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Game: Streets of Rage 4 - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-14T00:00:00.000Z

Streets of Rage 4 is a game that hates you (spoilers below). I do not mean the general “you”, the one that keeps your defences down because of how impersonal it is. No! I mean you in particular who is reading this. I know your name, where you live, and have already talked to your parents about this. But before I explain why this game treats you scornfully, let me give you some context to better appreciate what the fuss is about.

Before gaming at home became the norm, and before 1GB of RAM had the price of a heart transplant, video games were played at arcades on machines that were operated with coins. You would insert a coin and get a go at the game. When you would lose or complete the game, the machine would ask for another coin. Simple and super effective! At the end of your session, you had the chance to input three characters, representing your name, which would be displayed on a leaderboard screen alongside your total points. Those waiting in line could thus learn who holds the high score.

Inputting those characters was an adventure unto itself. Unlike our fancy modern gadgets with full-sized keyboards, key chords timed in milliseconds, and layered combos, the arcade machines expected you to cycle from A to Z by tapping a button that was already hard to press. Picking a letter would lock it in and move you to the next selection. A mistake could not be undone. In a civilised world, that would not be a problem. You would take your sweet time to cycle all the way back from, say, R to P and then ever so carefully repeat the steps to inscribe “PRT” or something. But ours is a barbaric world, my friend!

The arcade is a social place. You are there together with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells . There are no gaming chairs to make you feel comfortable nor hidden lights distracting you from your solitude. You are typically standing close to the machine you intend you use, playing mind games on the guy whose turn it is to make an attempt at reaching the top of the leaderboard.

If your friend gets the high score, you do what besties are there for: punch the bastard ever so gently to make him mistype his name, of course. We do not want him to become overconfident, do we now? The Greeks have warned us of hubris and all that. But we also do not need to be savages, so we let him have it sometimes, i.e., if he is below our score.

Many of the games at the arcade were in the fighting or beat-em-up genres. Streets of Rage 4 pays homage to the latter. In terms of gameplay, it does an excellent job. For a while I felt that Capcom’s Cadillacs and Dinosaurs got a remake. Though playing the game at home will never give you the same vibes as what you would experience at the arcade. Which is why this game hates you, amigo.

Streets of Rage 4 reminds you that you are at home. That is already a terrible fate. Then, you realise that you cannot punch your friend anymore. What a sad world we live in! It also features prominently a four-player co-op mode. No, not to make you invite people over for a game or two. Don’t be silly! It does it to highlight the fact that you have no friends.

Beside that, you will soon notice that everybody on the titular streets is maxed out in all possible ways. They have more muscles than those known to anatomists and more curves than those anticipated by that whole “curvature of spacetime” mumbo-jumbo that physicists dabble in.

Not only are they all cooler than you, they also have more free time than you ever will. You expend your vitality doing some unfulfilling job while they get to chill on the streets—and they even have coin-ops there to recreate the arcade experience!

Okay, I am not being serious. This is a fine game. I had a good time. As for the plot, it is a generic cartoon villain story of the bad guys wanting to control the world. The good guys are unmemorable vigilantes. I already forgot how they even look, which is fantastic.

For me, this is a strength of gaming. I do not want profound characterisation and interwoven backstories when the premise is that I run around kicking people in the stomach. This is the same point I made about Borderlands 3, namely, I like it when games do not take themselves too seriously. It makes for a fun and easygoing life.

My own little photo metadata management app - Baty.net

2026-09-13T18:51:35.000Z

My Exif Manager app (Linux)

After scanning a roll of film, I like to add camera make/model/lens exif data to the files. For years, I've done this via exiftool using the command line. It's not hard, but I thought I'd see if Claude Code could whip up something a little nicer to use. Turns out it could.

Launch the app, open a folder, choose from a pre-defined list of my cameras and lenses, and write the exif info to the files. It took Claude maybe 30 minutes from my prompt to a working app.

That's all I needed it to do, but I got a little fancy and added captioning, which many photo apps make more difficult than it should be.

Speaking of making things difficult, some apps (::cough Darktable::) don't deal well with metadata during export, so I have my app allow me to write the information to already-exported files based on file name. Let's say I have Darktable export a bunch of images to ~/Pictures/Export but those images lose their captions (it happens!). I tell my app where the exported files are and it matches file names and writes the metadata to those files.

The trouble with having an LLM at hand all the time is that now I want to work with it to build or extend little apps for everything. It's too easy, helpful, and fun to ignore.

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2026 Roll-036 (Olympus OM-1n) - Baty.net

2026-09-13T13:33:52.000Z

Shot a roll in the Olympus OM-1n with the Zuiko 85mm f/2.0. I find long lenses nearly as challenging as wide ones.

Adirondack chair on West Twin Lake

Lock on boat house door

Bryan's boat on the lift

Weeds on the shore at Bryan's cottage

Stairs on Bryan's dock

Alice's food and water dishes

Model wooden boat

Flowers on our deck wrapping around nearby lamp post

Kayaks

Portrait of Jack by Bryan Lewis

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Autumn - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-13T00:00:00.000Z

The joy of the cool morning air and the seeing singing birds fly between trees. There is a light haze in the air this morning, the haze of an autumn morning. My cheeks are chilly right now — probably pink too. Light shines through the windows and casts a long glow on the floor inside and the leaves outside — the crisp green glow of the sunlit plants. The day is so beautiful.

There are more trees changing colour — the sight of the trees in the sky outside the coffee shop was breathtaking. Everywhere I look morning welcomes me into this Sunday — the air is as cool as I love. I am listening to Lorde’s music, which takes me back to her concert a few weeks ago — the energy of the light in the darkness, the impact of the unity of voices, the joy and passion and depths of the songs. I was a writer in the dark and a writer in the light that day — every second a new experience, every second new observations that were and became a story.

The feeling of wanting to hold onto every note of a song — to hold onto every part of a moment.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Just as the sky was clear enough last night to see the stars, so too was the sky clear this morning, except for the light haze that graced the day. I went for a walk and visited a coffee shop, one of my favourite ways to start a morning. At one point on my walk, I noticed the leaves on one particular weeping branch on a tree were turning orange and red. With every passing week I notice the changes in the seasons to a greater extent. As I write, I look out onto a tree in the distance that has been changing colour for the last week; its orange colours standing out amid the sea of green on the horizon.

While sitting in the coffee shop, I read a blog post and noticed the author, a writerly friend half-way across the world, had mentioned me and my most recent post on autumn. My writing on an autumn leaf here in Scotland carried its way to another world where I think it will be around Spring now. Moments like this are what make the web special.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Writing this post, I carry with me the music that I listened to on my journey, and look forward to playing the next song.

Welcome to our festival - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-13T00:00:00.000Z

This is an entry from my journal.

I always enjoy working at the festival. I have in the past sold bread and related products, but this year I managed a toy store front that also featured κομποσχοίνια (komboschinia). A komboschini is a piece of rope with knots that you typically wear as a bracelet. Komboschinia have a religious significance, but people also use them as a fashion statement. I now have three on each wrist, for example, to turbocharge that religiosity.

