On number 69 of Joe Van’s Secret Podcast I interview a new guest about hobbies, near-death experiences, spooks, and manifesting reality. Enjoy!
PODCAST LINK: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jd-streams/id1541025716
Tag: van
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Welcome back to episode 68 of Joe Van’s Secret Podcast, where I have on another new guest. We talk about the simulation, relationships, multiple best friends, enjoying just yourself, dealing with realities of life, narratives bad actors with good intentions have, and the supernatural! Enjoy.
PODCAST LINK: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jd-streams/id1541025716
YOUTUBE CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwmAfQyH-NmPbOsDesbyksg
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In episode forty-five of Thoughts, I dive deep into the history and lore of aliens, what the word means, and how we’ve come to understand the possibility of other lifeforms in the universe. Enjoy!
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In episode forty-four of Thoughts, I go over the vast account of our ancestral lineage. From creation myth, to ancient aliens, to the facts, our time on Earth has been unfathomably long. Enjoy!
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In episode forty-three of Thoughts, I take you guys (meaning both) on a journey through the discovery of the word filbert, its origins, and what it means to label things. Enjoy!
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In episode forty-two of Thoughts, I expand on my previous episode: Reality, by going over the many forms our mind can take in regard to painting our reality. Enjoy!
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What’s that, in the sky? It’s a bird! A plane! No, it’s a U.F.O. BRO! Holy S**T Bro WHAT THE F**K?! Hey everybody and welcome back to another thought piece by me, ya boy, Joe Van! Today we will be going over the topic of aliens! Whether you mean people from another country, an unusual sensation, or intelligent extraterrestrial hominin-like organisms that evolved independently from us yet harbour many similar traits like language, limbs, and social tendencies!; they all fall under the same name. So where to start? Well, with the word of course!
The word alien in English came from an older version of French as the same name, which itself came from the Latin word alienus, meaning ‘belonging to another.’ Believe it or not but that Latin word came from an OLDER Latin word! The word being alius, meaning ‘other,’ though you could have guessed that. For this reason the word was primarily used to describe a foreigner, especially one who was not a naturalized citizen of the country where they were living. For this reason it was, and is, a term used almost exclusively in a derogatory sense. It would be a long time until the name meant what we now associate it with: the martians; but alien as a term is also used to describe a plant or animal species originally introduced from another country and later naturalized. And finally its other use is to describe the sensation of something being unfamiliar, and disturbing or distasteful.
We have, as a species, for a long time feared the world beyond our communities. Strangers, uncharted lands, and radical weather patterns breathed the same fear of the unknown. When sickness struck, we had no idea what was happening, and that was terrifying. It still is in cases like COVID-19. Viruses and diseases are invisible to the naked eye. They attack us in ways that make us feel alien in our own bodies. This feeling of unknowing is the extenuation of dread. We don’t know what’s happening, but it’s something bad and it’s coming for us.
Pivoting from the invisible, there are certain weather patterns that have made clouds look very strange. One such case is the cloud pattern known as: Lenticular clouds.
They are discus clouds that look unlike any normal cloud formation. They almost look like solid objects hovering in the air. Many religious paintings depict sacred objects in the atmosphere. Some are gold, others are silhouettes, but you can begin to see what would later be the hallmark shape we know now as U.F.O.s- though when people say that they don’t mean an unidentified flying object, they mean alien saucers.
The earliest known instances of the word “Martian”, (used as a noun instead of an adjective,) were printed in late 1877. They appeared nearly simultaneously in England and the United States, in magazine articles detailing Asaph Hall’s discovery of the moons of Mars in August of that year. The next event to inspire the use of the noun Martian in print was the International Exposition of Electricity, which was hosted in Paris in the year 1881. During the four months of the exhibition, many people visited to witness such technological marvels as the incandescent light bulb and the telephone. One visitor came away wondering what kind of world such innovations might engender in the next 200 years. Writing anonymously, s/he assembled some speculations in an essay titled “The Year of Grace 2081”, which enjoyed wide circulation. The Martians enter the story late in the narrative. During a rest from international conflict on Earth, humans begin telecommunicating with Martians.
This is when the fiction-fun began. W. S. Lach-Szyrma’s novel Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds (1883) was previously reputed to be the first published work to apply the word Martian as a noun. The usage is incidental; it occurs when Aleriel, the novel’s protagonist, lands on Mars in a spacecraft called an “ether-car” (an allusion to aether, which was once postulated as a gaseous medium in outer space). Aleriel buries the car in snow “so that it might not be disturbed by any Martian who might come across it.” Fifteen years after Aleriel, H. G. Wells’ landmark novel The War of the Worlds (1898) was published. We all know how that one goes; the Martians invade us as octopus-like organisms in tripods, before succumbing to Earth’s bacteria, wiping them out.
So now let’s jump into the modern mysteries of aliens popularized from Nevada in the 1950’s. The Roswell Incident was an event that brought curious eyes to a now freely available government cover up. For a comprehensive dive into its history, I recommend the Internet Historian’s video, titled: The Roswell Incident. Regardless of the actual truth, that the U.F.O. in question was actually a weather balloon, the masses were alight with conspiracies theories about collusion between little green men and the American government.
Believe you me, there’s nothing more exciting than coming across an attempted cover up and personally following along with a detective to uncover the ‘truth,’ but a lesson we must all understand, is that the truth is almost always whatever the most boring option is. That being said, though, our species has done great work to uncover captivating possibilities regarding the potential for there to be extraterrestrial life in the universe. One possibility comes in the form of a mathematical equation, called: The Drake Equation.
Created in 1961 by Frank Drake, the drake equation helps us formulate the probability of there being intelligent life through all the factors that goes into how we know life comes about. With that in mind, we need not look so far as other star systems to find extraterrestrials. If we’re only looking for life itself and not communicative intelligent life, as recently as 2019, Russian astronauts aboard the ISS found microscopic bacteria on the space station’s solar panels. There are many ways that bacteria could have gotten there, like strong up-currents of wind somehow propelling them out of the atmosphere, or from expelled ice crystals of any moon or other planet in our solar system, or most excitedly from interstellar celestial bodies harbouring ice. The main ingredient for life on Earth is water, so our only assumptions for life elsewhere is the same thing, even if it’s frozen.
Finally the last case of aliens we will dive into is the possibility of (if not intelligent, then at the very least) advanced extraterrestrial life on other bodies in our solar system. I just previously alluded to bacteria being ejected from moons, and the strongest candidates for this kind of habitability are currently icy satellites such as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn: Europa and Enceladus respectively. Although, if life exists in either place, it would probably be confined to subsurface habitats. Either way, that’s our closest bet currently on finding truly alien organisms!
I hope you guys enjoyed my little dive into the subject of aliens. I had a lot of fun researching it, but want to stress that you do your own research. There is a TON of stuff I left out to be explored in this field, so Google away if you’re curious! And as always, thank you for giving me your time, I truly appreciate it. I wish you nothing but love in your life, and ask you to remember, to keep on thinking. Ciao for now.
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In episode forty-one of Thoughts, I read to you guys from the beginning page of my four completed novels. I start the narrative with a mini thought piece to prime y’all for the what the story will cover. Let me know if you guys liked this video however you can! It’s greatly appreciated. Enjoy!
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In episode forty of Thoughts, I talk about the one thing we all perceive yet all perceive differently: reality. I go over how much we know or could know about reality, along with how our minds construct the reality we all personally experience. Enjoy!
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Well, once upon a time, Adam and Eve were made by God. According to the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions, they were the first man and woman. Okay, okay, I’m just messin’ with you, but for the longest time this story and others (where we all came from one pair) was the only answer we would get when asking about our origins? I mean, how could we possibly imagine what it really was before hard scientific work was put to it. After all, as magical as creation myths are, they don’t really answer the question, do they? So where did we really come from? Some fun folk suggest, or imagine, that we were once Martians before we nuked the atmosphere and fled to Earth. That’s why we have back pain and childbirth can be so lethal, because we were once from a planet that had less gravity. But, that still doesn’t work with what we know about reality, does it? So, where in the heck did we TRULY come from?
Most people can clearly see that we hold several similarities to chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas. They have opposable thumbs, expressive faces, and bipedal tendencies. The reason for these similarities is because… of these four great apes, we are the fifth! That’s right. There are five great apes on Earth and humans are one of them. An ape, or great ape, is any tailless primate, and seeing how we are primates and tailless, we fit in that category. So how did we come to be so clearly different from our discursive species cousins?
Wayyyyyyyyy back 85 million years ago, before the extinction of the dinosaurs, a common ancestor for every primate existed: Purgatorius. Then evolution did what it does, as it had always been doing, and diversified. Purgatorius migrated to separate areas and occupied different environments. These hominoidea then mutated through hundreds and thousands of generations, and completely new species developed. This is where a separation from monkeys and apes began. Certain primates stayed small with long tails while other grew big. Lemurs and Lorises were the earliest ancestors to branch out, around 60 million years ago.
