#Faust that was the man's whole last 200~ years. life's work. he just lost in front of his eyes. that his colleague extended his life-

[masked-and-doomed]

I should have written it here why did I write it in tags ofc I was gonna yap to high heaven.

Reblogging it so I can SS and continue my yapping-

This scene from -STRIVE-'s story's epilogue has always been so nice to me

It perfectly encapsulates both Faust and Chronus with just one sentence and feels unique to the other epilogue scenes. It feels like it was written JUST for these two.

Faust was forgiven for his sins as a serial killer (likely Doctor Baldhead. I mean, the rare fish with his bag on it is literally called "Dr. Octohead", it can't get much more obvious) and brought peace to the world with his healing. The best example of this I can think of is Leo going from calling him "the unlicensed doctor" in Faust's arcade mode, to discussing strategy in the same room as him.

As for Chronus, while he hasn't had time to do too much just yet, the seeds are already planted for his redemption. The first step was Faust choosing not to kill Chronus when they met at the end of Xrd SIGN's story. On it's own, this didn't mean much, since all Faust wanted from Chronus was answers about the Japanese colony, however, by the time we reach Faust's Revelator arcade mode, things have changed. They aren't exactly "friends", but it's clear that they're now working toward the same goal: figure out what's going on in the Japanese colony. By the end of it, however, not only si Faust actively protecting Chronus from Leo, Chronus even sits down and has tea while Faust calls Haehyun!

Also, side note, but, I find it really funny that Chronus just slides across the screen when they run away from Leo, I have no idea why they didn't just speed up his walking animation.

Back to the main topic, in my opinion, it's this tiny bit of forgiveness that pushes Chronus to do more than he has to. Sure, he could just sit in the Japanese colony all day, but he doesn't, he goes out on his own to save Asuka from Absolute Defense: Felion (btw, I am 100% certain that Chronus invented that technique and no one can convince me otherwise). This action, of course, helps bring peace to the world of GG, as Asuka was VITAL to stopping the revival of Justice in Revelator.

TL;DR: Chronus for -STRIVE-, Chronus cool, line from -STRIVE- epilogue cool

[redvalravn]

Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War - Chapter Three: “Forbidden” books of Western culture

Mary Sue heads home to Maine. He needs some private time to read and think in his family's old house, which has no electricity or running water. Mary Sue is tired of modern conveniences. He wants "less noise and more green." 

How dare you. Leave Tolkien out of this. 

I’d put some money by during my time in the Corps, enough to cover me for some months anyway; the garden and deer in season (or, if need be, out of season) would keep me from starving. The whole country was overrun with deer, more than when white men first came to North America, because there were so many restrictions on guns and hunting. In some places they had become pests; we literally could not defend ourselves from our own food.

Once I got settled, I took up Professor Sanft’s books, “that golden chain of masterpieces which link together in single tradition the more permanent experiences of the race,” as one philosopher put it. Homer and Plato, Aristotle and Aristophanes, Virgil and Dante, and Shakespeare and the greatest literary work of all time, the Bible, which was once banned from American schools, which shows as well as anything what America had become.

These are some of the implied-to-be-banned books that  supposedly define Western culture. I was under the impression that in this universe, which is meant to be like our universe, classics like Shakespeare's plays, Dante's Inferno, the Iliad and the Odyssey are quietly shoved under the rug for the sake of not offending anyone. Mary Sue says in the last chapter that the Martin Institute was "offering Dartmouth students the courses the college would no longer teach." These are still taught in college, if not high school. I read The Odyssey in high school English. We recognize that they still have things to say that are of value and we just make note of what is no longer acceptable. As in, "We used to think this way, but now we know better."

The Bible. Is not. Banned. From. Public. Schools. According to the ACLU website, students and teachers are free to read the Bible, (or the Torah, or the Koran) in their free time, in the school building, and hold onto their personal religious beliefs, you just can't hold worship services that prioritize one religion over another in a public institution. 

As if the author would accept that as an argument. As the reader finds out in the next chapter, the ACLU is evil. 

This reminds me of War Room, another propaganda piece with a militaristic call to arms to get "prayer warriors" in the federal government. At least the metaphor isn't quite as shoehorned. 

The Bible being the greatest literary work depends on what you mean. If we’re going by impact, then it certainly is one of the greatest. If we’re judging by quality...there's typos, censoring, gratuitous porn, no coherent plot, fanfiction in the (agreed-upon) canonical text, lots of excuses for racism, sexism, homophobia, rape, slavery...never mind I see why he likes it.

