same as it was when I was a kid and teenager. I'm still only 155 lbs, but the composition of the food is awful: it's all sugar and caffeine. Nonetheless, I think at an "old man's amateur beer belly league" level, I could be like a Luis Alberto: I have good vision, passing range (for my poor fitness level), and am an unorthodox thinker who likes flicks and backheels. Too bad there isn't such a league where I live: one disadvantage to a rural area, I suppose.

Finally and back to gaming, I'm seriously considering getting Sony's next "PlayStation VR" headset. The Resident Evil pair of "4 Remake" and "Village", along with "Horizon Call of the Mountain" all look interesting. My son and I would have a lot of fun playing "No Man's Sky" in VR, which is probably pretty surreal.

A friend recently told me a story, where a relative had a huge garage with two bay doors, one of which was totally empty. Weather reports showed a large storm approaching, with the significant possibility of large hail. He asked the family member, "Would you mind if I backed my car into the empty bay for forty five minutes until the storm passes?", to which the relative replied flatly, "No."

This brings to mind an interesting philosophical question. Clearly the relative is in no way obligated to let someone else use his garage: after all, it's his, and he is the sole arbiter of its use. It's his prerogative.

On the flip side though, the concession quite literally costs him nothing! It'd be like someone who can snap their fingers and make a sandwich magically appear from thin air, ala "I Dream of Jeannie", passing a starving person on the sidewalk, and refusing to feed the poor soul. True, the genie does not exist to provide for the starving man-- but the denial feels mean spirited nonetheless.

Then it becomes a question of motive: perhaps the concession is in psychic, non-material terms?

A small sampling of the good stuff coming out of the Davos gathering:

• Tracking every individual to make sure they don't eat meat or buy the wrong products.
• Pills which will "phone home" as to whether the person took them.
• A global surveillance system to "prevent pandemics".
• The "WEF" now has its own rifle-armed police force, with beautiful orange arm patches.

Klaus Schwab says that it's important that these elites act "on behalf of the community." I guess that's why they are also proposing all of these referendums, so people can vote about all of these things about to be done to for them. Right?

It's too bad I'm not a Lefty. All of these selfless, rational, helpful global elites want exactly the same things the Democrats do! That's how I know I'm on the wrong side of history.

A few weeks ago, I had wifey drive me to the emergency room at 4:00am due to what I thought in the moment must have been a heart attack: couldn't breathe, and extreme chest pressure. A gamut of negative tests plus doctor discussions have led me to adjust my hypothesis that it was a panic attack.

Yesterday, I had a stress test plus echocardiogram. My resting pulse is only around 50 so it took me fourteen minutes, the final portion of which involved essentially sprinting up hill, just to get my heart rate to the desired 170. The people involved were impressed by my relative fitness: "I'll be honest, it's very rare that we get someone running in here."

Feeling optimistic, I was surprised by a phone call this morning indicating that the test revealed abnormalities. I now have a June 17 follow-up with a cardiologist. Thankfully, my healthcare clinic uses an online system where they publish pretty much everything for the patient: it's phenomenal transparency! Sure enough, the full report was there when I looked-- here is the summary:



I've had mildly elevated blood pressure for almost a decade due to the practically absurd levels of stress I'm under on a daily basis, to the point where I've been in a constant dream-like state of derealization for that entire period-- but I've been able to mostly control the blood pressure by managing my weight.

Based on what I see online, this left ventricular hypertrophy of mine is probably caused by this protracted period of high blood pressure, and can be reversed with medication. I'm not sure what to make about the ischemia reference in the last bullet: all "ischemia" means is "reduced blood flow". It's not clear to me how that fits into the larger picture: do I have a blockage? Further tests probably warranted.

I've also had some kind of arrhythmia, a sort of palpitation, for the past ten-odd years. My regular doctor at the time plausibly wrote it off with "cut down on the caffeine". But now it's looking like there is indeed some larger, underlying issue.

Either way, in the next few weeks I think I'll find myself shifting from no medications to two: some kind of anti-anxiety solution, plus a blood pressure pill of some sort.

This is the best description of the Creepy Joe regime I've yet seen, compliments of Victor Davis Hanson. From the article, bold emphasis is mine:



In other news, Tom Woods had an excellent guest on-- an American expat who has been living in China for many years. He answered a bunch of questions, such as whether China actually has "ghost cities", whether they really do have access to the internet proper, and as the video's title suggests, what's up with the "social credit system"?

Unsurprisingly, the Western propagandized caricature seems to be a mix of truths, half-truths, and lies. Reminds me of my brother's best friend-- he spent his whole childhood there, half of his family is still there, and for the life of him he can't comprehend where most of the things said about China in the West even originate: no one he knows who has lived there their whole lives has never encountered any of these things.

All of that said, it is possible that the guest is living in an "expat bubble", so-to-speak. That said, I'd like to see more of this kind of discussion: get people on from China, Russia, Iran, and so forth, to get their sides of the stories.

In yet other news, turns out a group simulated a "monkey pox" global outbreak back in March 2021. Boy this is becoming a familiar formula. The timing is interesting: the media is pushing this "monkey pox" thing right as this is going on. It would be an interesting way to put a global government in place: engineer plus release a weird virus, and simultaneously get nation states to sign their sovereignty over to a supranational body, run by a Communist incidentally, which has total control "during a pandemic", and which is hereafter the declared permanent state of the world (there will always be disease!).

Finally and as a fun way to distract myself from the world, the new Nissan Z is getting pretty much universal acclaim. My current favorite car YouTube channel, "Savage Geese", actually preferred the way the Z drives more than the car I'm leaning towards, the GR Supra: their take is that the Supra's front end is a little vague, and so the car tends to rotate a little too much as the driver fumbles a bit trying to hit the apex-- whereas the new Z feels that bit more precise, and thus its rotation is more gradual and predictable.

All of that said, this is with the $51k "performance" trim's limited slip differential-- which the $40k model does not have. They emphasize that the diff is absolutely integral to how the new car drives versus the viscous version in my 350z or in the 370z-- which leads me to believe the base model new Z could potentially have radically different dynamics than what is being written by pretty much everyone (as Nissan gave the entire media the higher-end trim).

According to Kristen Lee, who pleasantly writes more like the "old white dude" car journalists I used to enjoy than the cuckfaced, soy boy, establishment lap dog current car "journalists", reinforces my view here that the Z feels more like a heavy grand tourer-- just like my 350z-- while the Supra is more exciting and bonkers. I'll probably never buy another car for myself, given how little I drive: for this last one, I want something exciting and bonkers.

Although-- back to reality now, from the fun distraction-- it's really annoying how the entire automobile punditry talks like how it's inevitably the "end" of the internal combustion engined car: sort of like the sun and the moon rising and falling. I even had a co-worker tell me once, "Electric cars are the future." I asked him why. He replied, "Because they're the future!"

There is no natural reason why the new Z has to be "the end of an era": there could (and should!) be another "new Z" after this one, and then another new one after that. The internal combustion engine is the best way to transport people and goods, and it's not even close. The only reason we're talking about external combustion engine cars at all is because governments have bayonets shoved into the spinal cords of car manufacturers and consumers. They want everyone into these 100% computerized cars (with remote kill switches!) so they can be not only tracked, but punished if they go against the regime.

Because external combustion engined cars are even worse from an environmental standpoint-- even worse "carbon dioxide concern", plus the mass-strip mining of rare Earth minerals-- it will be a bait and switch: as soon as they got everyone into the "electric cars", they would say "Hey guess what, these electric cars are terrible, so now it's mass transit only." Then that same co-worker plus all of the "journalists" will tell me we've always been at war with Eurasia, and that "mass transit is the future!"

This entire current state of affairs is not natural, it is not "inevitable", and it can and probably will be reversed, once the entire country has rolling blackouts and the external combustion engined food trucks have no external combustion output available via which to be charged! A famine would bring a swift end to our current "leaders", and the "electric car" nonsense along with it.

I've been keeping a keen eye open for which events may catalyze this cycle's mega-crisis, and being made aware of this makes everything else look like noise: handing over national sovereignty to the "W.H.O." could very well be a major turning point in world history-- the foundation upon which a global, hegemonic technocracy will be built.

Remember the video I did about how good art arrives through spontaneity, and that the more you force a work into an ideological straitjacket, the worse it becomes? Take a look at this: it's a piece of software which essentially auto-generates characters-- primarily so that they are all non-white, and non-male. Notice how there is no "political affiliation" dimension in their model. Why not just take it a step further and have AI auto-generate the game itself, to be as "woke" as possible? It could procedurally create the environments, the writing, the mechanics, and so forth. I'm sure such an approach would produce many timeless classics.

Some of the thread comments are interesting: "We've approved the new end boss in WoW, sir! It hit all the checkpoints in the diversity tool! Zey're black, gender fluid, breasts but no bottom surgery, missing both legs, blind in one eye, gay on the male days, asexual on the female days, with BPD and mid to high functioning autism!" Or: "The moment this shit becomes prevalent in Japanese games is the moment I drop the hobby entirely." Or: "Got to give those affirmative action people something to do, I guess this is what they come up with."

Which dovetails nicely into this clip. I'm not sure why David Jaffe has such a strong take on the topic, but he's entitled to his opinion, and I'm sure there is some truth in it. I've been impressed, and not in the right way, by the lack-- no, almost complete absence-- of notable software to play on my Series X. But I think there is a bigger issue than Phil Spencer, since he's probably not that involved in the day-to-day ground level stuff anyway. Rather, I think it has to do with the radical Leftist cultures at the development companies.