Tarsiers split from our common ancestors 55 millions years ago.
Then 30 million later the final connection between monkey species and ape species would be forever separated. New world monkeys then old world monkeys (Yes it’s in reverse) continued to diversity on their own. Let’s take a moment to press ‘f’ in the chat to pay respects, and wave goodbye to all the monkeys we will forever drift further away from in lineage.
Gibbons were the next species to delineate, being labelled not as monkeys but as the one and only lesser ape, most closely related to orangutans.
Which means orangutans were the next species to splinter from our common ancestors, nine million years ago. Then gorillas parted ways around eight and a half million years ago, putting us closer and closer to human-looking creatures. The present day is catching up to us quick!
Six and a half million years ago, the genus ‘pan,’ which became bonobos and chimpanzees, forever delineated from our common ancestor. For this reason, they are our closest inter-species cousins. There are many physical mannerisms and sociological traits that mirror humanity’s because of this. If you’ve ever had the luxury of seeing these guys in action you can catch them doing things we would do, like flinging feces- wait, wait… actually… that is something people have done throughout history. Okay, chimps, you do you.
At this point our ancestors were the hominin category of species that we are still connected to today, but our lineage kept changing. Human still wouldn’t exists for another five million years. The famous ‘Lucy’ fossil was from around three million years ago from the species Australopithecus. They were still very chimpanzee-looking but at that point only led to us. Homo habilis came about one million years ago, leading to homo erectus. Homo erectus as the name suggests were the first stages of a purely upright species. They were around from one million to 600 000 years ago, leading to homo sapiens.
Now you might be thinking, “We made it! It’s us- who we are today! Hooray!!” And listen, I don’t wanna rain on your parade, but I’m just gonna stop you right there! Take a step back from that cheer and calm down, partner! We’re not there yet. Homo sapiens are discovered to have come about around 400 000 years ago, but it’s still early days. Believe it or not, the ancestors we refer to as cave-people: Neanderthals, actually came about more recently than homo sapiens!; around 200 000 years ago. However, they no longer exist today. Some would suggest it was due to their inferior communication skills to the homo sapien sapiens- whos’ anatomical ability to form vowel sounds (with their larynx lower in the throat, allowing for better resonance of vocal waves) kept them going. I am not one of those people, though. I haphazardly subscribe to another theory, as it is currently undecided in the scientific community, one which brings us to an uncomfortable truth about ourselves: our capacity for genocide.
According to Canadian scholar Adam Jones, if a dominant group of people had little in common with a marginalized group of people, it is easy for the dominant group to define the other as subhuman. As a result, the marginalized group might be labeled as a threat that must be eliminated. He writes, “While history today is generally written with some fealty to ‘objective’ facts, most previous accounts aimed rather to praise the writer’s patron (normally the leader) and to emphasize the superiority of one’s own gods and religious beliefs.” Hypotheses which suggest that genocidal violence may have caused the extinction of the Neanderthals have been offered by several authors, including Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright. This capacity for brutality can be found in our cousins, the chimpanzees, so it’s not a uniquely human trait, but it is nonetheless one- if not THE- worst trait we possess. 30 000 years ago, after homo sapiens spent thousands of years interbreeding with Neanderthals, they went extinct. All we have to go on is fossil records so it’s not like we have detailed accounts of a great war being fought, but it is clear that they were blinked out of existence and we were not, so it’s unlikely they suffered some rare disease or environmental disaster because it would have happened to us as well.
Moving on from the darkness, we will pedal backwards to 40 000 years ago. Cro-Magnon appeared; the most human-looking ancestor yet, and even this subspecies faded from time about ten thousand years ago. Now for one final backward pedal, our current lineage of humanity: homo sapien sapiens first came about 120 000 years ago, though it’s still debated if it could be older. For a long time, ancient structures like the lining of houses gave us hints at human-kind’s first civilizations back around 100 000 years ago in Africa, but that too is in debate as more recent findings might point us literally double as far back in prehistory, around 200 000 years ago. Our inability to glimpse the past other than through bones and scraps makes it all so mysterious.
What exactly was it like back in the earliest known civilizations? As we find ourselves now, humanity records everything. We created religions, migrated across the globe, created businesses, and governments. If anything jumping into the question of ‘where did we come from?’ grants, it’s a scale of time that we rarely glimpse and still won’t be able to comprehend even after going over these biological facts. The vastness of time dwarfs humanities entire history. Everything we currently know through teaching, from philosophy, to art, to mathematics, and physics, all comes from this long trial and error effort of survival from our countless ancestors. The world we know today has been given to us by great minds and everyone else who did their best to utilize the knowledge and spread it across the world.
Our quest to understand where we come from is not done, however! The vastness of what brought us to being biologically human is complete, but what about our lost civilizations to our current recorded history? I shall make that a part two of this! So stay tuned for that article to know when it comes. Until then, I appreciate all of your time, wish you nothing but love in your life, and ask you to remember, to keep on thinking! Byebye.
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In episode thirty-nine of Thoughts, I go over Astrology, it’s history, objects and subjects involved in it practice, and my views on its legitimacy. Enjoy!
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Great Value Deluxe Mixed Nuts (with 40% cashews) houses many nuts, one of them being hazelnuts… but on the packaging they refer to hazelnuts as filberts. My girlfriend wondered at first what filberts were and why they didn’t put hazelnuts on the can. Great Value isn’t a Canadian brand as it is owned by Walmart, but these particular packaged mixed nuts were processed in Mississauga, in the G.T.A. (greater Toronto area) so with this fresh wonderment upon the both of us, I decided to look up filberts and find out why the hazelnuts were being called that. I initially assumed/speculated that it would be a wonky British term (because they have so many,) but what we soon found was the term’s origins coming from a religious French tradition.
(A little edit I wanted to add here; There are other theories to the naming of this nut, like that they came from the German word for full-beard ‘vollbart‘, and that later became filbert which is the nut’s first name, but I’m confident the Anglo-Saxons named the nut first as ‘hæsel‘ which later became hazels {because the earliest signs of the hazel species existing was in ancient England, 7 000 years ago.} It is up for debate whether filbert came from the previously mentioned German word or if they just sound similar, and I come to the same conclusion as Darth Vader’s name- that it’s a coincidence. Okay, edit done.)
As hazelnuts were best cultivated at the end of August, close to the feast day of St. Philibert’s Day on August 20th, the people of France began calling hazelnuts: filberts, in honour of that. Although Turkey is the world capitol of hazelnuts, the French people dominated the hazelnut name, arguably. In the U.S., people give hazelnuts nicknames like cobnuts or just hazels, but here in Canada, Great Value has (potentially) decided to bend the knee to our Quebec overlords and call the nut by their French name to appease them.
For those who don’t know, the province of Quebec has several different and divisive rules about product management, associations, and deals that corporations have to abide by if they want to have their business in their land. Quebec acts as if they’re their own country, essentially. And although this is just speculation, one can find a pattern or come to a conclusion that because so many of their rules placed upon international brands require changes like calling hazelnuts filberts, many of these French-dominant changes bleed over into the rest of Canadian products.
My girlfriend was upset to discover that the reason why hazelnuts were called filberts was for a saint’s day, saying that religion should not be the reason something is named differently, and I couldn’t agree more. It was only in 2005 that the term ‘Common Era’ really started growing throughout American institutions as a replacement for ‘anno Domini (in {the} year of {our} Lord, referencing Christ.) Even though the term ‘Common Era’ first came about in 1615 by Johannes Kepler as a nondenominational phasing to describe out species time in history, many Christians still fight to this day for their phrasing to be the one used by the world, finding their dominance over other religions being backtracked as an attack or affront to their faith.
What does filberts mean in the grand scheme of naming a nut, or anything at all? Things have history and histories are placements in time. Should we change nothing now that we have it? Or can things change all the time depending on the flow of society and their furthering interconnections? More so, what are good reasons to change things versus bad? The only emotional backlash I ever felt for something changing institutionally was the addition of feathers and fur on dinosaur models in museums. I have since come to love it, but I remember feeling so taken aback when I first saw it, thinking ‘NO! This isn’t what dinosaurs look like! These people have ruined everything!’ But looking at this hazelnut/filbert thing, I wonder what the point of only calling them filberts on the can is. I don’t know, but I think me wanting to share it with you lot comes from a place of questioning labels. I hope you got something out of this thought piece! And remember, I love you, and keep on thinking. Thanks for reading; bye.
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In episode thirty-eight of Thoughts, I talk about growing up, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Life holds so many changes for us and we’ve charted them to great detail, save narrowly for the ending of adolescence, in my mind. I go over this and what it means to really grow up. Enjoy!
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When I put together my visualized Thoughts piece: Reality, (that you may or may not have seen yet depending on when you’re reading this,) I used psychedelic visuals to start the video, yet at no point did I talk about the mind in that altered state, only that hallucinations are to be taken with care… and I feel like I left a hole in the subject of reality un-talked about. As we all know, whether we’ve had a psychedelic experience or not, it makes you think differently about the world. I continued pondering upon this until I got to a place where it just felt necessary to cover different states of consciousness entirely in their own piece! Hence, we are here.
