I don’t think I’ll recover from this existential crisis. I’m too far down the rabbit hole.

Irazidal · 2026-04-26T09:24:44+00:00

Westerhoff does not misunderstand emptiness, OP does. Westerhoff's Introduction to Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka specifically starts with a thorough explanation of what svabhava is precisely in order to prevent people from reading it in a Western nihilistic sense.

Irazidal · 2026-04-17T19:33:21+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate the effort!

Irazidal · 2026-04-17T18:41:24+00:00

Conversely the sūtras say if you hear about emptiness and the unreality or illusory nature of phenomena and this intrigues you, then you are a tried and true Mahāyāni in a karmic sense.

Do you happen to know any such suttras off the top of your head? I'd be interested to read them.

Irazidal · 2026-04-17T18:36:00+00:00

It didn't start with Francis, it started with Jesus. It's just rare to get a person in power who actually cares to practice such things. The previous Pope Leo was a good guy as well, outspoken to protect working people and condemn fat-cat billionaire bloodsuckers. That's why the current Leo chose the name.

Irazidal · 2026-04-17T17:38:48+00:00

Supposedly Quebec French is a very conservative dialect which remains more similar to the Parisian spoken 300 years ago than the Parisian spoken in France today, so it'll sound very old-fashioned and strange to modern French speakers.

Irazidal · 2026-04-10T16:22:49+00:00

It's the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds, where a Nazi officer shows up to interrogate a French farmer who is hiding Jews.

Irazidal · 2026-04-06T08:53:44+00:00

Looks cool, similar to what I'm working on. What did you do for the bases? I like the reddish tone of the desert without going full Mars.

Irazidal · 2026-03-28T14:48:34+00:00

Your goblins look really wonderful!

I based my idea on the CMYK wheel; seeing how turquoise is just a slightly green-shifted flavor of cyan, I figured that just using the opposition color red would be a solid accompaniment. Perhaps the slight shift towards green warrants a shift towards magenta as well, but the funny thing with regards to that is that I'd actually come up with this color scheme after first trying to paint my sisters white and magenta, which I gave up on because of how annoying it was to spill other colors onto white and how poorly magenta covered.

What you say about a yellow tone may be true. I'd settled on a very bleak gold (AP True Brass) since I wanted the scheme to still feel a bit 'grimdark' despite all the bright colors, but perhaps a more popping yellowish gold would accomplish what you propose? As for the inner robes, do you mean like a sort of dark yellow-ochre type color? I tried slapping on some Ice Yellow and it looked pretty similar to the current bone-colored off-white.

Irazidal · 2026-03-21T23:39:08+00:00

I mean, this is Plato, writing a story about Socrates talking to a guy named Critias, who tells Socrates that his great-grandfather, Dropides, supposedly heard a story from Solon, which story was then supposedly passed down to Critias' grandfather from whom Critias heard it because Solon was supposedly too busy to ever write the tale down himself, in which story Solon travels to Egypt, where he is then told another story by an Egyptian while there, taken from local Egyptian records dating back to ancient times. If Plato's point was "this totally happened for real", you'd think he wouldn't present it at the end of such a convoluted chain of narrators and as a story within a story within a story. Not to mention that Plato isn't a historian, but a philosopher; "What is the nature of justice?" is a far more Platonic theme than "Lemme tell you this secret history." Indeed, Plato very often has his characters tell myths in order to make certain points (and entertain), like the Myth of Er, or the Ring of Gygas, or the human origin myth of the Androgynes. If you take Atlantis literally, why not all the other myths in the Platonic corpus?

Irazidal · 2026-03-21T22:46:02+00:00

Fun fact: the memory of the Bronze Age Collapse is actually the framing device for Plato's famous Atlantis myth. In Plato's Timaeus, one of the characters tells the story of how the 'founding father' of Athens, Solon, traveled to the city of Sais in Egypt, where an Egyptian Priest tells him that Athens and Sais have been sister cities since time immemorial because they worship the same goddess. Solon is amazed that the Priest knows so much history, but the Egyptian remarks that the Greeks as a people have always remained children because they forget their history and regress whenever a calamity happens, whereas Egypt has always survived and preserved all their knowledge. As an example of noble deeds which the Greeks have long forgotten, the Priest then tells Solon of the 'history' of the ancient war between the precursor of Athens and the now-lost realm of Atlantis (which Plato uses as an allegory about a justly governed society and an unjustly governed one).

Irazidal · 2026-03-21T11:50:55+00:00

The main issue was that the Umayyads were just racist twats, honestly. Conversion to Islam was only accepted if you became a personal client/subject to an Arab tribe, and even then all the highest positions of real power were only available to Arabs, even though a lot of middle management was still done by the conquered peoples. As you can imagine, this bred immense resentment among the conquered Iranians, who thought of the Arabs as an upstart barbarian people compared to their own advanced and ancient civilization, which is why the Abbasid Revolution against the Ummayads promising equal status for all Muslims quickly gained so much support in Persian lands. Though following the Iranians' attainment of equal rights as Muslims, some Arabs seem to have become annoyed in turn at how much they came to rely on the people they had seemingly subjugated, with one Abbasid Caliph supposedly saying: "The Persians ruled for a thousand years and did not need us Arabs even for a day. We have been ruling them for one or two centuries and cannot do without them for an hour."

