Category: Uncategorized

Of Games and Civilizations

This is an interesting digression on the multiple aspects of what can be described as “Western civilization” and how game developers have attempted to account for some of its various aspects:

Civilization is not so much an architectural style but a thought process of metaphysics. And these different metaphysics create different cultures which create different civilizations.

From the other side of the world, the West might as well just be ‘Western Civilization’ with all histories plopped together as ‘History of the West’. Yet, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Without understanding the multiple Western Civilizations, how can one learn to utilize it? Or even to understand it?

One Western Civilization is a Christianized Paganism. The Second Western Civilization is the Protestation of the former. While you may think these are mere religious differences gone today, you would be completely wrong. There are two Western Civilizations that exist today.

The Christianized Paganism is easier to find its roots. You have the Greeks and Roman Empire metaphysics converted (e.g. instead of an Emperor, you have a Pope). This Western Civilization can mostly be found in non-English speaking countries or in some isolated conclaves of English speaking countries.

As far as the Second Western Civilization, it is better to see it as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ especially with its English language. The Paganism has been rooted out and obliterated in this civilization. It is the civilization of individualism, of hypocrisy, of the Enlightenment thinkers, but also of constant Revolutions. The modern ‘Woke’ culture is a byproduct of the Calvinistic Second Western Civilization metaphysical reality asserting itself. While Christianized Paganism stresses the experience of life, the Western Protestant Civilization stresses the rules of life. Aesthetically, Christianized Paganism bathes itself in the glamour of the ancient arts. Western Protestant Civilization lives in a stark utilitarian mindset and removes all such ancient glamour.

The history of the development of the Ultima games is very nearly as interesting as playing them, and to this day, Akalabeth remains one of my all-time favorite computer games.

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France Retreats From Africa

The French President has announced that it will remove its troops and its diplomats from Niger as per the request of the new Nigerien government:

France will pull its military and diplomats from Niger after a successful coup by anti-French forces, President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday. The move will see around 1,500 soldiers leave by the end of the year.

“France has decided to withdraw its ambassador. In the next hours our ambassador and several diplomats will return to France,” Macron told France 2 television on Sunday. “And we will put an end to our military cooperation with the Niger authorities,” he continued, adding that French troops would return home in “the months to come.”

Niger’s pro-French president, Mohamed Bazoum, was ousted in a military coup in July. Capitalizing on widespread public dissatisfaction with France’s decade-long anti-insurgent operation in the region, the coup leaders immediately suspended a military cooperation agreement with the French government and demanded that French troops leave the country.

This is a small, but serious defeat for The Empire That Never Ended. Clown World is imperial and it’s European satrapies are economically dependent upon draining the resources from Africa without paying full price for them. The growing BRICSIA alliance is quickly winning over the allegiance of the African nations in part because they are offering genuine trade rather than corruption and parasitical neo-colonialism, although it will be interesting to see if China can resist the temptation to stake a similar claim to Africa’s rich natural resources when it has the power to do so.

Russia, of course, has no need for them.

In either case, this will probably not be the last African country to demand European or US troops to leave. And it probably won’t be too long before Asian countries start following suit, although it is unlikely that the USA will politely accede to any such demands from Japan or Korea.

And, of course, France hasn’t actually withdrawn them yet…

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The History Subscription

We’re going to print with THE LANDMARK THUCYDIDES. The title page created for the Castalia Library edition is below.

The second and third books in the series are already printed, and the fourth book is presently being scanned in preparation for going to print. We’re waiting on the leathers, which should arrive sometime in October, and then we’ll be going into production.

If you haven’t subscribed yet to Castalia History, or to Castalia Library, this is a very good time to do so, as we expect to be hitting on all cylinders by the end of the year. Below is an image of the first custom stamp die created for the bindery; initial tests of the bottom jig have been good, although it appears we’re going to have to add a top jig as well in order to ensure properly distributed pressure across the cover. You can see the screwholes that we’ve added which will allow us to fix the stamps into an exact position; a system that is a considerable improvement on the two-sided tape customarily used to fix the stamps into position that we regarded as too haphazard and prone to operator error.

And finally, as you have probably already seen on SocialGalactic, both The Promethean and The Lawdog Files are now being spotted in the wild.

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Tilting at Windmills

Karl Denninger considers the possibility that he may have been wasting his time warning his fellow Americans about the coming hard times:

Tell me, how many of you have demanded your Representative and two Senators place the military on the border and treat the influx of illegal crossers as an invasion, shutting down all passage of bills and other Congressional activity until the Executive does exactly that and implements 100% E-Verify, ejecting all illegal aliens already here? Oh yes, the so-called “Conservatives” have, several times, placed 100% E-Verify in a bill but every single time they’ve pulled it rather than insist it pass to get anything else, yet that IS within their power to do. How many of you have demanded all the scams and frauds in the medical system, including that ruled illegal under 15 USC Chapter 1 forty years ago, be met with immediate indictment, prosecution and imprisonment? I have, publicly and repeatedly for over a decade and been raising hell about it for more than two decades. Have you? Or is it only a problem when the invading mass of people show up in your city and start taking whatever they want? Is that not what an invading army does? Do you only complain when you get hurt and need a physician — and get personally screwed with a bill ten or even one hundred times that someone else pays, or when you’re prescribed a drug that is one hundred times as expensive as the same drug, made in the same factory, sold in Europe.

