Ran Prieur

April 14.

2026-04-14T14:40:30Z

April 14. Long Reddit thread about Trump as the Antichrist. I have relatives who are devout Catholics, and decent people, who are now deciding whether to support the most flagrantly immoral person in the world against the Pope. It's so weird. Someday when this is over, I hope some recovered Trumpers write books and explain what was going on in their heads, because I don't get it. I tend to see it as an act of sorcery, a magic spell that operates on levels unrecognized by science.

But I do have a theory, and it's based on a counter-intuitive observation of who does not see Trump as the Antichrist: Biblical literalists. To me the Bible is an interesting book with some good stuff and some dumb stuff. I don't think that anything is true just because it's in there. Trump is the Antichrist in a metaphorical or allegorical sense, or at most archetypal. The author of Revelations was not God but a talented human who tuned in so deeply to human wickedness that he had some uncannily accurate hits on how it would manifest thousands of years in the future. Jesus is not going to return in any kind of obvious way, but maybe humans in general will become more Jesus-like, and the Kingdom of Heaven is a potential human society that embodies the Beatitudes.

Fundamentalists don't know how to think this way, and this incapacity is not normal religious thinking -- it's unusual. This article, The Great Myths 11: Biblical Literalism, explains how ancient and medieval thinkers were perfectly capable of seeing religious texts as allegory. Modern humans have acquired a cognitive weakness, I don't know how, that makes them highly susceptible to absolutism. That's how Trump gets his followers, by performing a primal confidence that is irresistible to people with flattened cognition. There's something about his way of being that they get pulled into and can't get out of. It reminds me of a line from Genesis -- not the book but the band: "Look into my mouth he cries. And all the children lost down many paths, I bet my life you'll walk inside."

April 10.

2026-04-10T22:00:32Z

April 10. Yesterday I finished a project that I've been putting off for years, a page about my Spirit Island stuff. Spirit Island is my favorite board game, a cooperative strategy game where you play nature spirits battling colonists. Back in 2021 I made a set of custom reminder tokens to keep track of multi-spirit solo games, and every winter since then I've been testing and refining three custom spirits. This week I finally put it all together into a video: Three spirit solo game. I don't know how prolific YouTubers do it. This hour-long video took me at least fifty hours of rehearsal and repeated takes. I recorded and deleted entire games just to figure out how to talk about what I was doing, and it's still pretty sloppy. Also on that page are short descriptions of the spirits, and downloads of printer-ready images for the boards and cards.

April 8.

2026-04-08T20:40:07Z

April 8. It finally happened. The DeepAI Olde Model that I was using for my videos, has been quietly enshittified/upgraded. Right away I saw that something was off, and when I tested familiar prompts in familiar styles, the results were a lot faster, a lot different, and a lot worse. I knew it was too good to last, and now I have to see if I can find any beauty at all in the new machine.

April 7.

2026-04-07T19:30:55Z

April 7. New playlist! When I was making my two Spotify covers playlists, some of the best songs were not on Spotify. These songs served as the anchor for a YouTube Covers playlist, that I filled out with some of my favorites from the other two lists. They're mostly obscure, with more songs under a thousand views than over a million. There are three covers of Bob Dylan, two of The Rolling Stones and surprisingly two of Van Halen. I love the transition between two not-on-Spotifys, Larkin Poe's Southern Cross and Killdozer's Sweet Home Alabama, which have almost the same riff.

April 1.

2026-04-01T13:30:27Z

April 1. No ideas this week, but I've just posted my Goodreads review of Paul Kingsnorth's Against The Machine. To give it less than four stars would be infighting, but there's a lot of stuff in it that I disagree with, and I list some anti-machine books that I liked better: Saving The Appearances by Owen Barfield, In The Absence Of The Sacred by Jerry Mander, Tools For Conviviality by Ivan Illich, The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman, The Final Empire by William Kotke, and Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.

Also, this is a great bit from an incredible book that I still haven't finished, James Dickey's Alnilam, describing what we might call the "flow" state, in terms of the swinging of a monkey:

Whatever the gibbon has got hold of is already something else; it's the next thing he's going to have hold of. The present thing is not being replaced by the next thing he's going to catch; it already is the next thing, and the next thing after that is already coming into place, coming at him, coming to him. There's no way that it can't come, or that he would miss it. His catching it is not only built into his body and his rhythm, but it's built into the branch or the limb or the part of a wall that he takes into the rhythm. His whole environment gives itself to him in the rhythm, it flows around him, everything is linked, everything is together for him, and is part of his motion, it's all flow and it's all him, as long as he keeps it up.