When John Carmack was writing the Wolf3D, Doom, and Quake engines, he would quite literally sit up all night. Bobby Prince even composed songs about it. Or look up what The Oliver Twins went through while producing their games: months-on-end of four hours of sleep per night, living in 90 deg F shed. Making games is hard: you have to be one hundred percent devoted to it: live and breath it. You need a really candid atmosphere, where people are comfortable saying virtually anything to each other: positive, negative, jokes, chop busting... the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Incidentally, this is why I don't work in game development: I decided to get married and raise kids instead. You almost can't do both, and be successful. Being a game developer is a bit like being a priest: you have to be all in.

Today's game companies instead are focusing on eliminating crunch, "cleaning up" the environment, no "inappropriate" jokes, corporate-style benefit packages... the kind of environment you see in HR pamphlet photos, with a pristine office and a crazy haired black lady talking to a white thot, while sipping coffee, not doing a lick of work. It's fine to have an environment like that-- but don't expect to be shipping working games even remotely on time, or for those games to have any personality or spirit put into them.

Then you add this extreme push for ideological purity, where the already not totally engaged artists and writers can't put "pen to paper" on what they actually want to make without the material going through the HR diversity commission's checklist... plus, a company's hard-won profits are being spent paying not people who will add value-- like top-notch programmers, who are almost always white males-- but "diversity hires" who subtract value by being hurdles to game production.

It all adds up.

Just to pick on one of Microsoft's companies: my son tells me that Mojang has seven hundred employees-- yet they can't even produce new content items for an existing game on time, let alone any new products. When you see people from their company interviewed, they are blue-haired SJW types. The redhead nerdy guy-- the one person who seems to have technical chops-- is apparently over there writing books now, not working on game code.

And perhaps all of this is ok: maybe it's ok to have short hours and a low-key, non-controversial work environment, in exchange for "meh", vanilla, politically-correct games which get delayed numerous times. But returning to the David Jaffe clip now, game consumers want to have their cake and eat it too: they want a "woke"-friendly work environment, with the output such an environment is incapable of producing.

I'm over half-way through this six hour documentary about Adolf Hitler, and so far it's absolutely superb. There are two sides to every story, and I'd only heard one side. Despite its title, more than half of the material actually has nothing to do with Hitler, and is more like a thorough recitation of the war itself-- but not framed through a "History Channel" absolutely unquestioning, blindly trusting, uncritical pro-West perspective. I've learned a lot about the various battles, and the geopolitics involved.

All of the below may be true. None of it may be true. There are a hundred claims-- fifty each from "The Allies" and the documentary makers-- which would need to be fact-checked one at a time. Since we've all heard the Western take a million times, as a counterbalance let me provide a tiny sampling from the other side of the story. I'll let you evaluate which sets of facts seem more plausible.


Sampling of the Documentary

To begin with, and one thing the makers emphasize-- this is nothing new to me incidentally, as I've done extensive independent research into this area myself-- is just how evil Stalin was. He must have been one of the top three or five most evil people to have ever walked the face of the planet. The fact that "The Allies" were siding with him, sending him billions of USD in aid, is not a good look. Winston Churchill repeatedly called genocidal maniac Stalin "Uncle Joe". Don't forget, Churchill also fought in the Boer War. Look that one up sometime. Want to know where the Germans got the layouts for their Concentration Camps?

More on Churchill: declassified documents from Britain show that Hitler repeatedly offered peace terms to that country, and that Churchill turned them down over and over. Why? Because Britain had interests in Indo-China, and the Japanese had struck a deal with the French-- if I recall correctly-- to take over some of that that country's Indo-China territory. So Churchill was dead-set on pulling the US into the war, on that basis-- to get the US embroiled in the Pacific, to indirectly protect British interests there from the Japanese. If he'd accepted a peace deal with Germany, he would have lost his leverage over the US.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt-- not Stalin levels of evil, but still a highly duplicitous and conniving figure-- desperately wanted the US to enter the war as well, but polls overwhelmingly showed that the public did not want to get involved in what they saw as an internal European matter. Thus, Roosevelt repeatedly provoked both Germany and Japan via sanctions, oil embargos, and so forth. I'd always heard that he basically knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked, ahead of time. But it was even crazier than that: in the documentary, they show several newspaper headlines: "Japan may attack this weekend." Common knowledge!

Truth, as it turns out, is stranger than fiction.

Other interesting notes: several of Hitler's highest ranking Generals were Jews, as was one of his closest friends, who was also his chauffeur. He had nothing against Jews, per se, but as a group they had plunged Berlin into total, nauseating hedonism, controlling over fifty percent of the media, most of the banks, and all of the media interests, despite being two percent of the population. The first thing he did when he consolidated power was take all pornography plus Communist literature, and toss it into huge bonfires. Next thing he did was negotiate an exchange program, so that German Jews could voluntarily transfer themselves and their wealth to Palestine.

The next thing he did was make usury illegal: in fact, that's one of the twenty five planks of the Nazi platform.

The result was that Germany went into an unprecedented golden age, not just in terms of material prosperity, but in terms of moral standards as well. About his racial views, he had no issues with non-Germanic people at all: rather, his view was "let the German race reach its peak mental, moral, and physical strength-- and let's hope the other races do the same thing for themselves." If true, it reminds me of how Communists twisted Ayn Rand's words and philosophy, because she was politically inconvenient.

Much of Hitler's army were non-Germanic people. He had significant contingents of Muslims, for example, in the SS. In fact, the documentary makers show photographs of special Qurans he'd sent them, with beautiful metal covers, emblazoned with the Nazi and SS emblems.

Hitler didn't "invade" Austria. Austria was part of Germany, and got ripped away as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler was invited into Austria, and was greeted with huge parades, everyone throwing flowers at him. Symbolically, he had Austrian armies move the other way into German cities, to show a two-way unification. The reason he invaded Poland was because Germans were being slaughtered in East Prussia, and he needed to reconstitute the land bridge-- another set of territory taken away after the first World War.

He was a big believer in pre-emptive strikes: he went into France because "The Allies" were massing for an imminent invasion, right on his border. Later, he attacked the Soviets for the same reason: Stalin was obviously preparing to invade Europe from the East, and Hitler saw it as his duty to keep the Bolsheviks out. Where Hitler rewarded and was adored by his men, the demonstrably blood-thirsty Bolsheviks were so brutal that, under Stalin's orders, if anyone was caught retreating even one step, no matter the circumstances, they would be shot in the head on the spot.

As the Germans progressed into Soviet territory, villagers were blessing them, thrilled to no end to be liberated from the brutal Bolsheviks, who had confiscated their crops, farming equipment, and who consequently caused forty million of them to die of starvation, with many having resorted to cannibalism.

Similarly, after the disasters on the Eastern front, during retreat the Germans took as many refugees with them as possible. The documentary has first-hand written, actor-narrated commentary from some of them, explaining how to the refugees, Hitler and the Germans were like angels from heaven, saving them from the hellish, unbelievably brutal Soviet reign of terror.

One of these refugees explained that the scariest part about the retreat was the massive Typhus outbreak which occurred. She explained that when she and the other refugees arrived at camp-- I believe she said it was Auschwitz, but I may have that wrong-- the Germans shaved all of the refugees' heads, put them in showers, and then ran their clothes through delousing chambers, using Zyklon B as the agent.

After the war, she was totally confused by the stories of "gas chambers" and mass murders: "The shower heads they showed on television were immediately familiar to me: they were showers, identical to the one I was in! And the 'gas chambers' were just where they deloused the clothes. Clothes which were still contaminated after delousing, they would burn away in a series of ovens. Yes, they had us crammed into bunk beds-- it was either that or sleep outside."

This is just one woman's testimony of course-- but it rings more true to me than the "gas chamber" stories, which seem incredibly implausible to me. There is an excellent article here explaining how the delousing rooms worked, in great detail. It's all right in the open. The rooms even had signage, labeling their purpose. The whole story seems like a 1940s-equivalent of "Assad's chlorine bombs".


Tentative Conclusions

And maybe this is the point where we need to circle back to what I said in the opening paragraphs of this blog post: I don't know what the truth is. But based on the digging I have done, and based on what I've seen in my forty years with my own eyes and ears regarding real-time evolving contemporary events, the documentary take rings much more true to me than what I was taught in school as a child.

I was taught that Hitler was a maniacal, batshit crazy mad man-- no evidence presented-- who was indiscriminately throwing people into ovens for fun, and who wanted to take over the entire world for no stated or explained purpose at all. And if it weren't for the noble United States and Great Britain, he would have succeeded. The documentary, by contrast, paints Hitler as being a complex individual, with varied motives easily articulated in his own writings, and plausibly based on his own life's experiences.

It's like reading a "Sesame Street" children's book written for two year olds, versus a reference work written for adults. Maybe the toddler book is a more accurate reflection of reality-- and I reserve the right to change my mind later as I continue to come into new knowledge. But the comparison isn't flattering, as I sit here typing right now.

From what I can see, Hitler was a phenomenal and extraordinarily popular leader, who had the interests of his own people in mind. He was surrounded on one side by shady, double-dealing Western leaders, and by the brutal Stalinists on the other. These forces conspired to goad him into a well-meaning war, which he would ultimately lose. These forces then bombed Germany into oblivion, then bombed the rubble into more rubble, then turned around and wrote the "Sesame Street" history books.

To me, it seems like the same thing is going on with the West and Putin today.

Just like Germany before them, the Soviet Union was stripped of its ethnic territory by the West. Repeatedly provoked and falling under abuse, Putin finds himself in the identical position as Hitler before him: re-constitute land bridges to save his countrymen. Meanwhile, Russia and Putin himself is the target of an arm-waving, absolutely hysterical character assassination propaganda campaign, painting him as a one-dimensional paper-thin mad man, with no plausible human motives or nuance. This campaign consists of a combination of outright lies, lies of omission, and the mixing of facts with fictions.

