Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Stats for 2023 and Goals for 2024

It’s a good idea to take stock of things achieved and goals missed at least once a year. Personally I always failed to count the things I did manage to achieve in a meaningful manner, and instead noted only the things not yet completed, or failed. It is perhaps a somewhat unhealthy approach to life, especially in terms of teaching a balanced work/life way of living, but then, that whole idea itself was based on the artificial concept of slaving away for a wage 9 hours a day for someone else. Five hundred years ago, you worked every hour God sent on Earth just to survive and try and leave something worthwhile to your children. And since those times are certainly more likely to be upon us in the next few years and decades, it may well be much healthier to figure out what is worthwhile doing with your life and then making that your purpose for the time you have here on Earth.

Insofar as I ever had such a purpose consciously in my head, it probably was something like:

1. Get a stable, happy, meaningful relationship you can rely on 100% (which is a somewhat autistically utopic goal).

2. Share the ideas, concepts, theories, I come up with that are useful with other people through my writing (on a personal level, this ties to hobbies of mine linked to human history, ancient structures, physics, the natural order of things, reality, philosophy, the human mind, the human body, biology, chemistry, astronomy, certain aspects of mechanical engineering, martial arts, hypnosis, writing itself, language, etymology, religion (a vast area that has many subcomponents), metaphysics, art and the numinous, so-called ESP, and many other topics, some of which turned out to be dead ends, and others being topics I can’t or won’t discuss publicly).

Those were my primary modes of functioning until my early 40s. It is really only after that when I had the concept of family and children come into it, and my first attempt at it was as disastrous as can be, bar real horror stories.

Since then, however, the goal of sharing the ides and concepts has evolved considerably into:

3. Do right by my wife and children (regardless of whether they initially see or even understand the purposes of my long term goals, since these will bear fruit in due course).

4. Which in the big picture means building a civilisation and fortified community that is large enough to be self-sustaining and self-protective enough to remain as a viable human civilisation in the foreseeable and even unforeseeable future. On a purely logical basis this is best achieved by selecting the most long-lasting, enduring and reality based life philosophy and tradition available in human history that has achieved the most positive results. Historically there is only one contender for that title: The (real) Catholic Church. It has literally civilised the planet, invented science, risen from the ashes multiple times throughout history, increased human happiness and the positive humanity of people in ways no other belief system ever has, created beauty and art and charity and faith at levels unmatched by any other philosophy, and lasted longer than any other empire, system, or human endeavour ever achieved, at more than 2,000 years. The closest second place is the Roman empire, which at about 800 years didn’t even come close.

Sure, Catholicism, and hence actual Christianity that was responsible for such things is currently only real and alive in Sedevacantism, (and 1958 sedevacantism at that, let’s be clear), but as I said, the Church has risen from the ashes before. The persecution of Christians by various Roman emperors, the attacks on it by gnostics, heretics, and satanists, throughout the ages, the Arian heresy that reduced actual Catholic bishops to a handful, the dark era of about 400 AD when savagery and degeneracy ruled almost all lands and Saint Benedict came along, and so on.

So the rest of my life will clearly be dedicated to building a community of proper Catholics with the skills, will, and intent of achieving total self-sufficiency and ultimately self-governing independence. It’s a big goal, but hey, what else am I going to spend my time doing?

So in practical terms, 2023 has been a very hard year, but some progress has been made.

The first sedevacantist aside from our family has purchased a home near us and will be visiting in January to see what his next move is, which is probably to rent it to any other willing sedevacantist that wants to move here. That is a pretty decent achievement, when you consider I still haven’t achieved self-sufficiency for myself, in terms of food production, clean water, and energy production. Nevertheless it’s a promising start given we have not been here three years yet and considering the conditions we started out from.

I failed at producing a working gasifier, but not for lack of trying, and rather, discovered that due to modern considerations, the much stricter tolerances of modern engines and the abandoned practice of drying wood in most places, it is really not very practical or viable to create a functioning one, and if you do, it will most likely gum up your generator very quickly.

I also suffered some health issues, damaging my back, knee and elbow joints somewhat, due to overworking on the farm, but the up side is that it’s teaching me some patience, a virtue I never had in the first half-century of my life.

On more mundane, but important for me in the scheme of things, I have also achieved a few personal as well as more public goals.

I finally completed the first trilogy of my fiction books, culminating in the compendium of it: NAZI MOON. That was a fully formed story I had in me since the mid 1990s, so it took almost 30 years to get out.

