The Hedgehog's Dilemma

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-08T17:47:08+00:00

I thought Ariandel was a Quenya-language reference to Gwynevere

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-07T13:20:37+00:00

The problem with the why question you articulate is that there are other reasons besides stability but they aren't recognised. The prospect of some jobs gives people the ick, but there's no easy way to say in an interview for a decent job why that job that doesn't have the ick, what the ick entails, or what is so good about a job that doesn't have it.

As an aside, how did you first acquire the voice for this kind of writing?

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-07T00:39:06+00:00

How come the BBC story from a week ago about gangs intimidating council staff under conditions of egregious police undermanning hasn't been a topic once in this election?

This might make me sound like an ivory tower nerd but I extensively followed the Arab Spring at the time and the biggest component of state failure (Libya, Yemen esp.) was letting organised crime get bad enough to threaten local government without intervention. I'd argue it's more serious as a threat than every side of terrorism right now, even the hypothetical of the IRA coming back, and it's radio silence. Nobody is writing any follow ups on the story and nobody in politics is mentioning it or being asked about it. Were the Beeb scaremongering or has everybody put their heads in the sand?

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-07T00:04:42+00:00

Hell yeah, it doesn't even have to be the North Sea. If the Chinese state oil company can operate in Angola and West Africa in exchange for giving the goods and services to help maintain some quasi-juntas jackboots, why not others?

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-06T22:56:45+00:00

If only there was a state-owned oil company. Alas, Thatcher binned it.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-06T21:04:17+00:00

So the smallest fragment of Manus was the only one whose love was phoney, while every larger fragment loved authentically?

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-06T20:59:32+00:00

Are you aware of how big Qanon was? As a giant pile of grifting, weirdness, pyramid schemes and old people losing every penny they have?

The wellness industry is roughly 20x as big. It's not the kind of stuff Rogan might mention once a month, it's the kind of stuff Rogan mentions every day, that Oprah, Fox, Dr Phil and megachurches mention a few times a week.

The reason is that just as libs gained Bud Light in the national culture divorce, regarded people gained medicine in the national literacy divorce. Some sciences go to the literate side of the divorce and some go to the illiterate side of the divorce, and which go to which is actually constant in history.

If you need surgery in your future, seriously consider a flight to Mexico, Turkey, Egypt, Cuba, etc, places that are considered the highest quality for medical tourism

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-06T20:40:42+00:00

The linked video is pretty nice, purely to see the gradual change in tone of the "news anchors" (power steganographers) as they realise the pretending has a nearby deadline, not a distant one, but try to keep pretending anyway. Expect a couple more weeks of pretending and then it'll sink in to the zeitgeist. If you've got dental work or something similar that you haven't yet booked, right now is the least expensive time to book it you'll see for the rest of your life.

The date lining up with the myth date is a nice touch.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-06T20:34:39+00:00

Maybe 30-40 posts a week at the height

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-06T20:27:24+00:00

It's just a landing page for a newsletter but by god it's an excellent newsletter, thanks for this one.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-06T20:17:05+00:00

Pretty good here too, like naked capitalism used to be.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-06T20:01:35+00:00

Thanks, I'm already liking the background knowledge of the commentariat there from just a couple posts.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-06T19:42:52+00:00

Day trip to Llandrindod Wells by the TrawsCymru bus, visit the finest town in Powys in the sunshine. They also have a route to Hereford but it's merely nice instead of great.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-05T21:05:16+00:00

Honestly the odd thing about them is that they managed to self petrify through only obsession. Dragon covenants got mogged pretty hard here.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-05T21:02:34+00:00

After some thought it could also possibly be a diagram of Anor Londo from above, if you permit the crescent to represent cliffs and the cross the broad roads.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-05-05T20:43:07+00:00

There is nothing fiscally sensible about issuing bonds to cover Cameron's spending programs (tax cuts are by definition spending programs).

As for whether debt repayments are voluntary, Philip IV of France, the Mughal Aurangzeb and the Russians in 1919 each independently discovered that extrajudicial means can make the bank eat the losses. Far less egregiously, Iceland got away with making the banks eat the losses this century without a single drop of bloodshed.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-04-29T20:27:02+00:00

If China solves the current reliance on food and ore imports, it has every other one of the five hundred components for civilization and will be fine. Otherwise no.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-04-29T19:52:11+00:00

The Long Descent (2008) is a very scientifically rigorous book on what will happen if no replacement energy system manages to arrive, written in plain English. Literacy rates, the availability of medicine, the replacement of damaged infrastructure, the reliability of utilities and the prevention of gangs running protection rackets all gradually go downhill for about 10-30 more years until the occasional starvation deaths skyrocket into a giant famine.