Even though I am an introvert, I am a good dealer at noisy places. I am sufficiently talkative, have a loud voice, and take nothing seriously if I do not have to. A tourist thought this was a bazaar where she would haggle to get a discount. I shouted for everyone waiting in line to listen “I want my swimming pool madame; no discounts!”. Then I said “okay, take six and pay for five”

Another person wanted to have a picture with me after we did some good business together and had a positive vibe. I was all smiles until that point and turned dead serious all of a sudden: “a thousand euro for my image rights!” and then I laughed.

Those who know me well will attest to my sense of humour and lightheartedness. The others will have to wait to see what I have in store for them. I am much more careful online because cultural differences increase the likelihood of misunderstandings. For instance, I cannot do the whole trick of raising my hands and shouting “my friend” at a German as soon as I meet them because they will, quite understandably, get PTSD that the Greeks are back for more money. In such cases I am cautious. Though I will still throw some bait, in the form of pointed remarks, and if I notice that the person has caught it then I will not miss an opportunity to make them smile.

Most of what I do either is directly for teasing people or has such a component. Sometimes I do it in a playful and exaggerated manner. At others I am subtle. The latter kind is what I typically do on my website: I challenge the reader to drop what was theretofore an idea that they took seriously. And there is a version of this which takes the form of a provocation. You do not see me laughing while I am saying out loud the most witty formulation I came up with, but if you knew me you would know this part as well. It is not your fault, of course, just the nature of the medium.

At any rate, the festival is my kind of place. The majority of people who show up are the average folk. They belong to the working class, dress with unbranded clothes, have no pretences to greatness, and are straightforward. The snobs will skip such events because they dismiss the plebs as uncultured and crude. They cannot stand out in the crowd, which annoys them greatly. For me not having their smug face there is wonderful news because I do not have to make them feel uncomfortable myself.

For example, I was walking my dogs and one of them took a moment to pee on a tire. Dogs do this all the time. I did not give it any thought until some posh dude called me out asking why did I allow my dog to do that to his car. I looked at him without uttering a word, then checked the car, and said “wash it, you have money”. Implicit in my comment was a common challenge I present: if you come to me to play the game you purport to be good at, then I will make sure you live up to your own rules or realise that it is better to be easygoing. Either way, you win.

To find entry level snobs, you can just go to any random cafeteria these days. They have all become high class. It used to be that coffee was the cheapest drink for the worker to start the day with a positive “good morning”. Now the places have cookie jars and cheesecakes on the front. Their menu is full of augmented drinks. A cup is adorned with creams, syrups, and make-belief all so that they can charge you a small fortune.

Water is extra, of course. Soon the authorities will outlaw that thing. It makes business sense to channel it all to the AI puppet masters. This way, jaded programmers can have the illusion of continuous productivity when an agent surfaces what grep and/or find would have discovered without draining a lake in the process.

Until recently it was 1 euro for a shot of Cyprus coffee (sorry, Turks, we rebranded it because we are petty bastards). Now that amount of money does not even get you a polite look. And say you buy a coffee, they will be pushy about you leaving as quickly as possible. “Would you like something else?” is the most ominous question you can get in this situation. If you respond negatively, they tell you that they will go fetch the bill. Basically, they make it clear that you are an impediment to the boss’ profiteering. Such are their instructions.

At the festival I meet the people who are otherwise invisible. They go to work, then back home. This is their budget. It is the same for me. I basically do not exist as a social animal most of the year. I even work from home for my coaching, which means that I can go for weeks without having an extended chat face-to-face. As for possibly coaching from cafeterias, that is terrible business because of how expensive they are relative to how much I charge. Plus, it would be inconvenient in practice.

Festivals are a reminder that the common folk exist, yet they only come to life when that time of the year arrives. Such is the stupid society we tolerate.

Selfie: from the festival - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-13T00:00:00.000Z

Just a picture while I was working at the festival the other day.

Saturday, September 12, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-09-12T11:54:00.000Z

Drinks with Eggleston

A couple days at a cottage was good for me. Never opened the laptop once.

But then, I come home home, fire up the computer, and immediately regret it.

I may just stop talking about the software and services I use, lest I'm suddenly labeled a supporter of fascism because one of them turns out to be built by an asshole or is friends with an asshole or once shared a quote by said asshole.

Or maybe I'll quit the whole fucking show.

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Of Day - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000Z

Herein, vignettes of today.

Silver-tipped trees, reddening leaves hanging over fences. Trees swishing like bristles of a brush, painting the day, or waving away the clouds. Morning — listening to music that makes me happy.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Two hearts drawn on a wall on the corner. It feels like a gift both to day and to everyone who passes by — the small details that make all the difference; the intersection of design and architecture — of what we build and how we collectively make it our own.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

In my mind I can transport myself to the depths of summer and feel the air of today cool me like I wished to be cooled back then.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

How architecture can remind us of places, traditions, times. Seeing a theatre in the Classical style shine white in the daylight. The shallow flowerbeds in the centre on the first floor add dashes of green, which complement the building well — Nature and architecture together.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The way the light shining through bright stained glass casts itself colourfully onto the white pillars that serve as the foundation of the church. I have never seen light shine this way before.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

I feel the trees are barometers of the seasons, while also being of the seasons themselves. Of walking past particular trees and remembering them in spring and when the bells rang loud and noticing now a few leaves grown from once-pink buds are turning red.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The joy of there being someone near me who, too, is studying an artwork in close detail.

Perspective - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000Z

The perspective of the painting; the painting of perspective; the perspective of the viewing. The contrasts of the colours between canvases. The contrasts of light between rooms.

I have seen Turner’s Sunrise several times this summer, and every time I see something new. Today, walking in, I immediately noticed a change in pace from the outdoors. Whereas I had spent the day walking busy streets, I was now in a place where there was both space and relative silence. My mind started to slow down. I did, too.

I am fascinated by how environments, especially art galleries, influence how we behave. Does the spacing between paintings in an art gallery influence our ability to focus on an individual piece? Do we walk slower in galleries because there is so much to draw our attention and we feel like we don’t want to miss anything? Why is it so easy to spend so long in an art gallery? Why, of all places, do I almost never feel the need to check the time when I am in a gallery?

On recent visits to the painting, I thought about the fog and the haze. Today, colours stood out more. The greys and the blue greys of the painting were fascinating. I thought about the periphery of the painting, and how, over minutes and over weeks, my attention ebbs between the castle in the centre and the fog and the grass around the edges. I then thought about the background. Is that a second hill? I have never thought about it before. I briefly imagine the second hill as a representation of the castle in the past – now even more faint, but still present.

I then notice that there isn’t a clear demarcation between the castle and the land on which it stands. Where does the castle end and Nature begin? I then start to think more abstractly. Where does the Earth end and the sky begin? I notice how the grasses in the foreground blends into the water. The fog blends into the background. The painting is both evocative but also enigmatic. Is it evocative because it is enigmatic? There is surely more to it. The colours are what first drew me to Turner’s Sunrise.

