I’ve got very fond memories of popping on an infinite battery mod for my power suit and exploring the oceans of FO3. I also really enjoyed pockets of underwater exploration in HFW. Although not underwater, I’d put the cave system of TotK in a similar category.
Lately, I have had an intense longing for games that scratch that deep sea explorer itch. Anything that is down, exploratory, lore-heavy, with a lot of survival mechanics but light on jump scares/combat.
For metrics, while I love Soma, that type of atmosphere is spookier than what I want atm. The darkest I can handle is TotK but I prefer something closer to Fo3 that leans more on satire. I’ve been sick and just want to explore cool ruins under water and piece together interesting lore and maybe eat seaweed.

My New Years resolution is to read more books. The only way I'm going to achieve this is by listening to audiobooks. I'm a freelance artist and i have very little free time to actually sit down and read, but i have 8 hours a day to listen to books while i work. After finishing the game Control recently i wanted to dive into the New Weird genre more so i came to this sub. Originally I was going to start with House Of Leaves but it doesn't have an audiobook apparently.
TDLR; I'm looking for New Weird style book recommendations that wont be too hard to follow when listening to them in audiobook format.
Weird things I like:

• I LOVE Simon Stålenhags art and books - Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, The Electric State and The Labyrinth. If someone can recommend a novel that has a similar feel to his world and short stories I will be forever grateful.
• Games like Control, Alan Wake, Dishonored, Soma, and Disco Elysium
• SCPs
• the Welcome to Nightvale podcast, and Candela Obscura web series
• TV shows - Twin Peaks, Good Omens, Tales from the Loop, Warehouse 13

I like stuff that's kinda satirical and treats the weird as mundane and everyday, like welcome to nightvale. Or where the weird is just under the surface of ordinary life, think strange occurrences in a small town style stuff, like twin peaks or tales from the loop.
I know a lot of new weird is also horror, and I'm looking for stuff that can be eerie, unsettling, uncanny but not tooo scary.
Thanks in advance for any recommendations!

The interim between Thanksgiving and New Year's is always, at least as far as my own creative/communicative impulses are concerned, a deliberately less-than-fecund time. I'm torn between trying to relax and fully enjoy my circumstances (which are extremely cozy this year) and doing some actual, umm, work, so to speak, but I rarely feel motivated enough to sit down and churn out prose. Now, I've once again got more movies in the ol' queue than I can reasonably tackle in one column in my standard format; and since I plan to address another two dozen films (albeit briefly) in my annual Best of the Year list, it would behoove me to get my passion-addled ass in some remote facsimile of gear. So what you'll see this week is more or less my immediate post-film thinking - as I remember it, anyway - unadulterated by my anal-retentive desire to progress from point to point in a logical and orderly (if terminally digressive) fashion. Welcome, in short, to my mind.
Oh, and before anyone asks "But where are the ponies?" Shut up. Please shut up. Since most of you are children (or at least act like you are), I should point out the sidebar rules yet again and tell you that this is an off-topic subreddit. We're allowed to post different things. I can share my hobby if I want to. Grow up and deal with it. If you're really that much of an entitled little pissant, the main sub is /mylittlepony. Stay over there. They have everything you could possibly want. Now please, for the love of god, please leave me alone and stay out of these threads. I'm sorry for being rude, but it's seriously starting to get annoying.
First up was Wonka
Crafting an origin story for a character who doesn't need one - and whose appeal in fact hinges, to a considerable extent, on his mysterious, inexplicable wondrousness - is not what one might call a wise notion, and yet here is "Wonka," a new prequel to Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Naturally, Dahl's work has become another valuable piece of IP for Warner Brothers and its embattled leader David Zazlov, who lacks the imagination and will to try something new. He seemingly found the right man for this material with director Paul King, who has folded animation and live action together into delightful all-ages adventures before, but saccharine timidity is what's really served up here.
This story explains how Willy Wonka, the mischievous chocolatier whose confectionary inventions seem as much a form of punishment as of delight, got his start. The character will be familiar to much of the audience, either from the book or from the earlier film adaptation, directed by Mel Stuart and starring Gene Wilder, and this familiarity has perhaps freed King to concentrate on the machinery of visual fantasy. The film is colorful, if a bit garish at times in its obvious visual effects, and features a few notable flights of imagination. Its convenient wonders just happen to advance its action in ridiculous ways, which serve solely to set up the specific conflicts, resolutions, and set pieces that yield the emotions and the songs that the movie is selling.
We're first introduced to Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) arriving in an unspecified European city with only a handful of coins. They barely last a day, with a needy mother asking for some generosity and a police officer fining our chocolatier for daring to daydream in public. Willy's only dream is to make chocolates from only the finest and most exotic ingredients, open a shop, and share his love of sweet treats with the world. It's in this bustling urban epicenter that he plans to open a shop in the same four-cornered Gallery Gourmet where the world's finest chocolate is produced and sold. Yet, the current titans of the sweets industry are Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Ficklegruber (Mathew Baynton), and Prodnose (Matt Lucas), a trio whose villainous nature and dynamics prevent Willy's efforts at every turn.
Grotesque villains were a Dahl staple, but because three ruthless capitalists who'll stop at nothing to protect their monopoly from a talented upstart apparently weren't enough, the script throws in a few coarse laundry owners, Mrs. Scrubit (Olivia Colman) and Bleacher (Tom Davis), who are presented in gratingly arch extremes (King really favors the close-up shots of those disgusting yellow chompers). They rent rooms to desperate people like Willy and entrap them into years-long stints of forced employment. Willy has to find a way to sneak out of the workhouse to sell his confections, and for that, he enlists the aid of the orphaned Noodle (Calah Lane), whose resignation to her fate is given a boost of optimism from her first bite of chocolate.
The zippy charm that King brought to his two well-loved "Paddington" features can occasionally be found in "Wonka," but it's not enough to distract from the fact that it's mostly pointless on a narrative level. The outright fun begins with Hugh Grant's brief appearances as an Oompa-Loompa who has a long-standing grudge against the chocolatier. He's a rather posh gentleman with a thieving heart, and he's just bizarre enough to provide a bit of faint enchantment. No surprise that he's relegated to a few sight gags and a late bit of phoned-in deus ex machina heroism. However, he remains, relatively speaking, more interesting than the main cast's wan eccentricity. For providing much-needed respite, Grant deserves combat pay.
Chalamet, on the other hand, presents a certain problem. Even if it's plausible that the young Wonka might not have developed the arrogant authoritarian side of the character as conceived by Dahl, Willy feels neutered here, stripped of any edge that might have made him interesting. I know I shouldn't be comparing apples and oranges, but Gene Wilder's child-like craziness was better suited to the Dahlian brand of strenuous whimsy than Chalamet's deadpan virtuosity. He might bring plenty of showmanship to his performance, giving his all to being a song-and-dance man, but he doesn't mesh with the rest of the movie; whereas everyone else is at least on the same cartoony wavelength, he seems to be operating on a slightly different plane, incapable of hitting either his comedic or poignant notes.
The most appealing thing about this Wonka, who tiptoes on the narrow boundary between whimsy and creepiness, is that he defies assimilation or explanation. Or at least he should. Inexplicably, and at great risk to the integrity of the movie, the filmmakers have burdened him with a psychological back story pulled out of a folder in some studio filing cabinet. Why does Wonka spend his days confecting sweets? Why, in the movies these days, does anyone - artist, serial killer, superhero - do anything? The loss of a parent, of course. The devotion Wonka has for his mother is meant to be touching, but mostly comes across as both a manipulative tug and a superfluous adherence to convention.
Few family movies match - or even come close to approaching - the particular delights of the 1971 film. "Wonka," then, has a difficult challenge in front of it from the start. It tries to strike the same tone, yet its heavy and calculated sweetness is weighted by the leaden requirements of IP filmmaking; you can see the whiteboard notes haphazardly poking out from behind each instance of silliness, every depressing collision of imagination and obligation. That seems to be the road we're heading down with most properties nowadays. It's not so much the waste of money represented by "Wonka" that depresses me, as it is the absolute certainty that no one with money and power in the film industry will learn any lessons.

Next up was The Boy and the Heron
Japan's Studio Ghibli makes animated films the way Faberge made ornamental eggs: with incredible painstaking handcraft and extravagant imagination. The most internationally famous pieces of the concern's feature cartoon output have been directed by its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki: exhilarating, oft-surreal pictures like "Laputa: Castle in the Sky," "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away," movies that often mix period elements with fantastical sci-fi concepts and blend obscure mythology and mind-blowing action, wedding all these elements to scenarios with decidedly heart-tugging intentions.
After a ten-year retirement that turns out to have been just a hiatus, Miyazaki has made another feature-length animated movie, "The Boy and the Heron," which finds inspiration from other fantasy/mythology veins in which he has previously worked. The setting switches between WWII Japan and another world that bears only a passing resemblance to our own, as it's deftly populated with all manner of airborne species, many of them jostling for supremacy (a consequence, perhaps, of an overzealous creator). Everything in this setting has a history, everything is beholden to certain metaphysical dogmas, but the full contours of both are kept just out of reach. It reads as a space where all the forces beyond human control reside.
For young Mahito (Soma Santoki), absence of logic doesn't seem to matter very much anyway. After all, he's in a strange new world of his own. Following his mother Hisako's death in an Allied air raid, he's whisked off to live in the country, where his engineer father, Shoichi (Takuya Kimura), will run a factory making parts for fighter planes. Shoichi has already remarried his sister-in-law, thus making Mahito's aunt Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura) his new step-mother. Unsurprisingly, the already sullen teen isn't over the moon about any of this, which puts him in a most sour mood as he arrives at the family mansion. His new school proves unfriendly, and when he gets into a fight, he deliberately injures himself to make it look worse, giving him an excuse to isolate.
Mahito, of course, has a lot with which to deal: a new home in an unfamiliar place, a father who's always at work, a stepmother who's pregnant, seven tiny old maids who bicker and gossip, and the lingering grief of losing his mother, who comes to him in dreams in which she's engulfed in flames and pleading for his help. He's irritated as well by the mysterious grey heron perched on the roof and its seeming fixation on him. The heron eventually speaks to Mahito, telling him that his mother is alive, and that she will guide him should he dare to go inside a mysterious tower that his late great-uncle built in the woods. Which, obviously, he does at the end of the movie's first hour, in a search to save his step-mother and perhaps his birth mother - or at least obtain closure with the latter.
From this point, the movie goes "full Miyazaki," which is to say that it enters a fantastic, magical otherworld that is populated by odd creatures, both familiar and monstrous. The grey heron turns out to be a costume worn by a twisted old man with a bulbous schnoz. There's a powerful magician and a stalwart, seafaring version of one of the old maids. And, as the title suggests, a good amount of this fantasy realm has to do with birds. One of the film's more inspired inventions is an army of fascistic parakeets, led by a king who, in more ways than one, resembles Mussolini.
There's a lot going on in this enigmatic, at times overstuffed narrative, which has a number of elements in common with the director's past. Miyazaki was only 3 when he and his family fled Tokyo, and the images of bombed-out, war-ravaged cityscapes never left him. His father worked in an airplane factory, and although his mother lived until much later in his life, he has talked about her profound influence on him. In fact, the original inspiration for the film was a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino given to Miyazaki as a youth by his mother, titled How Do You Live? He ultimately took a different path with the project, but shades of its theme of spiritual growth survive.
That the movie is also stunningly beautiful and strangely moving is, of course, something of a given because of its inspired creator. With so many aesthetically impeccable films under his belt, it's easy to take for granted the craftsmanship on display in Miyazaki's animated masterworks, but the exquisite landscapes with meticulous details in "The Boy and the Heron" remind us once more that what Studio Ghibli does is world-building of the highest order. Virtually every impeccably framed composition could be a distinct work of art, with vividly soft watercolor-esque backgrounds that are just a balm after decades of computer-animated plasticity. Not that I didn't love "Toy Story" and its immediate successors, but who wants everything to be so damn tactile?
Miyazaki has long practiced wondrously patient storytelling, the kind of uncanny dreamy mode that allows his signature undercurrents to come forth organically, as if he were less a visionary than an anthropologist of the human spirit. "The Boy and the Heron" evokes characters and themes from elsewhere in his work, but it never leaves you with the feeling that he's repeating himself. On the contrary, the film finds him standing atop the rubble of his almighty career and squinting against the sunset to measure the worth of that creation before he leaves it all behind. He's confronting familiar topics from a new perspective, and with the urgent disarray of someone who knows that he'll never be able to address them again.

Next up was Poor Things
Is "Poor Things" a fantasy with comedic elements? Or perhaps, considering its "Frankenstein" underpinnings, a horror movie? Or maybe a drama that promotes feminist ideals and libertine philosophies? In reality, it may be all of those things cobbled together - and much more. Most importantly, it's a breath of fresh air, a truly original motion picture that breezes into theater auditoriums and dispels the stale stench of stagnancy that has characterized far too many releases this year. What more can one reasonably expect from Greek-born Yorgos Lanthimos, a filmmaker who refuses to play by the rules?
As a phantasmagoric and Bacchanalian odyssey of the mind, body and spirit, "Poor Things" is, in certain respects, easily identifiable as a Lanthimos effort, though he had no hand in the script and the source material is a novel by Alasdair Gray, a genre writer (and illustrator) of considerable wit and inventiveness. The movie makes no bones about its fractured fable category and leans hard into Lanthimos' warped directorial signatures, highlighted by his fondness for cinematography that turns interior and exterior spaces unnaturally wide, rounded and dreamlike. The fisheye lens that he did to death in "The Favourite" gets a workout here, but it's not the only one he uses; recurring iris shots, low, upturned-angle images, sleek pans and pressing zooms further contribute to the action's aberrant grandeur.
However, there's also a vigorously beating heart, as well as a fully active mind, within this material, which also happens to feature a fantastic and unique character at its core. She's called Bella Baxter, and as played by Emma Stone, she's the result of a death-defying experiment that transplants the brain of a baby into a recently deceased adult body. In a lengthy black-and-white sequence that has cinematographer Robbie Ryan harkening back to the monster movies of the 1930s, we learn that she was discovered by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a physically and psychologically scarred scientist who lives in an opulently appointed London mansion that houses a lab in its lower depths. There, he dissects corpses to read their secrets, and a giddy Bella sometimes joins in the fun, stumbling on her feet like a toddler.
To study Bella's progress, Godwin enlists the services of his surgical pupil Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who's aghast at what his mentor has perpetrated and yet is quickly falling in love with Bella. While initially a coordination-challenged, speech-impaired simpleton, Bella is no idiot; rather, she's a creature in the nascent stages of development, and her first step toward maturation involves learning about sexual pleasure. Thanks to private and then very public experimentation, a hedonistic light goes on in her noggin. Despite agreeing to marry Max, she soon becomes intensely attracted to Duncan Wedderburn (a pointedly goofy Mark Ruffalo), who wants to steal her away for a trip through Europe.
Bella covets what Duncan promises and away they go, leaving behind the grotesqueries of Godwin's macabre home for Lisbon and seductive ports beyond. It's an expedition that commences with outrageous carnal profligacy (to Bella, sex is "furious jumping"). Things don't go exactly as planned, however: Bella proves to be sexually insatiable, wearing out poor Duncan, and he falls head-over-heels for her while she views him as little more than a means to provide her with carnal pleasure. As they travel around Europe, Duncan becomes increasingly desperate while Bella gradually loses interest in him as she explores her sexuality in increasingly extreme fashions. The resultant rising and falling fortunes of the couple, of course, bring to mind "Candide."
The rest of the journey has Bella meeting a whole cast of other mentors and fellow travelers on the path to self-discovery and enlightenment. Each location of her trip - London, Lisbon, a cruise ship, Alexandria, Paris - possesses its own aesthetic flavor and spectacle (Lisbon, for example, is an idyllic coastal town, punctuated by pink-hued clouds). Yet, that's neither the beginning nor the end of her evolution, as an older woman (played by Hanna Schygulla) teaches her there's as much pleasure to be found from exercises of the mind, and the cynical Harry (Jerrod Carmichael) gives Bella a crash course in economic inequality. Later, a Paris brothel's madam (Kathryn Hunter) and a fellow sex worker (Suzy Bemba) provide a debate between pragmatic capitalism and idealistic socialism, with a gradually awakened Bella figuring out what parts work best for herself, the people she has come to like and admire, and as many people as possible.
In the clever and colorful ways he depicts the out-of-time look of this world, Lanthimos rises to another step of his creative prowess. As a filmmaker who seems intrinsically drawn to material that conveys such a distorted but recognizable reflection of people and the world, he has found a perfect match for his comedic, satirical, and tonal preoccupations with this film. Jerskin Fendrix's score is similarly elastic, operating in so many diverse registers - sharp and suspenseful strings, low and terrifying tones, playful and flighty flutes - that the film feels like it's in a constant state of metamorphosis. It's a hauntingly beautiful vision that looks like something out of a storybook - but is never so overwhelming that it overshadows the emotional and intellectual core of the tale.
The movie belongs to Emma Stone as much as it does to its director. She might be the ideal choice for this singular role, not just in terms of her comic chops, which are formidable, but by virtue of somehow simultaneously looking very beautiful and kind of bizarre, with those enormous eyes that get to do so much staring and widening and darting as Bella accelerates through the entirety of human development. It's a bold, daring, and constantly evolving performance, with Stone making each and every step of the character's transformation comprehensible, richly considered, and inherently funny. We get the sense that she knows she has never come across a character of such vitality and possibility before now - and likely may not ever find one such as Bella again in her career.
There's more to the story, the characters, and the ideas of "Poor Things," but it would be a fool's errand to pick apart its many particulars. Basically, this is a sprawling comedic epic about the human condition and human nature's effect on society, grounded by its ideas and its unexpected compassion but elevated by its imagination, performances, and the weirdly empathetic - or just downright weird - character at its center. Devoid of the wry detachment that's typified much of his preceding output, Lanthimos' whimsical and wonderful comic tone radiates sincere and effusive affection for Bella. Everything here is new and interesting for her, and he matches her fascination with rampant glee.