From Xenophon and Herodotus and Thucydides and Caesar and Tacitus and all the rest, military and not (I did finally make it through Plato, too), I learned three things. Maybe they were basic, even simple. I’m not a great philosopher. But they were important enough to shape the rest of my life.

The first was that these ancient Greeks and Romans and Hebrews and more modern Florentines and Frenchmen and Englishmen both were us and made us. They had the same thoughts you and I have, more or less, but they had them for the first time, at least the first time history records. Do you want a thoroughly modern send-up of Feminism in all its silliness? Then read Aristophanes‘ Lysistrata—it’s only 2500 years old. For a chaser, recall the line of 17th century English poet and priest John Donne: “Hope not for mind in woman; at their best, they are but mummy possessed.” Pick any subject you want, except science, and these folks were there before us, thousands of years before us in some cases, with the same observations, thoughts and comments we offer today. We are their children. 

That led to my second lesson: nothing is new. The only person since the 18th century to have a new idea was Nietzsche, and he was mad. Even science was well along the road we still follow by the time Napoleon was trying to conquer Europe.

There are no modern philosophers. They don't exist. There are no new ideas left. There are a lot of people being scammed for philosophy degrees. What bullshit is this that there are no new ideas? We're currently having debates today that were unthinkable two centuries before, like net neutrality. New ideas may not have come into popular knowledge since the 18th century, but perhaps those need to stand the test of time to be worthy of remembrance. The technology we use for science we do now is completely unrecognizable to science of 200 years ago. It's impossible to progress in certain areas of modern science without computers. However, the scientific method has been around since antiquity, and we still use it, because it works. The way we think and the way we do things, if they've changed at all, are different because we found a better way.

Back in the old USA, newness—novelty—was what everyone wanted. Ironically, that too was old, but early 21st century Americans were so cut off from their past they didn’t know it (or much else, beyond how to operate the TV remote and their cell phone). 

You see, sometime around the middle of the 18th century, we men of the West struck Faust’s bargain with the Devil. We could do anything, have anything, say anything, with one exception: verweile doch, du bist so schön. We could not tarry, we could not rest, we could not get it right and then keep it that way. Always we must have something new: that was the bargain, and ultimately the reason we pulled our house down around us.

Satan, like God, has a sense of humor. His joke on us was that most of the stuff we thought was new, wasn’t. Especially the errors, blunders, and heresies; they had all been tried, and failed, and understood as mistakes long, long before. But we had lost our past, so we didn’t know. We were too busy passing around “information” with our computers to study any history. So it was all new to us, and we had to make the same mistakes over again. The price was high.

But sure, yeah, let's listen to the geriatric jerkoff whine that we're all glued to our phones and technology. It's much better to have culture be stagnant forever instead of growing with accumulation of knowledge. They could have predicted such things in Nietzche's time. 

The literary significance of Lysistrata is a whole other discussion, but its not a feminist work, although both the men and the women come off looking foolish in that one.

"Hope not for mind in woman; at their best, they are but mummy possessed." Is a line from "Love's Alchemy." The point of the poem is that true love is as impossible to find as it's impossible for an alchemist to actually make gold. The second stanza criticizes women in general and says that they're "vain bubbles" not worth men's time, honor, and money. The best men can hope to find in a women is an incarnation of their mother. Ew.

What mistakes? What failures? Are we still talking about technology? 

The third lesson, and the one that shaped the rest of my life, was that these thoughts and lessons and concepts and morals that make up our Western culture—for that is what these books contain—were worth fighting for. As Pat Buchanan said, they were true, they were ours, and they were good. They had given us, when we still paid attention to them, the freest and most prosperous societies man has ever known.

The Great Pat Buchanan. Conservative political commentator. Senior Advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. Republican Presidential Nominee in 1992 and 1996. Co-founder of American Conservative Magazine. Contributer to VDARE, an anti-immigration activist group. Anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. 

You know what, we can learn from history. ALL history. Not just white history. I wonder if William Lind has read about Confucianism or other Eastern philosophy, or if he's aware that we use Arabic numbers, or that the earliest known recordings of the concepts of zero, infinity, irrational numbers, and negative numbers, were from India and China.

You know what would actually be destroying Western culture? Book burning. Destroying of places of worship. A Christian registry. Rounding up of anyone who says they’ve read Plato, or the Bible, and sending them to death camps...wait has this kind of thing happened before anywhere else?