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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.

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.

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.

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.

Some more interesting articles.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/disclosure/
The dark historical roots of 'starseeds'

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...

Welcome!

Haha. I have made a few recently.

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.

Fantastic! Wishlisted. ;-)

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

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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.

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. ;-)

...inquiry cannot stand on its own as a political method, because we can't derive certain basic principles except by reference to axioms: I think that hurting people is bad, that people should have a lot of freedom to choose their path in life, and that all human life has value. I don't really think those things by reference to rational argument, they're my underlying beliefs. In a sense, that's my mythological/affirmation-centric mode of thought, and I think we need to be aware of that mode to think well about politics because we need to understand how those affirmations are underpinning the logical workings that sit on top of them. I agree entirely with you that the larger current problem is one more about affirmation taking over more and more of the political space without room for inquiry, but neither way round is ideal.

Oh that is very juicy and just the kind of thing I was hoping to learn / think more about. I'd definitely love it if you could revisit this subject more for us in a post I want to initiate on the origins of progressive vs. conservative politics. I've written it up already, but I want to refine it a little more before posting.

So I think with my historian's hat on, I instictively question Patočka on factual grounds: that is, I think that the delineation between mythological-theocratic and rational-political society is probably not something one can justify, both in that societies like ancient Egypt were a lot more 'political' than one might imagine, and societies like ancient Greece perhaps rather less so. Even in a society like ancient Egypt, pharaonic authority was probably sacral only in certain defined ways and spaces, and there was a political elite perfectly capable of questioning the basis on which things were done. Take for example Akhenaten's famous flirtation with a more solar-monotheistic religion - effecting those changes required at least the temporary acquiescence of a social elite around him, and just as importantly for our discussion here a major re-evaluation of answers to questions about the proper sacral role of the political community.

This is quite fascinating! Thank you for sharing. Patočka is very much coming at this from a perspective similar to Husserl's in his Crisis, which sees the heritage of Europe as having a special significance for the world. Can this kind of claim still be sustained in light of historical research conducted since? From what you are saying it does look tricky. I'd be quite interested in learning more about Akhenaten! Could you recommend any reading?

Interesting thread. Behind the Bastards did an SBF update recently, which was my onboarding for Effective Altruism.

I don't find it very surprising that there is a connection there with Utilitarian thinking, through his parents. While I do think we owe some debt to consequentialist arguments for the improvement of social equality, I'm very suspicious of the attempts this tradition makes at 'solving' morality like a mathematical equation. We cannot help but fall into all kinds of absurd paradoxes once we seek to ground morality in outcomes alone.

I've been getting more interested in thinking about politics recently. I've always maintained a strong interest, but the developments of recent years have pushed me to seek a better understanding the grounds of my beliefs, and of the beliefs of others.

With that in mind, I thought I could start up a meta thread, which will be used to link to other discussion threads on particular topics. I will update this initial post with links to those other threads. I'd like to request that this thread is used only for meta level discussions about what kinds of topics you would like to have linked back to here.

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What is politics?