I take two steps back and feel as I did last time: the painting became even more ethereal and enchanting. I thought about perspectives: how moving a little bit – through space, through time – can change the impression I have in the moment of a work. I wonder what I will see next week.

the painting - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000Z

the silence of the painting; the music of the painting.

The courage of the polymaths - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000Z

Writing for Aeon magazine in an essay titled Penchants of the polymaths, Mariam Sabri informs us about four geniuses of the Muslim world.

This semester, my students are learning about four polymaths who shaped Islamic science: al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi. Their circumstances could hardly have been more different: one wrote his way out of scarcity; one was held under house arrest for a decade; one distilled an era’s medical knowledge into a text that ruled European universities for 500 years; and the last worked at the largest research institution of his age. But each shared the same underlying instinct: to move freely between mathematics, medicine, astronomy, philosophy and poetry, testing one discipline’s assumptions against another’s. My classroom is in Pakistan, where students arrive eager to talk about disruption and employability, but rarely about breadth. I want them to see, through these four lives, that this kind of expansiveness isn’t a luxury for stable times; it has produced some of the most enduring breakthroughs in the history of science.

I wish Mariam good luck in inspiring a new generation of students to follow in the footsteps of those remarkable thinkers.

What I would add to Mariam’s account is the word “courage”, which is a necessary quality of character in keeping culture open to the possibility of genius.

The polymath has courage in that they are prepared to move outside the comfort zone of any given specialisation. They have the audacity to draw linkages that others do not discern, not as a matter of superior intellect but as a result of trying in earnest. By “polymath” I apply the term in its original meaning, the one who has knowledge of many things, without implying that such a person is necessarily a genius.

I write from a position of experience as a polymath myself. My skills are well below those of the aforementioned geniuses. I have not achieved anything remarkable in any of the fields I have delved into and have no formal qualifications to even make a remotely plausible case in my favour. Nobody references me now and none will remember me in 500 years. I do, nonetheless, embody the courage and concomitant exuberance that no promise of comfort can constrain and, as such, will go wherever I want to learn whatever my condition renders possible.

I synthesise street smart with book smart. I know of politics in theory as well as day-to-day practice. I have pierced into the psyche of humans in sport and the classroom, in company and competition, in solitude and in festivities, through hardship and opulence, in the hinterlands as well as the centres of power. I combine prose with poetry, rigour with beauty, intellectuality with physical prowess, a tendency for collectivity with the reality of a lone wolf, a study of human with an understanding of programming, an intuition on colour with a conception of pattern as such into theology and religiosity.

What is common in this multitude is the virtue to give everything an honest try by bringing to it the full power of my undivided attention. It is to not seek excuses for inaction. I never say “I cannot” when what that would really mean is “I do not want to”.

My initiative is neither informed nor conditioned by the opinion of others. They default to the kind of naysaying that confines a person to a tiny room with no sight of the open vistas. Whereas I am not satisfied with the comfy chair. I will hike to the top of the mountain and dive in cold waters. I proceed with the belief that I can learn anything I set my mind to and can perform admirably in it. Such is my conviction that I am not afraid of the challenge.

This is not a matter of genius, which is beyond human design. It is about attitude, which can be studied and greatly altered by continuous effort with the appropriate method, even if it also has a biological basis.

Genius is rare. I am not that person. I was not a child prodigy and am not a late bloomer either. Though I can tell from history that genius occurs more frequently and is clustered together in cultures that are defined by openness. Those are the societies who are young in age and spirit, freed from the burdens of institutionalist pretence and attendant etiquette, and who exhibit that unmistakable zest which drives forward their inquiry into the world.

Boundaries naturally occur in all fields of endeavour. There is a need to maintain a trail of paper by which to track outcomes. It is then followed up by the want to streamline processes, replicate results, and create a baseline of expectations. The bureaucrat emerges organically as an intermediary among those whose job it is to think things through and/or make stuff happen. The bureaucrat starts out as the custodian of records and eventually turns into the enforcer of norms.

Scholars who had achieved something noteworthy at a certain point in their career, and who lack the courage to press on with their inquiry, wish to cling on to their holdings. They effectively set up barriers to entry by weaponising bureaucracy in the name of standards, with which they limit their competition and thus retain their privileged status.

Over time, bureaucracy turns intellectuality into a pay-to-win scheme. It confers social status and creates a sense of classism where the way one talks communicates more about their perceived intellectual acumen than what they actually say. At scale, this shadow play manifests into a glorified popularity contest, more superficially sophisticated than high-schoolers figuring out who is the coolest among them, though not much different in function: the celebrated experts get the lion’s share of the money while the rest learn to be happy with leftovers.

Bureaucratisation evolves along with the fracturing of intellectuality into increasingly narrower fields of specialisation. The bureaucrat thrives in this environment as the driving force of the want for interdisciplinarity, by becoming the interlocutor among the relevant specialisations. The specialist, in turn, benefits from the resulting obscurity. There is practically nobody who can check on the tangible value of their contributions. This is a state of comfort, which can be alluring, at which point complacency kicks in and the system as a whole enters its state of decline.

Courage is both contagious and dangerous. When one speaks their mind fearlessly, others are emboldened to do the same. Once a few do this, the movement grows into a power impulse that emanates from the mind to affect conduct, institution, and artefact alike.

The potency of courage consists in its unpredictability. The courageous person will not accept to be constrained and is thus inconvenient to any established order that finds comfort in stasis.

What teachers such as Mariam Sabri can do is instil a sense of alertness in their students. Encourage them to continue where they would otherwise stop. Celebrate their every attempt at formulating a question and congratulate them for their eagerness to develop an independent thought. Push them to go where their curiosity leads and be there for them when they need a tutelary figure to help them channel their vitality into a force of creativity.

This, however, demands that the teacher be not pedantic and obsessed with adherence to formality. The teacher must, in effect, have that spark of alertness to push back, even in subtle ways, against the overreach of the bureaucratariat.

Do it right and the next genius might show up soon after to remind humanity that the most predictable is the least animate.

Immigration, youth, old age, and Europe’s normalisation of the far-right - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-11T00:00:00.000Z

In an opinion piece for The Guardian titled How Sweden lost its soul – and stopped being Sweden Martin Gelin comments on Sweden’s shift away from egalitarianism.

[…] many previously unthinkable far-right ideas are now comfortably embedded in the mainstream of Swedish politics. The past four years have been characterised by an astonishing acceptance of ethnonationalist views, xenophobic rhetoric and authoritarian policies, increasingly targeting children. And many of these ideas have been absorbed and appropriated by the centre-left opposition Social Democrats.

[…]

A new Sweden has emerged, cruel and cold for migrants, including highly skilled employees of research institutions, universities, tech and medical companies – who have been stunned to learn that they are no longer welcome to work in a country where they have lived for years, sometimes decades.

I am here interpreting Martin’s point through the prism of what I have analysed at length in Gigantism and Europe’s far-right transformation (2026-09-08). The gist of what I wrote is that those liberals who today shed crocodile tears about the recrudescence of the far-right will be the enforcers of far-right policies tomorrow.