I even read today that Beijing Biden brought back the Lend-Lease Act-- you can't make this stuff up! It's like the West is using the exact same playbook which they followed in the 1930s. Except this time, the target of their manipulations has the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

This isn't to say that Hitler and Putin are guiltless: they are both police state dictators. And it's easy to poke holes in some of the Nazi platform planks, such as the expansionism to which they claimed they were entitled (from where do they derive the authority?). But the truth is more complicated than a "My Little Pony" episode. The claims made against them are truly sensational. Meanwhile, the Western leaders are undoubtedly even worse: they are intellectually bankrupt, and seem to relentlessly hide their true motives.

Excellent article here about impending food shortages. Thanks to the graces of God and the wisdom he imparted to me, I'm pretty hedged against this for three reasons: I moved my family to the boonies, where we can grow enormous "borderline fields" gardens, if it comes to that; I work for a large employer which tends to benefit from rough times; my home is multi-generational, so we can pool our incomes to offset rising prices. I should also be able to contribute back to the community here via food and time donations.

I specifically liked this bit from the article:



Changing topics, I saw a pair of leaked "Forza Motorsport 8" screenshots in my feeds this morning. Here is one of them. In motorsports, there are hardly any black people at all-- but here in Gaslight Leftoid La-La Land, there are not just black drivers, but-- my favorite archetype-- crazy-haired black ladies too! I wonder if the game will have a "Bubba Wallace DLC Pack" story mode, where the black characters mistake door pulls for nooses?

This gaslighting works. Tell a lie enough, and people will start to believe it.

I recently saw a survey, which revealed Americans vastly over-estimate the size of ethnic minority groups. For the record, America is not "becoming more diverse"-- blacks represent about the same percentage now as they did thirty-plus years ago. The only group which has grown relative to whites are hispanics, and a lot of that simply comes down to the sieve-like Southern border, because rich white Leftists want illegal alien María to clean their house on the cheap, or Diego to come over and replace their roof.

Nothing against hispanics. I get along with them better than I do white people most of the time. But immigration needs to be legal.

Gaslighting is not a nice thing to do to people. It's sick.

On this note, as a society we've been gaslit for so long now, I'd almost forgotten what it was like to not be. When The Twatter staff very recently started burning the evidence before the new Sheriff could arrive, the suddenly-reversed algorithms saw the Right-wing people I follow on BitChute and elsewhere getting hundreds of "Likes" and "Re-Tweets" on all of their posts, in matters of hours or even minutes, after years of no traction.

The whole world is like some dystopian "Star Trek" episode, where "reality" consists of holograms-- then at the end of the episode, they destroy the hologram generators, and here they were on the ship's bridge the whole time. Like the world's worst theme park, I think Gaslight Land has just about run its course, and reality is about to re-assert itself. There will be no more time for nonsense.

It makes me sad to say it, but the white Leftoid atheist urbanites who don't own cars, have no food supply of their own, are squashed into high-density apartment housing, are not part of church communities, and who work on the multi-billion dollar plantation farms which own their development studios and which will throw them under the bus at the first sign of trouble, are in for a really rough ride if the grocery store shelves go bare. The least of their concerns will be putting black women on the front lines of World War II, or on race tracks.

I wonder if the Democrats have "The Fourth Turning" theory advocates speaking at their seminars, or if the book is required reading material for their card-carrying members?

The Democrats have been attempting to create a uniparty system, with a "largest in human history" state apparatus behind it, featuring arms designed around censoring all lie-exposing discourse that would steer people away from this establishment. During each and every one of these steps, they steep the justifications in "Civic Duty"-style language, telling "us" how "we" need to make sacrifices, just like how people did during World War II.

It's our "Civic Duty" to support "Black Lives Matter"; to oppose Justice Kavanaugh; to wear face diapers; to get the clot shots; to support Ukraine. Every one of these events, and then some, are framed as obligatory moral crusades, which must be supported ASAP. Anyone who chooses not to participate is shamed, ridiculed, "doxxed", and has their livelihoods destroyed.

An example I just read yesterday involved one of their nutjobs explaining how the country should have one party, with one candidate, which everyone can unify around.

The authors of "The Fourth Turning" predicted this push in the last section of their book. They explain that during every crisis era, civic life is renewed, governments are granted tons of power, and the society-- willingly or otherwise-- coalesces around a new set of values, enforced by the state. They explain that the political movements which move in step with this trend are the ones likely to take control. The outcome can either be favorable, or a Fascist-style dictatorship.

They also explain that benefits should be shifted from the elderly, to the young, during a crisis period (and then in the opposite direction during a high). Meanwhile the crisis, they describe, is when the infrastructure of the next cycle should be laid.

Whether instinctively or by design, the Democrats seem to understand where we are in this cycle. Their choice of values is totally nonsensical, which is why they aren't catching on. But at least they are presenting a holistic world view, attempting to fulfill the need the young have for making some kind of sacrifice, or being "heroes" in some way. They are also non-stop talking about forgiving student loan debt, and about building infrastructure (again, around a nonsensical "climate change" value however).

If the overall cycle theory is correct, it poses a problem for Conservatives: according to the authors, now is not the time for individualistic-centered Libertarianism. Rather, Conservatives should be proposing a competing civic model, with its own set of values for which young people can throw themselves on the sacrificial altar.

The authors-- in 1997, anticipating the condition we're now in-- proposed that such a model could be centered around being honest with people about the State being utterly unable to fulfill its obligations, and so frame the shared sacrifice as everyone rebuilding the country's infrastructure and entitlements, but in a balanced budget sort of way.

Most of the country's Conservative leaders-- Ron DeSantis, Rand Paul, and Tom Massie, to name just a few-- seem more oriented around reacting to and putting the kibosh on the Democrat's dystopian, global-technocracy police state ambitions. This is a good thing. But they shouldn't be as purely reactionary: they perhaps need to paint a holistic, competing civic model.

Funniest thing I've read in awhile: in the wake of Elon Musk buying The Twatter, Lazio fans have started a new running joke by en masse sending him messages like this:

• "Dear Elon Musk, here is a new challenge for you: after Twitter, buy Lazio."
• "Dear Elon, why don't you buy Lazio too? It's the first team in Rome. Think about it!"
• "Hey Elon, would you buy Lazio too? It has the same colors as Twitter, come on."

Makes my morning!

I haven't been writing much on here because I haven't had much to say! Just watching the American crisis implosion continue. I've been giving some thought to which of the "new values regime" we should tolerate, and which things should definitively be chucked into the ocean. Increasingly I think I'm going to be a sort of intermediary between the Boomers and the Millennials. I'm warming up to the task. That said, I think lots of those values will automatically disappear out of necessity once the impending disaster occurs. There won't be time for nonsense anymore.

My kids were baptized in a beautiful way during Mass this past Sunday. I will take them to Confession this Saturday, and they will have First Communion on Sunday.

Other than that, I've been continuing to work my way through "Horizon Forbidden West". Wonderful game, it's been getting better and better as I've progressed. I also have a couple of Switch reviews I need to write: "Pathway", plus the Neo Geo Pocket Color collection. I should do pictures of the latter, the Limited Run collector's edition is pretty special.

The battle between the Right and the Left isn't about "free speech or not": the battle is about who gets to control the censorship. How do I know?

The Elon Musk, Twatter circus has given me lots of opportunity to perform an experiment on Righties: "Hey, I hear you want a free speech platform-- I know of this great website called 'Gab', you should check it out. It's quite literally the best case scenario of what you want, and it already exists! You can go sign up for an account, right now."

One hundred percent of the time so far, I've either gotten nervous mumbles, weird excuse making, or word barf that's indistinguishable from the Left: "But, muh Jews! And people... say racist things!" My next message goes something like, "That's ok, you can go there and start a pro-Israel group! That's the beauty! No one will stop you. It also has a robust mute feature."

Crickets. That's where the conversation dies. I haven't yet gotten a reply beyond this point.

None of this surprises me. Many years ago I had a small handful of "Conservatives" that used to get upset and confront me because I would write principled, logically consistent things on this blog. They've all since long stopped reading-- in other words, if you're reading this, I'm not referring to you. That was when I realized that most people on the Right are not serious about liberal values: they say they are, but they are just as authoritarian as the Lefties.

By and large, the difference between the Right and the Left are mere quibbling about certain values. And even then there is a lot of overlap. That's why Republicans get into office, and usually do the same things the Democrats do. The Right doesn't want a free speech platform-- they want a Twatter that they control.

Some guy came up with a clever way to import and export data into and out of Fuze. The Switch just expects HID data over USB. As long as the Fuze editor is receiving characters in the proper encoding, it doesn't care how they're generated.

What this guy does is plug an Arduino into the Switch USB port in lieu of a keyboard. He wrote a little program on the Arduino which sends a "QR code on steroids"-generating code snippet. That Fuze snippet then encodes the rest of the Fuze source into an image. That image can then be scanned in on some other device like a laptop, and decoded back into Fuze source for backup or sharing.

This is why I'm not a huge fan of boycotting companies, generally: large corporations have tens of thousands of employees, most of whom disagree with upper management, and the two or three bozos who run the social media accounts. It used to be that fringe lunatics were called just that, and told to go away. Now, those people are given the megaphones.

But, I'm seeing that starting to change: just take a look at school board meetings. Cultural Marxism is not long for this world. As I wrote here, the Left are desperately trying to drag everyone towards the "new values" regime-- but things are different this time. They are failing, and will ultimately fail totally. And thank goodness for that. Their views are repugnant.

Incidentally, I was talking to my family today about how preachy and moralistic everything is. I rarely watch television, but when I am subjected to it, every single commercial is interracial families with plinking piano music and slow motion fly-bys two inches from people's faces, lecturing you about values.

I don't care so much if people have different values. If they want to kneel down to and pay reparations from their own money to blacks, teach their kids that that people can magically become potted plants and that there are six hundred "genders", and use their own money to voluntarily buy an external combustion engine car, then fine-- that's their prerogative. But leave me out of it.