I also finally launched an estore that already has several of my books on it, and where eventually all my ebooks will be available exclusively, and cheaper than if I had ebooks on Amazon. The physical versions will still be on Amazon at this stage. The estore will also feature other products, some of which will go online in 2024.

I had many other physical achievements in terms of fixing up the house here, which might be unappreciated by most, including me, but that make a real difference. A big one is that the home can now be well-heated without relying on gas at all, only our awesome wood stove, which in a pinch also doubles as cooker and oven, and if deemed worthwhile, can, in future, be adapted to also heat the potable water in the home. We also became aware and verified that if tended to properly our olive trees can produce a lot of the literally best oil in the world. Not a joke, it literally is, and has been voted such two years in a row. Hopefully 2024 will see that develop into some sort of ongoing viable business.

I also launched Kurgan TV in 2022, which has been moderately successful and will pick up again in 2024.

The sponsorship of the first 50 trees, to be named after a Catholic Saint and for the spiritual benefit of a person of your choice, as well as your own, has gone relatively well too, while only about half the trees were sponsored, over 60 years of prayers/sponsorship was achieved, increasing the number and frequency of people prayed for. A Holy Mass was indeed dedicated to all the sponsors, and it’s helped me get into more of a habit of regular prayer, which is an important practice to make habitual.

I have made a few new, yet very reliable friends, that think along similar lines. We get all the natural real honey we need for the year by the guy who leaves his bees on our property. I have a buddy that I can call upon day or night that I will also help if ever needed in whatever situations arise, and I am busy making more such friends.

And then, of course, is this blog, which in a way is my repository for all things and that I hope is also becoming a source of some positive effects for you readers too, so here are the all-important stats:

2023 Original (realistic) Target:

Visitors: 30k and Views: 100k

2023 Blue Sky (unrealistic) Target:

Visitors: 100k and views: 200k

2023 Revised (ambitious) Target:

Visitors: 50k and Views: 150k

2023 Actual Achieved:

Visitors: 47k and Views: a shade under 159k

So I shall now announce the 2024 goals for the blog.

2024 Original (realistic but ambitious) Target:

Visitors: 100k and Views: 300k

2024 Blue Sky (unrealistic) Target:

Visitors: 200k and Views: 500k

General Notes:

while my 2024 Original Target is realistic, I also think it will be harder to achieve, comparatively, than my 2023 Original Target. A number of reasons include:

  • Generally, literacy around the world continues to plummet.
  • My content tends to be more in-depth/eclectic so it’s essentially geared to actual readers not general “clickers”.
  • The stats have been fairly stable for the last few months, which would seem to indicate a plateau of some sort. I don’t have enough insight into this after a year to know the root causes or how long such a thing can last, but I am sure it can be years.

On the positive side, I use practically ZERO SEO, so the visits I do get are fairly organic and by real people. I am not sure what the effects of starting to use at least SOME SEO would be on readership, but I suspect it would inflate it but also be composed of a higher percentage of “clickers” instead of readers, and I’d much rather have the latter than the former.

Another positive effect is that due to my brutal policy of spamming without any warning whatsoever anyone that breaks any of the rules (which are not exactly prominently displayed) and/or who behaves in typical annoying gamma/troll behaviour even a single time, the actual commenters that exist on the blog are ones that are engaging with the topics posted and generally of a higher quality. That is a trend that over time, if sustained, will bring the type of commenters that actually increase the value of the blog for the type of reader I enjoy having.

As I said, 2023 was very hard, but some decent progress was still made.

2024 will hopefully produce even more progress and one hopes, also with the help of you readers to spread the knowledge of this blog, things might not be as hard.

So, onward and upward, and may you all have a great 2024.

Good Fan Mail

The reader that sent me an email with a picture of four of my books he is reading this year (see a few posts back) also does readings of books he enjoys on Youtube, his channel is small and just a hobby, but for the millennials among you who are reading-challenged, perhaps if you ask him nicely he might select a book you like to read.

As every writer who is honest knows, we enjoy receiving good fan mail. It certainly makes a difference from the stalkers, unhinged, fed-psyops, and outright hate mail anyway. And on balance I receive a lot more good fan mail than bad one, but People like Stephen truly give a writer a sense of achievement, because he articulates well the things he appreciated and as they resonate with my intent in terms of my writing, it gives one a sense of having managed to accomplish what we set out to do.

So I hope you enjoy his channel and that in due course perhaps he might blog too. He certainly seems to be an interesting person in his own right anyway.