We all know there are different states of experience. You could be sleepy, or fully awake! These fields of sensation aren’t just feelings, they are lenses with which our minds filter reality. Think of a glass slide in your brain switching every so often, unbeknownst to you. A bowl of tomato soup is just a bowl of tomato soup, but to one person it could be seen as something delicious, and to another something disgusting. A baby could find a car ride the most exciting thing in the world, and the parent could be in a state of frantic impatience.
These different states, to me, give us a proper look into our own mind. Whether these states change over time is irrelevant, what matters is our understanding of them in us. We have the above mentioned: sleepy, awake, delicious, disgusted, excited, and impatient; but what other states can we be in as humans? We can be happy, sad, angry, lethargic, twitchy, depressed, manic, hysteric, calm, confident, anxious, curious, lucid, livid, distracted, melancholic, tempered, or alarmed.
I know a lot of you might be thinking, ‘feelings aren’t states of consciousness,’ but I would say that feelings are what we experience the most, regardless of whether we’re aware of their colouring effect over our perception or not, and that makes them valid as states. Now, with all that said, this assessment is just my personal take on the topic. When I googled ‘States of Consciousness’ I got many different responses.
It seems a large number of new parents wondered why their babies smiled in their sleep, before showing any other forms of self-awareness, and WebMD’s response was this: “Often newborns will smile in their sleep. Sometimes a smile in the early weeks of life is simply a sign that your little bundle is passing gas. But starting between 6 and 8 weeks of life, babies develop a “social smile” — an intentional gesture of warmth meant just for you.” Ain’t that sweet? 🙂
Most other responses to the general query of ‘States of Consciousness’ gave me two, three, four, or six stages of consciousness revolving around wakefulness to a deep, dreamless sleep. While this field of scientific study is entirely valid in its own right, it wasn’t what I was looking for. The word conscious clearly has two meanings; there is the prior ‘wakefulness’, then there is having ‘perception’. So with that in mind, the final general response I got was what I was really looking for: higher consciousness, found through mindfulness. So now what is the state of higher consciousness? Plainly, it is the momentary state of being conscious you are conscious, and being entirely dispelled of the illusion of separation from yourself and the world.
This place of enlightenment or higher consciousness is very temporary. If one trains through meditation to reach it, it can take months or even years to get to a place where you reach the state of ‘oneness’ for more than a few seconds. Other methods of reaching this state are by consuming a combination of chemicals that change your neurological system. Some notable chemicals are DMT, LSD, ketamine, psilocybin, and mescaline. Once consumed, these drugs alter your brain chemistry and, with variation, rip away your sense of time, your labeling of objects, give you unbounded love to anyone in your vicinity, hallucinate objects or your entire environment, alter your thought process to give your a different understanding of prior beliefs, and so on.
This higher state of consciousness is not our default by any means, and one can argue that many people go their whole life without reaching it. Though it can be thrust upon someone without any drugs, meditation, or warning, like in the middle of a hike, it can also never happen at all. That can seem like a tragedy to those that have reached a higher state and understand its importance of impact on perspective, but each person must live their own life, however bounded by their own limitations in this regard. We all go through different states, whether we are aware of it or not. It is always happening multiple times a day, and it is up to us to recognize that and do our best to direct ourselves to the best possible state we can be in for both ourselves and others (Through patience, communication, and love.)
Thank you again as always for reading. I love you all and appreciate your time, and remember, to keep on thinking. Goodbye.
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In episode thirty-seven of Thoughts, I talk about Nintendo’s beloved video game franchise: the Legend of Zelda! With its countless iterations, each one reviving the characters we know and love, the Zelda series covers vast generations. Have you played any Legend of Zelda games? Let me know!
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What starts as something almost too simple to even think about, reality is so secretly perplexing that doing a deep dive into what we know will leave one floored. The truth is, we know very little about how we are here. The Big Bang theory is still the best possible take on how our CURRENT reality came to be, but it does little to explain how something can come from nothing. Or how our laws of physics sustain themselves in the matrix of our seemingly unbounded universe. String theory is a set of attempts to model the four known fundamental interactions—gravitation, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force—together in one theory. String theory is thusly a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings, and describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other.
But this, just like the Big Bang, is a theory, and these theories simply do not work the same way answers do; the way we would want them to. They are debated rigorously and to no current end, as we simply cannot know the answers to these things. ‘Why can we not know the answers to these things?’ I hear you ask. The reason is because we can’t perform the necessary testing to get the answers we seek. We are but merely physical, three-dimensional primates with minds evolved through survival and suspended linearly by time. It makes certain testing completely impossible. Our greatest strength against all these odds and obstacles, are our abilities to apply math to concepts. Then to simply have the creativity to imagine possibilities within the rules of the universe we know. A fun philosophical theory that fits these perimeters is: Last Thursdayism. It’s the proposition that the universe began to exist last Thursday, with the appearance of age and history leading to where we are now. Last Thurdayism was used as a response to claims of young-earth creationism that the Earth was created to look old, that, by the same logic, the world might have begun last Thursday. It’s a claim that can’t be disproved but also can’t be proved, like a God of the gaps situation.
Solipsism, for those who don’t know, follows the beginning of my Being Alone thought piece. It is the philosophical idea that ONLY one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. Sleep deprivation and the disorder of schizophrenia muddy individuals’ perception of reality. When one is not sure if something is a hallucination of the mind, or if it is physically real, the best bet is to not act on what you see, assuming nothing is real. That can lead to dangerous situations though and of course is never recommended, but if you ever feel like you can’t tell what is real and what is illusory, I personally urge you to seek professional help or seek a shelter where one can properly assess or care for you.
Now with that being said, it may sound crazy to suggest that everything we currently experience IS actually an illusion! I mean, wouldn’t that spit in the face of my previous statement? Not quite. Cognitive scientist Anil Seth proposes (in the TED Talk: Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality,) that every brain lives in an entire reality that it has created for itself. With all the signals our brains receive from our senses and all the prior experiences it has organized into expectations, each of our brains construct a coherent image of reality. To quote Anil Seth, the brain constructs a “multisensory, panoramic 3D, fully immersive inner movie,” for us to perceive. Seth then uses optical illusions and classic experiments to underscore the point that “we don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside-out as the outside-in,” in a process hardly different from that which we casually call hallucination. As hard as it is to comprehend, we are all always hallucinating. “It’s just when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call ‘reality.’” And as for what, exactly, constitutes the “we,” our brains do a good deal of work to construct that too.
The concept is one to galvanize the curiosity of anyone with even a mild interest in mind-bending subjects, like myself. He leaves us with implications of his and others’ research to consider, one being, “just as we can misperceive the world, we can misperceive ourselves”; and another being, “our individual inner universe is just one way of being conscious, and even human consciousness generally is a tiny region in a vast space of possible consciousnesses.” It is said generally that ‘our loved ones know us better than we know ourselves,’ like the other saying, ‘the closer you look, the less you see.’ As we can all imagine, reality would look very different from the multiple eyes of a fly. We know infrared vision exists, hinting at an entire world we simply cannot see with the naked human eye. What would the world around us look like if we had eyes on the sides of our head instead of directly in front, or if we had multiple optical cones instead of two specialized ones? What even is reality if there’s no one way to see it? It’s like our individual sense of self. We imagine it as one solid thing, but in reality our consciousness’ are more like a cloud of mini consciousnesses coalescing to make it seem like one coherent self. Same with the universe. It has no one visual state, and it is mostly made up of anti matter, something we cannot see, hear, smell, taste, or touch.
So all in all, reality is as complete of a mystery as anything else we find mysterious. The ocean floor, what lies beneath Jupiter’s clouds, gravitational time dilation, the afterlife, human consciousness, or secrets our loved ones hold, these things, especially the questions we don’t even have the imagination to ask, will be the things forever at the deep end of the pool of experience. Should we as a species continue to make progress, chipping away at individual questions and find better hypotheses, we would all be better for it, but we should accept that there will be things that can never be answered like the origins of reality itself. Either way, we are all still here to live our life, so let’s do what we can with this mystery by just loving as many others as we can. Thank you as always for being here. I love you all, and until next time, keep on thinking. Good bye.
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In episode thirty-six of Thoughts, I talk about different forms of tolerance, how we’re subjected to it, when it comes, and when it goes. Enjoy!
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Before getting into it, I just wanted to preface this piece by saying that if you believe in astrology, turn away now! I come at it with my biases and am rude to the subject. Now, with that said…
Ahh the reading of one’s psychology through the motion of planets and stars, peak science. Welcome back everyone to ya boy, Joe Van, and my thoughts on given topics. Today we are covering astrology, not to be confused with astronomy, a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. Where astronomy uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain the origin and evolution of the macro-verse… astrology (as a pseudoscience that claims to divine information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects) uses tarot cards, newspaper pages, and apps; all done by con artists and true believers.