When my kids and I made "Dredge" for the Wireframe contest, we didn't fill the game with Christian iconography, have a bunch of female characters in the kitchen making sandwiches for the male characters, or portray dark-furred characters as low-IQ violent drug dealers. What we did make was a game with cats fighting a guinea pig with glasses. Never in a million years would we have even dreamed of shoving a world view on our audience, just to piss them off.

It never even remotely would occur to me to make a commercial, a video game, a movie, or anything else for the express purpose of constant "high horse" moralization. It's like they literally can't help themselves! I don't understand it-- I'm not wired that way. There are two things you don't discuss with customers and co-workers: politics and religion. But then again, I'm not a Boomer or a Millennial.

The only places I talk politics are on this blog-- duh, that's the point of this web site-- and with my wife or mom, in the privacy of our own homes. I wish others would follow that model too.

I'm in one of the worst sleeping spells of my entire life. There is something about my new room which is making it impossible to sleep for more than four or five hours per night. I'm wondering if there is a "Feng Shui" explanation, perhaps involving me sleeping on a mattress on the floor.

My Kunio collection review is up. It's funny how the Western releases of these games had the "Kunio" parts wallpapered over. It'd be like having a "Sonic the Hedgehog" game, with the release making no mention of the name "Sonic" anywhere, and with a product title of "Fast Jump Running" or something.

The Switch is turning into the ultimate platform for playing these kinds of compilations. To name just a few, there is "Turrican Flashback", this Kunio collection, the Castlevania one, and the upcoming TMNT compilation.

This is what I saw walking out of the store today. Photographs don't even capture it because the sense of depth and proportion is lost-- but it gives a rough idea anyway.



This will probably be my last year owning it-- I'll be sad to see it go. But if the GR Supra comes down to actual MSRP pricing later this year, I'll love that new car even more.

Subaru may have lost their way, but here comes Toyota to salvage the situation: this is everything the new WRX should have been.

I've had my heart set on the incoming manual transmission Supra-- but I do enjoy my wife's 2014 WRX, and this would not only be an improvement over that, but it would be infinitely more practical for where I live now, with the heavy snow. Plus Supras are pushing sixty thousand USD at this point, whereas this GR Corolla will undoubtedly be in the thirties-- granted, I can easily afford such an expensive car, given my financial situation.

Speaking of cars, night driving in Gran Turismo 7 is surreal.

I'm still playing through it and haven't yet written a review-- but that hasn't stopped me from assembling the coolest screenshots I've taken in the "Horizon Forbidden West" photo mode. Click on any of them for a larger version. Additionally, as I'm wont to do, I made a montage of gameplay clips, showing off some funny moments along with the game's amazing graphics.

It was unthinkable for Italy to not qualify for a World Cup Finals. There are no words in the English language-- or probably in the Italian one either-- to describe not playing in two successive tournaments. It's beyond unthinkable: it's impossible. Yet here we are. Italy will have not played in the World Cup Finals for a now-minimum of twelve years-- a competition they have won an incredible four times!

What has happened?

It's a generational thing. Take a look at the squad which was victorious in the 2006 tournament. They were an Italian "Gen X" squad, with a median and average birth year of 1977. Cynical, chippy, and focused on literal nipple-tweaking antics which successfully antagonized their opponents, they were built around a 4-2-3-1, winning ticky-tack fouls, then counter attacking when their opposition would inevitably make a frustration-borne mistake. That tournament famously ended with a Zinedine Zidane so irate that he head-butted "Gen X'er" Marco Materrazi!

For me, that's what made Italy so fun to watch: it was a team cut from the same cloth as my own personality: pragmatic, authority-smirking, and realistic.

I remember hearing traditional Italian culture described as, "Only an idiot works harder than he has to." I also recall Gianni Brera in the 1970's explaining how, in his view, Italians weren't the most robust people, and that counter attacking football was suited to both their culture, and their physical limitations as compared to other European nations. The "Gen X" brand of Italian was effective because it was in harmony with the conventional Italian character..

As the squad gradually phased from "Gen X" to "Millennial", so did the style of play. The inward, pessimistic, pragmatic approach slowly gave way to a "heroic" outward 4-3-3 focus on flourish, ball retention, and passing movements. As this happened, the team started to lose its identity. As if to prove my point, in yesterday's aftermath I've heard many pundits reflect with great exasperation, "Why is it that opponents of Italy are now playing 'Italian', and defeating Italy?", and "At least Catenaccio got us results."

In a sport with margins so thin that a single split-second moment can decide defeat or victory, it turns out that being a naively idealistic, emasculated, wimpy, second-rate "poor man's Barcelona" is simply not going to cut it for Italy. It's in total opposition to the Italian character, psyche, and tradition. It worked for the very brief window required to win the Euros, when it caught opponents off guard-- "that was Italy we just played?"-- but was so unsustainable it couldn't even survive into the following year!

Some major soul searching is required: what do the words "Italian football" mean? What do they represent? What differentiates-- or used to-- the Italian character and style of play from all the other countries in the world? Will simply being an unnatural, watered-down clone of other countries be enough to bring victory when there is no margin for error?

Maybe this hypothesis of mine will be right, or wrong. We'll see as time progresses. Unfortunately, we have a long ways to wait until the 2026 cycle. And who knows: in the end, maybe this is just what Italy deserves, with the way their citizenship went bonkers mad and Fascist-style authoritarian during the WuFlu nonsense. They have bigger societal and psychological issues than just football.

This was extremely difficult to read. Look at the picture of him from 1989, then juxtapose that with what they did to him. His crime was having taken a selfie. It's just like I wrote here. It took this patriot an experience like what he had, to make the realization:



America is the country that the establishment is telling you other countries are. The sooner we come to grips with this fact, the sooner we can course correct.

In this post I wondered why we've seemingly never progressed into the crisis period, much less out of it. Rather, we're in an unraveling phase which spans four decades, it having started in the nineties. It continues today, picking up more and more steam as it goes. What's different about this cycle than others before it?

In previous cycles going back thousands of years, information was carefully controlled by the Prophets. They would lie, craft narratives, and engage in mass brainwashing. No one knew any better. Most people couldn't read. Printing presses were expensive. And so on. The Heroes would gobble these narratives up, then push the world towards the new values during the crisis window. The culture would emerge from the crisis window in lock step behind the new regime.

What's different this time is the internet, and smartphones.

For the first time in human history, the Prophet-Hero narratives can be deconstructed and factually analyzed. Ordinary people are "on the ground" recording every small bit of minutiae, then streaming all of it in real-time to a global audience with the touch of a button. And because the internet is decentralized, when the Prophet-Hero axis tries to shut down one web site, three more sprout up in its place.

Today's Boomer-Millennials cooperative is desperately trying to shove everybody bayonet-first into the new Cultural Marxist values. But for the first time ever, there is a critical mass-- a majority even!-- who have the means to make up their own minds. They are rejecting the new values! The "new values" media is often caught saying the quiet part out loud: "These web sites are not supposed to be telling people how to think: that's our job!"

Now people can do their own research. Is it true that the clot shots are "safe and effective"? Is it true that George Floyd was strangled by a cop and died by suffocation? Is it true that Ukraine is a bastion of freedom, and that Russia is irrational and unprovoked? And on and on. With the internet and smartphones, there is no way the official, phony JFK assassination narrative would have been bought, were such an event to happen today.

I don't think most Leftists understand this generational theory. But on some intuitive, instinctive level they know that things are going "not according to the usual plan" in some way that they can't quite put their fingers on. That's why they are getting increasingly unhinged, desperate, and authoritarian.

"That which can't go on forever, won't." It will be interesting to see what happens over the next five and ten years. Because I suspect this will be looked back on as a "broken" cycle, such as we had during the American Civil War when there were only three archetypes.

1997's "The Fourth Turning" is a seminal book, and there are so many good things to say about their model that one could probably write a shorter "meta book", about the book itself. But here I've plucked out a couple of things which really caught my eye. Maybe I'll do more posts like this in the future as I continue to work my way through the work.

Skim through this post of mine, from last year. In it I wondered if there had ever been a culture which had subverted itself. I also reflected on how I liked old people back when I was a kid, but not in adulthood. This chart answers both of those questions:



According to the authors' model, history repeats in patterns of four, twenty-odd year, single generation-long segments. Every eighty-odd years there is a major crisis, and the cycle starts over.

A crisis occurs, and a "Hero" generation fights and somehow resolves the crisis, either for good or for bad. Their own kids-- an "Artist" generation-- come of age during the crisis: so they are hugely overprotected, as their childhood is fearful and anxiety-ridden as they watch the adults in their lives scramble, with bombs potentially dropping or genocides being committed-- or whichever form that particular crisis takes.

Sensitive and wishy-washy, this "Artist" generation underprotects its own kids, because the crisis is resolved and the world is comparatively safe. Also, not wanting to have their children be "under the thumb" like they were as kids, or for their kids to have a childhood filled with worldly conflict like theirs was, they spoil and overindulge their kids. This produces a "Prophet" generation.

These "Prophets" rebel against their own apathetic parents and the values of their grandparents-- the "old order". Arrogant and hubristic, they deliberately subvert their own cultural norms. In their righteous furor, they raise their own kids-- a "Nomad" generation-- in a sort of lecturing kind of way, while simultaneously giving them very little practical life direction or supervision. This leads to these children being kind of "checked out", amoral, and apathetic.

By now things are starting to unravel in culture due to the meddling of the "Prophets". The "Nomads" go on to have kids of their own in a much riskier, crime-filled, unstable environment. As such, they overprotect their children. But the children, looking for strength, find it in their self-righteous hubristic grandparents. As such, they start to adopt those values, and become activistic.