Compassion requires understanding

Locals in any given culture who profess tolerance of immigrants typically do so from a position of ideology, not lived experience. They are perfectly fine with migration, in abstract, because it does not harm their vital interests, but they are not exposed to the struggles an immigrant faces. At some basic level, they cannot relate to what it is like to be a foreigner in general and a foreigner in their own society in particular.

The average liberal thinker is comfortably middle class and privileged in ways whose extent they are not aware of. They were not forced by economic hardship to remain silent in the face of blatant exploitation. They did not live outside the private banking system and did not have to rely on the acquiescence of others. They were not displaced from their homeland to begin with.

This does not, ipso facto, make the locals malevolent. It merely introduces a barrier that can only be overcome by becoming aware of it and then working to move past it.

The menial jobs I have done were always among migrants, with only the bosses being locals. As a bartender, I worked mostly with Eastern Europeans. In construction sites, I collaborated primarily with Syrians. In agriculture, I was together with people from the Indian subcontinent. Each group has its own niche.

Whenever I was lectured about “tolerance” was from those who have not used a pickax in their life; those who were not forced to work until their palms would start bleeding. That is what teaches you tolerance for good, not books.

Beware of comfortable ideologues

A labourer among labourers feels at home because each person understands the other’s predicament, despite their otherwise diverse cultural backgrounds. The problems arise when the person has to integrate in the broader local society, which now includes the parvenu and rich classes.

I discovered as much when I worked among leftists and other progressives of a Western European background at the European Parliament and beyond in the 2010s. With a couple of exceptions, they shared the same profile of the economically well-off, highly educated figure, who pontificates about workers the way parrots talk about programming.

My colleagues would comment in the most polite fashion on my “North African looks” and encourage me to wear expensive clothes because with those I “looked impressive”. I am confident about my appearance (I am confident in general) and will appreciate a fine piece of clothing. Though this otherwise innocuous language hints at a person’s assumptions and default cultural programming.

What they were actually saying, again without bad intention, is that my path to mainstream acceptance passed through money. With enough wealth or pretence thereof I too could become invisible in phase one and attractive in phase two.

Invisibility is not a matter of skin complexion per se. In the West, “whitening”, if we are to call it thus in the interest of brevity, is a process of assimilation into the dominant cultural group. If you do what they do and say what they say, if you too worship money, then they will recognise you as their equal. Start thinking for yourself, however, dismiss their idols, and deviate one bit from their worldview only to learn that now you have an appearance that stands out, which becomes a set of values they do not approve of, which becomes your entire being rendered as an “other”.

It is for this reason that the average centrist party will become a cheerleader of both far-right doctrine and conduct. At that point, though, what could originally be justified as ignorance must now be treated as complicity and, indeed, malevolence.

The cultural vitality of youth

Europe is an ageing continent. The natives are literally dying because they shifted to the urban life en masse, where the atomic family is the upper limit of their daily community experience. They stopped having extended families, which only really occur in rural areas with the inclusion of grandparents, uncles/aunts, cousins, and neighbours whose lineage is fully known.

This society-wide ageing is not merely a matter of people becoming older. It has far-reaching cultural implications. Older people tend to lose their cutting edge on all matters of collective living. They are not as keen on experimentation because they are settled in their ways. They become less open to new ideas and gradually stop searching for fresh thinking altogether. They lose their physical fitness, which prevents them from doing sport. They lack the playfulness for theatre, fashion, art in general. They are jaded and disinterested. Thus increasingly more facets of cultural experience are eroded until they are washed away by the inexorable passage of time.

Youth provides a power impulse to culture at-large. Younger people tend to be more interested in trying things out. To experiment with new technologies, to entertain potentially useful ideas, to push the boundaries wherever possible, to do sport, to play music, to organise festivals. This practically means that there also are more job opportunities for everyone.

For example, if I had thirty young lads in my mountains here in Cyprus I could easily play football as a hobby (I am elite physically) and even be their coach as a part-time job. Same idea for being their language instructor or life mentor. But without the youth I have no chance of getting a single interested party in these or practically any other activity. And all I ask for is thirty individuals, not thirty thousand. Even that tiny number is not available. Culture as a quotidian affair is thus non-existent.

The zombification of nations

Older people in communities that have plenty of youth get a second wind in life. The generations interact with each other through shared events. The elders provide experience and guidance while the younger ones act as the spark of energy that makes things happen. A healthy society has intergenerational solidarity, which contributes to its vitality.

Conversely, the lack of youth leads to the zombification of the nation. Europe’s native populations are in this rapidly deepening phase right now, which will become the driver for their increasingly intolerant reflexes because of how old age makes society less interesting overall.

The ideologues who dismiss any argument in favour of children as “natalist”, in a derogatory sense, those who are irresponsible and selfish enough to interpret “family” as far-right dog whistles and who thus give the extremists an easy win, do not realise how the prevalence of old age kills culture.

Much like the ignorant middle class liberals vis-à-vis migrants, they are not exposed to the insidious erosion of culture I mentioned above. By the time they understand what is actually happening, they will be zombies themselves.

Europe’s increasing irrelevance in global affairs

That Europe is punching below its economic weight in international affairs is not a coincidence. Same for its Russophobia and Sinophobia. Its decline is a function of the aforementioned. Without that spark of vitality at the micro scale, there shall be no potent force at the macro level.

Europe still has a lot of influence on the global stage, owning in large part to its colonial legacy, but its relative weakening is undeniable. As with many processes in life, change happens slowly until it happens all of a sudden. This is the predicament Europeans are in.

The continent is saddled in depth. Economic growth is frail. The industrial base is weak. Competitiveness is missing. Social movements have been infiltrated and inwardly corrupted by various brands of individualism.

What the political elites have for a while now understood as their short-term escape from this death spiral is the turn to the war machine, as I explained in my previous essay about gigantism and Europe’s far-right transformation.

The elite’s gambit is to antagonise Russia and China. Plus, with the help of Israel, which remains their friend despite minor noises about the occupied West Bank, they wish to exert wider control over the Middle East and North Africa. This wider region, culturally defined by its Muslim heritage, is showing strong signs of capacity for independence and has the potential to break free from the clutches of the Western empire.

Europe’s toxic cocktail of necessity and intolerance

Whatever they do, however, European societies require mass migration to prevent their disorderly collapse. I state as much because I have no faith that there can be a quick and thoroughgoing change in attitudes that would inject new life from within.

The average European native is complacent in their ways and unwilling to tolerate any kind of perceived discomfort, preferring instead the road of short-term inertia that ends in longer-term annihilation.

Immigrants are the only force that can, in practice, invigorate Europe: highly skilled experts but also working class people. Many of those immigrants will be of a Muslim background, because Islam remains a religion of vitality, in the sense of I have described herein. This means that Europe is bound to change face in order to stay relevant or submit to the rising powers of the world.