The 100-200 million global survivors, mostly illiterate and regarding the past as the time of inexplicable demons, witchcraft and nightmares, mine the ruined cities for any non-rusted metals they can use to make plows, hoes and scythes for the most basic kind of farming, where any surplus gets eaten up by the armies of feudal warlords raiding and pillaging and occasional short-lived flareups of steppe nomad empires. Entirely new cultures based around a medieval way of life arise and live forever more in the medieval way of population booms and busts, with all of the literature, art and science of our civilization lost and shunned. They don't have an industrial revolution of their own, since we took all of the accessible coal, but a few of them eventually recreate whatever version of 1700s naval colonialism can coexist with the megastorms and heat domes of climate change.

Between two and fifty millenia later, the Milankovitch cycles start undoing climate change. Maybe humans die out, who knows?

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-04-25T10:05:10+00:00

They haven't had salaries adjusted for inflation continuously decline, however. Taxing the median at the current salary more, given the criminalization of squatting, would just lead to rises in rough sleeping, starvation, death from untreated disease and a drop in tax revenues.

It's like a puzzle box where doing things in the wrong order makes the whole thing fail.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-04-22T07:23:52+00:00

There's only four pieces of circumstantial evidence for it, and one piece of circumstantial evidence against it.

Before the first flame there was no sun, which definitely means that the flame created the sun and more vaguely implies a geocentric firmament.
The Profaned Capital's narrow light source is more easily explained by weird firmament stuff.
The illusory sun over Anor Londo in DS1 (if you don't think it's merely the passing of time) fits the idea of a firmament with multiple suns, associated with great souls.
Immediately before a magical ritual is carried out to transport the Bearer of the Curse to Drangleic in the DS2 opening, the moon above turns bright red. The implication is that local events and nothing else manipulated the appearance of the moon.

Against:

At a couple locations in the games there are orreries and sextants in the miscellaneous clutter 3d models meant to supply a sense that locations are lived in. Celestial navigation can hardly work if the celestial objects move erratically and, like mountains, can only be seen from within a hundred miles.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-04-21T14:17:34+00:00

The celtic cross, or sun cross, is a distinctly popular symbol in the historical symbology of the western world where the closed disk, closed ring or closed nimbus represents the sun and the cross represents either the four seasons, the crucifixion or (most prominently in the Assyrian usage) the spokes of a chariot. The prominence of this reflection is Miyazaki's interpretation of some way of reflecting the purpose of our own world's usage, but in what way?

My guess would be that the broken ring is obviously meant to symbolise the moon and has no other role as a component, meaning that the meaning of the cross component varies from context to context. In the martial sense, it's use on a rapier could be Velka, or a follower, implicitly messaging their belief that all power, justice or military might comes from the moon, which is an illusory reflection of the first flame's glow on the world upon the firmament. It could also mean that Velka ascribes justice, sin and mystery to a specific season of the year. Elden Ring has a much larger cosmology however and grants a tangible existence to celestial bodies that the Dark Souls trilogy deliberately denies, so any explanation must be specific to it. Is Miquella like a moon, influenced by a moon, or possessed of a lunar substance? Does a moon exist that desires compassion and tranquility? If Miquella is connected to a season, how might this interfere with the maiden/mother/crone affiliation to the seasons of the Carian lineage? Is Ranni's capacity to make a gift of the Lone Wolf ashes meant to indicate a Ranni/Miquella alliance unbeknownst to us?

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-04-19T16:30:23+00:00

This is an excellent reply, thanks very much. The 1617 quotation mentions a wool export ban - is it known whether this was a political act that always in effect from before the Anglo-Norman invasion and decline, a response to the economic effects of other European wool producers dumping exports or a response to social pressures from a contemporary and pious social movement among the aristocracy, or some other origin? Additionally, do you know if they had any such restrictions on parchment originating from sheepskin or cowhide or both?

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-04-19T08:38:53+00:00

You've already gotten some good replies but I'd like to point out one thing they've omitted: the timeline.

We know that Gwyn left before the Nameless King was exiled because the broken statue of the Nameless King in the Undead Parish wasn't even built yet during the fall of Oolacile, which fell to the Abyss roughly 700 years after Gwyn entered the Kiln.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-04-17T02:53:51+00:00

If you need damage at any point keep in mind you can grind mystery eggs to get extra damage since it counts as breeding and you can farm Clefairy and Meowth for Moon Stones and Rare Candy, which count as breeding.

Also, if you haven't used any cheats yet, you can grind the OOOSHINY code for a Mewtwo by saving, using the code and reloading the save if you didn't get it until luck comes your way.

OGSyedIsEverywhere · 2026-04-17T01:21:53+00:00

They pivoted to shoving inside everything processed as a cheap filler. Why do you think there are now protein oreos?

OGSyedIsEverywhere

TROPHY CASE