The similarities between these subjects are their objects of interest: planets, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxies, and comets. Where they differ is on the relationship of these objects to us humans here on Earth. Astronomy makes no claim that our universe has any pulling effect on our psychology, except to poets when they look up at a clear night sky. Astrology has been dated to at least the 2nd millennium BCE- or ‘Before Common Era’, and has its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. Many cultures have attached importance to astronomical events, and some, such as the Hindus, Chinese, and the Maya, developed elaborate albeit arbitrary systems for predicting terrestrial events from celestial observations.
Western astrology, one of the oldest astrological systems STILL IN USE, can trace its roots to the 19th–17th century BCE Mesopotamia, from where it spread to Ancient Greece, Rome, the Arab world and eventually Central and Western Europe. And one can see why it spread as far as it did. Aside from giving divine meaning to our every moment, it stroke peoples’ egos. Contemporary Western astrology is often associated with systems of horoscopes that purport to explain aspects of a person’s personality and predict significant events in their lives based on the positions of celestial objects. So now let’s get into the nitty-gritty.
A horoscope is an astrological chart or diagram representing the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and astrological aspects meant to chart significance at the time of an event, such as the moment of a person’s birth. The word horoscope is derived from the Greek words ōra and scopos meaning “time” and “observer”.
The tarot is a pack of playing cards used from the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe, and is still used today for that function. BUT, in the late 18th century, some tarot decks began to be used for divination via ‘tarot card reading’, or cartomancy, leading to custom decks developed for such occult purposes. The earliest evidence of a tarot deck used for cartomancy comes from an anonymous manuscript around 1750 which documents rudimentary divinatory meanings for the cards. The popularization of esoteric tarot started with Antoine Court and Jean-Baptiste Alliette in Paris during the 1780s, using the Tarot of Marseilles. Regular French tarot card players abandoned the Marseilles tarot (a type of deck) in favor of the Tarot Nouveau around 1900, resulting in the Marseilles pattern now mostly being used by cartomancers.
Now let’s pivot back to the big picture. The zodiac is an area of the sky that extends approximately 8° north or south (as measured in celestial latitude) of the ‘ecliptic’, the apparent path of the Sun across the Earth over the course of the year. The paths of the Moon and visible planets are also within the belt of the zodiac. In Western astrology, and formerly astronomy back in its infancy of science, the zodiac is divided into twelve signs, each occupying 30° of celestial longitude and roughly corresponding to the constellations: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces. These astrological signs form a celestial coordinate system, or even more specifically an ecliptic coordinate system, which takes the ecliptic as the origin of latitude and the Sun’s position at vernal equinox as the origin of longitude. So there you go! That’s the origin of latitude and longitude!
But what does it all mean? Can a website really tell me what kind of person I am due to what day I was born? You might as well ask yourself this: can a medium really talk to your dead loved ones by guessing letters of their name? It is… unfortunately… a trick. Or is it? Technically, if you follow the words of your tarot card reading to the letter then it did actually come true! You acted exactly as the stars predicted, but in doing so all you really did was commit a self-fulfilling prophecy. And EVEN if you didn’t follow your daily predictions to the letter but have found that external actions brought you to a place where many if not ALL of the things predicted came true, would that make it real and not a trick? Well unfortunately, that process of evaluation is called confirmation bias. When you want something to be true, you will find ways that it is and ignore other aspects that would say it isn’t, even if you’re not doing it consciously.
Isn’t it easier to understand that non-intelligent patterns exist in the universe, than imagine that elaborate celestial plans are being conducted to bring you love or good fortune? It doesn’t mean you should not get those things, just that if you did, it had nothing to do with the alignment of large object in space. There is one thing I’ll give you in that regard though; apparently rape and murder statistics go up on nights with full moons. We know the tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, so what else could that pull be capable of? Irritation? Perhaps. Regardless, the world is endlessly fascinating without it having to have divine plans behind it, or have it be about you in some way. So with that, I shall say fin!
Thank you again so much for being here. I will endlessly appreciate your time with me. I love you all to no end, and remember to keep thinking!
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In episode thirty-five of Thoughts, I talk about late nights in general and their profound effect on our ability of reflection. Enjoy!
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Adolescence itself is the period following the onset of puberty, during which a young person develops from a child into an adult. We all know about adolescence. Aside from us personally experiencing it, countless coming-of-age movies and shows cover it. Most of the other major life changes are covered as well. Growing up is a thing collectively charted to great detail.
Starting as an only child to then having a sibling is one life stage found in films like Boss Baby and The Tree of Life. Both movies go through all the emotions that come with such an event… in their own way. Other stages are covered like making friends for the first time and navigating elementary school. Then having your first crush, and dramas in your friends’ group. Another is dealing with puberty in all of its insanity! Then one more extensively covered is trying to lose one’s virginity, like in Super Bad. Finally is the aspect of graduating high school with the future world looming over you and your friends.
All of these things cause radical inner turbulence and make for amazing story-telling, but one major life change that I feel gets covered very narrowly, (usually like in a montage,) is the ending of adolescence. Generally, the other major life changes are pretty uniform. First words, first walk, first friends, first day at school, first crush, and puberty; everyone goes through these beats in one way or another, but would it be crazy to think that not everybody passes through the milestone of adulthood completely? We’ve all heard of the people that peeked in high school, or in general I’m sure we’ve all come across adults that make us ashamed to be their peer.
Major societal life milestones are getting a job, getting a house, settling down with a spouse, and having children. While none of these are needed to mature to adulthood, they help par the course. The period of time between leaving school and making your way to independence is a tough road to walk. The future holds so many possible paths. A film that covers this period in its own unique way is The Social Network. But, something stopping this film from being a prime example of one leaving their adolescence for all to lean on is how Zucc has lived; in other words it’s not very relatable.
There are other films out there like the classic: Clerks, that are about young adults in the in between of still being a kid and being middle-aged. If anything, Clerks seems to be the blueprint for such a vague stage of life. We’re given a protagonist that’s down and out on their luck that hasn’t made much of themselves once leaving the nest, if they’ve even done that, and they find themselves stuck at that beginning ADULT milestone on the road of life. Then an inciting incident begins their journey to help them out of said rut. Now the only issue with this premise is that it can apply to any adult from 30 to 60. The new Bill and Ted movie coming out has that exact premise.
So is it just a thing that some people don’t necessarily grow up all the way? Well of course, humans are complicated, and external milestones don’t really tell us if an individual is a mature person per se, just that they did something other people that ARE mature have done. Someone can get a job, a house, get married, and have children, and still be standing at adolescence’s door. So our system at its core isn’t fool proof, but maturing usually means: coming to terms with or understanding our place in society as a whole, deciding in what way we wish to contribute to society, finding a mate or partner to love and parse life’s challenges with (like finding a home), then usually but not always either having children or adopting.
Why are there not more stories being told about the period or stage of all our lives when we leave our nest, or find our career job, or finish college or university? We all go through our twenties with way more variety than we all go through our teens, by the mere situation of our educational system, but its still a period of great growth for us all. Ending adolescence is the internal shift from taking orders to giving them, or from co-dependence to independence. It is the realization of our position as adults in society, no longer in school or under our parents’ rule. Ending adolescence doesn’t mean no longer being able to have fun or act wacky, it just means rising to the task of taking responsibility.
How are you guys, the readers, doing with life? Am I off-base with any of my thoughts on ending adolescence? What was it like for you to shift into adulthood, and when did it happen? Was finding your career a major milestone, or having your first child? Let me know anywhere you can comment! Thank you as always for taking your time to read. I truly appreciate and love you all! I wish you nothing but the best, and until next time, keep on thinkin’!
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In episode thirty-four of Thoughts, I go over the concept and origins of fame and infamy, and how we are all effected by it today. Enjoy!
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Hello one and all! Check out my YouTube channel found through this video here or in my CHANNELS page. I’d love to have a conversation with you about any of the topics I’ve talked about, and the others I have yet to! Let me know what you think anywhere you can comment, and enjoy!
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Welcome to episode 60 of Joe Van’s Secret Podcast! In this episode I bring back my first new guest post COVID-19 to continue our deep dive into various subjects! We cover the economy and how by not increasing pay during something like inflation IS in itself an action, we cover our earliest memories, health and fitness, milk, simple solutions, art, and emotional films. Enjoy!
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The Legend of Zelda is a video game franchise where you play a silent-type heroic character clad in green, that fights the flood- wait! Wait waitwait, wrong franchise. Sorry. In the Legend of Zelda, you play as a character appointed by your commanding nation to quell the forces against your kind, harnessing little more than a trusted weapon, tiny blue lady with all the know-how, and copious amounts of courage and luck. Your name is the Ma- Link! Link- you play as Link. Man alive. Who knew the only two video game franchises I’d come to love would be so similar? I’ve already covered Halo in a previous thoughts piece I’ll link you to here, so no more of that.