The problem, however, is that those immigrants are entering a society of intolerant zombies. The native Europeans are not open to much anymore and will only treat with hostility the growth of those migrant communities.

They will pick totemic issues, such as the scarf Muslim girls wear to school, in an attempt to enforce conformity with their own norms. They will deny any wrongdoing, making this a matter of “liberation”. Facts are their first enemy. They will go after vagrants who purportedly are a burden on the welfare state, only to end up targeting everyone. They will not hesitate to become vigilantes who burn the Quran and who generally use brutality to force people into submission. All to extend their privilege for a little longer. And they will do it while still claiming the moral high ground and touting their “European values”.

Thursday, September 10, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-09-10T12:31:56.000Z

Tailgating at Notre Dame (2015)

I used to be entertained when I visited Mastodon. I sometimes still am, but more often lately I'm angry, disappointed, frustrated, and depressed. Not sure what to do about that, but I'm sure it's not more Mastodon.

I'm addicted to my computer(s). It's unhealthy and I don't know how I'm going to fix it. For now, I'm going to a friend's cottage for a couple of days. Maybe that'll start something.

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I just need to pick a notebook, already - Baty.net

2026-09-10T10:56:16.000Z

This is only 3 out of the five (soon to be 6^[1]) notebooks I use regularly. I don't use all of them because I need them. I use them because I can't decide which notebook to use for which purpose.

In the photo are:

Traveler's Notebook. This is nice for having options. I can throw all sorts of inserts in there, and do. The cover feels great and has worn nicely.

Field Notes. I've carried a little Field Notes notebook for a long time. I'm not always sure why, as I seldom actually write anything in them. It's comforting to know it's there, though.

Baronfig Confidant Hardcover Notebook. My first Baronfig. It's nice, but I'm not sure I prefer it to my usual Leuchtturm. I use this for tasks, lists, etc. It's a bare-bones version of "bullet journal".

I've been here a few times. Things don't change much: see Three Notebooks from 2016.

These are just the ones I can reach from my desk

I've been here many times. See Three Notebooks from 2016.

Just like with blogs, I'd prefer to have just one notebook for everything, but I'm not a person who can do that, apparently.

I have a 2027 Hobonichi Techo on the way ↩︎

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Français: La nostalgie et le mal de notre siècle - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-10T00:00:00.000Z

Le mot «nostalgie» est constituer par les mots d’origine Grec «nostos» (νόστος) et «algos» (άλγος). Nostos est l’aspiration de [re-]trouver notre communauté dans l’espace où notre culture est prévalent. Algos est le douleur ou la maladie. Donc on a le mal de n’être pas avec notre peuple dans notre localité.

La nostalgie ne signifie pas en nécessaire la désire pour les temps passé. Quand nous cherchons pour une patrie qui n’existe pas nous sommes, en effectif, guider par la vision de peut-être actualiser ça qui être présent dans la potentialité de le monde.

Pratiquement, le personne qui est caractériser par la nostalgie est celle qui est un étranger dans son milieu. Nous pouvons devenir les étrangers même sans partir de notre terre maternelle. Ça arrive quand les conditions prévalent dans la société changent radicalement.

Tu a de nostalgie quand tu poses la question «où est ma communauté?».

Avec tous les réseaux de la technologie contemporaine nous avons institué du changement quasi-total dans le monde. La vie quotidien est très rapide. Les rythmes de changement et l’obsession de croissance économique perpétuelle créent du stress chronique, la déjection, et l’apathie. La nostalgie est l’idée d’avoir stabilité entre notre peuple. Mais parce que ça n’est pas ni facile ni permanent, la nostalgie est effectivement le mal de notre siècle.

C’est impossible de reconstituer les temps passé. Devant l’âge de les premiers humains, la technologie change notre idées et introduit le logique de fixer les problèmes qu’elle a crée pour garder les avantages qu’elle a donné. Mais en fixant les problèmes nous trouvons toujours des nouveaux problèmes et des avantages. Donc la transformation est inexorable.

L’option pragmatique est d’accepter que la technologie ne part pas d’ici et [re-]trouver les modalités des relations interpersonnel qui peuvent établir les communautés résilientes. C’est ça la remède du mal de notre siècle.

Et pour ma pratique de la langue française, la solution est toujours d’accepter des erreurs et de continuer à m’exprimer sans soucis. Voilà!

Visual; textual - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-10T00:00:00.000Z

My home page is a poem. I designed it in this way to explore the extent to which a literary medium – a poem – could be used for navigation, for way finding. Poems help me see the world differently, to navigate thoughts. So too does navigation: every link is a bridge to a new place, to new thoughts. While the style is unconventional and less clear than traditional navigation bars, I love it. My home page brings me closer to poetry, and reminds me of my love of words.

For the last few weeks, I have had an idea in the back of my mind: what if my home page poem had a few icons in the background that served as visual cues to different stanzas in the poem? These icons might make it easier to find particular sections of the poem. The would also add a more visual dimension to the poem. While poems are visual in themselves – the spaces between words and stanzas, indentations, the lengths of lines, the space the poem takes on a page, the typography used, and the symbols used, among other factors, all influence how we read a poem – images add a new dimension.

One of the things I love most about the web is that I can ask myself “what would this look like?” and then, through code and tinkering, bring the idea to life. I spent some time this morning searching through Phosphor Icons, an MIT-licensed icon set I use for, among other things, the icons in my mobile navigation bar. I decided on a flower for the first stanza, which speaks of stories and poems and ideas and joy, a notebook for the second, where my most recent blog posts are listed, and footsteps for the third stanza, which is more about navigation. I am not fully set on footsteps for the third stanza, as they don’t quite relate to the invitation to say hello at the beginning of the stanza. Indeed, part of the creative challenge of this concept is to find an image that matches many words.

Here is what I designed:

Faint blue icons appear on alternating sides of each stanza: right, left, right. The icons are all at slight angles. An opacity is applied so that the icons do not stand out as much as the words in the poem. The icons complement the text in each stanza to varying extents.

Thinking about the idea of adding images to a poem brought me back to a list I started curating in the last month of places where words exist next to images. Words appear on album covers as part of the art designed to represent the album. Words appear in front of or near images on book covers. In museums, words appear on some paintings (i.e. signatures, or even, in some cases, stories), next to art (i.e. on information plaques), below art (i.e. on a label on the frame of a painting), and more. Words and images, although separate modalities, appear together so often. Indeed, I have started to add more images to my home page that was originally all-text except for my website mascot; the images I have since added – two buttons – convey information in a way I can’t with words, but also serve as a complement to what is on the page.

While I haven’t rolled out this design on my home page – and I’m not sure yet if I will – it has been interesting to explore the intersection of the visual and the textual in this way. Indeed, my poem also explores a third dimension – navigation – through the links it uses. It is fascinating to try and extend a literary medium with the affordances that hypertext allows. What if a poem revealed a piece of art every time you hovered over a stanza?

My main reservation with the icon design is that it may distract from the words. But it also creates new visual anchors. There is a lot to think about.

