I'm still having issues interfacing with the blog. However streaming is actually going reasonably well.....to that end.....
Tonight at 9:00 PM EST / 01:00am UTC join us at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet for a Super-Secret-Silent-Sci-Fi Saturday as we watch 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1916). We showed this once before...to two viewers. However, this is a fascinating film, and the first theatrical release to feature actual underwater photography. I actually have multiple movie posters and newspaper ads to show, but the blog doesn't like images right now....
So....IMAGINE if you will : SHARKS!, A GIANT OCTOPUS!, FISH!, STALWART HEROES STANDING AGAINST THEM!, AN OLD BEARDED GUY WITH A SEXTANT!
Or....join us for all the fun tonight.
Afterwards we'll be playing Disgaea: Hour of Darkness!
Tonight (Sat7/8/23) at 21:00 EST/ 01:00 UTC we'll be doing another Testing and Breaking Things Stream over on Kick.com.
We'll be doing a bit of grinding in Disgaea to level up the new character and around Midnight we're going to watch some Silent movies, a silent short that is TBA and Der Golem (1920)
A German expressionistic Horror film set in the middle ages. The Golem is the last film in what was the very first Multimedia mass merchandising SciFi Horror Franchises, with Book, Radio, Film and Merchandise elements. It is also a prequel that serves as the origin story for the film series. https://kick.com/brickmuppet Come by, say "Hi!" and poke about while checking out the Beta of Kick.com!
(We actually showed this looonng ago on Twitch, but only had 2 viewers the whole night and this film really deserves to be seen. )
So, in what is now called Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, 247 years ago today, a group of men, some more reluctantly than others, declared the independence of their homeland from their nation.
After a declaration of principles, they listed their grievances. Those grievances are highlighted in red below the fold.
Aside from certain ones that have a contemporary ring to them ("He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us...") and a few others that were products of their time, I am struck by how mundane many of these concerns seem to most of us today, yet back then were seen as sufficient infractions of liberty to inspire men to take up arms against the most powerful military in the world.
I'm further struck be the lack of anything approaching child genital mutilation amongst the grievances.
This may yet be winnable without a great deal of violence.
SEcondly, the appropriate time and place for violence would be in circumstances where every American would understand it to be justified. See Rittenhouse.
Thirdly, the path out will need a victorious coalition able to deliver peace. The type of person most necessary to bring into that coalition are the ones who would dislike stupid emotionally compromised applications of violence, that are directed against innocents.
Each of these items alone would perhaps be grounds for some thoughtful and attentive deliberation. Together, I find them strongly compelling.
Most current things seen as provocation have perhaps been going on for decades. I think the schools were pretty abusive twenty or twenty five years ago.
Covid and the rest of 2020's activities were a combination of the left unmasking thinking they had won, and them being too clever for their own good. The current level of disenchantment is downstream of their own goals, and discrediting of their tools.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sat Jul 8 21:58:13 2023 (r9O5h)
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Ian's moderation team or Ian himself deleted my comment for that video. It may be my first time. The comment itself was fairly innocuous, I think. It said: "FYI Antelope Hill sell ``The Foreigner Group'' by Carolus Lofross on their website." I didn't even post a link (which I can post here, if you're interested). But someone could not stand it. I guess I'll go ahead and cancel my Patreon subscription now.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Jul 5 00:48:48 2023 (LZ7Bg)
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I think Lofross's book was the one that Patreon threatened Headstamp over when they were trying to publish it.
Thanks for the link BTW!
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Jul 5 07:37:11 2023 (ir7rl)
Posted by: Rick C at Fri Jul 7 09:41:19 2023 (k3/O4)
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OK, that was weird, I posted my comment, the page refreshed, and the video's there instead of "this video is not available."
Posted by: Rick C at Fri Jul 7 09:41:48 2023 (k3/O4)
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@ Rick C: I've heard that You Tube and Patreon have been deleting/ shadow-banning/ generally dorking with... channels that feature edgy content by the standards of hypersensitive Karens.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Fri Jul 7 16:37:43 2023 (ir7rl)
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Whoops, I missed your reply somehow. That wouldn't surprise me. Daily they seem to go to new heights of idiocy. In a recent Louis Rossmann video talking about their latest attack on adblocking, Rossmann says Youtube will display a message on some people's screens saying they need to "allowlist" Youtube's ads...because "whitelisting" obviously is a Very Bad Word.
