Epic's certificate and overload issue

 https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/expiration-date-4-6-2021

The Saga of Cannibal Ants in a Soviet Nuclear Bunker

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cannibal-ants-soviet-nuclear-bunker

On top of a ventilation pipe that juts out from the mostly underground facility, there is big, mound-like nest of wood ants. It is a perfectly normal place for wood ants to live. They feast on the sweet honeydew secreted by aphids dwelling in nearby pine trees, and soak up the rays of post-Soviet sun.

But within the bunker, in a small room at the bottom of that shaft, there was a second colony of ants. These ants had no sun, no warmth, no light, and no honeydew. So they survived on the flesh of their fellow ants. Their colony was the wretched result of individuals falling from the healthier colony above, and with no way to climb out of the bunker, they could never return. It feels like a mirror-horror that could have come straight out of the mind of Jordan Peele, except that instead of a commentary on race and class in America, it’s a testament to one population’s sheer will to survive. “It is a peculiar colony” says István Maák, a zoologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. “They are doing the best they can, surrounded by dying.”

This is actually not an uncommon behavior for wood ants. The species is known to engage in battles among colonies, particularly in spring, when they extend their ranges in search of food. Maák calls this time of year the “wood ant wars.” After a battle, the victors feast on the bodies of the defeated. Down in the bunker there were no alternative sources of food—not enough bat guano or passing mites, for example—so instinct kicked in.

Ant Colony Two’s drive to survive resulted in an extraordinarily meticulous ant necropolis that lined the walls of the small room and spilled through the doorway. “They were organizing their corpses in waste piles, putting neatly in the corners, and transporting it away,” Maák says. There were approximately two million corpses, many of which displayed bores from bites and fret holes—signs that their contents had been consumed, he says.

How John Gray's philosophy helped me understand my war experience

 https://aeon.co/essays/how-john-grays-philosophy-helped-me-understand-my-war-experience

 

 

 

 

Speaking at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2008, Gray highlighted an important caveat to the phrase ‘You can’t have an omelette without breaking eggs,’ which is sometimes used, callously, to justify extreme means to high-value ends. Gray’s caveat was: ‘You can break millions of eggs and still not have a single omelette.’

 

 

 But it was only through Gray that I saw the similarities between the doctrines of Stalinism, Nazi fascism, Al-Qaeda’s paradoxical medieval, technophile fundamentalism, and Bush’s ‘war on terror’. Gray showed that they are all various forms (however incompatible) of utopian thinking that have at their heart the teleological notion of progress from unenlightened times to a future utopia, and a belief that violence is justified to achieve it (indeed, from the Jacobins onwards, violence has had a pedagogical function in this process)

 

 

Gray points to the re-introduction of torture by the world’s premier liberal democracy during the war on terror as an example of the reversibility of progress

 

 

Gray acknowledges the theories of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, outlined in his book The Denial of Death (1973). Becker believed that human activity is largely driven by unconscious efforts to deny the inevitability of our demise. We invest in activities, institutions and belief systems that we think will allow us to transcend our brief time in the world. Becker wrote: ‘We build character and culture in order to shield ourselves from the devastating awareness of underlying helplessness and terror of our inevitable death.’ The stories we create give us a sense that we’re part of something greater than ourselves, which will continue after we die

Why people love Nier so much

 https://www.pcgamer.com/why-people-love-nier-so-damn-much/

 

Yoko Taro

producer Yōsuke Saitō

This all started with Drakengard, Yoko Taro's first game that was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2003. If Nier is merely strange, Drakengard is fully batshit. It's hard to explain it without going into intense detail about the lore, but what sets Drakengard apart from other RPGs is just how bone-chillingly dark and twisted it is.

Do you want some examples? Okay, you asked for it:

    What's key about Taro is that, even if his intentions seem impossible to divine, there always some kind of logic to it.

    One of the main characters is named Leonard and he joins the party shortly after his three kid brothers were butchered by soldiers while Leonard was off in the forest masturbating to the thought of little kids. Yup, he's a pedophile and is very torn up about it. He tries to kill himself but a fairy shows up and manipulates him into forming a magical pact with her in exchange for his eyeballs.
    Another main character is an elven mother driven insane by the death of her child. She slaughters and eats children because she thinks she'll be able to "protect" them inside of her womb. In one of Drakengard's many different endings, she is eaten by a horde of giant celestial babies. Now that's poetic justice!
    In one alternate ending, the main character's sister commits suicide because it's revealed that she harbors incestuous feelings for him. It's not clear if he reciprocates, but I doubt it because he's clearly in love with his pet dragon that also stole his ability to speak.
    In Drakengard 3, the main character was sold into prostitution as a child but is also a divine songstress on a mission to slaughter her five sisters and bring about the end of the world. She also has a flower growing out of her eyeball and rides a dragon with the voice of a child. Each time she kills one of her sisters, she forces their disciples to become her sex slaves. There's a cutscene where she explicitly tells one to prepare for sex by washing "front and rear," so you know she means business.