So, as the title says, I still can't get over how Larian did our girl Karlach dirty. No, I haven't played the new epilogue where her ending is supposedly fixed. Because rn I can't even bring myself to open the damn game again. And I don't think that it is even matters that much if she survives in the short term or not, because according to all laws of the setting the woman who spent the better part of her life in Avernus and couldn't pledge herself to a deity is supposed to go to the special little hell for the atheists, for she is de facto faithless. During the dryad's quiz, she openly scoffs at the idea that she might consider religion in the future. Or better yet, there was a theory that since tieflings are already partly infernal, and she has so much infernal metal inside of her, she will automatically go back to Zariel upon death. Oh, fun!
And look, I purposely don't play any depressing grimdark shit like WH40000 or anything published by The White Wolf, because I know that I'll get upset and nobody will have fun. There was no indication that the story will go like that. It fucked me up worse than games like Soma or Signalis ever did. Unlike those games, this one doesn't even have a point or makes any sense. Or is dooming endearing characters artistic or something? Am I the one who doesn't get it? Am I the problem?
Now my mom comes to me and asks why the hell am I tweaking so much. I can't in my right mind tell her that I'm losing my shit over a made up devil woman from a game for the stupid ass nerds. This is embarrassing. I'm a 27 years old man, and I'm not sure if I can go to work tomorrow cause of how shitty I feel rn.
TL;DR - is there a lore reason I'm still moulding about a game half a year later? Am I stupid?
I swear this is not a satire or a shitpost. There is literally nowhere else I can go where anyone would even know what the hell am I talking about

One thing that has always defined the study of Norse and overall Germanic myth to me is in how nothing is scared or secure. There is seemingly no status quo, sometimes it feels like there isn’t a single thing you previously considered to be universal truth and relatively common knowledge that hasn’t been questioned, disputed or outright revealed and generally accepted to be an exaggeration or falsehood by tirelessly cynical scholars. Everything purported as facts of Norse myth in pop culture from Óðinn’s title of ‘Allfather’ to the alleged canonical list of ‘Nine Realms’ has its detractos among academics. None of these is more hotly contested or befuddling to myself in recent times than the infamous classification of the so-called ‘Vanir’ as a group of gods, commonly purported as having particular connotations of fertility, distinct from the Æsir but similarly opposed to the Jǫtnar (‘eaters’ or anti-gods, often misleadingly translated as ‘giants’). Most people’s understanding of the topic and the most popular point of exposure may well be the opening of the Wikipedia entry:
>In Norse mythology, the Vanir (/ˈvɑːnɪə;[1] Old Norse:, singular Vanr) are a group of gods associated with fertility, wisdom, and the ability to see the future. The Vanir are one of two groups of gods (the other being the Æsir) and are the namesake of the location Vanaheimr (Old Norse "Home of the Vanir"). After the Æsir–Vanir War, the Vanir became a subgroup of the Æsir. Subsequently, members of the Vanir are sometimes also referred to as members of the Æsir..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanir
This group typically and centrally consists of Njǫrðr and his children Yngvi Freyr and Freyja, whose ‘real’ name is unknown.
Digression 1/2: Freyja is a title, cognate with German ‘Frau’. Whatever her name was, whether it was forgotten by the Viking Age or not, one would expect it to begin with a vowel in order to alliterate with her brothemale counterpart. Like the term Vanr itself, Freyja is not attested outside of a Northern Germanic context, although I personally believe at this point she must date back to early Germanic times, as Freyr has evidence for doing so in being attested in Gothic and I would expect each of a divine sibling pair like this to be integral to the other. Tacitus references ship rituals that may be reflected in her later association with Sessrúmnir, although this may have been originally a facet of Frigg which transplanted to her, like many may have. Regardless, one proposed theoretical name would be ‘Austra’, cognate with the scantly attested Anglo Saxon Ēostre. This is a slim chance and not especially likely, but it’s the most interesting I have come across in what is almost certainly an unanswerable question, like the Frigg/Freyja debacle itself.
The grouping may also include Njǫrðr’s scarcely referenced wife, whom I link to the scantly attested ‘Njǫrun’ (possibly attested by Tactitus as ‘Nerthus’ in the first century). The god Heimdallr is sometimes included due to a dubious written reference I will address, as well as Ullr, who has toponyms in Sweden that sit in the vicinity of toponyms stemming from the members of this familial group which I will refer to as the Njǫrðungar (Credit to Frog, 2021) for the sake of clarity and discernibility from the dubious term in question.
‘What are the Vanir?’ is indeed the premise of this writeup, but we shall start with what they aren’t. There has never been a clear traceable etymology for the term, although a relation with the Old Norse word ‘vinr’ (friend) is tempting. For many years there was little scrutiny applied to the categorisation, until in 2010 Rudolf Simek dropped (by the standards of this sphere) a bombshell in the form of ‘The Vanir: An Obituary’. Building on a publication by Lotte Motz (1996), this article flew in the face of the then, and usually current notion that Norse myth consisted of three groups of deities; Jǫtnar, Æsir and Vanir. Motz had challenged the traditionally interpreted role of the Vanir as fertility gods, challenging in the process Dumézil’s trifunctional hypothesis (we’ll get to that). Frog (2021) says (of Simek’s article): ‘The argument builds on Lotte Motz’s study that contested viewing “Vanir” and “Æsir” through a Dumézilian tripartite model and identifying the former as gods of farmers and fertility and the latter as gods of warriors and kings. Motz found this simple opposition inconsistent with gods identified in the sources, where “Vanir” were more commonly associated with royalty and “Æsir” with generative or creative powers.”
Simek had a bold statement to make: The word Vanr is just an old synonym for god. Like ‘regin’, ‘band' (hypothetical singular form) or ‘goð’, all largely synonymous generic terms for gods, it carries no more specific connotations than those until Snorri Sturluson interprets it as the label for a distinct group of gods. Indeed, it is Snorri whom Simek pins the whole thing on, saying ‘The Vanir were not alive in heathen days, and as a figment of imagination from the 13th to the 20th centuries’ in his closing paragraph. To Simek, it is not just a mistake but a deliberate choice to invent a label for the sake of another euhemerised tale, akin to his other works such as Heimskringla.
Simek’s evidence was based on the fact that every mention of the word ‘Vanir’ or ‘Vanr’ is alliterative, to a degree not even seen by its aforementioned alleged synonyms. Frog and Roper (2011) corroborated this, finding a 100% alliterative usage of the term in eddic poetry and instances where vanir even seems explicitly synonymous with aesir. Aside from eddic poems it has two obscure usages in Skaldic poetry, where even the character it is referring to is uncertain. It possibly refers to Óðinn in one instance, which if it were indeed the intended use would destroy Snorri’s narrative of a group distinct from the aesir.
It would seem to arise that despite being pagans themselves, the composers of many of these poems did not have a consistent notion as to what the word ‘Vanr’ meant, it was simply an archaic, largely defunct and obsolete word that nevertheless could be vaguely invoked in poetry for the sake of maintaining alliterative verse. We almost never use the word ‘lo’ in modern English aside from its preservation the phrase ‘lo and behold’. This is what a suspended archaism looks like. This leads to situations where gods like Heimdallr, elsewhere mentioned as an ǫss, is referred to as a vanr in a stanza of Þrymskviða mentioning his ability of foresight, like that of the ‘other Vanir’. The theory proposed here states that this is solely in order to alliterate with the preceding words ‘vissi’ (knew) and ‘vel’ (well) in eddic verse. This is a prime example of this need for alliterating synonyms creating the false impression of a separate label. We’re not typically used to this kind of repetition as English speakers. Imagine the phrase ‘see my crappy car, the most asinine and awful of automobiles’ for a hasty analogue.

So are there only the Æsir and the Jǫtnar?

Well, seemingly no, and this complicates matters. Medieval Danish writer Saxo Grammaticus would make it sound this way, where he accounted only for a war between builders and giants, which led to a truce and the creation of a third hybrid race. But with all due respect, fuck Saxo. His writings may be heavily reflecting Greco-Roman concepts and his goal with Gesta Danorum was never to convey a faithful depiction of Old Norse polytheistic beliefs. There certainly appears to be *some* group besides the Jǫtnar with which the Æsir had a war and to which Njǫrðr and his direct family belong. Stanza 51 of Vafþrúðnismál makes it unignorable that there is something going on here that cannot be pinned on Snorri, as well as Loki in Lokasenna confirming Njǫrðr’s status as a hostage of war.
Othin spake: “Tenth answer me now, if thou knowest all The fate that is fixed for the gods: Whence came up Njorth to the kin of the gods,— (Rich in temples and shrines he rules,—) Though of gods he was never begot?”
Vafthruthnir spake: “In the home of the Wanes did the wise ones create him, And gave him as pledge to the gods; At the fall of the world shall he fare once more Home to the Wanes so wise.”
Bellows (1923)
And Lokasenna:
“Be silent, Njorth; thou wast eastward sent, To the gods as a hostage given; And the daughters of Hymir their privy had When use did they make of thy mouth.”
Bellows (1923)
So Njǫrðr is almost certainly not considered to be from among the Æsir, but he was sent as a hostage. From whom? The answer on the surface is ‘Vanir’, but as we now know, the semantic meaning of this word is practically void. He is from some group of beings, what that group is remains to be seen. Respondents to Simek’s Obituary have noted that some may as well simply use the word ‘Vanir’ for this group in question, if no better label is available.

What is the trifunctional hypothesis?

It should be noted that only really Motz’s publication, which has been disputed itself, outright denies the trifunctional hypothesis’ relevance to this subject. This idea was coined by French philologist Georges Dumézil in Mythes et dieux des Germains (1939), wherein he drew parallels between Germanic and Indo-Iranian notions of a 3 stage hierarchy of warriors, priests and common folk. Dumézil saw these functions reflected in the attested figures of Norse mythology.
> “Basically, the parallels concern the presence of first-(magico-juridical) and second-(warrior) function representatives on the victorious side of a war that ultimately subdues and incorporates third function characters, for example, the Sabine women or the Norse Vanir. Indeed, the Iliad itself has also been examined in a similar light. The ultimate structure of the myth, then, is that the three estates of Proto-Indo-European society were fused only after a war between the first two against the third.” - Mallory (2005)
On the matter of the Vanir, Dumézil himself fell into the latter of two groups (historicists and structuralists) with opposing theories on the origins of the war between gods as a mythical motif. Historicists (like Motz) favour an origin in real life events, wherein a war between two groups of real-life peoples became referenced through the lens of mythical characters. Lindow (2001) theorises an allegory of an invasion of the Indo Europeans on other peoples, represented as Vanir. Structuralists (like Dumézil and De Vries) propose an origin in older Indo-European myth, conceived from a purely fictional standpoint. The story of the war has also drawn comparison to myths like the rape of the Sabines in Roman mythology. The structuralist view would seem to have more support from the sources and is generally favoured by academics.
To boot, according to Simek, the creation story of Kvasir, which directly follows and indelibly relates to the war, supports a structuralist Indo European context for said war. He gives a 10th century Skaldic kenning and the etymology of Kvasir, relating to berries, as good evidence for it being a native Norse pagan mythic motif (Simek 2007, corroborated with comparison to Slavic myth by Dumézil, 1974). He also points out a crucial parallel to the theft of Soma by Indra in Sanskrit mythology.
This point is where Simek’s contributions largely end as far as I am aware, and where I turn to the writings of another scholar, Dr Alaric Hall.

Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity (2007)