Posted by: Rick C at Fri Jul 14 09:14:18 2023 (BMUHC)
I was very distracted by the excitement of trying to follow that a little. (Was rooting for injuries.)
Doesn't really matter, we aren't going to be prepared to act on any Russian weaknesses until the Democrats are no longer in a position to backstab any sane American foreign policy.
Democrats are a greater potential danger to the American people than any foreign power could really manage. Even a hostile foreign disease warfare program would basically rely on Democrat collaborators for much of the real damage.
(I don't think the Russians or the PRC have much working nukes. They would need a good number of maintained warheads, maintained guidance systems, and maintained delivery systems to get past a working US defense system. The totalitarians are self sabotaging too hard to know which systems have what level of reliability given the actual maintenance. (I do find the totalitarianism in America concerning with regard to effects on missile and air defense.) If I thought the Democrat vote in the blue cities were not mostly fraud, I would be somewhat willing to write off a few cities as justice for the Democrat treason.)
If the Russians turn their backs on totalitarianism, they may be able to fix their maintenance and economic problems. Then we may really regret missing the opportunity to launch a counter force and counter Moscow first strike while those systems are this poorly maintained. Or Russia might get sane enough not to see us as their primary foe. So delaying action while we take the slow path on fixing the Democrats may or may not be the correct call.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Mon Jun 26 20:00:13 2023 (r9O5h)
KICK.COM is a new streaming network that seems to be much more friendly to individual streamers than Twitch...whose recent TOS fiasco has got a lot of streamers very nervous. Kick is currently in beta but it does have the capability to stream and seems to work fine with few bugs. These are mostly very minor streamer interface related things and not at all apparent to viewers
Well.....
My internet alter ego had a short test stream last night that worked OK. Reviewing the V.O.D. it still looked OK from the viewer end. So I'm going to do a SURPRISE full-on stream tonight at 9PM/21:00 EST /01:00 UTC over on https://kick.com/BRICKMUPPET We will be grinding in the item world of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness while chatting and spamming ALL 30 of my emotes. (Twitch currently lets me use 5)
Rudyard Lynch has a good overview of the history an RELIGIOSITY of communist thought (and far leftism in general). Unlike a lot on the right he looks closely and fairly at the genuine appeal this malign force has, why so many are persuaded by it's arguments and why it spread so fast. This is more honest and helpful than assuming they are all 2-dimensional pulp villains. (Which, to be fair is a rational, if misguided conclusion if one looks only at Communism's results). It's 50 minutes, but it is worth the time.
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I have some knee arthritis issues as well. Down to about half the cartilage I should have. I've been taking Glucosamine/Chondroitin, which has been helping, although I don't know if it will in your advanced state.
Posted by: Mauser at Wed Jun 7 22:54:00 2023 (BzEjn)
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I'm glad to see this news. I was a little afraid that I would hear of a sudden decline.
I'm very happy that you are seeing some improvements, and not just having to endure this stuff.
The reading especially sounds awful to me.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Thu Jun 8 07:59:25 2023 (r9O5h)
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You are right to postpone a replacement as much as possible, even at your age. Can't go back from those.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sun Jun 11 00:10:43 2023 (LZ7Bg)
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Received a number of cortisone shots when I was younger. Found out later that one potential side effect is early onset of cataracts. Found a knee compound from Garden of Life (no, they aren't paying me) that has a lot of good stuff in it and helps me a lot. The wife recently started having knee problems so she tried taking it, and it is helping her as well.
Posted by: Frank at Thu Jun 15 02:39:31 2023 (rglbH)
Tonight, as mentioned on stream the last few days, Brickmuppet Channel on Twitch will be having a surprise stream featuring La Pucelle: Tactics. Starting at 21:00 EST/01:00 UTC......
WE'RE GONNA PLAY IT TILL WE BEAT IT!
It might take 4 hours. It might take 24.
