Andúril

Writing a fantasy novel. Helping people see the hero within.🎚️

[Andúril @AndurilAlan]

More than a Conqueror

[Humble Flow @HumbleFlow]

The quickest way to realize we are not as clever as we think is to read someone who lived 200 years ago.

[Gareth Harney @OptimoPrincipi]

Russell Crowe on Gladiator 2:

‘They failed, and they failed because they didn’t understand what made the first film so successful: it had a moral core. Here’s the thing, most people want that. On the surface, they might go for entertainment, but if they’re going to love something and keep it with them forever, like that movie? …The love for that thing is because of its moral core. All guys want to be that man who can stay that strong, and all women want a man who can love them in that way.’

[BowTiedOx | SOF Athlete/Bodybuilder @BowTiedOx]

Just walk into a Catholic Church and talk to Catholics

I was intimidated my first time because as an American Protestant I was raised to believe they’re this cult like entity

They’re not, the Church contains the most devout, good Christians I’ve ever met per capita. Just say hi

[Andúril @AndurilAlan]

@Swurv__ I think Cyberpunk’s base story is solid but Phantom Liberty is extremely good. One of the better stories in recent memory. I was hooked from beginning to end.

[BONESAW 🕊️ @BonesawMD]

Jordan Peterson changed the trajectory of the cultural landscape completely. Before this, progressives would dog walk everyone because they captured the frame of moral superiority and dominated language, which inevitably shapes and perverts reality.

The anti-intellectualism of the right rendered them useless. A lot of them were –– in the kindest way possible –– too dumb or uneducated to put up much of a rebuttal.

They just whined in a quiet and confused frustration.

Peterson was precise with language, knowledgable, and articulate at a time nobody else on the right did their homework. His psyche has struggled with the burden and stress, but he'll go down as a majorly important figure in the history books.

[The Chivalry Guild @ChivalryGuild]

I'm old enough to remember that whenever a non-Leftist appeared on camera at this time his purpose was usually to get steamrolled, to be embarrassing, to look pathetic, to confirm progressive framing, and so on. It was wild to see a man who had something else in mind.

[Josh Howerton @howertonjosh]

“Sometimes God will let you hit rock bottom so you discover He’s the Rock at the bottom.”

— @drtonyevans

I heard this in the middle of a season of anxiety attacks I thought would end my ability to ever preach again in 2019.

He was right.

[Daniel Black🦎 @Dani_Activist]

I used to think Christians were naive. I thought faith in God was just an emotional crutch for people who could not handle reality.

Now I think the opposite.

The more seriously I looked at life, history, suffering, conscience, beauty, evil, and the limits of human reason, the less convincing atheism became.

Because everyone has faith. Everyone. The only real question is where that faith is placed.

In God, or in man.

I was taught that intelligence means distance from God. But what is so intelligent about believing that matter somehow produced mind, that chaos somehow produced order, that chemistry somehow produced conscience, and that human beings can ground morality by themselves while constantly contradicting even their own standards?

If we are only matter, then human dignity is just a useful story. Love is chemistry. Evil is preference. Sacrifice is irrational. Meaning is self invented. But almost no one actually lives that way. We all live as if truth matters, as if cruelty is really wrong, as if beauty means something, as if love is more than a chemical reaction, and as if justice should exist even when it costs us.

That is not nothing. That points beyond survival.

The Bible understood this long before modern people started pretending they had outgrown it.

Genesis grounds human dignity in the image of God. That means people are not valuable because they are productive, attractive, healthy, or useful. They are valuable because they bear His image.

John 1 does not begin with chaos. It begins with the Logos. Reason, order, meaning. Reality is not random noise. It is intelligible because it comes from a mind greater than ours.

Ecclesiastes says that pleasure, work, success, and achievement collapse into vanity when cut off from God. Anyone who has chased status, money, sex, or recognition long enough knows how true that is.

Romans 1 says creation points beyond itself. And it does. The order of the world, the mathematical beauty of reality, the existence of consciousness, the hunger for meaning, the presence of moral knowledge, these are not small things.

And history teaches the same lesson. The bloodiest experiments of the last century did not come from too much faith in God. They came from man trying to replace God with ideology, state, race, class, or power. When God is removed, something else always takes His place. Usually something crueler.

Christianity also does not begin with a vague spiritual feeling. It makes a historical claim. That Christ entered history, was crucified, and rose again. You can reject that claim, but it is not the same as saying faith is just blind comfort. Christianity stands or falls on what it says actually happened.

So no, I no longer think faith in God is stupid.

I think one of the most shallow ideas modern people were ever sold is that disbelief is automatically intelligent.

Sometimes disbelief is not depth. Sometimes it is pride.

And sometimes faith is not an escape from reality. It is what remains when you look at reality honestly enough and realize that man is not enough, matter is not enough, and this world cannot explain itself.

I used to think Christians were foolish.

Now I think many of them simply saw earlier what I was too proud to see.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Jordan Peterson: "People don't have mental illnesses, they have lives too complicated to manage"

"I actually think complexity is the fundamental problem. The terror management theorists think that death is the fundamental problem, and that's a good argument, because it is definitely a fundamental problem. But I think death is a subset of the complexity problem."

Peterson explains why:

"Sometimes people's lives become so complex that they'd rather be dead. The reason they seek death through suicide is to make the complexity go away. Because complexity causes suffering if it's uncontrolled. Things just get beyond your control."

He describes how this happens:

"You get hit by three or four catastrophes at the same time. Maybe the political system collapses. There's hyperinflation. You lose your job. Someone you love dies, or two people die. Maybe you get cancer. These things happen to people. And they just think: there's no getting out of this. It's just too much."