It looks like we’ve arrived at the elf segment of this writeup about elves, a mere 1,945 words in. Alaric Hall is a professor of Medieval studies at the University of Leeds, who in 2007 wrote this publication on Elves in Anglo Saxon England, also the topic of his PhD.
The first section discusses elves in a Scandinavian context, initially covering Snorri’s dichotomy of Ljósálfr and døkkálfar, light and dark elves that suspiciously align with a Christian concept of angels moreso than any old Germanic folklore. ’The categories of døkkálfar ‘dark elves’ and ljósálfar ‘light elves’ are generally accepted as his invention’ – Frog (2021)
Dark/black elves also seem to heavily conflate with dwarves, being used synonymously in the same sentences in places. Snorri’s purported version may at least hold a drop water, if only as a broken clock striking right, in that the elves he likens to dwarves take on a more antagonistic status, as Hall goes on to align dvergar (dwarves) with jǫtnar in the following pages.
Digression 2/2: I use ‘dwarves’ as a plural here, aware that common usage of that largely stems from Tolkien’s popularisation. It helps differentiate from ‘dwarfs’ (people with dwarfism) and is also simply more in line with how I write. I will never get over being marked down on a secondary school paper for using the more archaic ‘rooves’ rather than ‘roofs’. As we go on, I will get into the habit of using the ON ‘dvergr’, plural ‘dvergar’.
Much of one segment of Hall (2007) concerns aligning the Norse Æsir with álfar in contrast to this Jǫtnadvergar association. This is a notion supported by Frog when on the topic of the Old Norse word ǫss (the singular of æsir).
>*The Old English rune name *ōs is commonly accepted as a cognate, as is the plural ēse in ordered parallelism with ælfe ‘elves’ in a metrical charm, where use is consistent with the well-attested ON æsir–álfar ‘æsir –elves’ collocation\* – Frog (2021)
The purpose of this division of sides is to propose that the ‘powers’ (‘regin’) referenced by Vafþrúðnir that make up the mysterious (if we accept that ‘Vanir’ is not a label for this group) collective to whom Njǫrdr belongs - are indeed elves. This then implies a past war between æsir and elves, briefly referenced in Voluspa and ending in the sending of Njǫrðr as a hostage (Lokasenna) and creation of Kvasir, when both sides create him in the vat as a mark of peace and alliance between the two.
>”Finally, it is worth discussing a major division in the mythography of Gylfaginning which ostensibly excludes álfar: Snorri divides the gods into two groups, the æsir and the vanir. This division has been received as axiomatic in most modern mythography, but it is curiously ill-paralleled. Moreover, snorri’s usage of álfr in Skáldskaparmál is much closer to that of his poetic sources than to Gylfaginning. For example, Snorri states that ‘Mann er ok rét at kenna til allra Ása heita. Kent er ok við jǫtna heiti, ok er þat lest háð eða lastmæli. Vel þykkir kent til álfa’ (‘It is also proper to call a person by the names of all the æsir. They are also known by the names of jǫtnar, and that is mostly as satire or criticism. It is thought good to name after (the) álfar’)”
Here Hall begins to delve into parallels between the thematic role of Elves and Snorri’s Vanir within the mythos in relation the æsir. He then makes an observation quite ahead of its time on this matter:
>” This is not the place to reassess our evidence for the vanir and the assumptions which past scholarship has made about it. However, it is worth emphasising that Gylfaginning and Ynglinga saga aside, vanr is a rare word in Norse and unattested elsewhere in the Germanic languages, whereas álfr is well attested, widespread and with a range of clear Indo-European cognates.31 Whereas in Gylfaginning the gods are divided into the æsir and vanir, our other evidence, including Skáldskaparmál, repeatedly prefers to speak of æsir and álfar. The possibility arises that vanr and álfr originally denoted essentially the same mythological construct, their dissimilation in Gylfaginning perhaps reflecting Snorri’s systematising mythography.”
Indeed, the idea is still possible here for Vanir denoting its own category of beings, but it is noted that Gylfaginning is far more keen on the distinction than the primary sources Snorri draws on as we do. A coupling of æsir and álfar would seem to be a more well rooted motif. It is also supported by Hávamál stanza 143, wherein æsir and álfar are mentioned together on the same line, with dvergar and jǫtnar following thereafter. Elves are simply frustratingly rarely named, or even alluded to as individuals. Vǫlundrkviða is addressed near the end of the chapter, an unusual text full of old Norse hapaxes and likely influence from Old English. It is notable for uniquely explicitly distinguishing a character – the titular Vǫlundr – as an elf. However, it gives little insight into this topic and comparisons are largely drawn between he and Óðinn.
Mentions of elves in kennings date all the way back to the earliest attested and available skaldic poetry, including the famous Ragnarsdrápa by Bragi Bodasson sometime in the 9th century. Hall notes the general positive nature of these allusions to elves in conjunction with heroes and kings, as well as an apparent exclusivity to males. Snorri forbids the use of jǫtnar in kennings for people, but not álfar (Remember the purpose of some of his writings amounted an instructional manual in eddic poetry to medieval Icelandic poets, in response to the growing popularity in Iceland of imported continental European poetic styles). In this way, as well as the usages themselves, ‘álfar’ in kennings is quite in line with ‘aesir’. While ‘ǫss’ and ‘álfr’ are fairly regularly used as kennings for people, other beings or supernatural entities within Norse folklore and myth – dvergr, mara, þurs, jǫtunn, are entirely unused. ‘Regin’ and ‘band’ appear rarely. ‘Vanr’ is also entirely absent, maybe surprisingly to those who maintain it as a label for a group of powers on par with the æsir. This inconspicuousness of the term supports the idea of it being a largely redundant and obscure term, possibly an obsolete one by the Viking age, and not the mythos defining boundary Snorri recounts it as. The fact of the matter is that a pagan skald was far more likely to call you an ‘ǫss’ or an ‘álfr’ in praise than any other term denoting a mythic being. A kenning denoting comparison to a dvergr, jǫtunn or þurs would be explicitly mocking, if Snorri is to be believed. On the other side, ǫss, álfr (men), dis and norn (women) opposed the inhuman beings, placing elves alongside gods and humans in contrast to other creatures of lore, and potentially within the categorisation of ‘regin’ if we are to place the Njǫrðungar among them (Vafþrúðnismál st 51).
Again, the word ‘vanir’ is nowhere to be found in this division of groups that nonetheless lines up neatly with what would correspond with a category of beings in alliance with the aesir, comparable to and revered in much the same way as them, but semantically distinct with the distinguished context necessary for, say, a war between themselves and the æsir in the past, since resolved with the creation of Kvasir displaying unity between them, and now only to be brought up in the odd reference to the exchange of hostages that brought Njǫrðr to the æsir. Whether they are reflective of any aspect of the trifunctional hypothesis (fertility, most obviously) is not necessary for the theory to function and not my particular area of focus nor interest, but I would openly encourage users here to further research or look into literature discussing that aspect. As it is, I have no strong leanings on that part as of the time of writing, one way or the other.

So where are Njǫrðr and his family actually referred to as Elves?

Well, first there are possible implications. From Hall (2007):
>the Christian Sigvatr’s travels in the pagan lands east of Norway around 1020, describes a heathen ekkja (‘widow’) refusing Sigvatr board for the night for fear of ‘Óðins . . . reiði’ (‘Óðinn’s wrath’), because an alfa blót (‘álfar’s sacrifice’) is taking place in the house.49 This text implies that álfar might be worshipped in late Swedish paganism, and it is of interest, in view of the association of álfar with Freyr elsewhere, that there is strong evidence for the prominence of Freyr in Swedish paganism
Indeed, Sweden is the most prominent location for toponyms relating to the Njǫrðungar, and in the Icelandic sagas it is gleaned that Freyr and his worshippers are generally associated with Swedes moreso than Icelanders. Freyr is recorded as the ancestor to the lineage of Swedish royalty. It is also to be noted that he was granted ** Álfheimr** by the gods, as a teething gift soon after his birth. When Freyr first sees the jǫtunn woman Gerðr, he laments that ‘no one of æsir or elves will grant that we together be’ (Bellows).
The book continues, reinforcing the link between æsir and álfar and how Hávamál st 159-160 even denotes the terms in association with the word ‘tívar’ (‘gods’, the plural of the generic term directly related to the god Týr’s name). This stanza is also important for showing what appears to be a *semantic* connection between the two groups, as we’ve seen with the ‘vanir’ that poetic formulas are a factor and recurring literarily alone is not necessarily an indication of semantic association, or differentiation.
Lokasenna is then addressed, wherein the interesting conundrum is brought up of ‘æsir ok álfar’ being used to describe the guests at Aegir’s hall in the introduction, and although this poem cycles through more figures of Norse mythology in speaking roles than any other in such a short time, every single character addressed or shown as physically present lies under the traditionally described labels of æsir and Vanir. This is at least according to Snorri and modern conventional educational literature and summaries. Should this theory be true, the likely hard-to-believe notion for some that such a grand and broadly implicating notion as such prominent gods being elves being so ‘under the radar’ so to speak, would be quite soundly addressed by what would seem to be a naked and casually uttered statement of categorisation like this, perhaps largely overlooked for years as there was no reason to believe the Njǫrðungar present there were part of any group not known as vanir.
If an average Norse listener were aware that Njǫrðr and his family come from the elves, no more clarification of that fact would be needed after stating ‘the æsir and elves are at Ægir’s hall’, followed by the Njǫrðungar themselves appearing soon after. The war itself is already a poorly attested and scarcely referenced event for its seeming importance as an event within the context of the mythos. Either it was far less prominent and (for lack of a better term when typing at 1am) popular story than most today would assume, or preservation bias has simply left us with a fraction of the relevant material which otherwise would have greatly elaborated on it. In my opinion, the latter is more likely. Of course, we must also keep in mind the semantic and pragmatic possibility that any literal ‘álfar’ mentioned in the introduction may simply be silent characters, nameless extras relegated to the background. Hall sees this as unlikely, offering:
>Lokasenna is a tightly constructed poem and mythologically well informed. It would be uncharacteristic, then, for it to repeat a formula which within its mythological frame of reference is partly otiose.
He references stanza 30, where Loki accuses Freyja of having slept with every ǫss and álfr in the room, an insult heightened and made personal elsewhere with possible implications of incest, something he overtly accuses her of in his next line after she responds:
>”In the arms of thy brother the bright gods caught thee When Freyja her wind set free." (Bellows)
Incest is also something he levels towards her father Njǫrdr, although in relation to his sister-wife and not Freyja. Overall, it would outwardly appear that Loki’s second statement flows forth from his first as elaboration, and that he opens with an accusation of incest towards Freyja on top of solely promiscuity (ergi, still applicable to women as with men and almost as taboo). Hall also suggests that the obscure heiti ‘álfrǫðull’ (elf of light?) refers to Freyr, corroborating Freyr’s associate Skirnir, whose name explicitly invokes light and brightness.
In summary, there would appear to be a strong possibility that the Norse cosmos consisted somewhat of a trichotomy, mainly on the basis of location. Leaving the messy assortment of synonyms and location names of varying ages and questionable usages, we would appear to have the broad concept a land of æsir, álfar and light, a nefarious outer world of jǫtnar and their aligned associates, and a land of men, stuck in the middle with you. There is obviously a shipload of nuances, exceptions, elaborations and additions beyond that oversimplification, but it stands that the elves were a well cemented god-like phenomenon with every indication as to being viewed similarly to their æsir contemporaries. It stands also that ‘the vanir’ as a concept without Snorri’s assertive fan fiction is one built on a foundation of cardboard and PVC glue, that may be well overdue for an alternative or replacement.
I reached out to Dr Hall himself to ask as to whether his stance on this matter had changed since 2007. He replied to me that he was not following the topic particularly closely but did graciously direct me to the current latest relevant publication, that being Frog (2021). My sincere thanks to him.

References

Simek, R., & Hall, A. (2007). Dictionary of northern mythology. D.S. Brewer.
Frog, M. & Roper, J. (2011) Verses versus the Vanir: Response to Simek’s ‘Vanir Obituary’. RMN Newsletter 2: 29-37
Frog, M. (2021) The Æsir: An Obituary. Res, artes et religio : Essays in Honour of Rudolf Simek
Dumézil, G. (1939). Mythes et Dieux des germains. Leroux.
Dumézil, G. (1974). Gods of the Ancient Northmen. University of California Press. ISBN) 9780520035072
Lindow, J. (2001). Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford University Press. ISBN) 0-19-515382-0
Hall, Alaric (2007). Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity. Anglo-Saxon Studies. Vol. 8. Woodbridge, Suffolk / Rochester, New York: Boydell Press. ISBN) 978-1843832942.
Bellows, H. (1923), "The Poetic Edda: Translated from the Icelandic with an Introduction and Notes", Scandinavian Classics, New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, vol. XXI & XXII
Mallory, J. P. (2005). In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Thames & Hudson. ISBN) 0-500-27616-1

Prices don’t include shipping, buyer pays for shipping. $2 for a soft protector. If it’s in a soft protector in the photo it doesn’t mean it will come in it. That is how I store them. Would trade multiple for one but genuinely don’t want multiple in return for one of mine.
Proof
ALTA/Korra
Katara #1130 SE & Korra #761 SE $45
Katara Exclusive Sticker $20
Azula Chase $65
Misc (DC/Marvel/Television)
Black Adam Winter Con 2022 $30https://
Demogorgon Target #428 $25
Gloomy Bear Toy Tokyo NY22 #1218 $15
BL Sylvie SE #988 $15
Baseball Fury #824 $15
Signed Jack Armored #1052 $80
Jack Skellington #808 SE $20
Thor #1117 Chalice Exclusive GITD $18
Coach Beard NYCC Con Sticker #1283 $50
Stadium Fluffy Signed #08 $65
DBZ
Goku Ultra Instinct with Kamehameha Shared Sticker $20
Encapsulated Jiren #516 $175
Goku Ultra Instinct Sign #1232 Shared Sticker $15
Vegeta Powering Up Chase #713 $50 https://imgur.com/a/vx8p7bz
Black Clover
Charlotte Common #1155 $18 https://imgur.com/a/VgFYkOg
Charlotte Chase #1155 $60 https://imgur.com/a/fMCvKvH
Yuno $15
Asta $15
Noelle $15
Mereroleona Crunchyroll Sticker #1157 $25 https://imgur.com/a/y6UpATQ
Naruto / Boruto
Killer Bee Common Signed $120
Sasuke Rinnegan AAA Anime Chase $50 https://imgur.com/a/JOsSUVI
Naruto Hokage Chase #724 $70 https://imgur.com/a/Qqcby4H
Killer Bee Common #1200 EE Exclusive https://imgur.com/a/0VvsAA4 $15
Sasuke Chalice Exclusive #1040 $15 https://imgur.com/a/ByIwDa0
Hot Topic Gaara #728 $20 https://imgur.com/a/zD0t2k6
Hot Topic Asuma #1024 $20 https://imgur.com/a/Dy2A5di
Cho-Cho Con Sticker) $80 https://imgur.com/a/Tvz0YuB
Sasuke Rinnegan Common #1023 $15 https://imgur.com/a/STdFLAv
Naruto (Hokage) #724 Common $15 https://imgur.com/a/tOX5rZn
Young Kakashi #1199 AAA Anime Common $15
Jiraiya #1205 HT Exclusive $30
Demon Slayer
Encapsulated Inosuke #870 $100 https://imgur.com/a/YkYxTxT
Signed Nezuko #868 $90 https://imgur.com/a/Qgwdh9B
Enmu #1158 Shared Sticker $15 https://imgur.com/a/QhL7JeG
Tanjiro GT Exclusive #874
JSA Signed Tanjiro Chase #874 $150
Tanjuro Kamado AAA Anime $20
Tanjiro GITD Water Breathing SE $15
My Hero Academia
Encapsulated Mina Ashido #790 $110
Tomura Shigaraki Common #1149 EE Exclusive $15
Kinoko Komori #1237 HT Exclusive $20
Signed Overhaul #1012 CC Sticker $100
Dabi Shared Sticked #637 $145
Flocked Hawks #1147 CC sticker $15
Pokémon
Lapras #864 $14 https://imgur.com/a/syctSFE
Charmander #455 (no sticker) $15 https://imgur.com/a/0Pavqe8
JJK
Yuji Itadori with Slaughter Demon #1163 Shared Sticker $20
Yuji Itadori #1225 Shared Sticker $20
Ryomen Sukuna SE #1118
Yuji Itadori HT EXPO #1152
Fruits Basket
Shigure Soma #882 $15
Inuyasha
Evil Inuyasha Not Mint $15
Kirara flocked Near Mint/Mint $20
Sesshomaru Not Mint $15
Sesshomaru as a Demon Dog Not Mint $60
ISO
Bleach Pops One Piece Pops Gyomei Chase Tokyo Ghoul Pops Attack on Titan Pops.
Will look at anything anime.