This crossing of disciplines relates to a conversation I had earlier this year with an uncle when I mentioned that I don’t think the sciences and the arts are disconnected, but rather are complementary. I can’t remember his exact words, but I was left feeling excited about how someone else also didn’t see them as separate buckets. Similarly, it is interesting to think of words and images not only in the context of each modality, but in the context of all the spaces in between. Indeed, we already have picture books, prose poetry, technical writing, visual communication, and many other forms that combine two concepts or traditions together.

way finding Phosphor Icons

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-09-09T19:21:07.000Z

4x5 self portrait (2019). Blew the exposure so overdid the processing to compensate.

I keep posting on baty.blog like it's my actual blog. It's got something to do with not feeling like being in Emacs for a minute. Emacs isn't required to post here, but I have a bunch of little helpful lisp functions that make it easy, so Emacs is the only place I do it. Baty.blog uses Pure Blog, which makes it even easier to post there. Also, baty.blog has comments and is now Webmention-capable, thanks to Kev's resent work on Pure Comments. Anyway, I'm not ready to bail on either blog, so you're stuck with two of them.

The left Control key on the Framework 13 stopped working this morning. I thought to myself, "See!? I told you Linux was a bad idea!" but Claude Code did 10 minutes of troubleshooting and found a change made by a recent (CachyOS) system update and it was fixed. Sometimes Claude is a miracle.

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Sometimes it's better not to say anything - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2026-09-09T18:50:00.000Z

I was planning to write a reply to a post I read earlier today. I sat down in front of my computer, started typing, then a bunch of different people sent me messages for a variety of totally unrelated reasons, and I spent half an hour chatting with them.

When I finally got back to writing the post, I started at the screen and I was like «what even is the point of writing this?». That is something that happens more and more often, recently. I still believe that dialogue is, by far, the best, and probably only, tool we have to make progress on a multitude of societal issues. At the same time, I’m more and more convinced that dialogue, on the internet, using the public digital spaces we have at our disposal, is almost impossible to have.

Some of the reasons why I think this is the case are not worth repeating; I already wrote about them plenty of times over the years on this site. But one reason I think is worth highlighting is that a core ingredient for healthy dialogue is the ability to listen. But listening is not part of the social internet landscape. You cannot perceive the listening; you can only perceive the saying.

And that is why social media dialogue is fundamentally unhelpful. It’s a lot of saying and not much listening. Which is why it often degrades into the lowest forms of communication: the name-calling, the ridiculing, the mocking, the shouting, the insulting. Not much progress though, which is unfortunate.

Which is why I think sometimes it's better not to say anything. It’s better to simply read, nod along or shake your head, and then move on.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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Re: fear, clinginess, curiosity, and injurious experiences - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-09T00:00:00.000Z

The following is an excerpt from a private exchange. It builds on what I published before: Re: how do you manage your curiosity? (2026-09-05).

It can stand on its own, which is why I am publishing it separately. Again, I am doing it without disclosing the identity of my correspondent.

The quotes that are two levels deep are mine from my previous publication. The others belong to my correspondent.

You seem to have a very stable set of commitments. I wonder if trial-and-error was also involved here. For me, there were things I wanted to keep working on in the long term, but I always had to pause due to environmental constraints and external events. Did you have similar experiences?

Overall, my biggest fear with controlling my curiosity has been losing myself, but hearing your experiences gave me enough confidence that this is unlikely to be the case.

“Fear” is the key here. Keep this in mind for my other comments as well. It is related to every aspect of this topic.

First to your question. Yes, trial and error was involved. I was not always the person I am today. My growth has been surprising in this regard. I can compare my teenage self to my present self to give you a concrete idea.

As a teenager, I had no intellectual interests whatsoever. I was not reading books, I was not studying for school, I did not have any plan for my future such as to become a scientist or an engineer or whatnot. When they were doing career orientation day I was leaving school to go have fun.

I was good at sport in general and especially good at football (soccer). I took it very seriously and was a pillar of discipline about it, meaning that I would always be on time, do all the drills correctly, never fake it, train no matter the circumstances, never find excuses not to put in the hard work.

As a sportsman, I had tenacity of body because, fundamentally, I had tenacity of mind. But I was not an intellectual in any way. I was a dumb boy. You would never think of starting a conversation such as this one with me, for example. Or any kind of “deep” discussion for that matter. I would only do silly things and talk nonsense the whole time, while making fun of everything.

I did not respect most of my teachers at school. I talked back to them and ridiculed what to me looked like their absurdity. In short, I was not a “good boy” in the way most people understand this term. I was only good when it concerned what I cared about, namely, football. I was never a bully and would hurt bullies in my midst because that is the only language they understand. I was not a delinquent child. I simply was not one to be controlled and because of my discipline, which I would demonstrate in sport but which I generally had as a form of responsibility, I was earning my independence from a very young age.

Because of an untimely injury that prevented me from becoming a professional footballer, I turned my attention to studying. Even though I was not a good student at first and had no interest in all that “incredibly boring stuff”, I discovered that I actually enjoyed thinking things in depth. I was fascinated by the process of discovery. In short, I realised that I could become a thinker. What you see now is the result of that transformation.

But becoming a thinker was not a straightforward process. I had no idea what I actually wanted to do. The formal study I picked was about the European Union (the European integration process). I did not know anything about this field and the only thing that drew me to it was that I could use foreign languages (my native tongue is Greek). Yes, I was superficial in this regard—I was a dumb boy, after all.

I formally learnt about political science, economics, and law. Then I started my blog/website where I wrote articles on the political topics of that time that were of interest to me. A Member of the European Parliament from Portugal found my blog and offered me a job. So I ended up in Brussels, working at a centre of power, before even getting my Bachelor’s degree, without ever being involved in party politics, and without any connections to people of authority.

There I realised that I did not actually like politics. The theoretical aspects are appealing, but the day-to-day stuff is not interesting to me. In the meantime, I was always observant of phenomena, and would show a knack for discerning in them that which was common in their multitude. In other words, I was becoming a philosopher without realising it in the beginning.

This trial and error made me move away from Brussels to the mountains of Cyprus, where I now am. I have a house here, that I designed from scratch and built myself. I am no longer who I was when I was at the heart of the European Union. My preferences have changed, my ideas have become more clear, I have become more efficient in my methods and decisive in my actions. That I write in one go, that I do it frequently, and that my writings have the coherence they do is evidence of this.

Through these words you can find this person because there is no faking these words. I am this. To put it metaphorically, I have an extremely sharp cutting edge which was blunt in the beginning and became what it is now by continuously hitting it against all sorts of surfaces.

You can already tell from this that my path to where I have arrived was not a straight line. It went left and right, up and down, always open to the possibility of the new that I sensed but could not name. It took me from the most modest of jobs, such as construction work and bartending, to the centres of political control, and then to the countryside where I live at the margins of Cypriot society as something akin to a more polite dog.

People romanticise the man who moves away from established society. They do it to me as well. Not because they actually want to live the frugal life. No! They prefer their comforts even when they claim otherwise. They do it because deep down they know that the only way to find yourself is by losing yourself. But fear keeps them at the level of romanticising instead of acting out of that ideal, at the level of fantasising oneself as another instead of becoming another.

