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Messages - BeerDrinkingBurke

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I gave it a spin last night. Seems like it's coming along nicely. Lovely art. Really nice work on the little icons.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI
« on: January 22, 2024, 01:39:56 AM »
I finished the whole thing the other night, and I quite enjoyed it. At first I thought he was spending rather a lot of time time just talking with Fugal (current owner of Skinwalker Ranch) and his 'team', but in the end I could see his approach worked well for showing what these people are like. The key figures are predominantly fantasists (Bigalow, Fugal), but they also enjoy the grift. They like to think they are doing something extremely special, but on some level know it's all just entertainment. The capacity to hold those two conflicting attitudes in their minds at once is fascinating. One can be both a child and an adult at the same time, in different ways, in different contexts.

The intersection with Mormon theology was fascinating too. Greenstreet's own mormon background certainly turned out to be useful for this insight.

I found a related article on this topic.



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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI
« on: January 17, 2024, 05:40:13 AM »
I've still only just started watching it (I'll have to split it over a few evenings) but already fascinated to learn that Hal Puthoff was with project STARGATE. A great example for showing that 'the government' is not an all-knowing entity that operates in some purely rational manner. It's huge, messy, and like the general population at large, has its share of cranks. If you know how to say the right things, or get in the right ear, you can (historically at least) get money cleared for staring at goats.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI
« on: January 17, 2024, 02:03:52 AM »

Oh wow. The journalist at the New York Post covering this story (Steven Greenstreet) has released a 3 hour and 50 minute breakdown on youtube.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI
« on: January 11, 2024, 01:46:11 AM »
On that point, one interesting debunking by Mick West was a video of a tic tac UFO taken from a passenger plane window. They were able to catch the details of the fight, figure out the exact time and angle of the shot, and deduce (with flight record software) the precise plane the photo was actually of. However the camera of the phone, when 'zooming', was resolving the plane as a simple tic tac shaped blob, because really the lenses of the phone cannot 'zoom', so there was no extra information to resolve the shape into. (The video in question. )
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That article I shared before on the dark origins of Starseed thinking is quite interesting with this respect as well. I really recommend it. There's a certain religious / spiritual element, where the spirits of super naturally powerful ancient Indians (Aryans) were simply replaced by Aliens. Alien mythology is heavily cribbed from the alternative spirtualist / theosophist movements of the 19th century.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI
« on: January 10, 2024, 07:26:43 AM »
I re-watched this classic skit the other day. Seems relevant.

I quite like this tongue-in-cheek 'last will and testament' by Philip Klass, published in a newsletter in 1983.

Quote
THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF PHILIP J. KLASS

    To ufologists who publicly criticize me, ... or who even think unkind thoughts about me in private, I do hereby leave and bequeath: THE UFO CURSE:

    No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today. You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will never know any more about what the U.S. Government really knows about UFOs than you know today. As you lie on your own death-bed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse.
40 years later, and here we still are.  Getting excited over what somebody says somebody else told them. I guess it will just keep going on like this, over the generations, for quite some time to come.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI
« on: January 10, 2024, 07:14:40 AM »
Quote
One of the rough lessons for people who liked the scholarly early Internet is that a lot of digital things in the smartphone age are not for us.  As the Internet grows bigger, it becomes less like a cross between a university campus and a geeky convention and more like people in general.
Well put. When I got on in the late 90s, I spent most of my time on MUDs and Ultima Dragons usenet. Pretty much everybody was a fellow nerd.

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Nice gaming update! I've heard good things about Smallworld!

As for myself, after a bit of a break, our Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion group is back together. We finished a mission over two sessions recently. I think we are now a bit over half way through the campaign. I wasn't really enjoying it too much at the beginning, but it is growing on me. Particularly as my character (the Voidwarden) is starting to get more impressive as I level up.
Tomorrow I'll be playing a game of Feast for Odin with some other friends. It's my favorite game in my little collection I think. Looking forward to it!

Hopefully over the Christmas break I can also wrangle some games with a few of my relatives. Let's see...

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The Welcome Hall - Start Here! / Re: Introducing myself
« on: November 12, 2023, 02:51:05 AM »
Welcome!

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Haha. I have made a few recently.

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Hello all!
Innkeep has a new gameplay trailer. ;-)
Also a revamped Steam page!
ALSO, a new narrative trailer will be dropping tonight during the Realms Deep live stream event.

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Fantastic! Wishlisted. ;-)

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Today I am also reading this long form essay by Doc Burford on writing. It includes a great quote by Terry Pratchett.https://docseuss.medium.com/refuting-the-bullet-so-you-wanna-write-an-interesting-story-but-dont-know-where-to-begin-c67003cce233

Quote
>
O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
 

Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
 

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
 

P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book — I think I’ve done twenty in the series — since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
 

P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire — Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it — Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now — a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections — That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
 

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
 

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: What is politics?
« on: September 19, 2023, 04:44:27 AM »
These look interesting too. Thanks for sharing!

EDIT: I am soliciting some comments from my old professor, who is a Patocka scholar. We shall see what she has to say. ;-)

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