Have photos as the links :) Prices don’t include shipping, buyer pays for shipping. $2 for a soft protector. If it’s in a soft protector in the photo it doesn’t mean it will come in it. That is how I store them. Would trade multiple for one but genuinely don’t want multiple in return for one of mine.
Proof: https://imgur.com/a/pwurKbr
Baseball Fury #824 $15 https://imgur.com/a/1yZBI3r
Borat #1269 Toy Tokyo NY22 SOLD https://imgur.com/a/4npVxYk
Katara #1130 SE & Korra #761 SE $45 https://imgur.com/a/rGjG1ye
Black Adam Winter Con 2022 $30 https://imgur.com/a/mVOzfan
Demogorgon Target #428 $25 https://imgur.com/a/xiHJZXm
Gloomy Bear Toy Tokyo NY22 #1218 $15 https://imgur.com/a/gQ3d2Z6
Goku Ultra Instinct with Kamehameha Shared Sticker $20 https://imgur.com/a/SEKvE2a
BL Sylvie SE #988 $15 https://imgur.com/a/wEkMpiJ
Charlotte Common #1155 $18 https://imgur.com/a/VgFYkOg
Killer Bee Common Signed $120 https://imgur.com/a/qzOxPJO
Encapsulated Jiren #516 $175 ON HOLD https://imgur.com/a/o7Tnsn1
Tanjiro Nezuko 2pk $25 https://imgur.com/a/09LmKxT
Sasuke Chalice Chase #1040 TRADED https://imgur.com/a/rWhxeHX
Sasuke Rinnegan AAA Anime Chase $50 https://imgur.com/a/JOsSUVI
Naruto Hokage Chase #724 $70 https://imgur.com/a/Qqcby4H
Charlotte Chase #1155 $60 ON HOLD https://imgur.com/a/fMCvKvH
Encapsulated Inosuke #870 $100 ON HOLD https://imgur.com/a/YkYxTxT
Signed Nezuko #868 $90 ON HOLD https://imgur.com/a/Qgwdh9B
Jack Armored #1052 $80 https://imgur.com/a/qFF9j2g
Signed Overhaul SE #1012 TRADED https://imgur.com/a/kaNJKFv
Jack Skellington #808 SE $20 https://imgur.com/a/BnwT5y9
Thor #1117 Chalice Exclusive GITD $18 https://imgur.com/a/CnwLU0m
Killer Bee Common #1200 EE Exclusive https://imgur.com/a/0VvsAA4 $15
Tomura Shigaraki Common #1149 EE Exclusive $15 https://imgur.com/a/lEDhWz7
Enmu #1158 Shared Sticker $15 https://imgur.com/a/QhL7JeG
Lapras #864 $14 https://imgur.com/a/syctSFE
Goku Ultra Instinct Sign #1232 Shared Sticker $15 https://imgur.com/a/BfReVyO
Yuji Itadori with Slaughter Demon #1163 Shared Sticker $20 https://imgur.com/a/eccwPdR
Yuji Itadori #1225 Shared Sticker $20 https://imgur.com/a/2XEWa0B
Anbu Kakashi AAA Anime #994 SOLD https://imgur.com/a/aEyn1ka
Hashirama & Tobirama 2pk SOLD https://imgur.com/a/QdflJLo
Charmander #455 (no sticker) $15 https://imgur.com/a/0Pavqe8
Sasuke Rinnegan Common #1023 $15 https://imgur.com/a/STdFLAv
Mereroleona Crunchyroll Sticker #1157 $25 https://imgur.com/a/y6UpATQ
Naruto (Hokage) #724 Common $15 https://imgur.com/a/tOX5rZn
Shigure Soma #882 $15 https://imgur.com/a/jZADbyE
JSA Signed Tanjiro Chase #874 $150 https://imgur.com/a/xHkEpGR
Sasuke Chalice Exclusive #1040 $15 https://imgur.com/a/ByIwDa0
Hot Topic Gaara #728 $20 https://imgur.com/a/zD0t2k6
Hot Topic Asuma #1024 $20 https://imgur.com/a/Dy2A5di
Stadium Fluffy Signed #08 $65 https://imgur.com/a/25b7pJ8
Kaoru & Hikaru Hitachini 2 pk $30 https://imgur.com/a/7MVtGIX
Tokyo Ghoul Re: Kuki Urie & Saiko Bundle $15 https://imgur.com/a/bXsPSq8
Coach Beard NYCC Con Sticker #1283 $50 https://imgur.com/a/xtLb3DF
Tanjiro GT Exclusive #874 https://imgur.com/a/zD0t2k6
Cho-Cho Con Sticker (haven’t confirmed, I know I’ve missed on buying second hand before, can send more photos of sticker) $80 https://imgur.com/a/Tvz0YuB
Vegeta Powering Up Chase #713 $50 https://imgur.com/a/vx8p7bz
ISO
Bleach Pops One Piece Pops Gyomei Chase Tokyo Ghoul Pops Attack on Titan Pops.
Will look at anything anime.

For those unfamiliar, 猫城记 is a prominent novel written in the 1930s, widely regarded as China's first important work of science fiction, which satirizes contemporary Chinese society at the time of writing. I read the book in the original Chinese. It was intellectually interesting -- and I'm glad I read it -- but I'm not sure I'd call it "fun". Anyway, here's the introduction to the English version my friend is reading. I found it quite informative and figured some of you might like to read it (minor spoilers follow):
IN THE northwest corner of Beijing’s old city is a subway and bus workshop. It was built in the early seventies on the site of the Lake of Great Peace, which was filled in as part of a plan to extend the city’s subway system. In the bigger picture of the destruction of old Beijing, the Lake of Great Peace was just another loss – one of the countless cuts that have destroyed the old city and remade it in the borrowed image of socialism: modern, efficient and rootless. But its demise is especially poignant because it was here in 1966 that the greatest chronicler of Beijing’s urban life, Lao She, committed suicide after bein tortured and brutalised by Mao Zedong’s Red Guards.
Lao She’s best-known works are the novel Rickshaw Boy and the play Teahouse, both of which describe the challenges faced by ordinary people in China’s turbulent twentieth century. A champion of vernacular Chinese, he was one of the first to fully capture how people really spoke, especially the dialect of his beloved Beijing. But it’s in Cat Country that Lao She stretches himself the furthest, producing one of the most remarkable, perplexing and prophetic novels of modern China. On one level it is a work of science fiction – a visit to a country of cat-like people on Mars – that lampoons 1930s China. On a deeper level, the work also predicts the terror and violence of the early Communist era and the chaos and brutality that led to Lao She’s death at the Lake of Great Peace. Cat Country is often called a dystopian novel, but when Lao She took his own life, it was an uncannily accurate portrait of the reality around him.
The novel hasn’t always been seen in such terms. After it was serialised in 1932, it was roundly criticised as too pessimistic. Although it was a popular book, Chinese and foreign critics had a hard time placing it in Lao She’s oeuvre. Some have seen its value mainly as a way of understanding his views on China. But Cat Country’s stature has grown over time, after the detritus of a turbulent era has settled, the shrill polemics have faded, and the book is seen not only in the context of Chinese history but as a reaction to a time when many societies, both Eastern and Western, were degenerating into a violent, animalistic state.
Lao She himself was ambivalent about Cat Country, and saw it as a detour from his roots as a humorist in the Beijing storytelling tradition. He was born there in 1899 as Shu Qingchun, or Sumuru, in his native Manchu tongue. His people were the one-time nomads who had conquered China in the midseventeenth century and had been ruling it since then under the Sinicised name of the Qing dynasty. His father was a soldier who died defending the Forbidden City in 1900 against Western troops in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers had vowed to expel foreigners from China, and the Manchu court had made the ill-fated error of backing them – one of the final blows that caused the Qing to fall in 1912 and be replaced by a weak republic.
Lao She grew up impoverished: his mother had a tiny widow’s pension and the boy often lacked overcoats in the winter. But he was tough and one of his friends, the linguist Luo Changpei, wrote in an essay that ‘even when he was beaten with the rattan pointer until tears filled his eyes, he wouldn’t shed a drop or ask to be spared.’Academically gifted, he went to a teaching school and was immediately given a job in the educational bureaucracy. But he resigned in disgust at the corruption and lack of reforms – themes he would take up with gusto in Cat Country.
He went to London in 1924 to teach Chinese at the University of London’s School of Oriental Studies (the precursor of today’s School of Oriental and African Studies), and he read English novels in earnest. Homesick for Beijing, he began to write, partly imitating Dickens. His first novel, The Philosophy of Lao Chang, was well received because he had brought to the fore something that modern Chinese literature had previously neglected: humour. Two more novels followed and then he moved back to China, stopping first for half a year to teach in Singapore, where he wrote a children’s novel.
Assigned to teach in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan, Lao She wrote a novel that looked at how a Japanese attack on the city in 1928 played out against a family’s life. But that work was lost when he sent it to be published in Shanghai and the publisher’s offices were destroyed during a Japanese attack in 1932.
Cat Country was his response to these events, and a part of Lao She’s growing politicisation. He felt that he had to help China by writing more critically but it also betrayed his unease and distance from the country itself, perhaps a reflection of his position as a Manchu. Many of his kinsmen had been killed in pogroms after the fall of the Qing, and had been widely blamed for China’s troubles.
The novel tells the story of a Chinese man who crash-lands on Mars. His two companions are killed and he is soon captured by a group of Cat People who run one of the planet’s many countries. He frees himself from their clutches after realising that they lack rudimentary military technology, allowing him to use his pistol to scare them off. He is befriended by one of Cat Country’s richest and most powerful men, Scorpion, who has a plantation of ‘reverie’ trees, which produce addictive leaves that the Cat People eat.
Scorpion takes the narrator under his wing, protecting him from further attacks, but also using him as a mercenary to guard his valuable crop. Eventually, the two go to Cat City, where the narrator learns about Cat Country’s plight. As he puts it upon entering the city, ‘As soon as I set eyes on Cat City, for some reason or other, a sentence took form in my mind: this civilisation will soon perish!’
What follows is a detailed exploration of Cat Country, which can be seen as a direct commentary on 1930s China and indeed this may have been how Lao She intended it to be read. ‘Mr Earth’, as our narrator is called, views the Cat People with a mixture of pity and disgust. The locals are dirty and chaotic, the local food poisonous and unsafe, while modern education and foreign travel have only led to superficial knowledge and alienation from traditions.
The narrator’s informant is Scorpion’s son, Young Scorpion, who shows the disorderly state of museums and libraries, which have been pillaged by corrupt officials. Worse are the schools, where nothing is taught and everyone immediately handed a university diploma. In one particularly chilling scene, students dissect their teachers alive.
Unlike his great contemporary, Lu Xun, Lao She doesn’t put much hope in young people, believing them to be more hopeless than the older generation. As Young Scorpion tells our hero, ‘In Cat Country we don’t have any young people! We only have different age groupings . . . Some of the “young” people among us are even more antique in their thinking than my grandfather.’
But his criticism of China goes beyond the early twentieth century and many points ring true today. Our narrator is angered by the custom of pulling strings to get ahead – akin to the debilitating practice of guanxi that continues to hobble Chinese society. ‘If you had an influential friend at court, then you could rocket to the top immediately, no matter what you had studied in college,’ Young Scorpion tells him.
At the heart of these problems is another issue that echoes in contemporary China: a lack of moral guideposts. Lao She’s era was defined by the destruction of the imperial order, as well as unrelenting attacks on traditional culture and religion. In some ways, Lao She himself participated in this; he eschewed classical Chinese for the vernacular and his writings indicate he was a strong advocate of reforming education and politics. But he also sensed the danger in these radical changes; and indeed if the country of cats is anything, it’s one morally unmoored. This rootlessness, as Young Scorpion says, ‘prods our people into taking a backward leap of tens of thousands of years, back to the cannibalism of antiquity.'
Lao She struggled with these issues in his personal life. In 1922, he converted to Christianity at Beijing’s West City New Church (Gangwashi), still one of the city’s most important places of worship. He took the English name Colin C. Shu and taught classes in moral cultivation and music. But he seemed to have stopped practising after he grew frustrated with the lack of indigenous Christian leadership and the resulting sense that it was yet another imported ideology.
Unlike many writers and artists of his era, Lao She didn’t turn to leftist ideology as an ersatz belief system. Some of his sharpest scenes pillory young Cat People who go abroad to study and come back speaking gibberish – a sort of mock Russian that they can’t understand. The ruling ideology is ‘Everybody Shareskyism’, whose leader killed the cat-emperor and installed himself at the top. One of its deities is an Uncle Karl and students in one scene cry out, ‘Long live Uncle Karlskyism! Long live Everybody Shareskyism! Long live Pinskypansky Pospos!’
When Cat Country came out, it was roundly criticised as less successful than Lao She’s previous three novels. Some of the criticism seems to reflect a lack of familiarity with satire and its inherent limitations – some wrote that the characters weren’t developed enough or that the plot was somewhat flat. Perhaps more importantly, it was at variance with the critical realism that would eventually come to smother Chinese literature. A few years earlier in 1930, the League of Left-Wing Writers was formed, a hugely influential group that put pressure on authors to be political. But Cat Country was different. It was a blast of anger and revulsion at all sectors of society, not just the government or landlords, but also students and revolutionaries.
A few years later, Lao She published a collection of essays that reflected on his first few novels. In it, he declared Cat Country a flop, saying it was ‘like a bird fallen onto the ground with broken wings.’ Its key failure, he said, was that it had too much satire and too little humour. Perhaps as a result, Lao She later tried his hand at works of critical realism, which the People’s Republic declared to be his masterpieces. Yet Cat Country was popular when it appeared and went through numerous printings until the founding of the Republic in 1949.
Lao She tried hard to fit into the new society. He had been living in the United States, but returned home to participate in the creation of the new society. He wrote plays about the bad old days of pre-Communist rule, and in 1951 was honoured with the title of ‘People’s Artist’. But almost none of Lao She’s works lauded the new era of Communist rule. He candidly said that he didn’t understand the new society that Mao was building. In an interview shortly before his death, he told two foreign visitors ‘I am not a Marxist and, therefore, I cannot feel and think as a Beijing student in May 1966 who sees the situation in a Marxist way.’
That was an understatement. As the Cultural Revolution unfolded that spring and summer, Lao She’s sort of non-conformity became dangerous. Already 67, he was ill with bronchitis and had been hospitalised earlier. China’s canny premier, Zhou Enlai, reportedly advised him to stay put to avoid the turmoil outside, but Lao She was curious and on 23 August had himself discharged
It was incredibly unlucky timing. That same day, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, issued an infamous editorial applauding the Red Guards’ ‘revolutionary spirit’ and thus spurring new violence. Lao She was called out of his office at the Beijing Writers’ Union and immediately set upon by the fanatical mob. He was taken to the Confucian temple where religious relics were being burned in a bonfire. He and twenty-eight others were forced to kneel down in front of it for three hours – dubbed a ‘baptism by fire’. Their heads were shaved, black ink was poured on them and they were beaten. Lao She was singled out for abuse and accused of being an American agent. Accounts say he was beaten with a copper-studded leather belt until he fainted.
But like the stubborn boy of his youth, Lao She refused to bend. He rejected the accusations and wouldn’t wear a placard around his neck admitting his guilt. Incensed, the Red Guards took him to the local police station and declared him to be an ‘active counter-revolutionary’. He was released that evening and told to report to work the next day wearing the placard. When he got home, he found that his house had been ransacked, manuscripts burned and his prized collection of art strewn across the courtyard. The next day, instead of going to work, he walked to the Lake of Great Peace and sat on its shore for the day, as witnesses say. The next day his body was found floating in the waters, several of Mao’s poems scattered about
Lao She’s death came during ‘Red August’, a particularly bloody period during the Cultural Revolution. That month in Beijing, 1772 people were killed or committed suicide, calling to mind some of the chilling lines from Cat Country.
‘You see, adherents of Everybody Shareskyism will kill a man without thinking twice about it’; ‘And thus now it is a very common occurrence to see students butchering teachers, professors, chancellors, and principals.’
Another link between his fate and Cat Country came when this translation by William A. Lyell was initially published in 1970. Soon after, the Beijing magazine Chinese Literature published a screed attacking the translation indirectly, writing that ‘not long ago, the social-imperialists evoked the ghost of this shameless rogue and published a full translation.’ The article hinted at why this book in particular, angered the Maoists so much, ‘From start to finish the novel is a vicious attack on the guiding ideology of the party – MarxismLeninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.’
After the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, Lao She was rehabilitated. It was during this era that Cat Country was finally republished in mainland China. The author’s death is still a sensitive topic – a memorial on the site was never permitted to be erected – but a play based on Cat Country was performed to enthusiastic audiences in several Chinese cities in 2013.
The novel also occupies an uncomfortable place in modern Chinese literature. It can be seen in the Chinese tradition of fantastical encounters with strange peoples, but its Martian setting also makes it an early work of Chinese science fiction. The Communist Party, however, has long viewed this genre with suspicion. An early wave of science fiction died in the twenties when leftistinspired critical realism took hold. Another was killed in the early eighties when it was deemed to be ‘spiritual pollution’ and most science fiction magazines closed.
And yet appreciating Cat Country means shedding some of these labels and didactic explanations. When Lao She describes how the emperor is replaced by the head of Everybody Shareskyism, multiple interpretations are possible – not just the role that Chiang Kai-shek was assuming for himself in the 1930s, but the fate of many revolutions, from the French to the Chinese.
Likewise, the novel’s reverie leaves do immediately bring to mind opium, but equally fascinating is that in 1932, the same year Cat Country was serialised, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World and imagined a product he called ‘soma’ that numbed his dystopian inhabitants into accepting their fate. In this sense, Cat Country is part of a broad trend in world literature, reacting to efforts to dumb down and control people.
All of this makes Cat Country an anomaly in Chinese fiction, one that grew out of Lao She’s unique biography. Unlike his great contemporaries, Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, Lao She had directly experienced western culture. He was deeply rooted in China, but as a Manchu he was enough of an outsider to go for the jugular when looking at his native land and to eschew the naïve belief, for example, of Lu Xun, that all would be well if China just trusted its youth. Lao She had a clearer view of what could beset a country when the old markers are gone, and in Cat Country he gives us a brutal look at a China that resonates today.
-- Ian Johnson

