I don't get much traffic on this blog. Either the posts I write are too technical, not really interesting to anybody but me or not even that coherent. Sometimes all three. The reason I keep this blog is mainly so that I can re-read at a later point whatever I used to believe, and either mock it or use it to revise my own belief set. I also write down ideas I have here which I would otherwise forget about. Anyway here are some of the keywords that Blog.co.uk tell me that people use that link to my blog. I think they probably google these terms and end up here.
The most common term is "Life Tilt", a poker term expressing a mental state marked for its self-destructive nature, belief that the world is constantly conspiring against you, leading you to the delusional belief that you just don't care any more. Just fuck it. Fuck it all to hell. But of course you do care and hate yourself all the more for it. I don't know what would make somebody google "Life Tilt" . It could be to make themselves feel better about their current tilt by reading about somebody else's even worse life tilt. Unless you're Archie Karas there'll be somebody out there with a worse bad beat story than yours. By the way I have a tip for live tournament players who experience tilt. When you're knocked out, whether on a bad beat or not, you're perfectly entitled to walk away from the table in a bad mood. Shake your opponent's hand if they offer it, but you don't need to offer your own. Just get up and walk away and cool off for a bit: anywhere between 10 minutes and an hour. Then come back to the table and wish the person who knocked you out good luck (if they are still there), and your tilt should soon dissipate. In the heat of a knockout it's easy to hate your opponents with the deepest hate, but after a cooling off period you should be able to come back and wish them luck as a casual, neutral observer. You might even find yourself thinking, "Thank God I'm no longer involved in this complete madness."
The second most searched-for term is "naomi campbell evolutionary psychologists". This is followed by terms like "Keira Knightley" and "do men find keira knightley attractive?" and "the media's false beauty". Whoever came to my blog searching for those terms would have seen my entry entitled, The Popular But False Conception of Beauty. The main thing I regret about that entry was that I didn't make it clear enough that there are two conceptions of beauty. Ultimately, beauty is subjective. If you think it's beautiful then it is beautiful, I suppose. But I was mainly referring to human beauty from evolutionary game-theoretic perspective, i.e. not too dissimilar to Darwinian fitness. My point was that a lot of people, actually men and women, moreorless anybody who subscribes to some popular view about fashion, are deluded about what beauty is. They let small groups of people dictate to them what will make them more attractive to the opposite sex, and unfortunately these claims are mostly false.
I have a few searches about Rime Of The Ancient Mariner and The Odyssey which must link to my piece on The Odyssey and Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, probably one of the better or more accessible entries in this blog. Somebody asked, "are the sirens in the rime of the ancient mariner", so maybe it is quite common to compare the two, although I had never heard of such a thing prior to my study of Ancient Mariner.
The next most searched-for term is on Marshal Bernadotte, a subject I seemed to have quite little to say about. I'm still of the opinion nowadays that Bernadotte has done more than most to protect his bloodline, and that he is perhaps a greater paragon of meritocracy than Napoleon himself. Of all the marshals and their Emperor though I probably idolise Marshal Ney more than any of the others. One of my greatest fascinations in life is with the concept of chance, and more specifically: luck. Ney simply has to be one of the luckiest people to ever live. I have always had this strange (admittedly irrational) idea that being lucky is better than being good. I sometimes fear that I might die in some bizarre, slightly hilarious way that no person could ever reasonably hope to avoid, like being struck by falling masonry or randomly killed in an armed robbery. When I read articles about people who die through no fault of their own I cannot help but think that they just fail at life. I have a guilty chuckle that everything they ever did was a waste. Their diet was a waste because they were going to die a week later anyway. Their studies were a waste. They could have enjoyed themselves but instead they invested foolishly in their own non-futures. I feel like a dick for thinking this way, but I can't really help it, and I fear the same thing happening to me.
Of course Ney was both good and lucky, probably the best and the luckiest. He fought in over one hundred battles, usually leading from the front. He was wounded in quite a lot of the battles he fought in, but somehow the enemy never managed to keep him down. He commanded the rearguard action of the Grand Army on its retreat from Moscow. When he left Moscow he had something like 20,000 soldiers in his corps but by the time he reached Kovno it was less than 200. Some people even say that it was just him. There's a story, probably false, about how he entered an inn and told General Dumas that he was all that was left of the rearguard. Several times his band of survivors were totally surrounded by the enemy, he was ambushed at virtually every location he possibly could be, and they still never got him.
But that's not even the most astounding story of his survival. At Waterloo, it is reported, he personally led the French cavalry charge that resulted in Napoleon's defeat. He is said to have charged the British squares between ten and twenty times, unsuccessfully. He is also said to have had about 5 horses shot from underneath him during the battle. British marksmen were trained to shoot specifically at officers, and he was the most conspicuous person on the battlefield, so I don;t understand how he survived that. What I understand even less is that he was apparently at the head of the Old Guard when they advanced on the last military orders Napoleon would ever give. From what I know, Ney was at the front of the column, and it's also widely believed that the column was ripped to shreds by infantry fire, particularly at the front. How did he survive that? When the Old Guard retreated Ney was left in one of the three remaining squares that refused to surrender. The British were swarming all over them and somehow he escaped. One story states that one of the squares was surrounded by British who ordered the French to surrender and give up their arms, to which their general replied "The Guard dies, it does not surrender!" Ney, suicidally distraught at this point, with a blackened face and uniform destroyed by bulletholes, managed to stumble back to his own lines evading capture. One quote of Napoleon that I've been thinking about recently is the line, "Death is nothing. But to live defeated and without glory, is to die every day." I wonder sometimes whether I agree with this. If I do then it's not something I agree with enough to live by.
The fourth most searched for term is "nietzsche fail". That's quite a comical thought and I don't know why anybody would search for it. "Fail" is a concept, as I understand it, that is quite new and mainly exists only on the internet. It can be summed up by funny pictures like this, always with the appropriate "fail"-related caption.
I find the concept of "Nietzsche fail" quite funny, although not necessarily appropriate in most contexts.
But the weirdest keyword anybody has used to find my blog has been "Horse Ejaculates". They must have got to my entry on RPT. I also have a strange number of keywords based around Steeleye Span tabs. I don't know why because I don't think there are any on the blog. This anti-climactic technique of finishing an entry without a conclusion is probably the fourth reason as to why this blog isn't a very good blog.
