>>154157, >>154158, >>154159, >>154160, >>154161, >>154162
DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican - Personal update:
I disappeared last week, there's no excuse. I wasn't taking a break, I was finishing a novel.
Specifically, a novel I've been writing on and off for a few years. Normally, that's just a side pursuit, the same way you might piano or paint. But like programming, writing is a structural discipline. You study Joseph Campbell, study Save the Cat, break your story into acts and beats, and revise until your narrative spine stands up.
Catalyst at 10%. Mentor is introduced at 20-22%. B-story (romance) begins around then. Etc. If this doesn't intrigue you right away - then I beg you, don't Grok it, because this will ruin every single modern movie and book you read from here on. Seriously.
Anyway, most books of my type fall into a plot structure known as the "Superhero" genre — absolute good vs. absolute evil, chosen ones and villains. Harry Potter vs. Voldemort. Luke vs. Vader. I can't write like that, because I don't see the world like that.
Instead, I wrote a story where the villain is a system which preserves itself through manufactured consent. That wasn't a conscious political statement at first, but ... since taken on this X journey, it's become much more obvious where the inspiration came from. We all see this unfold during the Biden years: institutional decay, censorship, peace enforced through suppression.
That final ending, 30,000 words, came fast and was a direct inspiration of that.
So: thank you for tolerating the silence. Odds are, you'll never read the book... infamously, fewer than 1 out of 100 make it out of the slush pile. But if this one does, know that it's an allegory for everything I post about here.
https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1929058145802055883
This is going to be disturbing, but take a few seconds to think about it.
The "New World Order" after the Cold War was always about conquest, not democracy.
It was always about dissolving national sovereignty in favor of a supranational global system run by unelected elites, multinational corporations, and enforced by NATO.
Now imagine, just for a second, that Ukraine joined NATO and Putin didn't respond with nukes.
Do you really think NATO expansion would stop there?
Of course not. Because the end goal was never Ukraine, it was always the entire world.
The real mission of "democracy" is global dominance: political, economic, and military.