Both franchises hold dear places in my heart for both their story and the time they came in my life. I started playing Halo in 2007, but before that, the Legend of Zelda inspired my every creative spark. When I look back at old comic books I made or just original art in general, they were almost all based off of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Back in 1998 when I was five years old, my older brother and I got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas. The first 3D Legend of Zelda game subtitled Ocarina of Time just came out that year at the end of November so we and millions of others including one of my best friends received it as a packaged deal for the system. It was the first time we got a gaming console. Other kids at this time had a Play Station, NES, or SNES, but to my brother and I, this was the genesis of gaming. We later received other games like Mario Kart and Super Sash Bros but for a long time the Legend of Zelda was all we had. (Side note before getting into it, I always called the game ‘Oricona’ of Time for some reason, and I always pronounced deku, ‘deeku.’ For a kid, the latter is sensible, but my mix-up of ocarina has no rhyme or reason to it. Anyway, back to it.)
I remember my brother and I being stuck in the Great Deku Tree dungeon for the longest time until our cousin solved a particular puzzle for us. Afterward, once defeating the dungeon’s boss and leaving our character’s home of Kokiri, we entered Hyrule field of the first time. Witnessing the expanse of land housed the same feeling of awe in me that Halo’s second mission did. All of a sudden, you were in the world, and nothing was going to be the same again. It reminds me of when I was younger and would walk to school. My elementary school was ONE block from my house, so at the time my whole world was very small. It wasn’t until like grade five that I started biking around the city with my friends, where for the first time I truly grasped the scope and scale of the world.
As one does, I eventually beat the game. I had beaten it before my older brother and best friend. I remember that being the first time I had really competed and won. On the day my brother made it to the end fight with Ganon, I sat there furious. He hit B, triggering the final blow animation, and I ripped out the power cord! Like that was going to permanently stop him from beating the game. Talk about childish and petty. Obviously he soon beat the game along with everyone else and life went on. A year later, Ocarina of Time’s sequel was announced! I begged to have it and when it came out, my parent’s obliged. At this point it was clear to my folks that I was obsessed. I went through an addiction phase with the N64 where I wouldn’t do my homework or let anyone else play, so my parent’s grounded me from it and I threw a full-on fit. These were the first signs that I had an addictive personality, but how could my parent’s have known that? Regardless, I started drawing my own dungeon maps and spin off story lines for Link. Then, Wind Waker came to the GameCube. I was at first appalled by their change of art design. It was cartoony now! Completely divorced from the first two 3D games’ ‘realistic’ art design. But my love was strong and I adjusted to it, quickly falling in love with the story it told. Years passed before the next game was announced at E3 2004. It was at the time untitled, but… the art design… it went for a more realistic look! And in that reveal trailer the camera panned over a land that looked just like Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule field. I remember watching that trailer over and over again, thinking, ‘is this the third game to Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask? Will it take place between then and Wind Waker, where Link returns to Hyrule? My mind was running wild! As we all know now, that wasn’t the case. It was its own standalone story in its own universe. Before this game, I didn’t even know the stories of any of the other games in the series, and didn’t know they all held the same names of characters but were otherwise not connected.
So now I shall cover all of the Legend of Zelda games as quickly as I can: The first game simply titled The Legend of Zelda came out in 1986. Since there are over 19 games, this first one will be the only story I dive into for the sake of levity.
A small kingdom in the land of Hyrule is engulfed by chaos when an army led by Ganon, the Prince of Darkness, invaded and stole the Triforce of Power, one part of a magical artifact which alone bestows great strength. In an attempt to prevent him from acquiring the Triforce of Wisdom, another of the three pieces, Princess Zelda splits it into eight fragments and hides them in secret underground dungeons. Before eventually being kidnapped by Ganon, she commands her nursemaid Impa to find someone courageous enough to save the kingdom. While wandering the land, the old woman is surrounded by Ganon’s henchmen, when a young boy named Link appears and rescues her. Upon hearing Impa’s plea, he resolves to save Zelda and sets out to reassemble the scattered fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom, with which Ganon can then be defeated.
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link came out in 1987 and is a direct sequel to the first game, taking place many years later. Then the third game, A Link to the Past came out in 1991. It’s a prequel to the first two games, and is directly followed by Link’s Awakening in 1993. Ocarina of Time came out in 1998 and is apparently a prequel that takes the story back many centuries; according to character designer Satoru Takizawa, it was meant to implicitly tell the story of the Imprisoning War from the manual of A Link to the Past, with Majora’s Mask in 2000 directly following its ending. (Another side note, there’s a YouTube video by The Game Theorist called Dear Nintendo, I FIXED Your Timeline! (Zelda) He goes over the whole timeline properly for those who like things done properly. So just keep in mind that although I’m covering the official Zelda timeline, it isn’t something the makers of the franchise actually planned to have.)
Next, Skyward Sword from 2011 is a prequel to Ocarina of Time. Twilight Princess which came out in 2006 is set more than 100 years after Ocarina of Time. The Wind Waker from 2002 is actually parallel to Twilight Princess, taking place in another timeline branch, which we’ll get into in a bit. Phantom Hourglass from 2007 is a direct sequel to Wind Waker and is followed by Spirit Tracks in 2009 which… is set about 100 years later with a different link on a supercontinent far away from the setting of The Wind Waker. So like… why? Why even make it a Legend of Zelda story? Why say they’re connected?! But I digress. Four Swords from 2002 for the Game Boy Advance was considered the oldest tale in the series’ chronology at the time of its release, with Four Swords Adventures released in 2004 set sometime after its events. The Minish Cap, also from 2004, preceded the two games. A Link Between Worlds which came out in 2013 takes place six generations after Link to the Past. Important events occur in the game include the Triforce being reunited, and Ganon being resurrected.
Nintendo’s 2011 timeline announcement subsequently posits that following Ocarina of Time, the timeline splits into three alternate routes: in one, Link fails to defeat Ganon, leading into the Imprisoning War and A Link to the Past, Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, Link’s Awakening, The Legend of Zelda and The Adventure of Link. In the second and third, Link is successful, leading to a timeline split between his childhood (when Zelda sends him back in time so he can use the wisdom he has gained to warn the Zelda in the past of the horrifying fate of Hyrule) and adulthood (where the Zelda from the future lives on to try and rebuild the kingdom). His childhood continues with Majora’s Mask, followed by Twilight Princess and Four Swords Adventures. The timeline from his adult life continues into Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.
FINALLY, In 2017 Breath of the Wild came out, officially taking place after all previous games in the series (without specifying a connection to any of the three timelines), and moved Link’s Awakening to take place before Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages.
Now with all of that wiki timeline nonsense covered, the only games important to me were and are the console games. I understand if that makes me ignorant to other story beats but that’s where I’m at with the franchise. On that note I admit I’m not a super fan by any means. Even with the console games, I never played Skyward Sword which came out on the Wii. So for my own timeline, I know of Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Breath of the Wild, and Link’s Awakening which just came out with a refreshed coat of graphics in 2019 on the Nintendo Switch.
Whether you’ve played every game, only some console games like moi, haven’t played any but watched family and friends play through them, haven’t played any but watched the cutscenes online, or only know of the games by name, the Legend of Zelda’s got a place for everyone. According to Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the franchise, one of his most memorable experiences as a young boy was the discovery of a cave entrance in the middle of the woods near his childhood home in Sonobe, Japan. After some hesitation, he apprehensively entered the cave and explored its depths with the aid of a lantern. Miyamoto has referred to the creation of the Zelda games as an attempt to bring to life a “miniature garden” for players to play with in each game of the series, and to me you can really feel that sense of adventure when you play.
Also a fun fact worth noting, Miyamoto named princess Zelda off of American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife. He’s stated that he thought the name sounded “pleasant and significant” and decided to pay tribute. Another fun fact! The inspiration for Link and his fairy came from Peter Pan and Tinker Bell. And finally, the Master Sword was inspired by Excalibur, which originates from the Arthurian Legend in the Welsh collection of Mabinogion.
The Legend of Zelda is a strategy game series that rewards players’ puzzle solving abilities with a rich story of good fighting evil, courage in the face of insurmountable odds, and love. The latest game announced is a yet untitled Breath of the Wild sequel, to come out for the Switch possibly in 2021. It is said that it will build atop the original’s world with a new story and gameplay elements, something inspired by Red Dead Redemption 2. What do you guys think of this series? What games have you played? What do you know about Link, Zelda, and Ganon? What do they mean to you? Are you curious to find out what happens next for these characters? Let me know! Thank you so much again for being here. I appreciate your time, I love y’as, and I’ll see you in next one.
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In episode thirty-three of Thoughts, I am joined with a guest appearance by Ben from stuffwithben to talk about language! We give our take on what it is and what it means for us as a species. Enjoy!
