A Grim Thought Experiment

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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This one is more unpleasant than usual.  It reads like a guest post by Tom Arrows, but it’s me, Nikolai.  Your normally cheerful and exuberant narrator.

Wandering in the mountains I often have good ideas.  One such idea struck me upon a picturesque bend in the road, decorated with a giant, shady stand of bamboo and a gnarled, leafless, near-dead tree.  I thought, what if I was walking to my execution?  That next crossroads, twenty minutes away – that’s where my firing squat is waiting.  I am Read More

What is Good?

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Review of On Duties by Marcus Tullius Cicero, translated by Quintus Curtius.

The old windbag Cicero lived during a definitive, pivotal time in Western history – perhaps the moment, along with the American Revolution, that produced our world – but you wouldn’t have wanted to live then unless you have a fondness for starving and being chopped up.  The Roman republic was on the ropes with two cut eyes and early signs of Parkinson’s, and Julius Caesar and others sought to deliver the knockout blow in order to establish a totalitarian empire in its place.  Cicero, a lawyer and famed orator, favored the old republic.  Sometimes exhiled and eventually killed, he is best know today for Read More

The Toughest Cut

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Photo credit: akbzine.com

I just finished a seven week cut.  The hairy keg reduced by 3.5cm.  I was not very fat so this was just a tidy up after a long build and then a period of relative inactivity.

You fellas done a cut before?  It is hard.  They did an experiment once, on US soldiers.  They fed them about 500 calories less than they needed each day.  Within a short space of time they took down their lady pinups and replaced them with Read More

The Good Life

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Image credit: Detail from The Death of Seneca by Peter Paul Rubens, 1612-1613.

Review of Letters from a Stoic, by Seneca.  Translated by Richard Mott Gummere.

One can imagine the ancient Greeks, at the second breakfast of human civilization, suddenly having enough agricultural surplus to sit down for a moment and think about things and to record what they thought.  We live, they noticed.  Why?  And, what are we supposed to do now we’re here?  Conquer the world and smite our enemies?  Write the Great Greek Novel?  Honor the Gods?  Life, it seems, comes without even an indecipherable set of IKEA instructions.

The Stoics boldly attempted to write some.  Seneca was Roman but Read More

Blood and Tribe

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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I recently attended the funeral of a close family member.  A miserable service but in the midst of all those closest to us, a reassuring and comforting one.  We are not alone in our grief and there are many who support us, even if from a great distance in space and time.

Old friend were there.  Very old friends from childhood, old neighbours long since moved away, old cousins and great-uncles who I had heard news of but not seen in decades.  A scattering of newer friends, introduced to the old.

With only a couple of exceptions, everyone there was Read More

The One Weird Reason Why I’m Finishing This Blog

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

I baited and you clicked, so let’s do this.

First, the blog will end in about six months.  I still have some time and some stuff I want to say, and I’m going to say it.  Mostly it will be further debauched tales and making fun of mainland Chinese.

Second, the reason is not what you think.  I promised you a weird reason, and a weird reason you shall have.

It is not because Read More

Twists and Roundabouts

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

I’m wrenched awake by a gut-churning headache.  I’m in a tent somewhere in the mountains, long before dawn, far from home.  I fumble around in my backpack for my ‘Vitamin I’ (Ibuprofen) and realize that I’m all out.  Oh, shit.

I force my agony-fogged brain to calculate.

Continuing the hike as planned goes in the ‘ha ha’ basket.  Once I get a headache like this I need drugs or I’m out of action for days.  For this reason and many others I would never have survived in the pre-industrial era.

I can drive into the nearest town pretty easily.  Problem is, it’s 4am.  Pharmacies won’t open until 10.  I could get home by then, take the drugs there, then sleep in my own bed.

Can I get home?  Physically, can I drive that far in this condition?

Maybe not, but it looks like the best of a bad set of options.  My study of the Stoics shall be tested.  I cannot control painful events, but I can choose how to react to them.  On this occasion I choose to react by spitting obscene language and by furiously kicking objects that get in my way.