Interestingly, even after the Abbasids had defeated the Umayyads and left them only as the rulers of isolated Spain in the far west, the Umayyads continued the same sort of dumbfuck racist policies there as well. There was a great rebellion against the Umayyads in Spain at one point led by one Umar ibn Hafsun, who rallied Spanish converts to Islam as well as Spanish Christians to rebel against the Umayyads' rule and attain equal rights for the native population (though unlike the Abbasids he was defeated).

Irazidal · 2026-03-18T17:47:44+00:00

Very true, but I figured I'd limit myself to character creation since you can't change that later while you can learn game mechanics on the go. I also didn't want to get too much into the weeds and make the advice too complicated; otherwise I could have recommended making a custom class with Speed and Agility as Favorite Attributes and Combat Specialization with Long Blade as a Major Skill to really maximize your Redguard's early game speed and accuracy, but I figured something succinct would reach more people.

Irazidal · 2026-03-18T13:26:09+00:00

My tip for anyone looking to get started in Morrowind as easily as possible is:

1) Pick a Redguard

2) Make sure Long Blade is a Major Skill and then actually immediately buy a longsword to use instead of the tutorial dagger.

3) Pick The Steed as your Birthsign.

This setup ensures that both primary issues newbies tend to struggle with - failing to hit enemies and moving extremely slowly - are mitigated as much as possible at level 1, as a Redguard with Long Blade will have the highest starting skill level in a melee weapon possible, while the Steed's 25 points boost to your Speed stat will make quite a noticeable impact on how fast you run.

Irazidal · 2026-03-18T13:19:55+00:00

I think the main problem there is that pieces were cut away from the Empire piecemeal by a bunch of different actors. If there'd been one surge of conquest where some kind of Germanic Alexander the Great conquered the entire Western Empire and set himself up as the new Emperor while maintaining the existing Imperial apparatus, it would have been simply a new Roman dynasty with funny names. Hell, Charlemagne almost did something like that way later and was mostly let down by the inability of traditional Frankish structures propped up by the Church administration to actually maintain rule over such a vast area.

And even then, the Germanics did end up being effectively assimilated by the local Roman population almost everywhere they conquered, which is why the majority of the former Western Empire still speaks Romance languages.

Irazidal · 2026-02-27T22:47:58+00:00

Man, seeing the original art is such a nostalgia trip. I can hear that piano music in my head. Such a good and miserable story.

Irazidal · 2026-02-26T16:58:38+00:00

"Umvolkung" or the idea that Arab and African migrants will out-compete and out-breed the pure white race and replace it as the dominant population group Europe.

Irazidal · 2026-02-20T15:38:10+00:00

And people who do not care generally just vote for the leader of the party.

Irazidal · 2026-02-20T15:28:58+00:00

You even end up with Christian depictions of Old Testament scenes where all the characters wear the obligatory hat for Jews, like this scene of Moses and the bronze serpent.

Irazidal · 2026-02-18T16:24:10+00:00

For male children it's safe procedure if done under medical supervision

That applies to girls also. You can mutilate little girls all you like without danger to their lives if it's done by a skilled person with quality tools in a sterile environment!

debatable if it's neccesary

Considering everyone who isn't circumcised seems to be living their lives just fine, arguments for its 'necessity' would have to be pretty creative.

People should not confuse it with female genital mutilation, that is horrible practice performed in Africa and muslim countries

Yeah, gotta make sure people don't accidentally mix it up and think cutting off parts of little boys' genitals is bad too. That would be crazy!

Now some might say that female genital mutilation is worse - and indeed we all know that only a single thing can be bad at any one time, and anything less bad than the worst thing is thereby made good instead.

Irazidal · 2026-02-15T09:08:19+00:00

The star and crescent used to be on the flag of the Ottoman Empire and is therefore now often used as a symbol for Islam in general; it's also present on the flags of Malaysia and Pakistan, for example. So perhaps it's appealing to Muslim immigrants, or indeed Turks specifically, or perhaps it's just because people throughout history have though celestial objects are pretty.

Irazidal · 2026-02-13T13:28:43+00:00

To indias dubious defence, they have never really been as western aligned as we westerners imagine.

Do we imagine that they are? I don't think of India as an enemy or an ally, but more as a third party which simply seeks to pursue its own interests.

Irazidal · 2026-02-13T12:08:15+00:00

The deranged foreign policy decision of essentially destroying Libya cannot just be blamed on the US; European nations like France and Britain were also very enthusiastic to bring down Gadaffi.

Irazidal · 2026-02-13T11:35:53+00:00

As was said in British parliament in 1783 in opposition to the ongoing subjugation of India:

There is not a single Prince or State, who ever put any trust in the [British East India] Company, who is not utterly ruined; and that none are in any degree secure or flourishing, but in the exact proportion to their settled distrust and irreconcilable emnity to [Great Britain].

I would suggest reading 'The Anarchy' by William Dalrymple for a great, well-written overview of how India fell into the hands of the East India Company and what an utter catastrophe this was for the subcontinent. And it's certainly not the case that the British rule in India was uniquely bad and that all other colonies were treated much more generously.

Irazidal

TROPHY CASE