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Welcome to episode 59 of Joe Van’s Secret Podcast! Today I have on my fifth guest post COVID-19. We waste no time jumping into Ang Lee’s discography, conspiracies- both ludicrous and true, how separation leads to hate, the new viral ‘woke and racist’ skit on Twitter, Oakville’s checkered past AND present, why Canada should not compare itself to America, personal philosophies, and anime. It was a full episode that I’m happy to have had. I hope you enjoy!
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Welcome to episode 58 of Joe Van’s Secret Podcast! Today I have my first NEW guest, post COVID-19. We waste no time jumping into heavy topics such as belief, hard concepts that will ne’er have an answer, working to learn how you want to work, and living situations. It was a blast to have him on by the mere earnestness he gives with his opinions, as you’ll hear. Enjoy!
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When you think of tolerance, do you think of physical tolerance, or philosophical tolerance? The capacity to endure continued subjection to something, be it a drug, transplant, antigen, or environmental conditions, without adverse reaction, is physical tolerance. The ability or willingness to forbear something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with, is philosophical tolerance.
What should one tolerate? At high school dances there is a zero alcohol tolerance and that is easily understood at face value. In parenting, the adults must tolerate their children’s lack of understanding of things like table manners. Again without further explanation we all get that kids are wild because they’re in the middle of growing. In american society, people are charged with the task of tolerating injustices to not upset the status quo. Whether from your perspective that means not talking back against PC culture, or not protesting against police brutality toward unsuspecting people of colour, I leave for you to decide, but the one thing that’s clear is perspective plays a huge role in individuals’ capacity for tolerance.
Evangelical Christians are known to have little tolerance towards the idea of homosexuality. Twitter users by the very nature of how Twitter works have little tolerance for nuance. I have little tolerance towards people who think evolution is a lie. And I’m sure you, reader, have certain things that really push your buttons above others. While some people can tolerate almost anything like a zen master, it reveals what having a maximum tolerance achieves, or lack-there-of. In my piece, Importance, I talk about how people should care about things. If they didn’t, we as a species wouldn’t have found the motivation to get out of our caves and innovate! But this drive, though used to currently fight for equality in the western world, is the same drive that gave us religious wars, slavery, genocide, and all other terrible setbacks we as a species have endured because of the will of the powerful.
Civility is the hope for a brighter and more peaceful future in society, but it shouldn’t be expected right now when equality is not yet set. Right now in America, the vast majority of the population are white Christians, which also tracks to political power. If an atheist, Jew, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, or Jain tried to run for power, the masses would not vote them in. That shows a clear disparity against the minorities when the will of one group controls the others. The only things keeping Christians from enforcing their specifics beliefs like anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and so on across America, is the separation of church and state laws. If they were not placed into effect by the country’s founders… America would be a much worse place currently. Now, if you have taken offence by my ragging on Christianity’s place of power in America, I’m sorry. It was not my intention to offend, but merely inform. The western world is currently the most inclusive pair of nations on the planet, but just because it’s not like Saudi Arabia or Japan, does not mean there isn’t still a long way to go with inclusion.
Tolerance by its nature does not spread evenly across a given matrix, it pulls and wanes depending on the population and vigor of groups of people, so all we can do is get it as close as we can to equality without loosing liberty and freedom in the process. Every person deserves a fair start at life. Kids deserve the benefit of the doubt while growing up. Pains deserve a modicum of tolerance before seeking to disband it. And as always, we all deserve love. Thank you for reading. I’ll talk to you guys next time.
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In episode thirty-two of Thoughts, I talk about how conflict as an entity is fused to the meaning of life. It is what gives us rise whether we like it or not. Enjoy!
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I gave you guys a late night thought of mine in Transient Thoughts, and here I just wanted to talk about late nights in general. They are the time of a 24 hour cycle where most people are asleep. It’s when it’s quietest in your corner of the world, and it’s when deep thoughts can emerge. Free from the pull of work and socializing, we have a chance at reflection. Our thoughts can breathe, with either brevity or torture. It can be a time of great peace, or great melancholy. Though, even under the ever-judging scrutiny of our own mind, late nights wash waves of benign calm across our brows, soothing any hard edges. Its ability on us is undeniable. Should we bathe in the glow of our computer screens, or walk under the pale moon light? Do we reminisce on the past, or ponder the possible future, regardless of what may come in the morning to follow?
Work, studies, exams, trials, or tribulations are not found in the moments of peace formed from the late nights, instead we get a chance to just breathe. The peace hark like a light cast to the dark sea, that we are indeed here. We are conscious. We are alive. Our past has gone and our future is unseen. Our time is limited, but in the moment it is infinite. In the moment, we are present with the buildings and the birds and the trees and the wind. The universe has been here long before us and will long outlast us, but in the moment, we are both here, together. Tomorrow we may be gone, but not now yet. No. Here, we find ourselves. Here we be, for an unforeseen moment more, and in it we can think about our place. Should we only do right with our time. Time will tell.
Thank you as always for giving me the opportunity of your eyes. I appreciate your time, and hope for you nothing less than love and peace.
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In episode thirty-one of Thoughts, I talk about my experience with the video game franchise: Halo. Enjoy!
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Hey everybody! It’s ya boy, Joe Van, comin’ back at ya with another piece, but this one’s different from the rest. In this piece I wanted to recommend some YouTube channels to you guys. These channels are ones I’ve come across over years of binge-watching YouTuber content. So, they’ll come in no particular order, but their subjects will be similar. That’s how I’ll categorize it. First, I will recommend movie review channels!
Up front you got YMS, or YourMovieSucksDOTorg; Canada represent. He’s got a voice you either love or hate, so in that regard it’s a coin toss, but he is honestly one of the better movie review channels out there. You can tell he’s got a naturally high intelligence, and he uses that gift to critique movies, so on behalf of cinephiles everywhere, thank you for your service.
Next up we got ralphthemoviemaker. He’s young but sharp, and has a surprising eye for artistic expression. You’d think with his accent he’d just be a ‘fuckin’ bada-bing bada-boom!’ kind of guy, only interested in Scorsese films, and he is, but he also an entire universe more than that. Same goes with IHE, or I Hate Everything. You figure because of his YouTube channel’s name he would be just a pure cynic, but he’s really not at all.
Next we got Elvis The Alien. This guy smokes weed, and loves Nic Cage. ‘Nuff said. Following the alien we got Chris Stuckmann, a man that will to no end ask you to, ‘click right here… to get Stuckmannized.’ Georg Rockall-Schmidt is a dimly-lit, dry-witted reviewer of films both new and old. We also have Mr Sunday Movies, a duo that mostly, or only, cover pop culture movies like super hero movies. Same with The Cosmonaut Variety Hour.
Following that lot we got channels like, Like Stories of Old, and Renegade Cut. These pair cover movies through a deeply philosophical lens; not that the other channels can’t do that on occasion, but these channels make it their mission to only do that. It helps them separate themselves from the lot too, so all the power to them. Finally my only female recommendation, which is unfortunate but that aside, Lindsay Ellis. She covers other things like a lot of these channels but she’s known for me with her review of The Hobbit movies, specifically. That, and her take on Game of Thrones. Her basic style is based on her personality, like the rest of the creators. Aside for covering a niche, the big pull for any creator is their tone or more simply just their voice, and these people got me. I’m in, I wanna hear what they got to say.
Following that list I’ll now go over Halo channels! I’ll make this one quick because they all give the same thing more or less. Though they’re not all relegated to just covering Halo, ya got The Act Man, and HiddenXperia: men of culture. Installation00 has a brain he can sit in. Ultimate Halo is a youngin’ but one bursting with charisma. Aozolai, UberNick, and Sean W also got that charm going for them, bringing people back for more. Then you got Owl, KevinKoolx, Rejected Shotgun, Rocket Sloth, and Halo Cannon that house enough good content to make them ones to return to. Now, instead of getting into it I’ll just say I made sure to NOT add Late Night Gaming because of drama between him and Aozolai, and that’s it! That’s all I’m saying on that.
Moving on, we have scientific/philosophical YouTube channels! We have the likes of exurb1a, a mad lad that slices science and philosophy with comedy in little YouTube skits, while also being in general a writer.
Next we have John Michael Godier who’s the kind of guy to put you to sleep faster than anesthesia! But man, the guy puts out some interesting videos. He’s a sci-fi writer that basically goes over scary possibilities of the universe and what it holds, among other things.
Now for the final burst you got TED, Physics Girl, Thoughty2, Veritasium, Vsauce, RealLifeLore, and LEMMiNO. These guys are my absolute favorite channels on science! They each have their own voice, style, questions, and presentation to their works. Obviously TED is bigger than YouTube but they still apply for my recommendation.
So there you have it! Joe Van has now recommended some YouTube channels for you to check out if you haven’t already. I hope y’all were receptive to this! Let me know if there are other subjects you’d want me to cover in another recommends piece, but until next time, I love you all, and keep on thinking. See ya!
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Shamans and heroes! Serial killers and singers! Fame. The subject of fame is cool as hell because it’s one of those other things that’s completely unique to humans. It’s the state of being known or talked about by many people, especially on account of notable achievements. People the world over know who Tom Cruise is. It doesn’t matter if they’re young, old, rich, or poor. So where did this kind of thing come from? What are its humble beginnings?