Bending down is a really bad thing for headaches.  Probably that’s what extraordinary rendition camps do to suspected terrorists.  Induce a headache then scatter a bunch of irresistible goat porn on the cell floor.  You know what else really requires a lot of bending down?  Packing up a tent.  My condition worsens until I Read More

Why do I do it

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Image Credit: Gerrit Dou, Geleede die zijn pen snijdt, WikiCommons.

I disappeared from the internet for several weeks and no one sent me a message saying, are you okay.  Did you get kidnapped by the CIA.  Did you fall of a cliff in a hiking misadventure.  Did you get bit by a skanky cougar’s denture.  Thanks a lot, everyone.  I hope your poofy koi turn into megalodons and gnaw through your vas deferens.

So anyway, I clambered up the crumbling embankment and garrotted the agent (is that alpha? cos they have lady ones now) and I’m back in the cockpit, doing whatever it is that I do.

What is it?  This blog has no particular focus or purpose, or audience.  I sit down with a head full of shit and type away until I’ve put some of it in your head instead, then I feel better.  Like after going to the toilet.  This is a toilet blog.  Remember 1998 and that guy who uploaded a Read More

The Most Enjoyable Election Comments on Jezebel

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

You know the funnest thing in the world?  No, it’s not those clubs in Japan where you can watch the ladies above you above shit on a perspex floor.  No, it’s even funner than that.  It’s free.  And you can do it right now, without getting up or putting on your underwear.

  1.  Go to Jezebel.
  2.  Click on an election-related article.
  3.  Read the comments.

Better than chocolate sex.

All sic:

DrugstoreGlasses

I’m crying because I don’t know how the fuck were going to survive a trump presidency.  And if he wins this isn’t my country, period. It’s every man for themselves. FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING LIBERAL WHITE MEN. FUCK YOU.

Why is she blaming liberal white men?  To answer logically would be to answer wrongly.  The important thing is, those overweight angry women never liked the skinny bearded ones at all.  And who can blame them.  Note to the skinny bearded ones: lift and eat meat.  Then it will all start to make sense.  Oh, and switch to Read More

Word From the Dark Side,10/20/16

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images

An irregular collection of problematic news and opinion.

Project Veritas reveals hidden camera footage of Democratic Party trolls plotting to stoke violence at Trump rallies and voter registration fraud.  Sometimes disappears from YouTube or is hard to find, for some reason.  The journo also got banned from Twitter for some time.  Not jumping into the fray of this election (I’m not American) but I’ll happily sink a boot into a deserving arse should one be pointed in my direction.  I always assume that my readers will already have read the most notable links but a lot end up going through to CH and ROK, so I’ll include this one just in case.  Not much about it in the MSM.

In that jugular, a Trump campaign office is fire bombed.  And, the battle of the sexes in the election, state by state.

Even a Nigerian prince would invest in this.  Is it annoying when I link things without explaining what it is?  Okay, it’s a managed fund that invests in businesses run by women.  Happy now?  Did I save thirty seconds of your precious life that you would otherwise have spent reading to disabled children?  Yeah?  Now you owe me.

The unrequited love between Jews and Read More

In the Closet

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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1972.  Les has a wife called Chris.  He often talks about her at work.  ‘Oh, Chris and I had a picnic at Silvan Reservoir’, he says when asked about his weekend.  Yet each time the office Christmas barbecue comes around, Chris is unavailable.  She is unwell.  She is visiting family.  She had to help a friend.  Everyone smiles and nods.  Oh, that’s too bad.  Maybe next time.  We were really looking forward to meeting her.

Of course, Les has no wife.  There may be a Chris, and there was probably a picnic, but Chris is a bloke and everyone who’s figured it out politely pretends not to know.

2016.  Les strolls in to work wearing a repulsively skimpy frock.  After a quick visit to the ladies’ room he proudly flounces into the office and regales his colleagues with tales of his debauched weekend adventures.  It was this big, he says.  This big!  He gestures more vigorously in the face of the man who is trying to ignore him.  This big!  And full of veins!  Look at me, goddamn you.  Hate crime!