As they grow into young adulthood society essentially collapses, and they become the new "Hero" generation which resolves the conflict in one way or another. During this time they give birth to a another "of age during the crisis" batch of children-- new "Artists"-- and the whole cycle starts over.

Recent generations:

• Hero: Greatest Generation, i.e. "G.I.".
• Artist: Silent Generation.
• Prophet: Boomers.
• Nomad: Generation X.
• Hero: Millennial.
• Artist: Generation Z.
• Prophet: Generation Alpha.

The answer to the question "has there ever been a culture which subverts itself" is "yes"-- in fact, once every eighty years, throughout the entire recorded history of mankind! The book's authors give tons of examples, going back to the Romans and even back to the time of Moses.

The reason I liked old people during my childhood but not during my adulthood, is because the old people were a different generation! When I was growing up in the 1980s, the sensitive "Artist"-types were the half-retired ones driving my school bus, with the "Hero" guys making up the elderly. In adulthood, the people older than me were increasingly represented by the "Prophet" Boomers-- a preachy generation I struggle to get along with to this day.

In this post I discuss how I don't fit into either "Generation X" or "Millennial"-- hence why sociologists have somewhat recently coined the term "Xennial". According to the authors' chart above, I'm significantly more "Generation X" than "Millennial". I was and am:

• Reputation as child: good. (Hero)
• Coming of age: alienating. (Nomad)
• Primary focus: self-sufficiency. (Nomad)
• Young adulthood: competing. (Nomad)
• Transition in midlife: frenetic to exhausted. (Nomad)
• How it is nurtured: Overprotective. (Hero)
• How it nurtures: Overprotective. (Nomad)

Even the bottom-most portion of the table-- the "savvy, practical, liberty, survival, honor" and so forth-- fits me much more accurately. By contrast, the "selfless, unreflective, overbold, community" Millennial items just don't fit. I am not a "collegial, expansive, empowering world builder", to put it mildly! In fact, I roll my eyes at all of those things.

This also explains part of why contemporary video games annoy me so much: they are made for the cringey, eye-roll inducing values of the "Hero" Millennials. Whereas my favorite games, like "Star Control 2" or "Guardian War", are more abstract and absurd. Likewise, my favorite films-- movies such as "Blade Runner" and "Apocalypse Now"-- have these brooding sort of monotone anti-heroes, and themes where there are no "good guys".

Changing gears a bit: probably every cycle participant in history thinks "things will be different this time"-- but perhaps something has broken the model, or at least greatly extended the "unraveling" period? Read this passage:



Is not the paragraph starting "In linear time..." exactly what we are seeing today, down to the very last letter? It's like the unraveling cycle in the 1990s got "frozen in place", and just kept accelerating! We should be well into concluding the "crisis" by this time, but it seems like it hasn't even truly started yet.

Furthermore, I'm struggling to see how the Millennials are going to resolve much of anything: they were so overprotected that most of them are thin-skinned to the point that they can't even function on a day-to-day basis. Many of them can't even figure out if they are boys or girls, for Pete's sake. They are "pharmacologically disabled", as I once humorously heard them described.

And from what I've seen of the ones who actually are having kids, they are the most intense "helicopter parents" I've ever seen, to the point of being totally irrational-- which seems to break the model as "Heroes" usually underprotect their kids. I know one Millennial who takes a picture of his kid every single day, and keeps this exhaustive diary of when the child poops. It's weird and obsessive.

This behavior lends credence to the fact that the "unraveling period" never ended when it should have, and just kept accelerating. So rather than the Millennial's kids becoming "Artists", it's like they'll be "Heroes +"-- a second consecutive "Hero" generation-- because they are being overprotected to an absurd degree. From what I've heard about contemporary school children, they are even more thin-skinned and neurotic than their parents!

In any event, America is indeed "veering totally out of control along a bizarre centrifugal path." Maybe as an exercise I'll try to track down more recent writings from the book's authors, to see if they've adapted their model, or have reflections about the post-1990's state of affairs.

The entire cradle-to-grave American experience for the past four generations of its citizens has been framed through the lens of "prevented Germany and Japan from taking over the world". Because of that it's nearly impossible for even the most skeptical Americans to perceive their country from the outside. But I want to challenge my readers with just that exercise.

I am about to present to you a bulleted list of the United States's activities over the past twenty-plus years. As you read through this list, I challenge you to blank your existing yankee doodle, apple pie preconceptions about your country, and instead think about how you would perceive America if you were Chinese, or Russian, or even from Finland or Somalia or Japan, or nearly anywhere else.

Or if that's too difficult, imagine that I'm describing Russia or Iran or China with these bullets: what would you think about those countries? Would they seem like positive forces and freedom-loving bastions of democracy? Or conversely, would they seem like malevolent, destabilizing forces seeding discord and chaos everywhere they went?

• Invaded and occupied sovereign Afghanistan for twenty years, then abandoned it and US citizens, handing the Taliban eighty billion dollars in military equipment. Lied repeatedly about whether Taliban would take over.


• Invaded Libya, overthrew Gaddafi, set the country back to the stone age, with open air slave markets. Hillary Clinton laughingly bragged: "We came, we saw, he died."


• Waged war against Syria, tried incessantly to overthrow Assad. Put Damascus in ruins. Major refugee crisis flooded Europe. ISIS took over the Middle East. US worked with rebels to stage a false flag chemical attack in attempt to take over the country, then repeatedly lied about it. Russia and China intervened to prevent chaos.


• Has been funding a Saudi-led war against Yemen, creating a massive humanitarian crisis.


• Invaded Iraq, turned it from a stable country into a terrorism-fueled power vacuum. Used the existence of biological "weapons of mass destruction" as the pretext. None were actually there, lied about it incessantly.


• Funded the actual creation of biological "weapons of mass destruction" in Ukraine, right on Russia's border.


• Funded the "gain of function" creation of the WuFlu in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Repeatedly lied about it. Virus got lose, killing many, used as a cover by governments worldwide for a global violation of basic human rights, such as denial of food, health care, employment, practice of religion, forced house arrest, and free speech-- fundamental abuses so vast and thorough that it boggles the mind. Led to a dramatic rise of the WEF's cabal influence.


• Colluded with legally immune multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies to "Warp Speed" the creation of experimental, animal trial-failing drugs, then mass-injected their own population with them, creating a crisis of healthy age people and even young children dying from heart inflammation. Ran a massive, domestic psy-ops propaganda campaign to not just cover the scandal up, but to demonize people who exercised "my body, my choice" by declining the shots.


• Worked for decades to deliberately provoke Russia: repeatedly crossed line after line, adding countries to NATO, closing off geography Russia needs to protect itself from invasion, housing biological weapons on Russia's border, refusing to negotiate on a level playing field. Executed a 2014 coup in Ukraine to install a pro-West puppet leader, just to antagonize the Kremlin. Lindsey Graham and John McCain met with military leaders there, then: "Your fight is our fight."


• Has been running non-stop KGB-style agitprop against its own citizens for decades, demonizing and belittling one ethnic group (whites) while promoting another (blacks), using "Operation Mockingbird" stooges in Hollywood and late night television to push anti-Christian, destructive gay lifestyles and hedonism that would make Sodomites blush. Creating de facto legal double standards and even denying health care based on ethnicity.


• Allowed pro-establishment domestic terrorists to burn down its own cities for political gain of the establishment. Jailed and threw away the keys for people who peacefully protested against the establishment at the capitol building.


• Installed a senile puppet elderly man with Alzheimer's into power so that a hidden cabal could institute wildly unpopular, radical domestic reforms against the democratic will of its own people. Ran cover for and encouraged rampant election fraud, using its own WuFlu virus creation as an excuse to mass-use mail-in ballots, then certified the obviously cuckoo results.


• Actively suppresses free speech against its own citizens. Colludes with a tiny group of elite, multi-billion dollar technology companies to censor all information which paints the establishment in a negative light. Suppresses freedom of the press by intimidating and spying on anti-establishment members of the media.

And this isn't even a complete list, I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of other things-- but you get the idea. I don't bring all of this up just to attack America: rather, my goal is to rouse Americans to just how nasty and rotten their own country has gotten.

America is the Russia, the China, the Iran that you're told are so evil! America is the actual bogey man! You are the bad guys! Yes Hans, "We are the baddies."

Until we all come to grips with this hugely uncomfortable, almost impossible to digest fact, no matter how tough of a pill it is to swallow-- and believe, it's not easy for even me to cut through the bull shit and come to grips with and wrap my arms around it-- there will never be meaningful changes or reforms.

The United States can go back to its small government, free market-loving, prosperous, Christian-values "friendship with all, entangling alliances with none" roots from days far yonder. We can emerge from this Fourth Turning in a positive way. But like a spouse in denial about an abusive relationship, until the average American steps out of the haze and into broad daylight, this kind of huge change is impossible.

Remember the addition update I gave back in December? A couple of days ago things got so far that I was able to move into my room, and start using the new bathroom! Click on any of the pictures for larger versions.

This first batch respectively: my room; the view looking out my bedroom door, where you can see up the steps into the new closet in the old basement portion; my sister-in-law's room; the new bathroom; and the view from the old basement back into the addition portion.











This shot is of the new electric panels, plus the network rack. On that latter point, I had the electrician run CAT6 to all of the new rooms, then Duncan and I set up the patch panel and rack ourselves, punching in the wires for each port, and installing RJ45 wall ports into each room.

Both of us now know how, and have our own tools, to both create custom RJ45 and RJ11 cables, and to punch wires to create network and phone panels. We are also "beaming" the internet connection across the property to the large garage with a special long-range "PoE", pole-mounted broadcast device.



This final batch, also respectively: the new family room; the view out the windows; the view out the other windows and deck door; and my in-laws's bedroom, from two different angles.











The only thing left is to get the new furnace installed. There are ducts running to the new rooms, not hooked to anything. I've been running an electric space heater in my room to keep from freezing.