There’s a term called altruism that is the belief in or practice of selfless concern for the well-being of others. In ancient times when our ancestors practiced in the life of hunters and gatherers, the hunters would often find themselves in dangerous scenarios. For example, we can imagine an encounter where a sabre-toothed cat. (BIG side note here but apparently the term ‘sabre-toothed tiger’ is incorrect, and even sabre-toothed cat is close to a misnomer {a wrong or inaccurate name or designation} where the sabre-toothed thing’s genetic lineage is actually closest to marsupials! {like kangeroos or opossums!} But that’s niether here nor there.) In ancient Canada, a tribe of humans would typically scatter away at the sight of a sabre-toothed cat, hoping the predator wouldn’t chase them from the others. But now imagine a man at the back of the pack, noticing their son or best friend at the front… and in that moment the man decided to run toward the beast, sacrificing his life to save the life of the others. The man would indeed most likely die from this encounter, and the hunters that returned would hail praises at the man’s altruism, or heroics. They knew of no such words then, but the rare ideal to strive towards would have been set in the tribe.
As once something that no one yet knew they could be, the idea of a hero set itself upon civilization. Tribes that never met would all have similar encounters of singing praises to one doing something selfless, through pure chance, before it became ingrained into humanity’s conscience as a whole. But, as we are social creatures of all different brain chemistrys’, tricksters too would come out of the woodwork. After all, many heroes perform feats of greatness and live to tell the tale, and tales are so easy to fabricate, so these tellers of tall tales would sow seeds of grandiosity to anyone that would hear it and do what they could to swindle those around them. Everyone wants to be a hero, but not everyone has the courage or opportunity to excel themselves to that status level.
Now, there were other forms of fame that spread word across the lands of early civilization, and those were the opposite of heroes: those were the monsters. Ones to fear, that killed women and babies, or performed cannibalism. These individuals had tribes across the land warn all they could of their evil deeds. As time moved on, both leaders, inventors, and killers were talked about by the masses across even larger stretches of land. To be famous was a thing people of all walks of life could achieve if only they were loud enough. Before long, entertainment grew in popularity. What was once something localized to theatres or circuses, entertainers could now be found at every city with a nickelodeon. (Not to be confused with the children’s channel owned by ViacomCBS, a ‘nickel odeon’ was what existed to show citizens motion pictures before movie theatres became commonplace.) Great dancers, singers, and actors stole the hearts of millions with their performances. It wasn’t long before Hollywood changed who we considered famous.
Infamy through wrong-doing hadn’t changed in the slightest since the concept’s birth, but fame was now for the taking by anyone talented or attractive enough. Interestingly, though, since the popularization of reality television in the 80’s and 90’s to what it’s become now, for one to be famous, you need only be a fucking wreck of a human being. Okay, that’s probably not granted. There’s tons of reality T.V. that shows decent people living their life or completing difficult puzzles, but so much emphasis has been put on people living their life wrong now-a-days like in 90 Day Fiancée. It has become something people love watching, and it’s clear to understand why. One might think, ‘my life might be subpar in my eyes but at least it’s not as bad as this person.’ Watching people be absolute disgraces is like a confidence booster! It feels good to know you’re better than someone else, that’s just how our brains work. It’s probably why jesters were such a hit for royalty back in the day. If the king wanted to de-stress from a long day of making potentially wrong decisions, he could just watch an idiot bumble around.
You could have thousands or even millions of people notice you on the street because of your career choices. You could be noticed as someone great, someone silly, someone disgraceful, or someone dangerous. You could choose to be someone famous, or it could happen against your will. You could be someone who thrives from all the attention, or someone who crumbles from it. Alternatively, you could be someone who seeks fame your whole life but never gets it. Fame, as stated at the beginning, is a uniquely human trait. Our closest genetic cousins, chimpanzees, hold many similarities to us like social class and war but even they do not register fame. Fame is a part of the language game. It’s the retelling of an individual without them there, be it for good or ill. It’s the recognition of someone’s existence without their recognition of yours. It’s the masses’ acknowledgement.
Do you want to be famous? Why or why not? Let me know! Thank you again for stopping by. I love you all, and I’ll see you next time.
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In episode thirty of Thoughts I gush about love! Oh what a thing to be captured by. Enjoy!
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At my elementary school, when you rose to grade five, you were inducted to the fictional island of Foo. You learned their language and pastime sports, and near the end of the year you would compete with your peers to claim victory in each category. That was the first and only time I truly learned another language. All you had to do was add ‘INIG’ in front of every spoken vowel. Hinigellinigo, minigy ninigame inigis Jinigoe. It was really cool to have an understanding of a different mode of communication than the one you were raised with. Don’t get my educational system wrong though, I was taught French from grade four to nine, but it didn’t stick in the slightest. My theory as to why, aside from me not paying enough attention, was because their sentences are reversed. So aside from having to learn every basic word in their dictionary, you also had to learn how to form sentences in a completely different way than what your brain was automated to do.
Language is a trippy thing. Think of how you would form thoughts without it. Think about trying to understand someone else without it. It’s downright impossible. Babies want things but have yet to learn language, and look at how hard it is to find out what they want when they cry. Same with dogs. “What’s that, girl? Timmy’s stuck in the well?!” Our entire civilization depends on our ability to communicate thoughts to each other using the best means we have. Certain academics use the phrase ‘language game,’ when they talk about how we are all using words in society. Is there a possibility that in the future we will outgrow language for something more streamline like telepathy?
It is known that the German language has a word for almost everything. Whenever we, the English speakers, find ourselves unable to find the right words to express a feeling or idea, the best we can do is combine other words. It never quite works the same as having the right word. There is another phrase used when talking about potential advanced A.G.I. (artificial general intelligence) called a ‘black box.’ It is used to describe how we are all living now, never truly knowing what everyone else is thinking. Our only window into another individual’s mind is their own ability and… permission?- allowance- for us to bear witness of their raw thoughts. Otherwise we truly have no idea what is going on behind their eyes.
Now we must ask, what in the world would we as a species do in the unlikely event that aliens really visited Earth? Would we say hi? Hola? Salute? Would we attempt communication through Morse code? What if they only communicated through dance? Or in reversed meaning, where happy was sad and peace meant war? What if they only communicated through dreams, acting aberrant and uncooperative in waking life if you tried to do anything otherwise not talked about beforehand? Our brains formed solely through Earth’s evolution, from scratch. Alien life could have radically different minds if they even resembled Earth-like organisms.
Language is what built the life we have now. As a society, talking to each other built us up to being technologically advanced. It allowed collaboration of nations, democracy, infrastructure, and general stability. But just like the internet, language as a tool is a double-edged blade. It can grant us the best possible life in our individual situations, but it can also give us great pain. Sticks and stones may break my bones, AND words do also hurt me. It’s scary how effective words can hurt us. We have no ability to stop hearing things in front of us. Sound enters our ears and our brain computes it into meaning (if we know the language) and there’s nothing we can do about it. We have the ability to use our words for ill, or for good. It is up to us how we use it, and how we react.
With that in mind, I suggest we put in the effort, or attention, to use our words for better. Thank you again as always for reading. I love you all! And I’ll see you next time.
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In episode twenty-nine of Thoughts, I go over the MANY different definitions of strength, and discuss how power plays into strength. Enjoy!
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Does life need conflict? More specifically, do humans need conflict in our lives to keep things interesting? Just look at animals in zoos for Pete’s sake. They got no worries in the world, but also nothing to do. Good stories certainly need conflict. And states of higher consciousness or enlightenment are merely momentary, so it leads one to wonder what our resting place is. We try so hard with everything we do to not try so hard with everything we do. New inventions are created to help us relax more and struggle less, but it has yet to bring people any kind of lasting peace. People are just as mired now in conflict as they were a thousand years ago. Life has definitely improved where we don’t need to be in physical pain all the time anymore, but our resting mental state is still one that looks for conflict to fuck with. It doesn’t matter how much we meditate, pray, or fast, if someone less enlightened than us fucks with our shit, it’ll work. Our shit’ll get fucked up. And those people will always come. As a species we are only as strong as our weakest link.
Even if we spend the next hundred years working as hard as we can to bring everyone to a place of proposed peace, what would happen if we got there? Nothing would happen, really. And then what would be the point of all our lives? Everything would be so docile. Our goal is one we strive towards, but in actuality is one we maybe cannot obtain. Like passing the speed of light, it is something we can only pursue. It’s similar to the idea of living forever. We all strive to live as long as possible, but no one really wants to live forever. It would strip away the meaning of life from us. And so, that is the conflict with conflict. We kind of need it, if only mildly. Though it can suck and hurt, conflict also gives us purpose.
I hope you guys have a great, exciting day. Thank you for reading. I love you all, and I’ll see you next time.