March 20, 1962 Berkeley Language Center
Huxley:
Thank You.
{Applause}
Uh, First of all, the, I’d like to say, that the conference at Santa Barbara was not directly concerned with the control of the mind. That was a conference, there have been two of them now, at the University of California Medical center in San Francisco, one this year which I didn’t attend, and one two years ago where there was a considerable discussion on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking about technology in general and the effects it’s likely to have on society and the problems related to technological transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, this has been very well summed up by the moderator. In the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there’s been the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the reformation, the religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did one remove the effect of the human being.
Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.
But, as, I think it was (sounds like Mettenicht) said many years ago, you can do everything with {garbled} except sit on them. If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it’s exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.
It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World, which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system. Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.
A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well this process is, as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more interested in what is happening.
And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty- Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it’s a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.
Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I’m inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.
That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they’re living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.
But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.
And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.
And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman’s point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something that really works.
In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in Dr. William (sounds like Seargent’s) Battle for the Mind where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers/leaders of the past hit on the Pavlovian method, he speaks specifically of Wesley’s method of producing conversions which were essentially based on the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter of showing how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.
Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there’s no doubt at all that we can if we wanted to, carry them much further than was possible in the past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in China, we see that the pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into the very depths of the people’s being, and has got so deep that it’s very difficult to ever be rooted out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary quotes acceptance of the state the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement in the, even in the techniques of terrorism. But then we come to the consideration of other techniques, non-terroristic techniques, for inducing consent and inducing people to love their servitude. Here, I don’t think I can possibly go into all of them, because I don’t know all of them, but I mean I can mention the more obvious methods, which can now be used and are based on recent scientific findings. First of all there are the methods connected with straight suggestion and hypnosis.
I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past. People of course, always have known about suggestion, and although they didn’t know the word ‘hypnosis’ they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I think, a much greater knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our knowledge in ways, which I think the past was never able to make use of it. For example, one of the things we now know for certain, that there is of course an enormous, I mean this has always been known a very great difference between individuals in regard to their suggestibility. But we now know pretty clearly the sort of statistical structure of a population in regard to its suggestibility. Its very interesting when you look at the findings of different fields, I mean the field of hypnosis, the field of administering placebos, for example, in the field of general suggestion in states of drowsiness or light sleep you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping up.
You’ll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the number of people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility (snaps), just like that. is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end of the scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in between lies a large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that they can gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and in the same way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the administration of placebos.
A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the general hospital in Boston on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering comparable kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections whenever they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of the time were of morphine, and 50% of water. And about twenty percent of those who went through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled waters as from the morphea. About 20% got no relief from the distilled water, and in- between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.
So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly in regard to what in BNW I called Hypnopedia, the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a man who manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part of sleep, I mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd laughs), for confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting that these are records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15% and 20% of people who write indignantly saying the records don’t work at all, and he sends the money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who write enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better (laughter) etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of these records. And in between there are those who don’t get much results and they have to have letters written to them saying “Go persist my dear, go on” (laughter) and you will get there, and they generally do get results in the long run.
Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect very strongly that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also that it would not be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are extremely suggestible and who are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who occupy the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean it’s very fortunate that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed. But, once given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country.
And I mean, I think this after all, we had the most incredible example in recent years by what can be done by efficient methods of suggestion and persuasion in the form of Hitler. Anyone who has read, for example, (Sounds like Bulloch’s) Life of Hitler, comes forth with this horrified admiration for this infernal genius, who really understood human weaknesses I think almost better than anybody and who exploited them with all the resources then available. I mean he knew everything, for example, he knew intuitively this pavlovian truth that condition installed in a state of stress or fatigue goes much deeper than conditioning installed at other times. This of course is why all his big speeches were organized at night. He speaks quite frankly, of course, in Mein Kampf, this is done solely because people are tired at night and therefore much less capable of resisting persuasion than they would be during the day. And in all his techniques he was using, he had discovered intuitively and by trial and error a great many of the weaknesses, which we now know about on a sort of scientific way I think much more clearly than he did.
But the fact remains that this differential of suggestibility this susceptibility to hypnosis I do think is something which has to be considered very carefully in relation to any kind of thought about democratic government . If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government.
This is, I say, in this field of pure persuasion, I think we do know much more than we did in the past, and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the demagogues voice and image in a quite hallucinatory way, I mean, the TV and radio, Hitler was making enormous use of the radio, he could speak to millions of people simultaneously. This alone creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the ancient demagogue. The ancient demagogue could only appeal to as many people as his voice could reach by yelling at his utmost, but the modern demagogue could touch literally millions at a time, and of course by the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of hallucinatory effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.
But then there are the various other methods one can think of which, thank heaven, as yet have not be used, but which obviously could be used. There is for example, the pharmacological method, this is one of the things I talked about in BNW. I invented a hypothetical drug called SOMA, which of course could not exist as it stood there because it was simultaneously a stimulant, a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, which seems unlikely in one substance. But the point is, if you applied several different substances you could get almost all these results even now, and the really interesting things about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history its clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but the, and, this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don’t think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered.
Modern science has of course better ways of extracting the active principals of these drugs and of course has discovered numerous ways of synthesizing new substances of extreme power, but the actual discovery of these naturally occurring things was made by primitive man goodness knows how many centuries ago. There is for example, in the underneath the, lake dwellings of the early Neolithic that have been dug up in Switzerland we have found poppy-heads, which looks as though people were already using this most ancient and powerful and dangerous of narcotics, even before the days of the rise of agriculture. So that man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature.
But, the difference, as I say, between the ancient mind-changers, the traditional mind- changers, and the new substances is that they were extremely harmful and the new ones are not. I mean even the permissible mind-changer alcohol is not entirely harmless, as people may have noticed, and I mean the other ones, the non-permissible ones, such as opium and cocaine, opium and its derivatives, are very harmful indeed. They rapidly produce addiction, and in some cases lead at an extraordinary rate to physical degeneration and death.
Whereas these new substances, this is really very extraordinary, that a number of these new mind-changing substances can produce enormous revolutions within the mental side of our being, and yet do almost nothing to the physiological side. You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect.
And it is of course true that pharmacologists are producing a great many new wonder drugs where the cure is almost worse than the disease. Every year the new edition of medical textbooks contains a longer and longer chapter of what are Iatrogenic diseases, that is to say diseases caused by doctors (laughter} And this is quite true, many of the wonder drugs are extremely dangerous. I mean they can produce extraordinary effects, and in critical conditions they should certainly be used, but they should be used with the utmost caution. But there is evidently a whole class of drugs effecting the CNS which can produce enormous changes in sedation in euphoria in energizing the whole mental process without doing any perceptible harm to the human body, and this presents to me the most extraordinary revolution. In the hands of a dictator these substances in one kind or the other could be used with, first of all, complete harmlessness, and the result would be, you can imagine a euphoric that would make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.
I mean these things are possible. This is the extraordinary thing, I mean after all this is even true with the crude old drugs. I mean, a housemate years ago remarked after reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, He Says “And beer does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man” (laughter). And beer is of course, an extremely crude drug compared to these ones. And you can certainly say that some of the psychic energizers and the new hallucinants could do incomparably more than Milton and all the Theologicians combined could possibly do to make the terrifying mystery of our existence seem more tolerable than it does. And here I think one has an enormous area in which the ultimate revolution could function very well indeed, an area in which a great deal of control could be used by not through terror, but by making life seem much more enjoyable than it normally does. Enjoyable to the point, where as I said before, Human beings come to love a state of things by which any reasonable and decent human standard they ought not to love and this I think is perfectly possible.
But then, very briefly, let me speak about one of the more recent developments in the sphere of neurology, about the implantation of electrodes in the brain. This of course has been done in the large scale in animals and in a few cases its been done in the cases of the hopelessly insane. And anybody who has watched the behavior of rats with electrodes placed in different centers must come away from this experience with the most extraordinary doubts about what on Earth is in store for us if this is got a hold of by a dictator. I saw not long ago some rats in the {garbled} laboratory at UCLA there were two sets of them, one with electrodes planted in the pleasure center, and the technique was they had a bar which they pressed which turned on a very small current for a short space of time which we had a wire connected with that electrode and which stimulated the pleasure center and was evidently absolutely ecstatic was these rats were pressing the bar 18,000 times a day (laughter). Apparently if you kept them from pressing the bar for a day, they’d press it 36,000 times on the following day and would until they fell down in complete exhaustion (laughter) And they would neither eat, nor be interested in the opposite sex but would just go on pressing this bar {pounds on podium}
Then the most extraordinary rats were those were the electrode was planted halfway between the pleasure and the pain center. The result was a kind of mixture of the most wonderful ecstasy and like being on the rack at the same time. And you would see the rats sort of looking at is bar and sort of saying “To be or not to be that is the question”. (Laughter) Finally it would approach {Pounds on podium} and go back with this awful I mean, the (sounds like franken huminizer anthropomorphizer), and he would wait some time before pressing the bar again, yet he would always press it again. This was the extraordinary thing.
I noticed in the most recent issue of Scientific American there’s a very interesting article on electrodes in the brains of chickens, where the technique is very ingenious, where you sink into their brains a little socket with a screw on it and the electrode can then be screwed deeper and deeper into the brainstem and you can test at any moment according to the depth, which goes at fractions of the mm, what you’re stimulating and these creatures are not merely stimulated by wire, they’re fitted with a miniature radio receiver which weighs less than an ounce which is attached to them so that they can be communicated with at a distance, I mean they can run about in the barnyard and you could press a button and this particular area of the brain to which the electrode has been screwed down to would be stimulated. You would get this fantastic phenomena, where a sleeping chicken would jump up and run about, or an active chicken would suddenly sit down and go to sleep, or a hen would sit down and act like she’s hatching out an egg, or a fighting rooster would go into depression.
The whole picture of the absolute control of the drives is terrifying, and in the few cases in which this has been done with very sick human beings, The effects are evidently very remarkable too, I was talking last summer in England to Grey Walter, who is the most eminent exponent of the EEG technique in England, and he was telling me that he’s seen hopeless inmates at asylums with these things in their heads, and these people were suffering from uncontrollable depression, and they had these electrodes inserted into the pleasure center in their brain, however when they felt too bad, they just pressed a button on the battery in their pocket and he said the results were fantastic, the mouth pointing down would suddenly turn up and they’d feel very cheerful and happy. So there again one sees the most extraordinary revolutionary techniques, which are now available to us.
Now, I think what is obviously perfectly clear is that for the present these techniques are not being used except in an experimental way, but I think it is important for us to realize what is happening to make ourselves acquainted with what has already happened, and then use a certain amount of imagination to extrapolate into the future the sort of things that might happen. What might happen if these fantastically powerful techniques were used by unscrupulous people in authority, what on Earth would happen, what sort of society would we get?
And I think it is peculiarly important because as one sees when looking back over history we have allowed in the past all those advances in technology which has profoundly changed our social and individual life to take us by surprise, I mean it seems to me that it was during the late 18 century early 19th century when the new machines were making possible the factory situation. It was not beyond the wit of man to see what was happening and project into the future and maybe forestall the really dreadful consequences which plagued England and most of western Europe and this country for sixty or seventy years, and the horrible abuses of the factory system and if a certain amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time and if people had first of all found out what was happening and then used their imagination to see what might happen, and then had gone on to work out the means by which the worst applications of the techniques would not take place, well then I think western humanity might have been spared about three generations of utter misery which had been imposed on the poor at that time.
And the same way with various technological advances now, I mean we need to think about the problems with automation and more profoundly the problems, which may arise with these new techniques, which may contribute to this ultimate revolution. Our business is to be aware of what is happening, and then to use our imagination to see what might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances to be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their degradation.
Thank You
{Applause}

This was by far the year I played the most in my entire life. I finished 56 games and played 7 more that, for different reasons, I ended up quitting. There were only two I played from this year so those won’t be on the list for obvious reasons. All except Limbo, DOOM 3 and Dead Space were first playthroughs. I shared my views on the majority of these on this sub, so let me know if you’d like more detailed thoughts on a specific game and I’ll post a link for it.
With that said, here is the nutshell version of My Year in Gaming, in order of play:

1. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice - Good story, amazing graphics, very stylised, satisfying if repetitive combat, and very unique take on mental health using audio cues. Some puzzles felt a bit obtuse. 8.5/10
2. UFC 3 - Fun to play with a decent enough balance between career mode, punchy mechanics and fluff to justify a playthrough. 6.5/10
3. Blair Witch - Most people hate on this game but I actually enjoyed my time with it. It loses a lot of its appeal in the second half but overall it’s well worth a playthrough. It features a really cool camera mechanic and one of the most painful gaming memories I had this year. 7.5/10
4. Ninja Gaiden II - Hack and slash at its finest. Not as atmospheric as the first one but still pure chaotic fun. The setting is a bit of a turn-off. 8.5/10
5. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order - Very enjoyable. Beautiful world, simple mechanics and solid combat. Really brings with it that sense of Star Wars adventure. Has a couple of issues and its hub world sometimes feels a bit restrictive, but nothing that takes away from the experience in any meaningful way. 8.5/10
6. A Plague Tale: Innocence - Surprisingly awesome. Really good story, competent if basic stealth mechanics, good pace and fully realised dark medieval tone. A bit clunky and the characters can get on your nerves at times, but a highly recommended game. Can’t wait for the sequel. 8.5/10
7. Alien Isolation - Can’t remember the last time I felt such sense of dread in a game. It excels at making you feel uneasy and helpless, and the alien’s AI is one of the biggest accomplishments in recent games IMO. A bit of jank but it was on the whole one of my most memorable horror playthroughs. 9/10
8. The Witcher 3 - Took me literal hours and several tries to get into it, but after 1 hour in Velen I fell in love with what has now become #2 on my GOAT list. 10/10
9. Alan Wake - Clunky, awkward combat and somewhat dated, but the story, voice acting, delivery and incredibly accomplished noir vibe more than make up for it. Also incorporated a couple of mechanics that felt quite unique at the time. 9/10
10. Void Bastards - Sadly I didn’t like it one bit. Very cool art style, but after the first couple hours the novelty wore off and it became an overly repetitive bore. 3/10
11. Observation - Fantastic story, full of mystery and atmosphere, truly one of the best sci-fi tales I’ve experienced in gaming. Even with its glaring problems (movement and camera controls were rage-inducing at times, and navigation could be quite confusing), this is a game I can wholeheartedly recommend to any sci-fi horror fan. 8.5/10
12. Streets of Rage 4 - Great blast from the bast, arcade beat’em up done right. Very short yet enjoyable game that stays true to its roots and improves on most everything from the originals. Fun way to spend 2-3 hours. 7.5/10
13. Destroy All Humans - Very satisfying, fluid gameplay mechanics and a game brimming with charm with its on-the-nose humour and Cold-War hysteria. Experienced a few bugs on Xbox, one of which actually made the game crash, but it’s a fun experience that I can easily recommend. 7/10
14. What Remains of Edith Finch - One of the most memorable stories I experienced this year. Never a dull moment especially for walking sim standards, and a title that is as much a game as it is a work of art. 8.5/10
15. Dante’s Inferno - Really cool hack and slash, amazing representation of hell, solid tone setting and pacing, brutal visuals and fluid gameplay. The locked camera can be infuriating, and playing with a controller comes with a couple of frustrating aspects as well, but overall I feel this game is definitely under appreciated within its genre. 8/10
16. Night Call - A meh game. Great noir aesthetic and interesting premise, but the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired. Completely voiceless whodunit game which isn’t for everyone. IMO only worth it if you know what to expect and are a fan of these types of games. 6/10
17. Middle Earth: Shadow of War - Really fun game if you know when to quit playing it. The visuals are great, the gameplay is solid, the Arkham-like combat feels amazing, the nemesis system gives it quite a personal feel, and with enough practice your Talion can feel like a god. Should’ve ended on Act III because the post-epilogue game comes with too much grind just for a 3 minute cutscene. 7.5/10
18. Wolfenstein: The New Order - Fantastic reboot and one of the best shooters I’ve played in recent memory. The narrative makes you surprisingly invested in the characters. No compromise action, great looking guns and above all, really awesome gunplay. 8.5/10
19. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood - Yes it’s considerably shorter and at times feels more like DLC, and yes the story is considerably less grounded, but I ended up liking it slightly more than TNO. It came down to tone: I’m a sucker for darker atmosphere and that’s exactly what this game brought. An awesome, almost emotional throwback to Castle Wolfenstein. 8.5/10
20. Wolfenstein: The New Colossus - Definitely not as good as its predecessors. Bigger focus on narrative that doesn’t land all punches it throws, inconsistent messaging, over reliance on cutscenes, unimpressive level design and frustrating game indicators make this a less enjoyable experience even if Wolfenstein’s gameplay and combat trademarks are still there. 7.5/10
21. The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan - Disappointing. Unlikable and underdeveloped characters, an over exposure to jump scares and QTEs, and the unrealised potential turn this into a tough one to recommend. 5/10
22. Lonely Mountains: Downhill - Great little Game Pass gem. Relaxing, beautifully crafted and strangely addictive even if the gameplay is as simple as it gets. The nature soundtrack provides a perfect atmosphere, making it easy to dive into the soothing experience that can nonetheless still get tense when you’re trying to beat time. The somewhat frustrating camera doesn’t take much away from this really fun game. 7.5/10
23. Limbo - One of my absolute favourite side-scrollers. It isn’t the best from a technical standpoint, but like I already mentioned I’m a sucker for atmosphere and I personally feel Limbo’s dark, hypnotic tone speaks to me in a way very few games do. The first 2 thirds especially are next level good. 9.5/10
24. Call of the Sea - A puzzle solving walking simulator that feels a bit clunky and suffers from some convoluted puzzles, but that sets its tone with wonderfully accomplished artwork (almost like a colourful psychedelic Lovecraftian tale) and comes with an intriguing story that engages you from the get go. These alone were more than enough for me to look past its flaws. 8/10
25. Yakuza 0 - Most people rave about it, but to me it almost felt like a ceremony of opposites: good story, yet also very long and cutscene heavy; punchy combat that quickly feels repetitive; interesting substories that are so far apart in tone from the story that they almost feel out of place; great looking world that ends up feeling more superficial than substantial. A good game that doesn’t fully deserve its hype or justifies the required playtime. 7/10
26. GTA V - It’s pretty much what I hoped it would be, and 8 years later here I am singing its praises. It still suffers from typical Rockstar movement clunkiness, but it also delivers a huge, engaging world full of things to do and stories to tell, all wrapped up in an accomplished modern day crime satire. 9/10
27. Resident Evil 7 - My very first entry into the RE saga. Fantastic atmosphere and some genuinely scary moments even though it doesn’t quite manage to keep the same grip until the end. The 1st person camera was a great choice. A couple issues with movement and enemy design but very easy to recommend overall. 8.5/10
28. Titanfall 2 - Best FPS I’ve played in recent memory from a technical standpoint, topped off with a solid, captivating story. Fantastic combat and flawless systems. Speaking as someone who is far from being the biggest fan of the genre, this one fully justifies the hype. 9/10
29. Bioshock - Straight into my GOATs list. An FPS that offers so, so much more. The story’s every bit as good as I was told, and even if the game shows its age here and there, the pros are so many and so impactful that they fully eclipse any cons. Fantastic. 10/10
30. Bioshock 2 - Bioshock’s Aliens, overall resulting in more bang and less atmosphere. Not a bad game by any means, and I really loved some of the additions, but the narrative, although decent, isn’t at the level of the first in quality or storytelling. Not outstanding, just great. 8.5/10
31. Bioshock: Infinite - Saved by the Burial at Sea DLC, which wrapped up the trilogy in a solid way. The base game, although featuring a beautiful world and a strong side character, strayed too much from the first games, displaying an identity crisis coupled with poor level and sound designs. 8/10 only if you consider the DLC.
32. Sniper Elite 4 - Some annoying issues don’t ultimately overshadow the fun. Simple, intuitive systems, decent amount of freedom and good maps, along with its short playing time, turn SE4 into something I can recommend. 7/10
33. For Honor - It squanders almost the entirety of the potential it shows on a couple moments. A barrage of technical issues and a really lacklustre campaign makes me think single player was an afterthought. Fun at times which makes it all the more frustrating. Wasted opportunity. 4.5/10
34. Ryse: Son of Rome - Some jank and overly simplistic mechanics but I look at it as an interactive cinematic experience: gameplay elements exist to serve its surprisingly good story and beautiful visuals rather than the gameplay itself. If this sounds appealing, you’ll love Ryse. 8/10
35. SOMA - This game persisted in my mind weeks after I finished it. To this day I still think about it. Amazing and amazingly told story. I was hooked on it and its atmosphere from start to finish. Its issues (gameplay is meh) are almost not worth mentioning because of how much you get from the experience as a whole. Sci-fi horror at its best. 9/10
36. Dragon Age: Inquisition - Really enjoyed it. Beautiful world, decent amount of choice/consequence, punchy combat, epic dragons, and a story that takes its time to allow you to grow attached to plot and characters. Didn’t like the MMO aspects or the bloated crafting system, but I still I had a blast throughout my 130hr playthrough of the base game and (mandatory, even if cash grabby) DLC. 8.5/10
37. Carrion - Surprisingly good way to start my Spooktober. A stylish homage to 80s sci-fi horror. Great visual and audio atmosphere, tight controls and cool mechanics. Navigation can feel confusing, especially with the lack of a map. 7.5/10
38. Kona - Pleasantly surprised. Not many games I’ve played were able to convey a cold, bleak, desolate vibe as well as Kona. Frequent loading hiccups bring the rating down, but the world, story and wonderful narration overshadow its flaws. 7.5/10
39. Outlast - Worse than I expected. A decent horror experience with a pretty good visual tone and audio design, but the over-reliance on jump scares, very formulaic gameplay loop and unremarkable story make this one a hard recommendation without caveats. 6.5/10
40. Outlast 2 - Better than the first but still not great. It tones down its predecessor’s reliance on jump scares and overly formulaic nature and also improves on an already great audiovisual experience, but the poorer level design and weird difficulty balance harm it. Still worth a playthrough. 7/10
41. Inside - Brilliant. It didn’t reach the same emotional heights as Limbo for me, but it is a technically superior game and it tells its story through a beautiful, oppressive world that will stay with you long after you play it. 9/10
42. Resident Evil Remake - Frustrating mechanics, awkward controls and dated camera angles made it a tough go at first, but once I was hooked I couldn’t get enough. Awesome level design, impressive atmosphere and truly satisfying puzzles explain why it’s still one of the best survival horror games to date beyond its impact. 8.5/10
43. Resident Evil 2 Remake - It bolsters a couple of big issues like narrative inconsistency and a frustratingly repetitive second run, but it also truly nails every single important survival horror aspect while boasting remarkable physics, wonderful audio design and fantastic graphical presentation. 8.5/10
44. Resident Evil 3 Remake - Okay Hollywood blockbuster way more focused on action than horror that often feels like an afterthought. I still think it accomplishes what it tried to do and the short runtime means it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it’s very different in tone. Good if you know what you’re getting and are ok with that. 7/10
45. Bully - Really fun throwback to my ZX Spectrum’s Back to Skool days. It gives you a ton of different things to do and I also appreciated the tongue-in-cheek humour. Shows its age a bit and gets repetitive towards the end but it was a worthwhile trip down nostalgia lane. 7.5/10
46. World War Z - Hordes are what truly sell this game, unleashing on waves upon waves of zombies is a ton of fun. Very polished in terms of performance and mechanics. Nothing earth-shattering and you only get a very short single player experience, but still worth it. 7/10
47. DOOM 3 - My favourite Doom. Part of it is nostalgia, but I also love the atmosphere (lighting effects and sound design are fantastic) and its sense of claustrophobia. Some technical issues and enemy and level design problems, but I disagree with the ‘it isn’t a Doom game’ take even if it drives the franchise into a different direction in some respects. 8.5/10
48. Dead Space - One of the best survival horror games ever made. An absolute joy to revisit, and the (back then) revolutionary limb dismemberment has aged like fine wine. Unparalleled atmosphere, and even a bit of jank and formulaic nature don’t take much away from this game. 9/10
49. Dead Space 2 - It improves on just about everything mechanically yet somehow fails to recapture the original oppressive vibe of the first game. Still a fantastic experience well worth your time, and it also features the very best enemy in the entire series. 8.5/10
50. Dead Space 3 - It takes the franchise into a worse direction, and the barrage of issues - microtransactions, convoluted crafting system, zero survival aspects etc - are bad. But the well accomplished sense of pace, the inclusion of a few cool mechanics, a couple of impressive levels and the somewhat decent story make this worth experiencing. 7.5/10
51. DOOM (2016) - Does exactly what it sets out to do and I had tons of fun with it. It plays great, it looks great, and the adrenaline-inducing pace turn this into a highly engaging experience. One of the most accomplished FPS out there. 8/10
52. Firewatch - Incredible storytelling experience. Very few games were able to immerse me in their world as effectively as Firewatch. Fantastic suggestion-fuelled atmosphere, art style, voice acting and story (contrary to some I actually liked it) were more than enough for me to overlook its technical shortcomings. 8.5
53. Alan Wake’s American Nightmare - A disappointment. Feels more like DLC than a fleshed out game and drifts away far too much from the original tone to be memorable. The brilliance of ‘TV screen’ Mr. Scratch (that ‘Psycho’ moment is epic) is its only crowning achievement, since everything else feels poorly designed. 6/10
54. Unravel Two - Awesome way to wrap up the year. I don’t play a lot of couch co-op these days but this was still one of my best shared experiences. Beautiful audiovisuals, well designed puzzles, solid sense of cooperation, amazing gameplay feel and great sense of fluidity make Unravel Two an incredibly easy recommendation. 8/10

UNFINISHED:

1. Two Point Hospital - Close to finishing it but stopped playing at one point for some reason. Pretty enjoyable if you’re into fun, silly hospital sims. Some Theme Hospital vibes was what I was promised and it absolutely delivered.
2. The Outer Worlds - Even though it was a bit on-the-nose I was rather enjoying its storytelling and world building. Unsatisfying combat, overly saturated environments and poor performance on the Xbox One S made me stop playing it, but I want to revisit it on the Series S.
3. Forza Horizon 4 - Technically impressive and mechanically really good but it felt way too bloated and somewhat ‘hollow’ to me. Seems pretty much tailored to a multiplayer experience. Gave it almost 5 hours but it just wasn’t for me in the end.
4. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown - Played for about 5 hours before deciding to quit. The controls and some mechanics were a bit frustrating, but I have very little experience with the genre so it might have been on me. Ultimately I didn’t find anything capable of hooking me in to complete a playthrough.
5. Outer Wilds - The most bizarre exception here, in the sense that I wholeheartedly recommend it even though I didn’t finish it. Played for about 10 hours and in the end found the gameplay loop too frustrating, but the world, visuals, mood, music and sense of solitude are so impactful that I’m still thinking about it today. I want to play it again.
6. Yakuza Kiwami - Gave it a good 3 hours before concluding it wasn’t as good as Yakuza 0, which made me stop playing considering I had already thought the first one wasn’t fully worth the lengthy price of admission.
7. DOOM Eternal - It simply didn’t click after spending a little over 4 hours on it, and yes I know this is very controversial. Nothing to criticise from a mechanical standpoint, but IMO it strayed way too far from the tone, simplicity and straightforwardness I loved in all other Doom entries.

This was it. Like I said 2021 was my most prolific gaming year by far, and I had a ton of fun playing some truly amazing classics for the very first time, which made me even happier to be a patient gamer. Hope you all have a fantastic 2022 full of awesome gaming experiences!

Once again, delayed. Things have been a tad hectic.
An extremely short list this time. ODA left early access, a pretty little cyberpunk puzzler. Tokyo Detectives is made by fans of the Ace Attorney series, with added cases planned as DLC. Watch Over Christmas is a Christmas themed 2D point and click puzzler.
The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Act 3 is the latest entry in the series based on the British childrens novels, While I haven’t tried it, there‘s a demo available.
On the native side, there is I’m on Observation Duty 4, its… there has to be a proper term for them, it’s where you keep an eye on monitors so that you don’t get mauled by whatever horrible thing thats being stored there. There’s also Asteroids Extreme, which is a twin stick space shooter coming across from Itch.io.
And an honourable mention to Star Wish Traveller, which looks to be the last Mac game to come out on Steam for the year!
Watch Over Christmas (Dionous Games) 2D Point and Click
ODA (Moon Bear Studio) Retro Puzzle Platformer
Just Survival - The Zombie Awakening (Awakening Games Entertainment) Zombie Survival Action MMO (EA)
Mac version indicated
I’m on Observation Duty 4 (Notovia) Surveillance Camera, Psychological Horror
ASI native
Mature: Psychological horror, mild nudity
Martial Law (FIXER) 2D Choices-based
Note that this is set during the Russian occupation of Poland, and may be a sensitive issue.
Tokyo Detectives (Rincho Games) Detective Visual Novel
Asteroids Extreme (Agami Games LLC) Top Down Twin Stick Shooter
ASI native
*Slette Mette (Heimdal Games) Political Satire Endless Runner
*The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Act 3 (Soma Games) 3D Adventure Exploration
Quaratineer (Papaonn) 2D Pixel Dystopian Strategy
ASI native
Mature content: Pixellated violence
Deadly Nightmare (Electrical Eagle Studio LTD) 3D Horror Survival Exploration
Mature content: Intense violence, blood, nudity.
*Star Wish Traveller (Justicat Games) Visual Novel

This week's regularly scheduled 1984 post reminded me of this great book I'd recently read, and I figured I'd talk about it a bit.
Most people who read or have read dystopian fiction are familiar with 1984 and Brave New World. While neither of them match completely with the state of the world today, both books have several elements can be seen in our society, making them quite popular. I believe Joanna Kavenna's Zed is this generation's 'update', so to speak, of the dystopian hellscape that both these books have demonstrated in the past, and it is far more relatable than its predecessors.
Considering how 1984 and BNW were written far before the advent of modern technology and communications infrastructure, the narratives, while prescient to some extent, don't really translate well to our world of instant digital connection and gratification. Enter Zed, which portrays a world which takes all the various problematic elements of the modern digital sphere, and extrapolates them into their logical worst outcomes.
The world is essentially run by a few megacorporations, with most of the focus on the western megacorp: an amalgam of Google's breadth of digital services, Apple's hardware/wearable tech and ecosystem, and Facebook's analytics and profiling algorithms: a delicious cake iced generously with artifically intelligent personal assistants a la Siri/Google Assistant/Alexa. There are elements of the Minority Report in here as well, as these predictive algorithms can be so accurate as to reliably report what a person will do over the next day.
AVR digital spaces enable virtual-real interaction between people across the planet, and these interactions can be digitally filtered to present yourself in exactly the way you wish. Heavily armed humanoid drones enforce the peace, driven by behavioural algorithms that allow them to 'evaluate' interactions with humans, and respond as required. The world is harmonious and chugs along without issue, because the algorithm knows all, and the algorithm is never wrong.
Of course, the algorithm begins to fail catastrophically, evidenced by events that are drastic outliers to predicted outcomes: Zed events. Over the course of the story, more and more Zed events pop up across the world, and the megacorp is left scratching their heads. Is the algorithm flawed? Impossible, says the textbook narcissist who serves as their CEO. It is in fact, the people who are no longer acting rationally. It is imperative that they are advised of the error of their ways, and encouraged to behave as the algorithm believes they should. Our intrepid corporate leader takes it upon himself to demonstrate to people just how wrong they are for making the choices they do.
Zed is a lot more relevant to the lives we lead today, seeing as how it was published just two years ago, and it paints a picture of a terrifyingly plausible future where our reliance on tech for greater and greater conveniences leads us to contributing towards the creation of a society where our identities are easily molded, our opinions are decided for us, and any aberration is treated as a failure of the self and not the system. Kavenna writes with tongue planted firmly in cheek in a style reminiscent of Douglas Adams, because the dry sarcasm and abundant tautology are crucial to preventing the subject matter from becoming morbid. You'll have a sensible chuckle when you understand what she's saying, and then the smile melts off your face as you UNDERSTAND what she's saying. Her prose is layered and always purposeful, and a slower read will serve you better as you explore this narrative she has compiled.
Zed isn't a masterpiece, just as 1984 and BNW aren't really, but it is an excellent dark satire that surpasses them, in my opinion. An entertaining cautionary tale that assumes the worst of tech corporations and how their zeal for 'efficiency', 'brand new services' and 'customer interaction' almost always works against the individual in the long term. Several sympathetic characters guide you through this Black Mirror-esque nightmare and a story that engages your curiosity keeps you thinking for a while after, about the long term implications of our modern technological platform.

