Nicholas > Recent Status Updates

Don’t you die on me, Rocky!

Blip A has docked to Hail Mary. Knock knock knock. Is it really an 👽? We’ll find out!

Astrophage. Slippery little suckers. Where are they leading us? “Hail Mary full of Grace.” Ryland Grace 🙄

“War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force.” - Sergeant Zim

On the bounce!

“Greeks were drawn to enigmas. Resolving an enigma means shifting it to a higher level.” From Oistrus to Oedipus, “in the maximum pointlessness lies the maximum splendor.”

Just wrapped up Ch. 9 and it’s interesting how Calasso starts to let go of you. He’s concluding his book now that we’re towards the end, and he does so gently - as id he’s well aware of what you’ve just been through. A delicate hand holding throughout a nearly incomprehensible journey of nature, man and cosmos. Like Aristotle says “ancient physiology.” Breathe in, breathe out. We’re almost there.

Book VIII was intense. That one really leaves you buzzing. Feels like Calasso reached a crescendo and gets you as close as he can to understanding what myth was and, most importantly, still is.

I swear I’ve always known, deep down, the Sparta was a bunch of Communist lunatics. Lycurgus sounds like the blueprint for Lenin and Stalin. In fact, their greatest weapon of all was their own propaganda depicting them as a noble and virtuous, law abiding society. But they were really just deceitful and ruthless, Commie killers. I must have an Athenian blood memory about those punks, they never sat right with me.

Stalin. Wow. Absolute lunatic. I see him embodied in so many of these low IQ, LARPing “revolutionaries” of today. It’s the exact same type of nasty, rat like Prole like little Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was. Or, excuse me, Lenin, as he liked to be called. Because, of course he used pseudonyms, he was a psychopath revolutionary his whole life and had to live under many different aliases while exiled. Sheesh.

If, driven by an old compulsion, we were to define what the gods were to the Greeks, we might say, using a Occam’s razor, everything that takes us away from the ordinary sensations of life. “With a god, you are always crying and laughing,” we read in Sophocles’ Ajax. Life is a mere vegetative protestations, glazed eyes looking out on the world, the certainty of being oneself, without knowing what one is…

Just finished book VII. Focused on Demeter and Persephone and the deal that was made to send Hades’ bride back to him half the year. Representing the rotation of the earth and the changing of seasons.

I mean, this may as well have been written yesterday. Never before has Marx and Engel’s vision been more popular, particularly in the U.S. And it’s frightening to think that Hoover had laid out such a clear warning, only to have his character assassinated by the Marxists. Much like Nixon, they torpedoed him with propaganda and conspiracies using the state media. I’m excited and nervous to continue.

Starting Chapter 5. Just wrapped a large part on Delphi including the myth of Charila and Plutarch’s study of myth for use in his teachings. Very fascinating.

Hilarious how I found out about this book while reading an old 1993 Entertainment Weekly. Either way, I’m very excited, I feel this will help in the dilution process with all the mythology I’ve ingested over the years. At the very least, a fresh perspective! First chapter really emphasized Zeus’ betrayal.

Not bad, actually pretty awesome if you consider it was written in the 1950s. The movie is all I know, and so far it seems like a good adaptation.

They’ve found the undulating green cave and the creepy copies of ole Ricky. And poor Rosie, getting dragged like that, like ants carrying a kill into the colony. 🤢

I really hope they exterminate these things, although I’m not too hopeful. Something still doesn’t feel right.

It’s eerie, something is very “off” at this facility.

And Ricky is super weird, the wife is hurt from the car accident but still going to come out to the desert? The kids were scared to go visit their mom, but they were forced to.

Have these things taken over the world and Jack is talking about the outbreak in the past tense? Yikes? Big if true. 😬

There’s something very strange happening beyond the obvious. The way Jack talks in the past tense at points, describing is underestimation of the swarm.

The wife, Julia, element. Raising the swarms like pets. Teaching them.

So far I’m suspecting that his baby Amanda is definitely compromised, maybe all three kids, and MRI magnets definitely affect the swarm. We shall see if my predictions are close.

“That was how little I understood my adversary.”

Well, we’ve just been introduced to the swarm. Interesting to finally understand his concept of this tech. It’s a genetic manufacturing as much as it’s a micro mechanical. A mix between cellular and silicon. And the apparatus Crichton imagines is spectacular. The gleaming glass octopus assembly line.

So far so fun!

So far so good. I love the idea of utility fog. One of my favorite science fiction concepts.

Jack just accepted the offer from his old boss. Ricky is acting weird, and everyone who is suspicious looks hot. 😆 Apparently changing your features is one of the first things these things do when assimilating.

I’m guessing MRI machine magnets are what can destroy these things.

I’m just gonna say it, Anatoli was just a typical stubborn Russian who would never dare back down after feeling slighted. It sucks how things turned out between the author and Toli, but that’s pretty much par for the course if you try telling an Eastern European that they made a mistake. Either way, Anatoli was a badass mountaineer, shit happens. He, quite obviously, was only “guiding” as a means to an end.

Well, that escalated quickly. It’s wild how there’s zero margin for error when you’re in the “death zone.” Storm, miscommunication, mistaken identities and timelines due to hypoxia. Like David Robert’s quote from pg 152 says, “much of the appeal of mountaineering lies in its simplification of interpersonal relationships… adolescent refusal to take seriously aging, frailty of others…”

Vicious.

My reading “climb” continues for Into Thin Air. The author has just made it to camp 3 for his “acclimatization” and returns to base camp. Concerns are expressed about having an author along on the expedition, regarding unnecessary pressures from being written about. Pretty fascinating when you consider what Rob Hall was risking, business wise, if the climb was a failure. Makes ya think! 😬

Author is at Camp 2. He encountered his first two dead bodies, well, one and a half. His recollection of the IMAX Expedition and Sandy Hill Pittman was a fascinating anecdote. The fate of the Sherpa HAPE was also wild, after all that work to help him rapidly descend, he ends up dead anyway. Brutal.

So far so good. Krakauer knows how to make you feel like you’re there. The cast of characters up on the mountain that spring of 96 was wild. You had the Schoener guy, known as “The Belay” from the notorious K2 incident in the 50s. The scammy dude leading the South African expedition. The competing enterprises of Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants. What a wild series of events. Time to keep reading!

Wow, his battle with the spiritual fraudsters was big. He straight up puts them as lunatics and criminals whose sole intention is to defraud unsuspecting innocent people. The punch(es) wasn’t how I imagined, so it’s nice to know how that actually transpired. Damn Whitehead.

What a phenomenal showman! While he may have been “difficult” he probably deserved to be. There were A LOT of weirdos around. RIP HH

Houdini’s relationship with Sir Authur Conan Doyle is hilarious to me. Doyle was clearly disturbed by the death of his son and others in WWI, but the way he fell into Mysticism, Psychics and “Mediums” was just weird and sad. He tried so hard to convert Harry and even went so far as to claim he DID convert him. Harry got pissed and publicly denied Doyle and dissolved their friendship. Houdini was based af.

Houdin’s flirtation with flight. His foray into movie making. Particularly The Grim Game and his stunt jumping from the wing of one airplane to another. Considering MI: The Final Reckoning, which just released last month, features Tom Cruise doing a bi-plane wing-walking stunt in the final climax. It would seem what’s old is new again! Houdini inspiring artists long after his passing. Legends truly never die.