You can now understand “fear” better. It is the clinginess people have towards the thing they think they own. We are not prepared to let go. We hold on to whatever we think is ours and we carry it as far as we can. This is how Sisyphus, the man who rolls a boulder up the mountain, punishes himself. He is representing clinginess: to hold on to everything and to carry it with you. This “everything” includes the self you are, where you are not prepared to forgo this self so that you might become another. The “might become” is how Sisyphus drops the boulder and can now move up to the top of the mountain unburdened. There at the top he sees open vistas, new horizons, an entire world of possibilities. He is no longer the man who is punishing a boulder uphill for an eternity. He left his clinginess roll downhill.

You find yourself by losing yourself. What does this mean? It means that you proceed through trial and error. You trust in your heart that the inkling you have about what you are searching for might actually be what you will fall in love with. This is not a rational plan. Those who think they can sort out everything through a thought experiment or some neat program are simply letting their fear do the talking. What I represent is the person who jumps off a cliff, with nothing but faith, with nothing other than the inkling that there is something there to be loved, and who grows wings on the way down.

For as long as you are thinking about it without doing anything, which means that you may be overthinking it, you are operating within the boundaries that your innermost fear has delineated. The fear has drawn your comfort zone. It is even encouraging you to continue overthinking: “figure everything out completely” it says, “before you make a move”. What it does not add is “because I do not want to leave this place”. The fear knows that you will never figure out everything, so you will stay exactly where you are, which is what it wants.

Notice that in the above paragraph I am personifying the fear as somebody else who is not you and who is keeping you there. You can think of it as another spirit, as a daemon as we say in Greek, which has a life of its own (“daemon” does not mean evil; it is a spirit with a life of its own, and thus with preferences). This is a rhetorical device, a metaphor to say in one word what requires an entire essay to describe. I am referring to the clinginess we have, where we think that what we hold on to is super valuable, when it seldom is.

Now consider all of the above in light of what you wrote about “controlling my curiosity”. This is your fear talking even if it does not feel like an intense emotion. It says “stay here, do not go anywhere”. It will show you all sorts of monsters to compel you into inaction. It will speak about horrors and the terrible fate that awaits you if you dare to move away from where you are. For as long as you do what it is telling you, you are in effect befriending your fear. The daemon has taken over you and you are now its toy. You are staying there.

Trust in your feelings. I speak of “feelings”, not reason, because there is no reasonable explanation why I jump off cliffs. I do it because fear is not my friend. I am the daemon to the daemons. I do everything I want because fear does not talk to me. I live where I do, outside a built-up area, because even fear is afraid of the dragon I have become.

There has to be a goal for the curious mind. Something greater than curiosity for the sake of curiosity, which provides immediate guidance on whether a given path is worth exploring or not.

What if the path seems unrelated to the goal on the surface, but can actually give new insights?

Then you will surprise yourself, which is consistent with what I wrote above. You will discover something you had not anticipated, something that was not part of your dreams, something that did not live within the boundaries of your comfort zone. What remains to be determined, then, is whether you will follow it or not.

Goals can feel empty when they are not embedded in the conscience as important. In other words, they are not connected to something greater still. For example, a student might not understand why it is useful to study because they have not connected the fruits of studying to some concrete lifelong benefit. Having sight of the immediate target of the study is not enough: it has to be contextualised in something that gives it meaning.

Could you give your definitions of the related terms, such as “goals”, “commitments”, “projects”, and so on? That would help me a lot.

I learned the hard way that I cannot just fake my goals! They need to be sincere. When I tried faking them, I eventually asked “why” and then collapsed.

I can give you any definition you want. I am interested in rigour. You know there is rigour in my deeds, there is coherence in my thinking, there is consistency throughout, no matter what I do.

Though you are smart and already experienced enough to understand that what I wrote above about fear fundamentally speaks to our desire for clarity and closure. We want things to be closed because what we fear the most is openendedness. The open vistas are scary, the stories without a finale leave us unsettled, whereas our cosy little bedroom with its clear boundaries is so nice.

What I write is defined by fearlessness. You know it has structure. You know it is as defined as chiselled marble. You also know it is uncompromising and will go wherever it wants because it is free of fear.

So I can give you definitions, which you can cross-reference with dictionaries or all the books of the world, but you will eventually learn that “definitions” is not what you need, even if it is what you now want.

What the curious mind needs, and may develop gradually through trial and error, is to learn the art of thriving in indeterminacy. It is the mastery of living in a world that has no closure.

Here are some definitions, to answer your question, but I repeat that those are a distraction from what you really need.

Goal: The end state of a process (e.g. I will write to Protesilaos).
Commitment: Activity that requires upkeep (e.g. watering the plants, else they die).
Project: An analysis (“breaking down”) of a goal that enumerates the prerequisites and thus the intermediate goals (e.g. to build a house, I have to build the foundation, the foundation unlocks the setting up of the walls, which then unlocks the installation of electricity, etc.—to write to Protesilaos, I have to have an idea of what to discuss, I have to have the tool to make the communication happen, and so on).

Not faking your goals is how you learn to trust your heart. Take that to where it leads you and you will discover that you too can jump off of cliffs, with faith as your sole motive, like I have been doing.

I’d always identified myself as a software developer, but I’ve been thinking that this might not be my only calling.

Ever since I started to learn computer science, I’ve been feeling the strong desire for rigorous and formalized theory. I found informal explanations in introductory books were not satisfying enough. This led me to study formal logic at some point, which I think was one of the most fascinating experiences in my life.

I do still love building things I want, but this desire for rigor is not going away. I can feel it whenever I’m studying some theory required to build something.

It is useful to be rigorous. It is also intellectually rewarding. You can think of it more as “fun” though rather than an absolute necessity for everything. Because if you make it a requirement for everything then you will be miserable as you will always be seeking closure and you will always be feeling unease while you are dealing with indeterminacy or uncertainty.

Software developer or not describes the kind of activity that is interesting to you, but is not who you are. Remember that you can be the person who lets the boulder roll down the mountain, while you move on to the summit to get a completely different view of the world. Today you are a software developer, tomorrow you can be something else. There will be elements of the past that continue to live through into your future, though they take on other forms.

People suffer because they identify with their job and with their ideas to the point where they cannot move on when the time calls for a change. Again, this is clinginess. The job/activity is helpful for as long as you are feeling alright with it. It becomes burdensome once your heart no longer has passion for it. This may happen for all sorts of reasons, including external factors. But the fact is that you will be harming yourself while forcing yourself to do that which you no longer love.

I keep mentioning emotions and love because I want to emphasise that you cannot fully rationalise the world. You will never be able to describe the beauty of a sunset through some formula. That is a reductive exercise and “reduction” is the correct concept because it takes something away from the whole.

You will never capture in words how a kiss feels. Those who always try never experience a kiss even while being kissed. You know deep down this is the case, so the sooner you embrace the multifacetedness of the human condition, the reason and the emotion, the bodily pleasure and the aesthetic delight, all as one, you will be prepared to navigate indeterminacy.

