2020, twenty-four hours to go: I've got another bookshelf entry for you!

Happy New Year's Eve everyone, I hope you get the appropriate level of drunk to celebrate the end of this year from hell. I've got a couple rum and Cokes lined up to ring in the New Year right proper, before we all wake up and realize that 2020 won.

I'm not sorry for those puns, and I'd make them again. But to make up for them, I can announce a new bookshelf entry I just finished marking up. It's titled An Academic Journey to a New World, and it's one of two papers I discovered on my laptop from my undergrad days. In what's starting to look like a pattern, I once again dabble on the fringes of known history, weighing evidence for Phoenician and Carthaginian travel to the Americas. I was solidly in favor of this idea as an undergrad, then I swung against it as a graduate student, and now I'm not sure. All I can do is point you towards the evidence, be honest about where that evidence has been debunked in the intervening years, and offer my best guess.

If someone held a gun to my head and told me to guess, I'd say that this particular pre-Columbian contact probably happened. The Phoenicians were no less able seafarers than the Polynesians, who I briefly mention in the introduction almost certainly did make it to the Americas and back. The evidence is scattershot and circumstantial, but not without merit. Some peculiarities about the trade with the city of Ophir mentioned in the first book of Kings in the Bible weighs in its favor, as does some narcotics found in Egyptian mummies, and some shipwrecks off the Eastern seaboard. To learn more, you'll just have to check it out.

How to build a tinyhouse in a desert

I've gotten questions about my tinyhouse. I've left Nevada for the winter, so unfortunately I can only use pics and videos I've already taken to illustrate the process I used to make it, and what it looks like now. And as I look through the video I took, it didn't capture the stuff I thought it was pointing at. It's mostly just me talking and pictures of a cloudless blue sky, so we'll skip that bit. The parts that aren't blue sky have been GIF'd for your viewing pleasure to the left, and my narrative in the video isn't really necessary as I'm writing one here.

The first part was building the road to the property. I won't dwell on it too much except to mention it, because if you're trying to do what I'm doing, property access is always your first consideration. Many people who live near me built their roads through other people's property. For the most part, that's okay - so long as you get on with your neighbors. But the moment a feud starts, you don't have the legal right to drive to your own property on the road you built. So literally, don't cut corners here. It took me three months to even just get to my property, because I was pulling out sagebrush and levelling the dirt and digging swales. But it all went through public property, where the developers of my ghost town had once planned for a road to go before never building it.

More cartographyposting: The British Raj

This is India at the territorial height of the British Raj, give or take an Anglo-Afghan War or three. Another cartographic entry into the galleryposting, and like the last one, I made it for an eventual video I'll make for my Youtube history channel for apolitical normies.

The Gospel is revolutionary.

"Chains shall He break
For the slave is our brother;
And in His Name
All oppression shall cease."

I hope you're all having a very merry Christmas. I'm spending mine with my family, and enjoying their company this winter before I head back out to Nevada to get back to work in the spring. I set this up to autopost when I'll be waking up.

I don't have a whole lot of insight to offer you this morning other than a notion I'll be expanding on in a full-blown essay, maybe even a full-blown book: the Christian gospel is revolutionary. So is the Jewish Law, so is the Muslim sharia, so is the Buddhist Eightfold Path, so is just about any other original religious tradition you can think of. Religions are just metaphysical ideologies, and they spring out of the same conditions that create materialist ideologies like socialism or fascism. Fascism never lasts very long, and neither do fascist religions. Religions that spring from socialist roots outlast them, and religions that retain their socialist roots longer and stronger remain cherished in the heart of the working class all the more for it.

This isn't to say that nothing bad ever happens as a result of religion, or that you must be religious to be socialist, or that the particular metaphysical claims of any given religion must definitely be true. What it is to say is, that Whosoever breaks the chains of the slaves my brothers is my King, and any such Name that would end oppression will forever be upon my lips.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Merry Christmas! I got you some old music and a new bookshelf entry.