We're also having a sub-athon, but that is ongoing while I pursues my far away goal of 15 subscribers, so the important takeaway is that I intend to actually FINISH a game.
If we finish exceedingly early we'll chat a bit and explore some of the other games that the channel has acquired.
Come by and say "Hi!" as we grind....and grind....and grind some more in preparation for sallying forth on yet ANOTHER rematch with the final boss!
Again and again....until we vanquish this genocidal monster with mommy-issues and save the world, our friends and hope itself.
Stare in bewilderment at the late '90s Japanese take on fantasy Christianity. Marvel at the boomer trying to make sense of a PS2, Laugh at the inscrutable early 2000's Woolseyisms, Come for the scuff, stay for the cringe!
See you all there in 3 hours.
UPDATE:
It took almost 10 hours....but La Pucelle: Tactics has been vanquished. Thursday, we begin Disgaea!
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BTW, I'm still Anime blogging, if anyone is into that any more....
Posted by: Mauser at Sat May 27 23:05:04 2023 (BzEjn)
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Holy cow!!!
I will have to catch up on days off. I want to see you win!
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Sun May 28 05:59:08 2023 (sF8WE)
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I hope someone watches it eventually. The actual last series of dungeons leading to the final boss is @7:54:52. The V.O.D up until that point is just interminable grinding on the same two dungeons. It took an hour and a half because the last fight is a series of dungeon crawls with no refresh/save option and it is a maze. There are also 2 very long cutscenes...this game is very much a visual novel with heavy tactical elements.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun May 28 12:16:42 2023 (ir7rl)
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a) war zone that is an information warfare environment. b) A ways back someone joked somewhere about the Russians moving the goal posts to 'recognizing the independence of' Oblast 'republics' that had been internationally recognized as Russian Federation well before the previous invasion of Ukraine. c) we shall see.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Mon May 22 18:58:23 2023 (r9O5h)
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It also gets better. Apparently just down the road from these people is the town of Golovchino. Close enough that it appeared in one of there maps shown in the video our host posted. Allegedly there is an ammo dump a little outside of town that supposedly contains 240mm nuclear rounds. Stories about this are blowing up on Youtube. Personally I say caveat emptor on this story because I can't see Russia positioning nuclear rounds that close to a border, even in the Soviet days, much less with a hot war with Ukraine running.
Posted by: StargazerA5 at Mon May 22 19:22:23 2023 (QTWPE)
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The funniest part about it, I think, was when the ukronazi terrorists drove two Humvees into a pitfall trap, barely covered with some wood planks and trash. Moreover, the dastardly Russians didn't dig it in the roadway, but alongside, and placed some kind of marker. It's the Roadrunner and Coyote school of warfare for the 21st Century.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tue May 23 18:08:10 2023 (LZ7Bg)
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The 2nd funniest part, I already see pro-Ukrainian accounts saying that it was all staged and Russians dragged those Humvees into the hole. It wasn't just completely ukrodiots who cannot drive, no Sir. It was a Putin's psyop. Who do these people think they are fooling with this?
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tue May 23 18:11:21 2023 (LZ7Bg)
In the comments, Pete said that stream every night.
Well, sadly, I'm not that competent.
My internet alter-ego is streaming from an abandoned curry mine deep within an active volcano in the dinosaur infested jungles of Vermont*.
He does this on Sundays, Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, with occasional surprise streams on Saturdays. All streams start at 18:00 EST / 22:00 UTC except the very occasional Saturday streams generally start at about 21:00 EST / 01:00 UTC. Join him tomorrow at twitch.tv/brickmuppet and point and laugh as a weeb muddles through Eorzea with delusions of adequacy.
*Note that zoology, geology, geography, and how spices are acquired all work differently in the internet.
Addressing the Irrelevancies In a Knowledgable, Erudite Manner
Peter Zeihan is a smart guy. He has a profound understanding of global trade, the shipping industry and various factors that are generally overlooked by not only laymen, but policy makers. He is someone whom one should listen to as he has great insight into second and third order effects of various disruptions on global shipping that many would just call "Black Swans". Do follow him.
However, he also frequently wears a man-bun.
And that is a warning sign, as can be seen in this video where he exudes a pitch perfect, high-pitched blue-county-sneer as he relates in fantastic, and knowledgeable detail the process of accession into NATO.