It is possible to kill curiosity. Sometimes people die inside and are forever broken, never to find their zest again and make any meaningful contribution that fulfils them. Though I do not expect this to happen merely by directing your curiosity. It will have to be something more injurious.

What would “something more injurious” be like?

Some really harmful experience like betrayal or abuse. Though it can happen more slowly too as slow erosion and eventual collapse of an environment. For example, you love a certain job and you go work in a certain place where you discover that over time it has become a toxic milieu. This is the death by a thousand cuts that people never take seriously because they only think of death by a single blow.

There, because of that toxicity, you become stressed and jaded. Your defences are always up and you lose trust in everything, including your very ability to cope with the challenges. Your horizons start shrinking because there is nothing around you to look towards with a sense of admiration and awe. Nothing is beautiful anymore. Nothing is attractive. As the horizons shrink, they converge into a tiny dot, with darkness all around. There you only find depression, which is how you as the person who reached that point dies; it dies while still leaving behind a body that lives as an empty shell hoping to be animated again, to have a soul breathed into it once more.

Consider this metaphor of the shrinking horizons in terms of thinking things in depth. If you go too deep, in a literal sense, you only find darkness and the kind of air that poisons your lungs. There may be riches along the way, such as valuable minerals, but you are moving towards a world that is not your world and will be hostile towards you.

This is why the wisest of Greeks speak in metaphor and why people who do not understand that surface and depth are one only think literally. We call these phenomena “Hades”, the god of the underworld, the god of the dead, the god of wealth. In the depths you find riches and you also find death. The riches are literally the minerals but figuratively they are the profundity of thought, that deep knowledge the curious mind seeks.

The “underworld” is a place that is very close to us while being decisively alien. We move towards Hades whenever we go in depth and reach a point where all we see is that tiny dot. In seeing that dot, we have become the person who can only see a dot. We have been transformed into that being. But that being no longer belongs to the world of the sun. It is forever destined to stay with Hades: he will not let anybody leave. Hence death.

So the injurious experience that involves depression will kill the person. This means that what you were doing is no longer viable. There may exist a new soul that can be breathed into your body. This can happen as you move towards a different direction where you might discover something else that you are passionate for. This is again the metaphor of transanimation, of your soul dying so that there is a new soul to take its stead.

I have experienced this death and this transanimation. It is part of the trials and errors I have been through. And because I was dead, and because I was reborn, I am not afraid of anything anymore.

Also, I’m being more and more skeptical about being a software developer. The industry in MY COUNTRY [edited for privacy] appears to be mostly talking about running businesses, building agents with LLMs to ship products more efficiently. I don’t want to play that game, however entertaining these can be.

I understand and feel you. It seems so shallow. Though you realise that people will be shallow most of the time, no matter what you do.

I can tell you from my self that the curious mind, the mind that tends to go far and deep, typically is lonely. It is very unlikely that you meet another person who is on the same wavelength as you. You might have a thousand friends, covering a broad range of activities, and you will still be lonely in this regard.

“Lonely” means that you cannot share the depths of how you feel with others because they simply cannot understand you. They are not there where you can go so they have no frame of reference. Imagine you are a fish and wish to invite your human friends to the depths of the ocean: they will never be with you because such is their nature and such is your nature as well.

To reuse the metaphor I brought up earlier, in my case people meet an ordinary man. I am talkative. I am amiable. I am fun. I can do stuff with them and help them out. What they cannot fathom in the face of all this, because the depth is obscure, is that I actually am a dragon.

I let my curiosity take me far enough. Though I have a sense of what is “too far”; a sense that I got through experience. “Experience” basically means trial and error. You will have to feel some pain to know when to stop. The body is an excellent mechanism in this regard. It is why you want to put ideas to the test. Do not keep them in your head. Try things out, give them a material expression, which will then allow your body to give you the fine feedback it is capable of.

I read this as getting myself into a feedback loop; I have an idea, test it out, gain feedback, and repeat this process. I guess I need some practice here. I tend to overthink without actually doing anything.

I’m also curious about how this would look like in philosophy.

Exactly! You want the feedback loop. You want it to involve your body. You want it to have consequences “out there”. Those are conditions that somehow shape your decisions. The “out there” reality of your ideas helps you have a three-dimensional understanding of what they are and what they can produce.

The philosopher is prone to overthinking and thus to suffering. All of what I wrote above can be presented as my philosophy of living, which is that deeds form you, that your choices become your destiny. This is a long way of saying “you cannot just be a friend of wisdom (literally what philosopher means) but you must become an agent of wisdom”. Stop thinking. Start acting.

Second year - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-09T00:00:00.000Z

I woke up in excitement this morning. Today is the day I can start to access my course materials for next year. My second year of university doesn’t officially start for another few weeks, but from today I can start reading through the introductory material. I spent the morning reading about the structure of the year in the art history and creative writing modules that I am taking: the course overview, how assignments are structured, the referencing requirements (which are going to get more intense in art history in particular, because I will be citing more artworks), and more.

I am writing this in the afternoon, when the excitement from this morning still has not waned. If anything, it has grown more intense. I am so excited for the next year. I started reading the introduction to my creative writing textbook and already started to feel challenged in exactly the way I want. The course overview for the art history module – Art and life before 1800 – piqued my interest in several places. In October we’ll be starting with a block on Art and its Environments, where we’ll be studying landscapes and forests and snowscapes and more. I was just thinking yesterday how much I love snowscapes. I wonder what I will learn about them next year. Across all of the art history work for next year, I am especially interested in learning about the role art occupied in society through history, a key theme throughout all of the blocks we will study.

In creative writing, the main focuses will be fiction, poetry, and life writing. I am excited for all of these areas. The course also touches on building a writing practice. While I write often anyway, I have already found the exercises in creative writing have pushed me in new ways. This is precisely what I want from studying: to challenge myself and grow my skills in areas that interest me. There will also be materials on professional publication, which, while not a goal I have right now, will surely be interesting.

After I caught my breath after a morning of reading, I realised that my first year of university is essentially complete. It will be a few weeks before I get the results from my final assignment, but there is no more work to do for my first year. I did it! I finished my first year! It feels somewhat surreal for my first year to be over, but here we are. Time flies. I am proud of all the work I did in my first year, and am looking forward to the next one.

My first year, which was structured as a foundation in the humanities with opportunities to start exploring the subject area(s) we found most interesting in more depth toward the end of the year, was a whirlwind through art history and creative writing and history and religious studies and more. Every week there was something new to study. I studied Jane Eyre, Antigone, the Benin bronzes, Van Gogh, the foundations of Buddhism, and more. While I was eager to get to the art history topics last year, I loved the approach my school took to covering a wide area. It was the inclusion of creative writing in my first year that helped me build more confidence in my writing, especially in fiction, and ultimately led me to change my degree from a sole focus on art history to studying both art history and creative writing. This combination feels right for me.

Here’s to another year of studying!