WELL?

I get it, people go along to get along.

But every now and then I have to look at the record, along with the over 15,500 articles I’ve written (not counting replies and discussions) since 2007 and ask: What has come of all the put-in effort, other than a bunch of worn-out keyboards?

After all there’s only 24 hours in a day, and now matter what I do, and how much money I have (or not) I can’t get a single one of the hours I spend doing this — and its a fairly significant investment in time and effort, for which I expect and earn basically nothing in terms of money — back.

I’m going to spend some of them doing something else since, at a certain point, you have to wonder if you really are tilting at windmills.

By Karl’s chosen metric, saving the American nation from itself, he has been a complete failure and all his efforts have been a complete waste of time. And it’s true, he has been and it was. But this failure was inevitable, because there is no saving a nation from itself. The task that he set himself was always impossible from the start.

A better metric, I think, is to ask whether one’s efforts have been beneficial to others. And on that basis, it is absolutely inarguable that Karl’s efforts have been a near-unprecedented success. He has almost certainly saved more individuals from unnecessarily experiencing poor health, degraded immune systems, and sudden death than one thousand doctors over the entire course of their medical careers. That is more than success, that is time well-spent and a life well-lived.

I’m not saying this to try to persuade Mr. Denninger to devote more time to his Market Ticker, or to make him feel any better about how he has spent his time and efforts, or to curry any favor with him. I’m simply an observer pointing out the observable facts, and the observable fact is that by any historical measure, if there was still a real Catholic Church with a genuine servant of Jesus Christ at its head, Karl Denninger would be beatified as a literal living saint for his selfless services to humanity.

Lest any readers here fear for my own feelings about the complete failure of my own 27,333 blog posts and even more significant time investment to save the American nation or Western civilization, please take comfort in the reminder that I am a quintessential Sigma male, I have always believed most people are self-serving idiots who are totally incapable of recognizing the inevitable consequences of their collective actions, and I have never expected anyone to understand, let alone agree, much less take any action on the basis of, my efforts. I observe because I am an observer and I write because I am a writer. That may not be enough for others with more ambitious objectives, but it is enough for me.

Perhaps we are all just tilting at windmills. But so what? Dragons or windmills, some of us are just born to tilt.

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Should We Cancel Chuck Dixon

I am reliably informed that he is associated with some deeply unsavory characters. Also – you’ll never guess – antisemitic! These are very serious charges.

Dane, a YouTuber who runs the channel ActualFandom, recently appeared to defame Chuck Dixon as an anti-Semite as the Rippaverse is about to release Dixon’s upcoming Alphacore book.

On X, the YouTuber wrote, “If you’re someone who values the wellbeing of comics communities I implore you to read. Rippaverse Comics will soon publish a comic by a former industry pro, creator of Bane & Time Drake – Chuck Dixon. It gets disturbing from there.”

In the tweet, Dane takes issue with Chuck Dixon’s creation of the comic series Alt Hero Q for Vox Day’s Arkhaven Comics. In an image he shared as part of his tweet he writes, “He’s also worked with a publisher called Arkhaven, on a comic called ALT-HERO:Q. As in QANON. The first arc is titled ‘WHERE WE GO ONE’, which refers to the Q conspiracist mantra of ‘WHERE WE GO ONE, WE GO ALL’, often shortened on social media as ‘WWG1WGA’.

He then goes on to provide summaries of the first couple of issues of the book. From there he states, “For those unfamiliar with the IRL QAnon, it is a belief that a vast conspiracy of Hollywood elite and every politician who isn’t explicitly pro-Trump, is engaged in acts involving children ranging from an updated take on anti-Semitic ‘blood libel’ narratives, to pedophilia and Satanic sacrifice.”

Let me get this straight. Because The Legend wrote a comic about an evil elite that engages in child sex trafficking, he is antisemitic.

Now, isn’t that an open and public admission that a certain group of people are engaged in child sex trafficking and Satanic sacrifice? Especially given the fact that the comic doesn’t mention or imply anything about Satanic sacrifice.

Anyhow, this is just an attempt to get Chuck kicked off Eric July’s projects, which isn’t going to happen. What’s amusing about this is that if Dane is worked up about AH:Q, he’s going to stroke out on the spot if he ever reads The Legend’s Levon Cade novels…

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