He does this to explain that Russia cannot possibly feel threatened by NATO expansion because the process is democratic.
While the process is a good one, I think that in this context the actual process is irrelevant.
The Russians, especially the current Government (who are totalitarian assholes) do not care one whit about "process". Totalitarians care about results and the result of the process is that Nato has moved closer to Russia's border. Russians are, as a people, clinically paranoid. This stems from the fact that the history of Eastern Europe over the last thousand and a half years has been written in Slavic blood.
The thugs who run Russia are especially paranoid because they live in constant fear of court intrigues. He takes the argument of the stupidest , 2-digit-IQ, Russia-simps ("Ukraine is a conspiracy run by gay-Jewish-NAZIs"1) to dismiss the concerns of a very large number of Americans.
The idea that this situation couldn't have been handled better in any way is simply not defensible, and his dripping, Aristocratic contempt for those who do not support neo-lib foreign policy is poor form coming from a guy as well read and used to looking at all sides of an issue as Zeihan is.
I say this as somebody who generally supports the idea of arming the Ukranians if they are willing to fight and who sees this as the closest we've come to an actual "Munich moment" since, well, 1938.
I'm GLAD Europe is standing up to aggression in this case, but the people who are justifiably concerned about Russias 5,889 nuclear weapons are also the people who WILL NOT be talked down to anymore by the man-bun wearing laptoppers who, as a class, have made the world a far worse place for working and middle class Americans.
Zeihan is a smart guy, but his dripping contempt and strawmanning people's concerns risks the exact sort of backlash that led to the disengagement of the U.S.A. from the world in the 1930s and facilitated one of the worst wars in human history.
Zeihan has made the case elsewhere that Russia sees this as a response to an existential threat and I find his reasoning on this to be sound. Given that postulate, as well as the obvious paranoia of Russia's executive branch ( I don't know what the situation in the Duma is) it is not unreasonable to suggest that we don't allow the sort of mission creep that causes us to go from propping up the Ukraine to "Bear Baiting" when the bear has almost 6,000 nukes.
Few things are more dangerous than a wounded bear that feels it is cornered.
There's a lot of blame to go around regarding how we got here because we started on this course back in the late '90s. However, lacking a Tardis or Time Tunnel, we must deal with the world as it is and not let the pencil pushers in Foggy Bottom and Brussels start World War Three.
It's probably an equally bad idea to piss off and scare Middle America so bad that the U.S. Government is forced to abandon Ukraine and bring Russia to the Polish and Romanian frontiers.
A sneer is not an argument.
1: Yes...that is an actual argument that some people are making because the world is stupid.
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Zeihan is quite knowledgeable, but he has huge blind spotss on the causes of this war that he shouldn't have given his knowledge. I will say, however, that his talks, among others, about the causes of the 90s collapse of the USSR and their dependency on petroleum/nat gas exports opened my eyes to the real causes and explains a lot of other things that have happened.
Short form, the Sovet Union had been floating their economy on oil exports to the West for a while. In the early 90s, the price of oil collapsed and the USSR economy imploded due to lack of foreign currency. Flash forward to today and Russia is even more of a petrostate than the USSR was. Now about a decade or so ago it bacame public knowledge that 3 of the world's largest completely untapped Nat Gas reserves were in places named Crimea (off shore), Donetsk to Belarus, and the Carpatian Mountains. If those fields came online, it would displace most of the Russian NatGas going to Europe, causing a replay of the 90s in Russia. As evidence, when Putin took Cirmea and Donetsk in 2014, ALL the infrastructure that was built to tap these supplies were destroyed or repurposed. Putin didn't even want to steal it.
Now, for bonus points, this puts a hiuuge spin on US domestic politics as well. What do you think the Bidens, Clintons, and many many other US political dynasties were going after in Ukraine. When Putin invaded in 2014, he blocked them from skimming Billions off the top of the NatGas revenues. That's why we've had a so-called Russain hiding behind every thing that could possibly be blamed on them since and they became enemy #1 for many of our elites.
Posted by: StargazerA5 at Sat May 20 22:06:07 2023 (zmt6b)