Evangelion - all four films

1.01

2.02

3.33

...?

Anyway, did enjoy the story telling. Perhaps better than the series objectively but I always will love the series.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman - "The Yellow Wallpaper"

One of the first female-perspective horror books... and while I had my usual trouble feeling the real thriller/horror part, it was a nice read.

Fatboy Slim mix XFM

https://www.mixcloud.com/FatboySlim/fatboy-slim-on-the-road-to-big-beach-bootique-xfm-show-1-310312/

 

Hellbound

"Next big South Korean hit"

Amusing enough, about people getting told they will die and go to hell. It seems to make little concessions, killing people off etc. Not as captivating as Squid Game at all, but still OK

B. Catling - "Earwig"

Strange but wonderful story of a girl with frozen saliva teeth, a man to look after her, a bar in Belgium... it's hard to describe this story, but highly recommend, although the moment where he tries to kill the cat but fails is haunting.

When God gave the first human consciousness, as they shivered their way out of Eden, he whispered advice under his celestial breath: 'obscure thyselves.' Every tribe of the sons of Adam and every half-simian with ingenuity has since learnt to brew or distil fluids, vapours and powders in order to relieve themselves of the intolerable jabber of thought occasionally; to numb their senses just enough to sensually smugde judement and nerve. A good bar is a sanctum to this need. Au Metro was a cathedral.

The catch found her fingers and the cage opened and she put her hands inside to touch something entirely new, like an unfound cleft or ripple in her own body. The cat moved into her hands, and a shape bigger than that brought on by the boy filled her from her toes to her optic nerves. She brought it out and held it to her once bony chest. It squirmed in against her warmth and a tiny part of her leaked out. The cat purred, and the change in its sound astonished her. There was only one thing to do, so she did, and purred back. This was the beginning of a profound an irrational friendship. She quickly took the little beast to her room and curled up on her bed with it tucked close to her chest. It did something extraordinary, and again Mia felt arousal. It gently pummelled her belly with its stuff, hard little paws, and pushed its scrawny head into the scrawny parts of her body. This odd person showed love in a physical and direct way, as if it wanted to burrow inside her and become one. The delight she felt was overwhelming.

Akram Khan Company - "Outwitting the Devil" (part of Carnival of Shadows)

Seen at Sadler's Wells

Great dance, particularly with the repeated "slow" moving bits. Music was quite captivating at times.

Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, Savina Yannatou

Savina Yannatou - Sumiglia – sad, doleful, style of Death Can Dance, just her voice and a violin

Latest album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - "Raise the roof"

Particularly "Last Kind Words Blues"

Julia Armfield - "Salt Slow"

Amazing magic realism / fantasy stories.
Beautiful way of phrasing things, juxtaposing feelings and impressions. (I've been using the wrong page numbers, of another book, for the first quotes and did not notice anything amiss.

To her eyes, there is nothing obviously wrong with any of them; they all wear logo T-shirts, like to pose next to barbecues, all seem partially blinded by the sun. Her friends, however, tap their screens to zoom in on throats and the corners of eyelids, reminding her that to love a man is to watch him buckle.

Later on, she goes back to the kitchen to wash up. Looking out into the shared garden, she sees Mrs Lumis making a shuffling tour of the lawn in the first of the snow. A strange sight, spectral. Like death walking in the morning, looking for its lost cat.

Knew herself for what she was: a great failure at solitude. Sluicing through her twenties illuminated only by the glow of terrestrial television, finding much to her dismay at the age of twenty-nine that she longed to amuse and to be longed for. A faint life. Eating apricots and growing bony and forgetting how to talk to people Loneliness like a taste on the skin.

Mornings have been the hardest things to adapt to; company after three decades of waking up alone. She has always considered herself the kind of person seen to best effect at four p.m., once the day has burnt away and softened up her difficulties. Having someone with her from the outset gives her no rehearsal space, no time to sink down into some more pliable version of the creature she is to begin with.