”We must put our desires under merciless suspicion."
Joined January 2020
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Orthon von Bismarck retweeted
Jun 12
In Türkiye, you can just have Guenon, Ibn Arabi and sports in the same magazine. Amazing
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Orthon von Bismarck retweeted
Tolkien would've felt like Oppenheimer, Tolkienheimer if you will, if he saw the mess he caused by accidentally popularizing the idea of "worldbuilding"
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Orthon von Bismarck retweeted
Jun 12
People don't use "liminal" to mean something on the border, a space in between different realities
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Hideo Kojima please lock in
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Orthon von Bismarck retweeted
bicameral mind is the biggest midwit slop anybody has ever come up with. it's like if Harari wrote a book after reading an AI summary of the phenomenology of spirit
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At this point most fantasy aesthetics aren't really based on medieval - or any historical - aesthetics, but rather various generic fantasy aesthetics with no real corresponding style or designs in the real world.
Jun 10
"Hello? Fantasy Writer? Can you not base the world on medieval society aesthetic?"
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Ohlmarks is an incredibly fascinating and immensely productive writer in general, having produced a large number of translations and works on very disparate subjects. His doctoral dissertation was a weird one about arctic shamanism which Mircea Eliade was rather unimpressed by.
Jun 11
Fun fact, the Swedish translation of Lord of the Rings was considered so bad that the translator had a crashout over all the criticism and wrote a book accusing Tolkien of being a Nazi sorcerer.
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I think if I am not mistaken that he was the first to provide a proper translation of the Dhammapada into Swedish. As for its quality I cannot say. Every Swedish buddhist is basically familiar with the edition even if they're unfamiliar with Ohlmarks himself.
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A man of a great number of talents and distinct personality flaws, he is however a remarkable stylist, and is always immensely pleasant to read.
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In a way, I think "genre" can be suitably defined as that which comes into being when a set of conventions are repeatedly employed poorly.
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Just started reading one of the classic primers to cults in America. It's somewhat dated but sursprisingly sober in how it approaches the difficulties of the subject. The introductory chapter makes a couple of interesting points which are forgotten in much of modern discourue.
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Much of the reason why California became a hotspot was simply because you’d find a lot of summer break uni students from other places just loitering around there.
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Thread continued in this QT
x.com/Orthon_Spaceman/status…
Will return post lunch for this thread to discuss the concept of the cult as such, as Melton deals with it and the issues I have with it.
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Will return post lunch for this thread to discuss the concept of the cult as such, as Melton deals with it and the issues I have with it.
Just started reading one of the classic primers to cults in America. It's somewhat dated but sursprisingly sober in how it approaches the difficulties of the subject. The introductory chapter makes a couple of interesting points which are forgotten in much of modern discourue.
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Melton suggests that those who studied such groups had a habit of not working rigorously from cumbersome definitions and models and more associatively from a set of well recognized examples which stand as prototypes, such as ISKCON, Scientology, Unification church etc.
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An important point is that the modern use and spread of the cult concept is less indebted to the work of academics than it is to anti-cult movments, deprogrammers and similiar initiatives which emerged principly as a reaction to the spread of new religious movements in the 1970s.
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