UPDATE: I actually went to see one of his videos and he certainly gives me high praise from about 4 minutes in, here. And I was correct in thinking he is an interesting character.

EBooks at the ready

In order to move away slightly from the sede on sede violence of the last posts, a quick question.

The Ebooks, including NAZI MOON, have now been done, along with some books that people requested for a while (like RTCC) but I was unhappy with the variation in layout. They will be available for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, Nook and Google Play from my E-Store.

HOWEVER, it will require you emailing the books to your device. It is not a difficult thing to do, you can usually just go to the settings of your kindle and it will show you what email you need to use, BUT, your kindle will only accept emails from registered addresses, so the Estore will not immediately be one that your Kindle recognises unless you add it to your approved email list on your devices in Amazon.

So you need to buy the ebook with the email you registered to your device So for example for an amazon kindle, this is usually the email you have registered with amazon.

You then download the ebook and forward it to your kindle email using your amazon registered email.

Like I said, it is fairly easy and many of you know this already, but that’s what I wanted to check. Please let me know in the poll below:

Do you know how to send an Epub file for your device to it already?

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What Next?

There are three paths I can go down with respect to the next book I write.

NAZI MOON (linked) is now available at least in the US and CANADA and should be available soon in other countries too.

Do you Prefer I next write:

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I have been asked to do the relationship book by friends and men in general for years; at least 20 of them. I resisted the impulse* for at least a couple of decades, primarily because, as one of my alter egos/nicknames —given to me by friends in Italy over 20 years ago— said in one of the graphic novels he appears in: “Any man that says he has understood all there is to know about women, is either a liar or insane.” And it’s close enough to the truth in some ways. Nevertheless, I feel that after two divorces, a lot of women in between, and finally a proper Catholic marriage, not to mention 4 children I fathered, I have probably made —and persevered!— and (one hopes), learnt enough that it is probably acceptable to pass on a few pointers to younger men; at least on those issues I feel I have now got enough experience to retroactively note when I did the right thing (regardless of outcome), and when I did the wrong thing (again, regardless of outcome). I mention this, because as I say, there have been a lot of people asking me for this for a long time.

With regard to my non-fiction, each book I have written so far, is really mostly a compilation of my theories and conclusions formed with many years of experience.

The Face on Mars was the result of a lifelong interest in Astronomy from very early childhood. I understood what a light-year was at age four, thanks to an uncle who was, and remains, a total geek to this day. He also sent me a telescope in my early teens, with which I observed the mountains of the moon, and how the moon itself moved. I also saw Haley’s comet with it, from our home in Africa at the time. And to this day the concepts I put forth in that book were then, and for the most part continue to remain today, unique. Some have badly plagiarised aspects of it (hello Graham Hancock) but the overall main issue had not been understood by anyone I am aware of before I saw it. And most remain totally ignorant of it, despite the predictions and theories I made back in 1995, playing out as correct in the intervening time. The update in 2014 also added a new dimension to the reality of my ideas, which is partly expanded on a lot more in my fiction work.

Systema was similarly, a book I wrote after I had personally spend decades in the martial arts world. And I wanted to demystify a LOT of the nonsense that goes with many martial art “concepts” and their related egos, and which —in particular— seemed to have a vortex of “mystic ninjas” concerning the Russian system. Which is an impression many martial artists might have if they have not experience of it firsthand. By merely watching YouTube videos or hearing “fantastic” stories of almost magical ability, they are most likely going to assume it is some woo-woo nonsensical “martial art”. That thought is disabused within minutes of confronting any of the top exponents of it. Unfortunately, as always, along with the really good practitioners, there were also a lot of “mystic ninjas” and some of the practitioners did nothing to demystify the situation, so I did it. I have been doing martial arts since I was a very small child, thanks to my dad, so I had pretty extensive knowledge of it before I put hand-to-keyboard after almost four decades of it.

Reclaiming the Catholic Church was in some ways the “odd man out” because I had a road to Damascus Event in 2013 and the book came out in 2020, that is, only 7 years later. However, I had been reading different books on all the main religions, mysticism, “spiritual” and even New Age stuff, again, since my teens, and literally infiltrating various cults as a hobby, in order to see if anyone had anything that was demonstrably true, real, or worthwhile. I had settled on a basic Zen-Agnosticism, with a clear understanding there must be an intelligence behind creation (the math, astronomy, biology and physics, as well as logic, pretty much confirms it many, many, many times over) but no sense of a God as such that was specifically interested in us mere mortals, much less me specifically. That changed in a radical, unexpected and utterly surprising way, that while “subjective” in the sense that I cannot prove it to anyone else, was absolutely objective and very much so for me. The other part that helped was that because the Catholic Church has ALL of its rules and dogmas written down, it was fairly easy to follow the thread of its history and see the astonishing truth it is founded on. As it was, to see that the current inhabitants of the Vatican are, without putting too fine a point on it, flat out Satanists.