The next house project is re-siding the "old" house exterior to match the addition portion. After that, it will be getting a large deck installed off the deck doors. We already have a gas line running the liquid propane from the house tank, for the grill, all ready to go for when the time comes.

In the ultimate "Are we the baddies?" moment, it turns out that the US and Ukraine have been jointly developing biological weapons in various parts of Ukraine, in biolabs. In other words, Ukraine actually has the same "weapons of mass destruction" which Saddam didn't have, which was used as the pretense for the US to invade Iraq. And Vladimir Putin is the bad guy in this current conflict?

If you overlay the map of Russia's air strikes with the locations of US-Ukrainian biolabs, there is an almost perfect match.

I watched a few minutes of the Manchester Derby over lunch, and what was more interesting than the game were the animated billboards.

The first one to go past said how "together matters". Unless you object to having the State or your employer forcefully inject an experimental substance from a multi-billion dollar legally immune pharmaceutical company into your veins. Unless you object to being beaten with batons if you resist having your business shut down for a virus with a ninety-nine percent survival rate. Or unless you're Russian with a Mastercard, even if you haven't been in the country for years.

The second one was about "no racism". What that means is that if you're a white European and you are proud of your culture and want to preserve it, you're a monster. If you think it's a bad idea to let an unlimited amount of totally undocumented people from violent third-world hellscapes come across in life rafts, then you're a Nazi.

The third one was about "sustainability", closely followed by one telling everyone they should travel to Abu Dubai on a gas guzzling jet-- you know, where they drive around in Bugattis they got from siphoning oil out of the ground and selling it.

Watching the little bit that I did made me feel like Neo once he realized he lived in the matrix. Everything is fine as long as you stay on the plantation, don't question anything, just do whatever you're told. If you even point out the existence of the plantation, let alone do anything to rock the boat or combat it, they destroy your whole life.

The crowd looked ninety-five percent white, yet they were paying huge percentages of their paltry paychecks to watch a bunch of black guys kick a sphere around, making hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, kneeling to "Black Lives Matter" and lecturing them about how racist they are, while being subjected to non-stop Globohomo propaganda in the stadium, condemning them and everything they-- at least used to-- believe in.

I was curious about how far away Moscow is from Kyiv, and what the two countries look like. As I do any time I'm curious about geography, I hopped in "Flight Simulator" on the Series X, grabbed my Beechcraft King Air 350i, and flew directly from the former city to the latter.

The first part of my journey saw me take off from Moscow's most busy airport, then fly Southwest across the countryside for about four hundred nautical miles. It was kind of a boring path: really flat, and nothing but forests and the occasional farm.













After about two hours I arrived at Kyiv, and flew around for a bit. The place is split by a river, with a large body of water to the North. I saw lots of boring Soviet-style gray buildings, lots of strange curved ones, and some oddly colorful ones too.













Because of the ongoing conflict, my destination airport was buzzing with human player activity, with people swooping all over the place, and almost crashing into buildings. Even as I was landing, I had to frantically swerve after touch down to avoid several planes which were landing going the wrong direction!

I recorded some video clips, but I have no way to edit the videos the Series X produces in anything other than the Windows video editor-- which obviously doesn't work under GNU/Linux. Otherwise I'd upload them, as they are very amusing. But here are some screenshots of the airport and my plane after landing, anyway.

Lots of interesting things happening right now. The list of clot shot side effects was released, and it's a nine page wall of text. Further, out of the not-insubstantial amount of adverse effects-- tens and tens of thousands of them, just in the tiny period shown in the data on offer-- three percent of those events were death!

Numerous insurance company reps and funeral parlor people have remarked that since the clot shots have gone out, they have seen unprecedented amounts of death among working age people. It's all anecdotal because the powers-that-be are suppressing the data to the maximum extent possible-- but the pieces fit together.

Changing gears, Sean Hannity and Lyndsay Graham are literally calling for Vladimir Putin to be assassinated! Now everyone will hopefully understand why Russia invaded Ukraine: the Russians have tried and tried and tried for decades to get the West to treat them as equals in diplomacy, and got nothing but middle fingers. Backed into a corner they finally took action, and rather than try to end the conflict-- "let's not throw rocks at a cornered animal"-- they got "cancel cultured". And I thought the Left cared about "xenophobia"? And now calls for the Russian leader to be sniped.

The actors in the West are cuckoo for cocoa puffs: they have the "liberal pathogen", as Mark Dice calls it. They don't care about their people, all they care about is ramming through their "you will own nothing and be happy" agenda, something I've humorously and accurately heard described as "Globohomo." Tucker Carlson summed it up well in a segment last night. He used Cameltoe as the example, but you could substitute her with Trudeau, Creepy Joe, Macron, Merkel, Boris, Draghi, or any of the other lizard people:



I should have seen all of this coming. I very closely followed the "Assad dropped chlorine bombs on his own people!" nonsense back in 2018. I wrote about it several times, including here, here, and here. Funnily, that episode involved-- who else-- the Russians! And between the Western governments and the Russian State, guess who was lying and who was telling the truth? Vladimir Putin's explanation at the time, paraphrased: "I don't give a shit about Assad specifically, but after what happened with America's invasion of Iraq, do you really think it's a good idea to destabilize that region further?"

That's a consistent pattern I see with Putin. He jails opposition politicians and journalists-- I wouldn't want to live under his rule. But at least he's a rational actor: I completely understand his logic and reasoning, even as I often disagree with his methods. By contrast and from a personal standpoint, the scary thing for me is that I live in a country led by unhinged lunatics, propped up by a lunatic general public. It's an ochlocracy: total mob rule.

One second the NPCs are supporting "Black Lives Matter" domestic terrorists burning down my city, to the point where my small business mechanic friend had to spend days in a van in front of his shop, with a shotgun and no sleep, to protect his livelihood. In matter of seconds the NPCs got the firmware update, and started denying me access to healthcare and groceries because I wouldn't dress like a Branch Covidian Death Cultist, for a virus with a 99.9% survival rate, from which I'd already had and recovered. Then in a matter of seconds again, the NPCs dropped the WuFlu instantaneously: new firmware update, now we need to assassinate Vladimir Putin and start World War III!

It's like living with a psychotic family member, who alternates between stealing your things and threatening to burn the house down with your kids in it. What's next?

And now let me conclude by looping this back to Tucker Carlson for a minute: remember "January 6th!", when a guy with a Daniel Boone hat and a spear came close to overthrowing the United States government, so we needed martial law in Washington DC, with fencing and Gatling guns? In the many weeks after, Carlson had to preface every segment of his show with pearl clutching: "What happened that day was terrible! Horrible! Reprehensible!" Then about six months later, he suddenly started being truthful about it, making fun of it for the farce it was, while pointing out how staged and fishy it was.

He's doing the same thing with the Russia-Ukraine situation now: "Not a single American would ever support Vladimir Putin or Russia! Every single American thinks Russia is evil, c'mon, that's not even what we're debating here!" It's like there is this grace period with Tucker Carlson, where you only get the truth once the dust settles. I don't know if it's him being afraid, his producers shackling him, or what.

There is an immense amount of truth saying in this Eric Peters blog post, and it extends far beyond cars.

I just read that Electronic Arts is patching out all of the Russian teams and players from their products, such as FIFA. Regardless of where you stand on that war, consumers paid X money and were promised Y number of teams and Z number of players-- which can be changed on a whim by the publisher, so they can virtue signal to other idiots on The Twatter, because the player doesn't own a copy of the software, but merely a temporary license to use the software, which can be revoked or have its terms modified at any time.

Gran Turismo 7 can not be played without an internet connection. They can't even change that behavior via a patch, because in fifteen years when the servers are gone, how would the patch be delivered? This is where we're headed.

The Davos crowd wants to do this with everything: your car, your house, your food, your clothes, and on and on. You'll subscribe on a EULA basis to get stuff. Then if you say something mean on The Twatter or donate money to peaceful trucker protesters or buy a firearm or practice your religion without a face diaper on-- or whatever-- you will find your subscriptions terminated. Some conflict comes up? You're not allowed to have an opinion: you will be punished either directly or indirectly, if you don't agree with Nasty Pelosi or whichever lizard creature is in charge at that moment.

The same goes with development technologies. I wrote this web site in January of 2007, and in the fifteen years that have followed, I have only had to touch the code once due to "obsolescence", where I had to replace like three lines of code which performed MySQL calls. Frameworks like .Net are driven by a commercial need to continually drive people towards new products and services-- planned obsolescence, baby. Whereas languages like PHP or Python aren't continually pulling the rug from beneath you, because the motivations and incentives are different.

In general, the more we can disconnect ourselves from multi-billion dollar corporations, governments, and weirdo hipsters, the better off and more independent we'll be.

The whole reason I bought a PlayStation 5 at launch was in anticipation of this-- which comes out in two days! The best thing about the game is that it retains its trademark Japanese quirkiness-- just look at those NPC names and character portraits! Once upon a time the "Pro Evolution Soccer" series was the football-equivalent, with goofy menu music and lots of Engrishey elements-- but morphed into a totally Westernized "FIFA" clone, which incidentally is why it died in popularity: what was its differentiating factor anymore? Good to see "Gran Turismo" is staying true to its character. I wish more Japanese developers would go back to their roots: almost everything they produce feels very Westernized these days.

Changing gears, Creepy Joe has been such an unbelievable-- and I mean that word, to the full extent-- disaster that he even makes a lot of the RINOs quoted here sound like voices of reason! That's how low the bar is. How about evacuating Afghanistan by removing the soldiers, but leaving behind all the civilians and military equipment? How about stopping domestic oil production, importing replacement oil from Russia, then having Russia invade Ukraine shortly after? How about wishing a winter of death on families who wouldn't get the clot shots, then telling everyone not to see the WuFlu as a divisive issue?