I wrote this after much thought about the inter-related world of civilians, societal leaders, geopolitics, pandemics and international trade. But at it’s core, all these things are instances of social interaction. Social interaction is largely is about the contested world of forming narratives, and he who tells the best stories wins. He who wins long term, creates cultural norms which are by nature tough to budge. What is ‘Culture’ other than embedded stories we all tell ourselves each other, over and over, without much or indeed any thought. I now fully recognize the art of “telling stories” determines what gets done and by who, who leads and who follows. In other words the ancient tradition of storytelling lives on in its beauty and pre-eminence more than it ever did, and also if we are not careful bad culture comes as a growing weed along the fence, avenue, town, city, nation and finally the World.
Proof of this constant need for narrative and storytelling has been seen during the heavy lockdown period in 2020-21 coupled with a period of not-seen-since-the-1930-s media and tech giant censorship. A totally new environment of “the pandemic” required demand for a new both local and world narrative. So I wasn’t so surprised when opening a web browser and seeing Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World were at the top of Amazons fiction list of best sellers. In this state of flux, people are scrambling for good storytellers to tell them what’s happening and how to act. In many an eye of the public today, the dystopian future outlined in these books 1984 and BNW is now happening. We feel a distinct flavor of Authoritarianism, and these famous ‘storytelling’ books 1984 and BNW of course are also a message to the future, the future we are now in 72 and 83 years after they were written. It is not so surprising a fact these books ring true, given Orwell and Huxley were gaining much knowledge of the Authoritarian times they lived in, coupled with the History Rhymes thesis.
So the best story wins, and in the Western World at least, Huxley and Orwell have the best story about the nature and future of Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, that why they were and are still again bestsellers. In 2021 we live in a world which seems to approximate these two books. In the future, if history is not fully erased, we will be known as the people who fought off Totalitarian disaster and World War, only to decades later throw away all for a few inflation reducing bucks and a few obselete-ing foreign made widgets. I haven’t mentioned ‘Animal farm’ which is probably very silly as my short story and the themes are more obviously similar to that Orwell novella. I will thank these three books and these two men, for the unknown guiding hand that helps move the pen when I talk of dystopian and authoritarian subjects.
I will speak no more, as you more than get my drift. I don’t claim to be anywhere as good as these two writers, I am a beginner or at best a sophomore writer who is probably emerged in too much silliness. However Orwell and Huxley are a great inspiration for me personally to attempt meaningful fiction, which I hope to achieve on some level in the future.
I’m sure when all is said and done, the animals will have a better plan for us all.
P.s. I cant help but think of the BNW theme where society programs people to die exactly at age 60, the logical point where the societal dependency and reducing economic value began to become ‘a problem’ (& by the way, is coffee the new soma)?
Please enjoy the story!
““The Proud Cats At The P*U*C*C Finally Put Their Paws Down”” – A Short Story by Martin Anton Smith 2021.
My Cat, being Conservative by nature, always wears an old world formal dining coat.
It’s Coal black with highlights of the finest Aegean sea tortoiseshell.
It fits perfectly as one piece, with the only gaps being the most physically necessary ones.
He does not, of course have a dull cat name like Tom, Mittens or Timmy.
He has a wide range of titles bestowed upon him by the finest chaps and chap-ess’s.
They are: Squeaky, Sir Squeaky, King Squeaky, His Nibs, Squeak Chop, Sir Squeeksalot.
These Titles, he advises me, are from his esteemed fellows from the strictly exclusive ‘ Pragmatic Utilitarianism Cats Club’.
Often out of Nowhere, he will say “I’m off the P.U.C.C., don’t wait up”
“Me and the ‘Cool Cat’s’ will Talk Geopolitics all night”.
To which I mentally squash the obvious childish retort of “But I thought Cat’s were lone wolves”?.
A cat of Sir Squeeky’s class, would always despise such time wasteful comedy, especially while on the way out the door.
As King Squeaky always looks resplendent, and is as organized and on-time as a German train, he is not one to mess around getting ready.
I hear the door slam shut, followed by a muffled goodbye of “toodoloo!”, followed by the slowly reducing sound of paw steps on the crunchy driveway gravel.
After somewhat feeling jealous of Sir Squeek’s upper crust social life, I retreat to my bedside reading: The books title is “China Now Owns The World, SO NOW GET USED TO IT”.
The hours pass, and I wonder how His Nibs the cat-about-town, is getting on. Then exhausted from the days running around, my eyes droop and I fall into a deep sleep.
The next afternoon Sir Squeeky opens the door and meanders in to the living room almost as slow as a turtle dawdling along on a beach.
He’s before me in the living room, eyes half closed as he has been up all night yakking at the exclusive Pragmatic Utilitarianism Cats Club – or “The P.U.C.C. or more simply spoken as “The Puk”.
“taking my opportunity for a sneaky quip I cheerily utter ” Look what the Cat dragged in; how was the Club”?
Squeaky ignores the ill mannered quip and replies perfunctorily.
“Well, we talked and decided the China problem is ok for us Cats, but extinction-ally bad for Humans, so I’m concordantly content”
“But what about shipping delays” I say, “their will be undoubted delays in your finest branded Cat Biscuits – RegalCataBix”
To which “His Nibbs” replies – “It’s sorted we’ve organized an alternate secondary shipping backup via the ex Cape Horn Spice trail and the boats are all manned and manufactured by craftsman felines”.
Again I squash the obvious quip “I thought cats hate water” and I ask “what about delays regarding sardine smelt production from Canada”, I rebut.
To which Squeak Chop dismissively replies:
“I and the P.U.C.C can get it fresh fish from the mountain stream at the next village, you dunderhead! canned sardines pffft as if, OUTRAGEOUS!”
Sir Squeaksalot starts grooming his paws nonchalantly, exuding his usual unflappability under fire.
Continuing my line of questioning I say “And so you talked about the Pandemic? So what if you Cat’s all get sick?
Squeeky looks at me with the same disdain the Queen might if a politician had upon greeting had hugged her instead of bowing politely.
“That ridiculous, we can’t get sick from something we developed ourselves in our virology labs along with the antidote”
Quite stupefied, I ask him “Are you saying you elite cats down at the P.U.C.C developed this virus in the lab, in order to do away with all Earths people”
“Sir Squeaky pawed his whiskers, that’s exactly what I’m saying, and I’m dreadfully sorry on a personal level, as you’ve been a good foot soldier for me around this joint, but we at P.U.C.C are a pragmatic and utilitarian bunch – we couldn’t take any more silliness, you were all feeding us a far too limited diet, and making the air far too dirty to breath, so much so half of us now have asthma. On top of that our coats were becoming grimey and that simply wont do. We had to put our paws down.”
To which I protested: “But you get the best quality biscuits, I feed you beef bits from the butchery, full cream milk and even some shaved deli ham on occasion”
“Yes, of course – you have been good my dear boy – it’s the rest of humanity we made this call for – you will unfortunately be what’s called ‘collateral damage”
“Collateral damage” how could you be so cold Sir Squeeksalot? After all these years”
“3 to be Exact”, he firmly retorts. “Well as I said, dear boy, it was a tough decision, not taken lightly and we spent all night on it, and it could have gone either way at any moment.”
I was about to further protest when a firm “Knock Knock Knock” cut out our conversation.
“Special delivery for Sir Squueksalot – paw print required”
I opened the door, and Squeeky jumps up on top the box the delivery man is holding. He proudly thrusts his somewhat oversize paw to the mans digital scanner, he scans it with a “boop-bip” sound, says a robotic “thankyou”, and leaves in a flash.
Then in a blur Squeeky cuts through the carton with a deft flick of an un-retracted claw, the top box flaps open to expose a small ray gun which seems to have a handle which has been molded especially for a cats paw.
Before I know it, I see Sir Squeeky point the ray gun at my head and he says “This is harder on me than it is for you sonny”.
I am swiftly encapsulated in an otherworldly green glow of visible plasma particles. It’s like I’m looking out into distant space from the surface of Alpha Centuri.
Time seems to slow to a halt for what seems like an eternity, then in the blink of am eye, all’s normal again.
For some reason I have a monstrous craving desire for ‘RegalCatabix’, some fresh Canadian smelt all washed down with a saucer full to the brim of full cream milk ‘.
I squash the acute hunger as I see Sir Squeaksalot peering at me with that common cat look of squinted half closed eyes – though this time our eyes are equal level with each other.
As the reality begins to set in, my rising anger erupts ….I open my mouth to aggressively chastise Sir Squeeksalot and ask him to reverse whatever in hells name he’s done to me with that green plasma ray gun.
I open my mouth to let out the words, but to my surprise instead of my human voice all I hear is elongated unhappy screechy sounds:
Meoooooow ……Meeeooooowwww……..Meeeeeooooooowwwwwwww.
I am about to look around and find where the feral cat is hiding – perhaps behind the couch? Then it dawns on me.
Sir Squeaky has turned me into a cat, so as to save me from the Cat-in-the-Lab designed ‘Killer Human Virus’. The Virus that would abruptly solve all of the Earth’s man made problems.
I look sheepishly at Squeeky, he looks back in a grandfatherly-wise way and says hypnotically and with gravitas:
“It’ll take you a while to get used to your voice box and speak Cat English again, but me and the Cat’s at of the P.U.C.C will teach you everything we know”. As a tear appears in my eye he swipes my face with claws fully retracted, as says ye-olden-days speak: NOW KEEP A STIFF UPPER WHISKER AND FOR SPHINX’S SAKE CARRY ON – YOU’RE A CAT NOW”
I pawed the tears streaming from my now wide yellow cat’s eye’s. Soon my spirits began to lift as I realized how lucky I was to have Sir Squeaky save me from a certain viral death.
I no longer had to worry about the deadly ‘Man Virus’ and I could live in a paradise in a world ran by Cats running of the philosophe of “Pragmatic Utilitarianism”.
I was now an ‘insider’ cat, controlled by the strongest paws and the best minds of the P.U.CC. Soon no doubt I’d be inaugurated as a fully fledged member of P.U.C.C., and no doubt would be asked by His Nibs to jointly head the committee which will manage world affairs in lieu of those dumb humans. I mean what could possibly go wrong?
Sir Squeaky then wheeled out a platform with at least 30 large red books.
“Now we have to get you schooled up of the ideology principles and methods of the P.U.C.C. system- start with Vol 1.”
Sir Squeeks pawed off one of the books from the platform, and it landed with a thud in front of my nose. I looked at the front cover. It read as the following
“P.U.C.C. MANEFESTO Vol 1 – A NEW WORLD DIGITAL CURRENCY – THE PURRCOIN”.
Then uncontrollably, my furry stomach started revolving, like the rolling waves on the open seas. Then I started rocking to and fro, violently like a sailboat in a storm in the roaring 40’s. Then I broke out into a drenching sweat, I could see my fur clumping together through my now salty sweat addled eyes. As ill as I felt, I could hear King Squeaky mumble over and over: “Oh no, not again, this theoretically shouldn’t even be possible…dear oh dear…somethings wrong with the plasma re-orienter settings, those bloody P.U.C.C. techs are useless…useless…USELESS!”
I thought it was over when a paw toe suddenly turned into my old human pinky finger, then it popped back to a paw toe, then a finger, then back again. Then horribly the same thing happened to my head. The whole upsetting experience lasted no longer than five minutes, then I was once again fine and fully formed. I was a healthy normal cat.
His Nibs sat me down and gave me a warm saucer of full cream milk, to settle my nerves after this harrowing trial. I said nothing and listened to his soothing words.
“Don’t worry, these teething issues occur initially, the ray gun plasma blast is 100% healthy. Your mild symptoms are merely a small technical hurdle the nerd cats at P.U.C.C. haven’t ironed out yet. This wont effect anything. For the moment just follow this process that has been rubber stamped by the highest P.U.C.C. committee, which you will be happy to know I also reside on as Chairman.
“One – avoid large gatherings or anywhere where you cannot reach a bathroom stall within 3-5 minutes. In other words no sports games or concerts, automobile trips etc.
Two – the signal to hide yourself away in a bathroom stall will occur when your tummy starts revolving, you of course must get to the bathroom stall before your head starts to flip between your normal cat’s head and your old human head. You must understand If anyone who is not a part of P.U.C.C sees a cat with a human head, the P.U.C.C. will be shut down. We cannot under any circumstances let that happen.
Three – when safely hidden from prying eyes inside the stall, you will wait the remaining minute or two till its all over, perhaps 5 to be safe, then you can rejoin the prior activity with no one the wiser”.
I was finally feeling a bit less worried when he kindly added “If you follow this process there wont be any problems, and of course you can still potentially be a member of the P.U.C.C. and I’ll make sure I’ll keep a guiding eye on you until our best P.U.C.C. Ape-to-Cat Reconfiguration Technicians resolve the problem”.
With Sir Squeaky’s increasingly calming words, I knew I was in good hands. I didn’t protest, I smiled obediently and wiggled my whiskers joyfully. Now was the time to begin psychologically preparing myself for a whole new post-human existence. After all, What else was I to do? Go back to being a human being who would be wiped out by cat instigated virus? Never! I wouldn’t dare squander the gift of life Sir Squeaky had manifestly bestowed upon me.
I reached my paw out for the well bound, red leather cover of the P.U.C.C. Manifesto. After all I had so much study to do. Sir Squeaky casually ambled over to sit on his favourite grey furry blanket, that overhung the base of the couch. He turned around twice the settled and went to sleep almost instantly. His purrs rung out loudly as I turned over the first gilded page.
THE END