Merry Christmas, to those of you who celebrate! (And Happy Holidays to those of you who do not!) I hope it's spent in relative happiness around friends and/or family, and that it's a season of spiritual renewal for you.

I was given an idea for a new essay last weekend, and have spent all week writing and then marking it up for the internet. It's ready to go, and it's about our modern music subcultures, and I call it Millions of Red Bops.

In the course of finding relevant videos to deck the essay with, I found this little gem of footage of me covering two old Christmas songs from the Middle Ages. I didn't have anything else ready to go for a blog post, so it's there to the side. Audio quality isn't great, it was recorded in the early 2010s, but I kinda dig it. I chose to cover "The Seven Rejoices of Mary" and "Veni Veni Emmanuel" because those songs have some real meaning behind them. They aren't materialistic Christmas songs from the Boomer era, but were written and sung by people who believed and hoped earnestly in the teachings of their faith. There's a richness of spirit, an organicness to them that you just don't get from modern capitalist carols.

Imma bout to drop some fresh cartography on ya

This is the Spanish Main, what pirates and the colonial empires they resisted called the Caribbean. It's period-specific to the colonial era, but only in broad terms; possession of the islands went back and forth between the various powers.

"Performative Axisship" is up on the bookshelf!

I just formatted and published another essay I wrote out in the field, Performative Axisship. It's an investigation of how dogwhistles, pacts with fashy idiots, and deliberately tweaking the pinkhairs are occasionally necessary to help communists advance our emancipatory goals. I expect to be so cancelled, you guys, but I also just don't care. Read up on it if you want to learn the contours of this theory. Although many communists have embraced this theory in practice in times past, I'm unaware of any communists explicitly writing theory about it before. Today, it's my humble contribution to the collective effort.

Upon the occasion of the electoral college electing Joseph Biden

My fellow Republicans:

One hundred and sixty years ago, we took up arms to defend a Republic by the people, for the people, and of the people. Our ancestors swore their oaths to the Constitution, to this people's Republic it set forth, and marched through the heart of the South for the liberation of an enchained race and the promulgation of this Constitution.

Today, the world lay in imperialist chains forged by liberal Democrats, and I understand the desire of many to deny them their victory, so barely won. But the only tool in our hands by which to shatter these chains is our own Constitution. By it, a rebellion against those chains, those liberals, those Democrats, can be blessed and sanctioned by all the force of our law. Without it, it is just unremitting war of the few on the many, one we the many are not prepared in any wise to win. We must uphold the Constitution, even when it works against our short term interests, because by allowing the workers of America to vote in a new government and to peacefully organize, it gives us a greater scope of action if properly used.

Another charcoal: the Maitreya Buddha, and that time I blackmailed a mafioso's kid

I drew this in the only college-level art class I ever took: Drawing 101 in Anne Arundel Community College, MD. It wasn't the first charcoal I'd ever done, nor the first charcoal I was really proud of, but it was the first that taught me the technique of using a different color of paper and adding white back in with white charcoal. This is on grey paper, and the assignment was simple. The instructor brought in a figurine of the Maitreya Buddha he had from home, and had us draw it from where we were sitting. I was a star pupil in that class and got done with the basic assignment fairly quickly, so he had me elaborate on the background a bit. I also signed my name in Japanese in the upper right corner; it's a language I speak badly, and my real name does not translate well at all to Japanese. But given that the Maitreya Buddha is a key figure in the Zen pantheon, and Zen is the main school of Buddhist thought in Japan, it seemed to fit.

So this particular piece of mine has an interesting history.

Saturday shitposting roundup, 12/12/2020

Aaaaaalmost forgot. But it's still Saturday in Nevada, so I'm not technically late. I kinda gave myself the week off because of a much more serious post and its emotionally draining subject matter, and spent the day playing Civ V. Maybe one day I'll write up a throwaway shitpost about my vidyagaem habits.