This is a superb video explaining why Russia is invading Ukraine. It lays out the kind of complexities I was warning about in this post from a few days ago. My intuition was that Russia was backed into a corner, with little choice left if they wanted to ensure their own survival-- and the video confirmed my suspicions.

I think the Russians are full-in, with their backs against the wall. They may even use nuclear weapons if they are pushed any harder. To them, this is an existential crisis. I heard a top Russian "journalist"-- State-backed, sort of like a Russian CNN anchor-- say something like "we may use nukes, because what's the point of a world without Russia in it?"

Clearly, the West needed and need to take Ukraine NATO membership off the table. It's not too late. Unfortunately, I don't think that will happen. My mother-in-law borrowed me a copy of "The Fourth Turning", a book I'd been meaning to read for many years. Newt Gingrich is correct here, and even tosses out "77 years", a number very close to the typical four seasons cycle duration.

We're about to see a "reset" in the world order, and no one is going to back down. Instead of having empathy and making conciliatory gestures towards Russia to get them away from the ledge, the West is going to double down on the sanctions, and the US may even begin military operations directly against the Russians. I hope it doesn't go that way, but history tells me it probably will.

Next, China will invade Taiwan. I'm essentially expecting that, maybe even in the next week or two; from their perspective, it's "strike while the iron is hot". Then we'll be back to World War II, with a European theater, and a Pacific theater-- except this time, all of the powers involved will be nuclear armed. China has been making thousands of hypersonic missiles for a reason-- and those missiles can carry nuclear payloads.

I should be getting emailed by Valve imminently, at which point I'll have seventy two hours to decide whether or not to follow through on my 650 USD "Steam Deck" purchase. If I do go forward with it, I can see the experience going one of two ways: either I will love it and not want to touch another piece of contemporary game hardware ever again, or the thing will sit in the carrying case and several months from now you'll see a blog post involving me lamenting the fact that I'd wasted my money.

To support the former timeline is the fact that I love playing games on Switch so much, even when the experience is dismal compared to other formats. I bought "Doom 2016" on Windows then again on PlayStation 4, and couldn't get into it either time. I bought the "lower than lowest quality, smeared in Vaseline" Switch port, and played all the way through it twice. And with the Steam Deck, it's not "lower than lowest quality": it's medium, high, or even ultra settings depending on the game and how long you want the battery to last, at the native resolution of the display, at a locked thirty frames per second!

Lending credence to the latter timeline is that there are better ways to experience these games. Why would I want to play "Elden Ring" in the future at medium quality at 720p, when I could just play it on my PlayStation 5 on my fifty inch 4K HDR TV with ultra quality settings? And the Switch is a smorgasbord for indie titles and collections of old games, even with frequent case and manual physical releases via companies like Limited Run Games. For my favorite kinds of modern games-- "Hi-Bit"-- the Steam Deck has no performance advantage, and lacks the Switch's wonderful OLED screen.

I think my whole experience with the Steam Deck would hinge on how well it would function for the hacker side of me. How easy is it to get a good RetroArch experience? How easy is it to get DOSBox working well? Can I run LibreOffice and VeraCrypt on it, and maybe even use it to replace my desktop PC altogether? Because if the Steam Deck became this magical 3DO, "EZWolf", "GZDoom", and "One Must Fall: 2097" handheld on which I can also do my taxes, I'd never desire anything else. Conversely, if it became one of those things where every time they roll an update everything breaks, I'd find it hugely disappointing. So far today, haven't yet found a single person who is looking at the Deck from this kind of angle.

Another use case could be as a development "workstation" of sorts. Regular readers know that I am a huge fan of "Fuze" on the Switch, and doing development straight on the handheld with a USB keyboard. I know that the "Godot Engine" guys have been working with Valve a lot over the past several months on having flawless support for the Deck. I've been wanting to make the leap from "Fuze" to the aforementioned "Godot Engine", and the Deck might get me motivated to follow through.

So we'll see. I probably won't know until I'm about to click the "Purchase" button on their web site, which way I'll go.

When drawing the lines of nation states, one possible approach is to grab the straight edge and run the pencil along ethnic or cultural lines. Another approach is to draw them to divide up spoils among conflict victors. In places where the latter principle is prioritized, ethnic lines are often split. Like water running downhill, inevitably forces seem to conspire to re-draw the lines to more closely conform with the wills of the people who were pseudo-arbitrarily pulled apart.

When ISIS started taking over the Middle East, I recall super-imposing various maps-- for example, one showing Sunni and Shia majorities-- and remarking at how ISIS's so-called "New Caliphate" was less culturally arbitrary than the lines the English and French had drawn up long ago. Another example would be the Balkans, which inevitably split between the Albanians, the Greeks, the Romanians, and so forth. Some modern-day countries are "fake": take Belgium for instance, which has major Flemish, French, German, and Italian populations in lieu of a unified "Belgian" identity.

Another "fake" country so-to-speak is Ukraine, which drove a wedge between ethnic Russians and the historical Ruthenians. I have a Moldovan friend whose father grew up in and then later returned to Crimea. This father was and is a Russian loyalist. When the Russians took the peninsula, he and his entire community did not perceive it as an invasion: they viewed it as a homecoming. In their eyes, they had been drawn on the wrong side of a pseudo-arbitrary line in the first place!

Russia's current military operations have the same flavor to me. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority-- or at least a critical mass minority-- of the people in the operational areas would prefer to be a part of Russia. I'm not a huge fan of armies marching around invading places, but I also recognize that sometimes that is simply how these splits eventually get resolved.

Either way, I don't want the United States to get involved. Two hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities doesn't leave much choice. And beyond that, the wisdomless Nancy Pelosi and her ilk don't even know the difference between Hungary and Ukraine, much less the elaborate historical and cultural issues at play in the conflict. Any meddling they do will just make things worse.

More than even in the pickup truck market, video game customers are extremely tribal. They operate on a series of triggers, and once in awhile a game will come out which trips several of them at once. Here are some quotes I am seeing regarding "Elden Ring":

• With Elden Ring, we're in masterpiece territory.
• It's one of the best games ever made.
• While it feels like the impact of Breath of the Wild is waning as the open world genre starts to stagnate again...
• At the risk of hyperbole, it has dethroned Bloodborne as my favorite game of all time.
• The thing that surprised me most about Elden Ring is how good the exploration is. Better than BOTW in some ways.
• I'm here to witness history.
• On Friday I get to play the best game ever made.
• God bless Fromsoft.
• Never doubt Miyazaki.
• Game of the year locked up already and it's only Feb.
• As expected, it is the greatest game ever.
• Our lord and Savior Miyazaki doesn't fail.
• It's the first game since BOTW that's going to have a sense of wonder and discovery.
• What a time to be alive.
• Zelda fans crying.
• Thank god for individuals like Miyazaki.
• Combat in Elden Ring is unmatched by any other game.
• Game of the decade incoming.
• They are creating history now
• So happy to see these scores!!

Outside of the first few bullets, none of these other people have even played the game. The lowest "professional" critic review is a ninety. Most of them are literally one hundreds. I haven't seen this kind of mass psychosis hyperbole and groupthink since "Breath of the Wild." So, it's not surprising to see that game referenced with regards to this one.

"Breath of the Wild" was a solid game, but not spectacular. I'm sure "Elden Ring" is a solid title too. But the commentary around titles like these are rooted more in gaming culture psychology than the actual releases themselves.

I keep seeing headlines like this, where it's stated that prices are rising at the highest level in forty years. But that's just not true, because the apparatchiks keep changing how the CPI is calculated. In fact, prices are rising higher than they were in 1982; price inflation is over 15% right now! I bet it's the highest price inflation in the history of the United States.

I also like this labor force participation chart. It was down, down, down from 1965 on, and that was with women joining the labor force. Then Trump gets into office, and for the first time basically since then it was up, up up. That by the way coincided with him making the US no longer have the highest corporate tax rate in the entire OECD. But then Brandon gets selected? Down, down, down again.

Let's not forget what an awesome President Trump was. I didn't agree with his clot shot pushing, but even on that subject he was light years from ever wanting to require them, or face diapers: he just wanted the shots available if people did voluntarily want them. And I can guarantee he'd be the only Western leader condemning the major, third-world style human rights abuses going on in Canada right now via Fidel Jr.

Changing subjects, after the abomination that was V, Street Fighter is a dead series-- along with pretty much everything else from my childhood, such as Star Trek. To seal that conclusion, I couldn't even make it twenty seconds into the VI video: patently ridiculous looking Blender models, rap music, and a stock Adobe image for the logo. Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does.

Speaking of modern games, I've been asking some people who recognize as strongly as do I how evil this Cultural Marxist infiltration in gaming is-- KKK in reverse-- what their strategies are. The best advice I got in a nutshell: don't pre-order anything; watch extensive YouTube footage, look for red flags; is it a Western game? Does it have black trannies or purple-haired retards in it? Is a genre which tends to have a silent protagonist and lots of player freedom? Time box to two days, and make a decision.

I'm about five hours into "Horizon 2", and I'm not sure I can keep going. The first game already had the "woke dial" on maybe a six or seven-- but I could plug my nose and get through it. This sequel is at about a nine or a ten. Every single white male character I've encountered so far is either evil, ridiculously passive, or a doddering idiot. Meanwhile, all of the women are the crude, vulgar, frat-boy lesbian types. The noble male characters thus far have all been blacks.

Aside from the Victimhood Olympics nonsense, the writing, dialog, and characterizations are so paper thin, I can scarcely believe what I'm watching. My eleven year old daughter's writing is orders of magnitude more sophisticated.

