Blog Entries from Xoic

  1. Breaking Down Breaking Bad

    I did a few posts about it back in the Hodgepodge thread, but now I want to devote some time and energy to really digging into it. And I'll start with this: The video is from this article: Our Favorite Lessons on Screenwriting from 'Breaking Bad' Once again I'm using the blog as a notebook where I can drop links and articles I'm learning from.
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  2. Little Stevie's adventures in Hollywood

    Close Encounters is really the story of Little Stevie Speilberg getting swept up from his ordinary life and into the exciting world of Hollywood. You gotta look deep into the subtext to see it though. He used Richard Dreyfus as his alter ego in Close Encounters and Jaws, and both movies feature elements of his own life and the excitement he experienced getting into Hollywood. I know, that's a lot to swallow. Guess I'd better start to back it up. Note the UFOs are mainly seen as spectacular...
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  3. Canning and food preserving

    I want to quickly put down some info, partly just to help me remember it and sort out some ideas. But it also might help people who are interested in getting started on this. How I started—originally I bought emergency food— a few cases of MREs and then a bunch of #10 cans of freeze-dried foods. It's pretty expensive, but this stuff will literally keep for a decade or longer. This was my only plan in the beginning, but then an idea hit me— I should look into stocking up on foods I already...
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  4. Hodgepodge

    I have a couple of videos I want to post here, but they don't fit into a single category (well, they do if you expand your thinking enough). So this is a hodgepodge thread. One of the best overall statements I've seen on the Petersonian understanding of the Bible: And a great talk by Iain McGilchrist about his latest book The Matter with Things:
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  5. The real meaning of magic

    I was plunged into this by a random statement made by Ian Crossland on the Tim Pool podcast. Ian is not the brightest bulb on the tree, and often says things that seem ridiculous to me, but this one took me up short and launched a new line of inquiry for me. He said something to the effect that Words were originally magic spells, that's why they're spelled Hey, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even somebody who says a lot of ridiculous things also spits a lot of truth. I know...
  6. Visual Thinking

    I discovered Dr. Temple Grandin, who is an extremely visual thinker. She brings up some fascinating things in this video: I still haven't followed up on my earlier post about visual thinking, and I always intended to. This is getting me fired up about it again. I don't have the powerfully vivid imagery she seems to have, but I do get some visuals, and I can work with them in my mind, change them at will etc. I definitely do some of my thinking this way, probably especially when I'm drawing...
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  7. Some excellent explanation of Jung's ideas

    Illustration painted by Jung in his Red Book I spent some time scouring the internet for tidbits about the Red Book and suddenly ran across this amazing page: The Red Book: Some Notes for the Beginner Here's a blurb by way of explanation of what the Red Book is for those who don't know: “The years. . . when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My...
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  8. The Exodus begins

    Back in the spring Jordan Peterson announced (around the time he joined Daily Wire) that he was getting together some of the smartest people he knows to go into deep discussion about Exodus in preparation for a new series of Biblical lectures, as a followup to his amazing series on Genesis. Apparently the Exodus Seminar has happened, and as far as I'm aware this is the first video to be offered in relation to it, aside from some mentions here and there in some of Peterson's videos.*...
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  9. The pattern shown in every story of Genesis

    I'm working my way through the Matthieu Pageau book The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, and it's a real mind blower. The symbolism is pretty simple, but not self-evident to people raised in a materialistic culture that has lost the understanding of this code of symbolism. I'm going to try to explain it here as well as I can. Jonathan Pageau in his videos always seems to leave important parts out, and even Matthieu leaves some things out that need to be understood. I can...
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  10. Many sci-fi monsters are a continuation of mythological monsters

    What I mean is that they're chimerae or hybrids, symbolic combinations of various animals, sometimes fused with the human. In mythology they were often represented very simply as two different species merged at the waist—Centaurs, Mermaids etc. Or sometimes many different beasts merged, as in Griffins. It means the monster has the specific properties of the various creatures represented—the fierceness of the lion for instance, with the venemous sting of a scorpion, plus wings to fly with....
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  11. Jonathan Pageau on Literal vs Symbolic interpretation of the Bible

    This guy is so good at explaining this!! I hope one day to be able to do it as well, or anywhere close. The events described in the Bible happened—of course they happened!! But it's being told in a language that compresses vast cosmic ideas into a few words and uses symbols, such as Adam for Man-as-such, and Eve for woman-as-such. And in the ancient world everyone understood this. At least many did—there may well have been literalists even then. Hard to say, that world is largely lost to...
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  12. Jonathan Pageau explains the esoteric view of Heaven

    This is the stuff I've been going on and on about, only he explains it much better! He's an orthodox Christian. The orthodox religions are very esoteric in their outlook. Heaven in the esoteric estimation is the world of pure abstraction. It's the same thing Plato was referring to with his world of perfect forms. Pure thought, pure idea. The invisible things, that have no physical mass.
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  13. We're of two minds, say two great men

    Iain McGilchrist on his new book The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World: "The devastatingly reduced vision of the world that we now have—this reductive, materialist ideology—which is absolutely not compelled on us by science, as people seem to think, by science or by reason. It's a version of the world which is very much consonant with the view that one of the hemispheres of the brain—the left hemisphere—takes. And we shouldn't be paying too much...
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  14. "You're not the master of your own house" (your own mind)

    Psychologically, there are sub-personalities living in the unconscious that can take control, that have an independent autonomous character and are not at all subject to your will. In fact many times you're subject to theirs.
  15. Working with mental imagery or the lack of it—digging into hyperphantasia and aphantasia

    In which I begin to lay out the terms hyperphantasic and aphantasic and what they mean. Developing and working with mental imagery, and without it. Creativity emerging from the unconscious.
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