Peterson shares what he learned as a psychologist:

"One of the things that's very interesting about being a psychologist is what you learn: people come to you with mental illnesses, and that's almost never true. People come to you because their lives are so damn complicated they cannot stay on top of them in any way that doesn't make it look like they're just going to get more complicated. And then that causes symptoms."

He uses a metaphor for genetic susceptibility:

"Take a balloon and blow it up until it's beyond its tolerance. It's going to blow out at the weakest point. That's sort of what genetic susceptibility is. If I just keep adding complexity on top of you, at some point you'll blow out at your weakest point.

Maybe you'll get physiologically ill. Maybe you'll start drinking. Maybe you'll develop an anxiety disorder. Maybe you'll get OCD. Maybe you'll get depressed. Whatever, there'll be something about you that's the weakest point. If I just push, that's where you blow out."

Peterson reframes what we call "mental illness":

"Those things almost never just happen. Sometimes, but not very often. Usually, people have just been hammered two or three different ways, and then they collapse in the direction of their biological weakness. Then maybe you put them back together. But it's almost always a complexity-related phenomenon rather than a mental illness-related phenomenon. Not always, but almost always."

[Stormfall @stormfall33]

"Executive requests gold turned into poo to appeal to poo eaters"
Many such cases

[Alex Becker 🍊🏆🥇 @ZssBecker]

If I could give you one success life hack.

And trust me. I literally have a hyperbaric healing chamber in my house. I take life hacks seriously.

If I could give you one tho. It'd be this.

Grab a bunch of epic fantasy books as thick as your head. Replace all your TV and social media time reading them.

Your brain will slowly start to work again. The focus from reading the thick ass wordy books will slowly put it back together.

Sanderson. Abercrombie. Gaimman. Pierce Brown. Great places to start.

Replacing this as your main time wasting hobby will give you absolutely crazy returns when it comes to actually making money. The focus you gain will make you lethal.

[Andúril @AndurilAlan]

@05jake5 @CtrlAltDelrith Faction quests are great, some really cool side quests, and I don’t mind the repeated POI’s. I expected it as soon as they revealed the game had 1000 planets. Still tons of handcrafted content to explore in all of it.

[Lumpy @LumpyTheCook]

No clue what Mass Effect could do to make itself more “accessible” than it already is. It’s one of the most mainstream-friendly sci fi series ever made, to a detrimental level even

[Deep Psychology @DeepPsycho_HQ]

A HARVARD psychologist says: “if you’ve achieved nothing by 25, you’ve avoided the most destructive illusion of youth”

> In 2021, a Harvard psychologist surprised a lecture hall with an unexpected statement:

“If you haven’t accomplished much by 25, you may have escaped one of youth’s biggest illusions.”

At first, the room laughed.
She wasn’t kidding.

> The illusion of early success.

In your early 20s, the brain seeks quick proof of worth ~status, attention, rapid achievements.

But psychologists warn that chasing recognition too soon can lock people into roles or paths they never consciously chose.

They decide too early… and spend years trying to undo it.

> The exploration phase.

Research on career development suggests that people who explore more before 30 often build stronger long-term directions.

Testing ideas.
Making mistakes in public.
Changing course.

At 25 it looks like confusion ….but by 35 it often turns into clarity.

People who feel “behind” in their mid-20s frequently gain something others miss:

Perspective.
Patience.
And a clearer sense of what truly matters to them.

That foundation often leads to better decisions later on.

At the end of the lecture, the psychologist left the students with one final thought:

“You’re not meant to have life fully figured out at 25.”

“You’re meant to discover who you’re not.”

[T @walterwhitepill]

The high T man as a type realizes after enough life reps that the very fact that Christianity and belief in God may not come easily/naturally is the reason to do them. Once you understand the hard thing you're hiding from is what's best for you in one place, you see it everywhere

[Andúril @AndurilAlan]

Paul I’m a fan of the show and I promise you that Marathon is an incredible game. The score being a 9 is not a sham at all. It’s genuinely one of the most hated on games I’ve ever seen with it being this high quality. Most of the people haven’t played the game. The steam reviews are incredibly high from people who purchased it.

[Andúril @AndurilAlan]

@TheCinesthetic To be fair I think that the prequels were doing this same exact thing, the only difference is George beloved that myth is intertwined with all of these systems. Which I also fundamentally believe to be true.

[J. Y. Song @Critical_Scribe]

Ngl I don’t so much like the association of bleak and “realistic” here.

A lot of issues mentally today is this idea that realism means things are depressing and dark, when it’s actually so much more than that.

Realism, properly done, should emphasize all facets of humanity. Not just happiness, not just sadness, not just success, and not just failure. It’s all of those facets that create reality.

The human experience in the real world can be hard, I’m not denying that, but reality itself can be quite beautiful when taken in from all the aspects that create it. Even better is that we have the ability to change reality with effort and will.

Is it easy? No, far from it, but framing realism as some sort of impossible or depressing and bleak existence does nothing except encourage a lack of action to change things.

[Isabelle Krause @Isabelletkrause]

What blew my mind most about the Lord of the Rings was how perfectly a fantasy story represented evil & temptation and how it works in each of our lives.

The Ring doesn't make you evil overnight. But it whispers in your ear, it makes the wrong decision feel so incredibly reasonable, it tells you that this time will be different. How many times in our life do we have this conversation in our head? I’ve had it, many times.

And the longer you hold onto it, the harder it becomes to let go. Which is just crazy. The things we know are destroying us are often the things we can’t put down.

Frodo didn't fail because he was weak. He failed because no one is strong enough to carry sin alone forever. We are all Frodo, that's kind of the whole point.