But until then, the public demands memes. Statistics tell me these posts perform exceptionally well, which is kinda depressing until I see that the bookshelf entries are also killing it. All is not lost for the effortposting side of things, and the bookshelf entries are the main reason this blog even blogs, so yay. In any case, without having to do any promotion whatsoever, a lot of you are just here for the Saturday shitposting. I know it, you know it, there's no sense denying it. So you know what that means...

You might as well jump!

A year and a day later: here in the precious blood I stand.

A year ago today, the neighbors came to my van to ask me to check up on their daughter. I drove down the dirt road towards Highway 93 figuring that I'd be changing a flat, or that her rusted-out hoopty had finally had enough and I'd be giving her a ride home. But for whatever reason, a dark thought crept into my head. What if it's real this time? It scared and disgusted me, and I went back to reimagining the steps to changing a flat in the dark. Find the jack, ratchet off some nuts, slide the tire off...

And then I saw the lights, a sickening cacophony of reds and blues filling up the desert and then receding, photonic harbingers of terror, and my internal world collapsed in on itself.

Probably the single coolest thing I've ever drawn: "Carta Caela," the map of the stars.

This is a map of the fifteen nearest lightyears to Earth, as understood to science in August 2016. The most recent discovery at that time was Proxima b, which is why Proxima Centauri has a planet denoted. The little dots are known planets.

Saturday shitposting roundup, 12/6/2020

It's that time again. What time? Why, the time for my lowest-effort post of the week! After formatting Ziusudra and the Conquest of HTML No Matter What, I've earned it. And I've got some real winners for you today! The shitposting forecast for this past week was partly repetitive with chance of liberalism, but the weekly edge was concentrated in a couple of them. Follow me after the jump:

New essay up on the bookshelf!

Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation is now live! This is an in-depth look into prehistory, looking at the post-Ice Age floods, whether the Biblical character Noah really reals and how, the fate of the Neanderthals, and the origins of settler-colonialism. And just for good measure, I threw in some original etymological analysis, as one does. It's the first historical work I've published on this blog, and it won't be the last. This puppy is over twice as long as the last bookshelf entry, How to Class Analyze Anything, and the HTML formatting alone took me six hours. The research and the writing of the article itself probably took a week out in the desert. It's a labor of love, so please read it and let me know what you think.

Trump fired Kissinger!

This broken clock named Trump has had the right time so often lately that I'm wondering if it isn't really ticking. He's the only American President in living memory to have no use for Henry Kissinger. Right before Thanksgiving, there was a purge of neoliberal ghouls from the Defense Policy Board, clearing the way for new appointments to carry out a new mission in the Department of Defense. These people are Trump loyalists, yes, but in this context that's a good thing. Their loyalty to Trump will preserve them from shitlib pressure to keep the forever wars going, and Trump's new Defense Department is bringing troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

To the surprise of literally nobody who knows who Henry Kissinger is, he was one of the key impediments to doing what Trump is doing right now abroad. In this Washington Post op-ed from 2011, he-like all good liberals-presents himself as being for something he's really against. He talks about wanting to withdraw from Afghanistan, but requiring four "tests" that must be met, which can never be met in these material conditions:

For negotiation to turn into a viable exit strategy, four conditions must be met: a cease-fire; withdrawal of all or most American and allied forces; the creation of a coalition government or division of territories among the contending parties (or both); and an enforcement mechanism.

Grr. Coding is hard.

I haven't been able to get a whole lot done on the blog in the past few days because I'm trying to resurrect an old webcomic I once had. Why? Because even though the original webcomic host went down three years ago, and even though the bare-cones backup I stuck the comic files on looked like trash and had literally no promotion or updates whatsoever for three years, its four hundred pages drew twenty thousand pageviews anyway.

People must just have liked the comic, and searched it out, and reread it. I've had the original files with me this whole time, and even though I stopped making more because I was too busy with a thesis I never finished, I've reread it once or twice too. It's a webcomic, but it's not a gag-a-day sorta thing. It's an involved story, the kind of thing where you totally could read 400 pages in a go if you have that kinda time.