BELIEVE! Instead, published a year before RTCC, was a much smaller work, putting out my new, or updated, basic outline philosophy. For those who have read both books, you will notice that BELIEVE! is not even a fifth of the size of RTCC, at just under 100 pages, and is a lot more open with respect to overall views and concepts. RTCC was the follow up that basically said, “OK, so that’s sort of where I am with respect to religion as a whole (BELIEVE!) now let’s take a look at this one path that I state is the best one I can see so far, and in this book, (RTCC), I went full autist, covering every aspect of Sedevacantism (i.e. the actual, current, only Catholicism left) and demonstrating it in a manner that no one has so far even attempted to refute, much less succeeded. The result is that RTCC is the foundation on which BELIVE! is really sitting on, which is probably why even if a much smaller and less detailed book, BELIEVE! has resulted in now over 100 people converting to Sedevacantist Catholicism (aka simply: Catholicism).

The reason I point all this out, is because in these last two non-fiction books, it becomes obvious that even my overall looser and more generic ideas, as expressed in BELIEVE!, for example, clearly have had a lot of genuinely positive effects on people who read them. And we know it was this that sparked the results, because BELIEVE! came first, and yet, even without all the details (presented in RTCC), it had a serious impact on people’s lives.

I see a LOT of confusion, struggles and heartache among young men today concerning intimate relationships and finding the right woman.

I literally get questions, emails, or messages on the topic to a frequency that is starting to become hard to keep up with. And as anyone that reads my blog knows, I have a rather low opinions of PUAs, and would very much hate to be mistaken for one. That said, I know for a demonstrable fact that my advice benefits these younger men, because they are getting married, having babies, and resolving issues they had for many years of their lives. I have literally had everything from friends, neighbours and even strangers, asking for advice, on an ad hoc basis, to hypnosis sessions with people that were under clinical care as supposedly paranoid schizophrenics under medication that went on to stop the medication (yes with doctor approval and full knowledge of my sessions with them) and go on to have a productive life with a functioning relationship, when prior they were 29 year old virgins. And I have been doing this for at least 15 years, with positive results.

So, perhaps, there is some utility in putting together some of the baseline concepts concerning male-female interactions and so on.

The other options (SF saga continuation) or YA SF books are, respectively, more a divertimento for myself and, a less fun, but I think helpful addition to the current dearth of adventure stories for boys mostly. I am not aware of anything like the Hardy Boys and so on coming along anytime recently, which is why Castalia House is doing well printing old classics. I would not enjoy writing such books as much as my own adult Science Fiction, but it would not be too difficult to do and they should be able to be produced fairly quickly. Although, I am not likely to be acclaimed as a children’s author anytime soon, or even long after I am dust, so the effort might not be worth it.

Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on the matter, so please feel free to leave comments after you vote, thanks. 

* Vox, on this post, referring to someone else, Taleb, in this case, said something that holds true for most of us. Personally I have always genuinely tried to resist the temptation, and often people have been quite “deflated” when trying to make me their “guru”, when, after being asked something I know little or nothing about or at least I don’t feel qualified to take a stand on, I simply say “I have no idea”. Some were quite insistent nevertheless and I always consciously dissuaded that, as I explained in some detail in my book Systema: The Russian Martial System.

Blog Stats Update

As I previously mentioned, my target for this year was 100k visits from 30k unique visitors. Well, that target was achieved a little while back.

My more ambitious and probably unachievable goal was, as I said then, “blue sky”:

So, here are my blue-sky goals to be hit by 31st December 2023:

  • Over 15k a month visitors for at least 3 consecutive months of the year.
  • Over 200k views total.
  • 100k or more unique visitors.

I think it’s safe to say that I will probably not hit any of those goals.

More realistically I think with a small effort I should be able to reach 150k views with maybe up to 50k unique visitors, which I would be happy with.

So, if you are that way inclined, tell your friends, spread the links, and don’t forget the shameful plight I am under: I do not yet own a Colt 1911.

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