Then you get to the protagonist, who is about the most unlikable character I've ever encountered in a video game. It's like they wrote her to have as repulsive of a personality as possible: she has no sense of humor, no warmth, no graciousness. In every interaction she's smarmy and sarcastic: hand on hip, doing the weird side-to-side neck crane deal black women do when they're trying to get free shit in a McDonald's, mocking the white guy she's invariably lecturing. There are literally no redeeming aspects to her character as a human being. She's the kind of person who would clear rooms at parties.

Beyond that, they took the character design and essentially made her twenty percent fatter, and her skin twenty percent more pock-marked. The Left hate female beauty with a passion.

I'm going to give "Gran Turismo 7" a shot in a few weeks. But if that one winds up being a dud or simply not that interesting, I'm just going to pawn the PlayStation 5 on eBay, and probably the Series X too. The most fun I've had by a wide margin with any video games over the past twelve months or more has been playing "Crash 'N Burn" and "The Horde" on 3DO. Nintendo's stuff isn't "woke" yet, so I'd still have the Switch-- albeit some of the character designs in "Arceus" raised my eyebrows...

This is an excellent retrospective regarding the WuFlu. I mentioned to someone recently that all the way back in March of 2020, it was already obvious that the whole thing was a con. "Nah, no way! We didn't know that back then." Well, thanks to this blog, I keep receipts.

Here I am on February 5, 2020, citing speculation that Tencent accidentally revealed mass casualty at the hands of the virus, in China. The data was unclear as of that date, and the truth could have been in either direction. But by March 27, 2020, I was so confident in the data having revealed that the whole thing was a fraud that I penned this, wherein I marveled at how disproportionately bent out of shape people were getting in their fear over what was no big deal.

Seven days before that-- on March 20, 2020-- I wrote here about how the trade-off in civil liberties was not even close to warranted given the threat of the virus. And the day before that I wrote about how the Fed showering trillions was bad, and very shortly therafter-- March 25-- I called out that this inflation of the money supply would raise prices. Boy did I get that one right. Boy did I get all of this right. Not because I'm smart-- but simply because I impartially pay attention to what's occurring.

Fast forward all the way to July 23, 2020 and Minnesota's low-IQ governor, Dim Tim Walz, mandated "face coverings", something which I eviscerated in this post, citing lots of statistics. It was totally nonsensical. Even if the WuFlu had been dangerous, and even if this "mandate" would have helped things (i.e. duct taping a bandanna to your face would stop airborne aerosol particles), late July would have been hilariously too late to accomplish anything.

Some people I've talked to recently have said that it's better to just be an ostrich with politics: "You can't control it anyway!" My riposte is that, "Yes, but then you walked around with a stupid looking diaper on your face for two years, didn't you? And then you got a heart tissue-destroying fluid injected into your veins, while simultaneously ceding your civil liberties, some of them forever. And then you caught the virus anyway!" That's what the ostrich approach gets you.

It doesn't make sense to worry about politics. But it does make sense to follow what's going on. In a "normal" world maybe one could vote in a politician, delegate some responsibility to them, and trust them to more or less do the right thing. But we are not in "normal" times. These people are authoritarian dictators: serial liars who will do whatever it takes, no matter how short-sighted or unscrupulous, to obtain and retain power. You absolutely need to day-to-day follow events in this crazy era.

I was just having a conversation about this topic of snow driving with my eleven year-old daughter, who can't wait to start driving. She's very tall for her age, and I taught her how to operate the clutch and change gears last summer. "But snow driving", I explained, "is a whole different skill set. I will explain many things to you before you even get in the car for the first time in winter."

One of those "skill set" things I am going to introduce her to is how to control the car when the back end comes lose. Because when it's really slick, any car on any tires is going to experience at least a little oversteer, if not a lot in the case of my 350z.

I am going to take her into a big open area, turn off all traction and stability control, and have her just do donuts for awhile. Then I will show her how you turn a donut back into a straight line. They do this in Finland: forty hours of skidpad work to get your driver's license. This way, when people take a corner and the car begins to rotate, the driver doesn't panic.

My first car way back when was a 1994 model year, and didn't have anti-lock brakes. Perfect way to learn. I wish I had some way to shut those off for her too. To this day, I "pump" and am very light on the brakes, staying out of ABS except in glare ice conditions where they come on no matter how gentle I am.

On a totally different note, I took a shot at listing the "best" proprietary video game platforms of all time. So, no VGA / Adlib DOS games, no Game Boy Advance, no Amiga-- just game consoles:

1. Sony PlayStation
2. Nintendo Famicom
3. Sega Mega Drive
4. Nintendo Super Famicom
5. Atari VCS
6. Sony PlayStation 2
7. NEC PC Engine
8. Sega Saturn
9. Nintendo Switch
10. Sega Master System

My favorite list looks different, I think it'd be: 3DO, Mega Drive, Saturn, PC Engine, and Atari 7800. I even like add-ons such as the 32x. The Dreamcast would be in the top ten somewhere. I'd probably enjoy a Jaguar, if I could ever justify spending that kind of money on one. Versus something like the PlayStation 2, a system in which I have zero interest, but can "objectively" recognize for its enormous library.

Let us begin this session by blessing ourselves in the name of the Diversity, the Inclusion, and the Holy Climate Change, Amen. Let us now reflect on the things which make this world Most Holy, the Blessed Sacraments and Sacred Commandments.


Our Commandments

Diversity Is Our Strength: The less people have in common, the more the group's members will be in harmony, and the more prosperous they will be. Therefore, it's important to remove as many white people, men, and Republicans as possible from every situation, to make the group ideologically homogeneous. Diversity!

Stereotyping Is Wrong: It's wrong to judge people based on superficial characteristics. And that's why we pigeonhole people not just into a couple of groups, but stereotype them into many! There are many ways to be a victim! Each specific to that person's life experiences... just kidding! Are you black? Are you a woman? Are you gay? Then you're a victim! Blessed are the victims among us, for they shall inherit the State Department, amen.

Inclusion, a Blessed Shibboleth: We need to include everyone, and make them feel welcome. Everyone! All are welcome here! Yes! Everyone who supports Black Lives Matter or who voted for Democrats are welcome! Those who like to fuck assholes are welcome! Those who want to increase the power of multi-billion dollar corporations are welcome! Let us now take a break to say a prayer: Oh, bless me Saint Patrisse, sanctify and save my soul, oh sanctimonious hero martyr Floyd, save our souls from the white devil Republicans and the fiery pits of the patriarchy, amen!

Mother Gaia Needs Help: Quick! Hurry my children, my flock! We need to immediately begin strip mining the Earth of all its cobalt and lithium with slave labor, so we can stop strip mining it of its oil! External combustion is the way forward, not internal combustion, you silly child! Or the atmosphere will be filled with too much plant food! The Earth already became Venus once when there was two hundred and sixty seven times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than today-- last time that happened we ran out of margaritas and our fossil fuel powered air conditioner broke. We can't live without air conditioning obviously, all of the curl goes out of our hair!

Everything is Racist: My flock, my faithful pupils, we are Children of Progress! We know that it's not a matter of whether a given object is racist, but rather how it's racist. Therefore we need to spend trillions of dollars-- trillions!-- to Build Back Better. With equity! This will make the world a better place, because everything will be ten times more expensive, and the poorest among us will be plunged into poverty. Which is their own fault for not going to college! Or for choosing to work for a living by not moving to California or Washington DC and becoming diversity consultants like the rest of us. Progress, my lamb, progress!

The Sacred Precept of Accessibility: Everything should be accessible to everyone! Only a bigot thinks movies aren't for blind people! Or that music isn't for the deaf! What else would they possibly do with their time otherwise? We need to immediately drop what we're doing to make everything accessible to everyone at all times! Except for hospitals, workplaces, movie theaters, restaurants, or grocery stores for the unvaxxed, those most foul of heathen anti-science beasts, may Saint Floyd curse their souls!

Trust the Science: We need to trust the experts at all times! All experts! All experts who are on CNN need to be trusted immediately! And science! Men can have periods, too! Mosquitos can be stopped by a chain link fence, so wear that cotton mask immediately, you bigot! When The Most Holy Doctor Fausti said before that masks were paranoid and didn't work, he was mistaken: but he repented, and was absolved of his Misinformation! Locking people into their homes and excluding them from society will keep them safe and healthy, especially from the most lethal of WuFlu nasal congestion-- that is true, my child!

Evangelize: Everyone should be made to feel comfortable at all times. And everyone should be free to express their opinions, and to bring their whole selves with them. No one should be made to feel uncomfortable, and should live in a safe space. That's why, my flock, we need to enter every last situation by non-stop espousing our world view at every turn! Every meeting at work should begin with a meditation session, reflecting on the Original Sin of white people, and on the virtues of homogeneous Diversity! And because it's important for everyone to bring their whole selves, anyone to the right of Chairman Mao needs to be immediately censored and excluded from all aspects of society. This is how important Inclusion is!


When in Doubt

Some days you may be plunged into despair: you can't afford a fifty thousand dollar car which needs a new ten thousand dollar battery pack after eight years. Or you can't afford groceries because Build Back Better has created equity. Or because of Holy Lockdowns you aren't allowed to have a funeral for your boyfriend, who died from Myocarditis after getting his sixteenth Holy Jab of Annointing-- I mean, who died from the stress of Climate Change!

All of those evil white devil patriarchal monsters told you all of this would happen-- but they are broken clocks! Even a blind squirrel, my dear, even a blind squirrel. Therefore, cease all of these blasphemous thoughts! Banish this foul Cognitive Dissonance! It's the work of the Trump Devil! Wear your mask in pride! Buy another rainbow bumper sticker for your Prius! Say a prayer to Saint Cullors, Saint Floyd, or the Most Holy Priest Doctor Fausti! Thank The Biden, and never forget the power of the Virtue Signal: solidarity, comrade!

Let us end now in peace, except for Republicans. In the name of the Diversity, the Inclusion, and the Holy Climate Change, Amen!