Gabapentin can be helpful its a strange drug it is like some kind of (insert here) all rounder type drug wouldnt call it a mirracle drug accept for WITHDRAWALS I keep a kit ready for anytime I might run out of medication, and Gabapentin is a must for anyone "in the know" on its own it can reduce up to 90% of withdrawasl in some patients. I keep in my Emergency box 600mg pills of Gabpentin (you have to take them in doses as high as 1,400-2,000 miligrams to get the full effects that help withdrawl immensly (these are non toxic legitimate amounts to take)
I also Keep Tramadol to use on the first few days to help ease into the withdrawal process I dont want to jump off of 300mg of oxycontin a day now do I ;)
I also use codeine its just a low level low opiate its also for the first few days I will incorporate tramadol with the codeine the first few days and after that switch to just tramadol and the gabapentin 1,200 to 1,800mg 4-5 times per day.
I also Keep valium in my box EXCELLENT for opioid withdrawals I can not tell you how much relief they can bring with the muscle relxer effects and just the feeling of anxiety relief which is one of the killers in an event of withdrawal.
I also Keep "Kratom" and "Kratom concentrates" in my box they can be found at the "head shops" or ordered off the internet...these are to switching over too as wuickly as your body might allow, I reccomend on the third day for people going through terrible withdrawals I tell them run and buy Kratom, but if you are spreading it out and trying to have an easier withdrawal save the kratom for further doen the line such as when you stop the tramadol about 6 to 9 days in, go Gabapentin/Kratom/Valium....
Begin to taper off the Valium and then take as much Gabapentin and Kratom/Concentrates of it as you need until you are feeling allot bette stable, then taper off the valium.
Then after a couple days taper off the kratom you should not exceed 9 days taking kratom, it has an addictive element in itself that should not be underestimated.
Keep taking the Gabpentin as needed and you can take it as long as you wish it will help with benzodiazipine withdrawal as well so if you are feeling a bit sketchy or anxious weaing off the valium just keep taking the Gabapentin. At this point the final drug in my arsenal is Soma (carisoma/carisporadol). These pills are great and can be taken along with the Gabapentin for as long as needed until you are ready to wean down on both and off. At this point you have been a boss and conquered your withdrawal like a mack, but you might have trouble finding these supplies. Not to worry I am a specialist at getting medications such as these over the internet sent right to your door some from US to US most from overseas. They are so low prioity you have absolutely no legal risk they are all schedule 5 if scheduled at all and small personal amounts if even opened by our customs will only result in what is satirically reffered to as a "love letter" by people farmiliar with ordering their medication over the internet to skip over the rediclousness of the so called "gatekeepers" idiot doctors and asshole pharmacists when YOU or I know what you need way better than they do, and can get it for you as well with no wait at the pharmacy and no doctors apoitment needed. Just PM me and I will let you know which websites are the best for whatever yoiu need, honest to goodness ones where credit cards are accepted, pay pal, etc. and they treat you with respect and dignity and even provide you with a legitimate prescription and your name on the medication packet once it comes to your door after a 5 to 9 day wait on average.
Just PM me to let me know. Gabapentin is "okay" for pain, the problem is allot of doctors like to just "Crank the Gabapentin" whenever a patient on say 4 norcos for years developes new pains and instead of increasing their dose they like to crank the gabapentin because they are not in your interest but instead looking at non narcotic wqays to get you out the door and them left alone to not have to do their job, usually citing some worry about the dea or their liscence if you ask them, even though they have all their patients receipts and know who is really messed up and whatnot and couldnt possibly be prosecuted, their is some general fear of possible investigation but if you are straight and honest and are not a pill mill doctors have nothing to worry about they just have to keep notes on the diagnoses of the pain patient and what has been reccomende d and tried other than thayt they are free to prescribe what they feel is aprropriate, and that goes far past a few norcos each day...Increasing your gabapenitn is a way of getiing you out of their hair and wll likely not work out for you and when you go back and tell them that if they do not increase your opioid dose they are not the "best" doctor for you, good doctors are becoming hard to come by however so you have to take what you can get until your circumstances improve. I.e. Order great opioid meds approved by the UK by a pharmacy suggested by myself, but I HAVE TO GET TO KNOW YOU FIRST AND KNOW YOU ARE NOT SOME HOOT TRYING TO ATTACK ME (CAPS) and call me names and this that and the thrid and probably cause problmes on the secret section of the websites i KNOW ABOUT AND WISH THEY WERE SHUT DOWN, WHAT A GRINCH DON'T YOU THINK?
Everyone have a wonderful week and hope things get better, work out, love triumphs your difficulties in life. God bless! Sincerely - Hilton

I'm finally listening to the audiobook of this satirical masterpiece. In Chapter 3 there are three separate yet simultaneous storylines, with the narrator bouncing between them, switching focus with each sentence, and even within sentences. This rapid-fire alternation might be what Benny Shapenny was after in his awful book. After all, BNW is held up as an example of the "socialist dystopia", so it's safe to assume that Shaps had read it at some point.
Possible? Plausible?

Read 13 books since the beginning of quarantine and really wanted to share them with you and what I thought (briefly) about each one.
1 - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: The last book I had read before my year long break was 1984, since it turned out to be one of my favourite books I decided to pick up another one of the dystopian classics. The contrast between these two books was astonishing. Absolutely loved Huxley's satirical writing. The obsession with consumerism and materialism, and the people's clear lack of distiction between sensational pleasures and happiness is eerily familiar.
2 - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: Another classic dystopia. I'm dissappointed to say that I haven't enjoyed this one as much as I did 1984 and BNW. The message of the book kind of seemed forced and I didn't feel engaged at all with the characters.
3 - Animal Farm by George Orwell: Basically the "explain like im five" version of the russian revolution, which I really appreciated since my history knowledge really needs major refining.
4 - Night by Elie Wiesel: This was one of my first non-fiction books. It's an autobiographical account of Elie Wiesel's experience in the Nazi concentration camps. Horrifying beyond words. Very eye opening. I honestly do not know what to say about it except that after reading it, it's clear to me there's almost no limit to the suffering a human can endure.
5 - Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl: This book is what taught me, among many things, how people can find purpose and meaning in their suffering which I thought was beautiful, especially being delivered from a Viktor E. Frankl, a psychologist who experienced and survived the camps.
6 - Flow by mihaly csikszentmihalyi: This book truly changed my perspective on the phrase "the pursuit of happiness".
7 - The Shining by Stephen King: I've wanted to read a Stephen King book since forever, I thought what better way to dive into his world than with this classic. I loved the psychological horror in this book. The level of detail to which Jack Torrance's mind and thoughts are described slowly descending into madness was an insanely thrilling experience. I've seen countless people recommend pet sematary, almost certain it's going to be my next SK book.
8 - The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris: When I watched the movie last year (I confess), I instantly could tell that the book would be miles ahead of the movie, and I wanted to explore Hannibal Lecter a lot more deeply than was portrayed in the movie. I gotta say it did not disappoint. Fascinated by Hannibal Lecter, such a unique and thought-provoking character, will definitely read The Red Dragon soon.
9 - Dark Matter by Blake Crouch: By far one of the most exciting plots I've read. I couldn't put it down once. The pace was perfect. Incredible plot twists. Absolutely incredible roller coaster of a book
10, 11 - Six of Crows, Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo: Decided to revisit the YA genre (was obsessed back in high school with the genre, I know, typical) with the Six of Crows since it was recommended to me a lot. No regrets. The plot almost always had me on the edge, I'm glad the author didn't feel pressured to drag it out for a trilogy which made it almost perfect. The characters were very unique, I absolutely loved being attached and connected to the characters throughout the books. Great character development as well. The only thing I didn't like about the books was the characters' ages (all teens who are under 20) I know it's this weird YA thing where it has to appeal to high school students but their age didn't make sense whatsoever.
12 - The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: Obviously what got me to read this book was the circumstances surrounding the author. The plot being loosely based on her life made this book's reading experience surreal and really widened my perspective on mental health. It made me want to study a lot more about mental health and mental disorders.
13 - Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky: I just finished this book. What a masterpiece. I finally get why its such a classic of russian literature (and all of literature for that matter) and why Dostoevsky is seen as a genius. This book was by far the realest piece of literature I've ever experienced. Dostoevsky captures human nature in a truly profound way. I almost feel unworthy of even attempting to comment on it.
Hope this had something meaningful, was just excited about being addicted to reading again and wanted to share my thoughts about what I read. Would truly appreciate if you shared your thoughts with me!
Have a great day everyone!

‘Lo everyone, I was curious if anyone knows whether or not Pierce Brown has mentioned if “Brave New World” played an influence his writing of Red Rising.
I’m reading Brave New World (BNW) now and noticed a few parallels:
Caste System - through genetic engineering, both universes rely on subcastes to preform labor. BNW uses Alpha - Epsilon vs. Gold - Red.
zoladone is used in RR whereas soma is used in BNW to numb the mind and emotions
Both refer to the Society as a system of ruling/global identify as well as Sovereign/World Controller.
I also noticed a parallel whipping scene between characters...
Just curious if it has ever been stated aloud the Pierce drew influence for Aldous!

this is one hell of a read. Huxley is right as well. 1984 has the party kicking down doors and forcing people to obey. That’s not today’s reality, people love their servitude like in BNW. Big brother sure is watching, but the masses allow it without question. People are popping here SOMA today that could be any prescription drug. By the way, soma means blind in Hebrew.
You guys should read more into the Huxley family. There are some very strange connections.
Peace and love to all

I finished reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. And for a while I was conflicted whether this really was dystopia or utopia. When I was reading 1984, the story had a gloomy atmosphere and I also felt that gloom. But while reading The Brave New World, for the most part I was unmoved. But it really got me thinking. And after much thinking, I think I loved BNW.
A world, where there is no ambition. No wishes unfulfilled for all they wish for is soma. All of them think they are living in privilege and almost everyone is happy with their position. I wouldn't call this world a happy world, but rather a content one. And even those who are not content get a choice to live their life on their own terms with people like them on an island.
The major conflict in this story according to me was the struggle of individuality that we first see through Bernard and later John. There is liberty to move around freely and to be with anyone. But there is no personal liberty nor personal space. Solidarity is frowned upon. Admiring nature is queer. There is no thought process of their own and nothing to think or talk about. No artistic freedom for there is no such thing as art. No scientific thinking because science is limited. There is no philosophy. No literature. No other hobbies. No affection for each other. No progress, no growth. This civilization is stunted. So much that the humans feel like robots.
All of it feels like dystopia but only for those who are aware of what they are lacking in life. But BNW citizens are not aware of it. And when there is no awareness, how would they know if they are lacking something?
If you are content , would you want to be happy? Would you risk being happy at the cost of contentedness and stability?
I loved the whole bit about class distinction. How they engineered humans and conditioned them was very interesting. My heart broke for john. In his past life and even in present, he was never accepted in either world. Not able to fit in anywhere. It was interesting how his mother was conflicted too. She had motherly feelings but was ashamed of it. When she was in the reservation she couldn't forget her past civilization. And when John was in the new world, he couldn't forget his past civilization. Linda embraced the old ways when she came back. Forgetting her son. And the son embraced his old ways in the new place, always remembering his mother.
And I absolutely loved the conversation between Controller Mond and Savage John. It made many things clear. Also I liked how Mond was not evil and unaware of things. He was empathetic and intelligent.
Also the bit about emotional engineering. I think our society engineers our emotions in some way too. Aren't we all expected to be social and do the things society think is normal? Society demands us to do certain things by certain age. And when someone is different or thinks differently, then that person is frowned upon. How are we different than BNW? Because we still have rationality and thinking power. And the choice to be ourselves. We have awareness about our identity and personality. And maybe that is what makes us more human.
What are your thoughts? Would love to hear them.

I just reread "Brave New World" and I couldn't help but notice two things upon rereading it:
First, I couldn't help but notice that I wouldn't really mind to live in this world. Sure, almost all the people in the main world are mindless zombies that only care for pleasure and not for actual deep thought or emotion, but readers seem to forget about the islands where all he free-thinkers are. As far as I'm concerned, whether you're a free-thinker or a person who just wants to get high on Soma, there's something for you (so what's the problem?)
​
The other realization that I had was that BNW's world is exactly like that of the Garden of Eden. In Eden, Adam and Eve were allowed free innocence from all troubles and from pain/embarrassment and allowed a life of pure pleasure, but they were also forced to live in a place devoid of free thought (at least, until Eve ate the apple). This is exactly like BNW's world (even if it's world is a bit more raunchy), and yet everyone classifies Eden as a utopia and BNW as a dystopia.
​
What are your thoughts?

A.R.K — Acts of Random Kindness 

📜 Next Giveaway: August 5th (Edit: Updated date)

• 📖 Giveaway [Part 5]

After launching four successful book giveaways — first, second, third, fourth — and getting tremendous responses by everyone, I decided to do this more often. Although I am planning to make this a monthly thing, it'd require some time to set it up. I'll've to arrange proper system and channels to ease the process, and have more transparency and automation. I am already on it! 😃
UPDATE #1 Congratulations everyone! The book is now one of the top in Amazon's 'Best Sellers' and 'Most Wished For' Lists 😃
For this giveaway, I selected the book which was much requested since our first Giveaway:
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
On BNW: 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 are widely celebrated as the trilogy of authoritarian warning. They are also the most banned books. When you put it in historical context and realize that Huxley's magnum opus was published in 1932 - when Fascism was on the rise in Europe and just before World War II started - before many of the ideas that Huxley explores were even developed as they are today, it makes it even more of an astounding read. It's a bit disturbing how accurate a book written in the 1930's has been. Also, I think it can be paired with Mill's Utilitarianism to get a good idea.
It takes place in an advanced future where humans are cloned, socially indoctrinated and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian order. It is a remarkable piece of literature in that it deals with a world that is genetically engineered and could become a reality. What makes this novel so powerful; it’s not unbelievable. There’s just enough truth within Brave New World for it to be real. It’s a cruel mirroring of our own existence, should we follow a certain path too strongly. Nationalism, Jingoism, Xenophobia, Fascism, Authoritarianism, Totalitarianism, Separatism, Isolationism...how subtly they are intertwined, with much accountability.
Quotes from the book:

“Because our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel and you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.”

If you are interested in reading this, here's how you can get it!
I send the books through Gift Registries. This way you don't have to disclose your personal details and address to me. Gift registries are safe, from privacy point of view. I won't be able to see any Addresses/Mobile or anything, completely confidential. If you don't know how Gift Registries work, don't worry, here's how you can set it up in 5 minutes:

Log in to you Amazon.in account.
Go to 'Your Account' > 'Your Addresses' > Click on Add Address > Save your full address including your mobile number > Save > Click on 'Set as Default' to make that address your default [This is important]
Now Create a WishList, it should be Public and not Shared. Remember to check the box that says 'Third Party Shipping Agreement', when you make the list.
Now search for the title of the book, and add the book to the same Public WishList.
And you're done!

After you're done with setting up your Gift Registry:

• You first need to request for the book by commenting on this post, so to get visibility, and I can add you to my list from there. This way I get to manage list of requests in a sequence.
• Now you need to DM me your WishList link. Please don't copy the invite link, you need to copy the WishList link from 'Send list to others' button or directly from URL :)
• I'll try to fulfill every request made here. I won't send the book to users who created the account on same date, because that is just abusing the system.

The eBook version is also freely available to read in the Archives! Here are the links:
PDF 1 - ePub/Mobi - AudioBook
Thank you! :)
NOTE 0: 💰 Okay, I am going out of my way to do this. I would really appreciate if you would like to contribute for this little initiative. I cannot do this all on my own, and if you think this is a good enough cause, and that it can make an impact, you can come forward to help and be a part of this. Okay, I am bad at asking for help, but I've never done anything like this before. Some people suggested me to open a donation box for this. I haven't set up a proper channel for it, but if you're interested in contributing, that'd sponsor for some books, you can still do that. Please contact me through DM. You can also donate through Amazon Gift Cards. I won't be able to see your name/email or any other details. I really appreciate this! :)

• Email to send Amazon Gift Cards: srksatyam [at] gmail.com
• My PayPal link
• For any other modes of donation, please DM. [Your identity will not be disclosed with anyone]

NOTE 1: I am very active on GoodReads, where I post reviews and rate books. You can check there for recommendations, and also connect with me!
NOTE 2: It's not really important, but some people asked me for this, so here is my WishList, and this is my Books WishList