But our culture is certainly not one of anything goes.  While some lifestyle choices are now fawningly celebrated, other choices have become objectionable.  And I am beginning to realize that I am making one of those socially unacceptable choices, and that I need to keep it in the closet.

You see, I am Read More

The Meaning of Life

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Book review of Stoner, by John Williams.

Kant said, beauty is that for which we have no concept.  We can look at it, admire it, and feel that certain qualia that comes from beauty, but if we attempt to explain it in mere words we fail because words can only express concepts.  Such beauty might come from a moment of perfection in music or from the composition of a great work of art.

In this spirit, it is impossible to properly describe the qualities of Stoner.  It tells the story of a very ordinary man and his life which is, on the surface, insignificant.  He is born into rural poverty, attends university and becomes an academic.  He has some joys, tragedies, suffering and some minor triumphs along the way.  These are of a sort that any person might experience.  In the end, he Read More

Isolation

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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The Anchorite by Teodor Axentowicz.  Image credit: WikiCommons

People who need people are vapid.  Those who cannot tolerate a day or so alone with their thoughts are madmen who will one day die without having ever reflected upon their lives in a meaningful way.  Like a female gorilla or a river red gum.

A native anchorite, I am the opposite.  I need occasional interaction with other members of my species in order to feel grounded and sane, but too much of it is exhausting.  I have had periods of some months where I could choose exactly how much to go out and socialise.  I found that my sweet spot is for a few hours, once or twice a week.  My friends are exasperated when I pike at 11pm but that’s just how I am.  The rest of the time I am happiest alone, reading or working on my own projects.  I used to think this was a bizarre quirk of my nature but I’ve since read that this preference is Read More

In which I post while drunk

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Image credit: WikiCommons

How much gin does will take to make my soul come back?  I think it might be four shots, five at the outside.  Depends how quickly I drink.  Need to reach that sweet spot between feeling drunk but still depressed and the moment when I begin to vomit.

I’ve been a couple of weeks without sex, mostly due to lack of effort on my part, and that old incel rage is coming back again.  It shouldn’t take effort.  There should just be a button.  Whoever programmed this universe is a cunt.  Probably laughing at us.  If there’s a way out of our universe to his, he’s fucked.

Gin is horrible but it’s too hot for whisky.  And my whisky is too good for ice.  And I am too good for cheap whisky.  I deserve to win the lottery.  I’d set aside an annual budget of $12,000 for whores.  Then I’d never need to speak to another woman again.  Never get a message from my ex who’d said she wanted a break, now saying Read More

Sympathy for the Devil

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Book review of Paradise Lost by John Milton

 

Been cast into Hell for eternity?  Look on the bright side.  That’s what he does:

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell

Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings

A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n . . .

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

Whose side are you on, Milton?  You seem to have framed the Devil as an admirable Stoic.  Of course Milton has to pretend to side with insipid, old God and his goody-two-shoes son, Jesus, but the scenes of those two sedatives chin-wagging are about as compelling as the dinner table conversation at the Flanders’ house.  We can disregard the boring bits.  Paradise Lost is an epic poem in iambic pentameter about literature’s most fascinating and maligned character, the one who dared to stand against God himself.  He may have a bad reputation but the Devil seduces from us our curiousity.

Milton opens his verse in the midst of the drama, with Satan having been Read More

The Tale of Tiziana Cantone

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Image credit: Instagram/tizianacantonereal

In Italy, a respectable young lady named Tiziana Cantone and her boyfriend broke up.  She then had a brilliant idea, one that would knock other Italian thinkers such as Cicero and Galileo off their lofty intellectual perches: she had sex with four men and apparently sent the resulting video to her ex in order to Read More

Word from the Dark Side, 9/14/16

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

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Image from www.dramafever.com.

Right you lot, been busy but now I’m B.I.T.  Had to do a Dark Side because there’s all sorts going on out there to warm your little cockles.

Don’t live with gays.

Living life my way.

A discussion of legal and political possibilities arising if Clinton became incapacitated.

An alternative view of Duterte.

Delicious Tacos is looking for a girl who is a loser.  In the comments he gets an expression of interest from a teenager and he Read More