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In episode twenty-eight of Thoughts, I talk about the follies of consciousness and what we do with our understanding of them. Enjoy!
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When you first saw Halo, were you blinded by its majesty? Before I jump into the video game that I’m actually referring to, let’s cover the other uses of the word. A halo is a disk or circle of light shown surrounding or above the head of a saint or holy person to represent their holiness. It’s also a circle of white or colored light around the sun, moon, or other luminous body caused by refraction through ice crystals in the atmosphere. Synonyms of halos are rings, belts, or bands.
So with that out of the way, let’s talk about the video game franchise. I could honestly make my YouTube channel a Halo channel, I love it so much. I’m honestly kind of annoyed at how much emotional power it has over me. The latest game is set to launch at the end of this year of our forerunners 2020 and I’ve been checking the r/halo Reddit every day since E3 2019. It’s sickly, guy, I’m a mess. So when did my love of these games start?
Growing up, my family was a Nintendo household and I loved it. I had the N64, the Game Boy Pocket, and then the GameCube and Wii when they came out. I didn’t even hear about Halo until grade nine, which for me was 2007. I made a new friend who came over to my place one day after school and we played Super Smash Bros. His reaction to it was honestly insulting. He ragged on the fact that it was a platformer and had inferior graphics to Call of Duty. He had just recently got an Xbox 360 with its new high definition graphics so my Wii couldn’t compare. After a few days of mulling it over, he decided to give me his old Xbox so that I could have a real gaming experience! I was beyond grateful. The only game he gave me with it was Halo: Combat Evolved. Everyone talks about this so I get how its not a unique experience, but when I started the second level and looked up for the first time, I was blinded by Halo’s majesty! I was in awe, and I was hooked. I remember getting my first legal job at 15 just so I could buy an Xbox 360, which I did, then I quit. I wasn’t really money oriented at that time.
So now for the people who’ve never played Halo, let me quickly break down it’s story. 500 years from now, humans take to the stars with slipspace engines that let them go father than we currently can, and with it we inhabit like hundreds of planets. After some wars between the UNSC and insurrectionists, our farthest out Planet, Harvest, makes contact with aliens for the first time. They’re called the Covenant; a collection of different species all working together to uncover artifacts of a long dead OTHER alien race that they revere as gods. So, side note, but why was humanity not inscribed into the covenant? It’s probably mentioned in a book, who knows.
The first game Halo starts in the middle of our space war with the aliens, and we’re losing. The Covenant has far superior weaponry than us so we never really had a chance. The ship you’re in comes out of slipspace after running away from the last planet we’ve inhabited aside from Earth. You play as John 117, better known as the Master Chief: his military rank, alongside Cortana as a chip in your head, Captain Keyes, Sargent Johnson, and Echo 419. You wake up to find that the ship you’re in has come across some kind of giant artificial planet in the shape of a ‘Halo.’ The aliens are on your tail so you descend onto the ring and fight on the ground. After discovering the Halo is a part of the alien’s religion, you seek to control it, later discovering that the ring is actually a giant weapon made by the ‘forerunners’ to wipe out all life in order to starve ANOTHER, parasitic alien species called the flood. Bingo bango, you blow up the Halo to save all life.
Second game brings you back to humanity where we’re still in the middle of losing. We get introduced to the Arbiter, an alien ship master that lost to you in the first game and must now make penance. As it turns out, the Covenant have no idea that firing the Halo will kill them all. They think it’ll teleport them to heaven or something. Meanwhile with the Master Chief, an alien fleet found Earth. Lucky for us, for the first time in a long time, we outnumber them, and force them to retreat into slipspace. You follow them this time and when y’all get out of slipspace, wouldn’t you know it but you’re at another Halo. You fight to destroy the aliens’ leaders but get picked up by an intelligent form of the flood, that instead of consuming you, convinces both you and the Arbiter to work with it to stop the Covenant from firing the ring. You do that and head back to Earth.
Third game has you back at Earth where the aliens are gaining the upper hand, but they also seem to be digging some structure up in Africa. You fight your best but run out of time as the aliens activate this forerunner device, creating a portal. They go through it and you follow. It leads to a Halo MAKER called the Ark. On the Ark, the Covenant can activate all the Halos scattered throughout the galaxy so you gotta stop them. You do, then save Cortana who got mixed up with the flood dude, blow up ANOTHER Halo and skip dodge as shit blows up. You nearly die but make it out only to be floating in a random part of space for an unforeseen amount of time.
There’s a lot I left out there but that’s the gist of the original trilogy that everyone loves. Years later, after I had played the prequel and spin off games, I headed to College. At this point a brand new Halo 4 was announced! I was excited for it but also nervous. It was the first new game by 343, who took the mantle of responsibility by Bungie, who had done 1-3, ODST, and the prequel. Would they continue Master Chief and Cortana’s story in a good direction? The game came out to mixed reviews by fans. Some loved it, some hated it. Most people hated the multiplayer because it copied Call of Duty’s load out system, and I agree to that point but didn’t care at the time. The only thing that grinded my gears was the Prometheans. They were a new robot-esque enemy to fight along with the Covenant, and they just aren’t good, man. Like, the Covenant are living things. Each species have their own history for how they ended up in the Covenant, and the faceless robots don’t have jack. Suffice to say, it didn’t feel like the same caliber of games as the O.G.s. At that point in my life I began to lean off of playing video games, for one reason or another, and the new Xbox One came out so I simply passed on the next Halo game that came to the system.
Halo 5: Guardians continued Master Chief’s story. In my mind they used that subtitle, Guardians, to lean off of numbers like they have now done with Halo 6. It’s been a marketing strategy used by other studios like Ubisoft with the Assassin’s Creed games. I’m not against it, but just thought I’d note it for y’all. Now, the story of Halo 5. Oie. Again, my opinions here aren’t unique but damn did they do Cortana dirty! And Buck (you don’t know him from me but he’s great,) but most of all, they did Chief dirty! They had such a bad writer come on to do this game. Like, guys! The reason people like Halo is because of its story! I mean, all of the other elements need to work too like the music, graphics, game play, multiplayer UI and so on and such, but the story is the hook! Anyway, at this point I wasn’t with it anymore. It sucked because I really loved the story. It kind of hurt not continuing with the franchise.
After many years passed, I started a relationship with the most gorgeous woman on the planet, and during Black Friday of 2018, she suggested I get a Nintendo Switch. It had been so long since I actually played video games, but now I wouldn’t be playing alone. It would be like my childhood when my siblings, cousins, and I played Mario Party and Mario Kart. So I got it, and really quickly got into the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I’d never been much of an open world player, but BotW on IP alone sucked me in. I was in love again with a gaming franchise! It wasn’t even a year later that I made up my mind that I was going to buy an Xbox One. I did so, buying the Master Chief Collection and Halo 5. I got Game Pass for a number of months and played Halo Wars 2 through that, and may I say, it was great. I’d say I was right at least to wait, because apparently MCC and Halo 5 at launch had HUGE problems. I never had to suffer any of it, luckily. The MCC has been going through new glitches as 343 ports every game to PC, but it gives me little grief knowing it isn’t permanent.
So there you have it! My time with Halo. The newest game is on the horizon (a potential end to 343’s trilogy) and they have decided to go back to Bungie’s art design. It has a lot of people happy, myself included, making this year not CONCLUDE quick enough! Is my love of this franchise a bit much? I’d say so. But hey, everybody’s gotta have a thing, right? For some people it’s religion, for some it’s sports, others it’s Star Wars, and me in part it’s Halo. Will all my dreams be answered from the new game? I figure, yeah. Whether or not it’s good like Halo 3 or bad like Halo 5, I just want the thing out so I can decide once and for all if 343’s a botch studio. Either way I’ll still give it 80+ hours of playtime/my life. One thing I’m wondering is what the fate of the Master Chief will be? If he’s continues on after this game’s campaign I feel like it might dull his appeal. That’s probably what they’ll do, but our boy is getting old! If he were to die or retire or something, it would feel granted in my mind. Let him rest I say, and give him a nice send off.
But any who! With that, I’d say my thought piece is finished. It’s done. Halo is one of those franchises deserving of its place in pop culture because of its rich story universe. There are endless books to read, forums to pose questions and theories on, and movies/shows to watch. What do you guys think will happen in Halo Infinite? Let me know! Thank you for reading and until next time, wake me when you need me.
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In episode twenty-seven of Thoughts, I dive deep into the philosophical standpoint of Determinism. Is it the truth of reality? One must make up their own mind. Enjoy!
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Love is compassion and attraction. It’s kindness and well wishes. It’s hidden magic, being in it, and something worth fighting for. If life is a game, love is the prize! It’s the one thing everyone wants. But does true love really exist? Sorry to keep playing the word game with you guys, but let’s look at what love is defined as, then what we understand it as. Love according to Google is an intense feeling of deep affection. I wouldn’t personally use those words to describe love, but that’s the definition. I’d say that’s definitely a type of love, but I’ve understood love in my life to be an unbreakable bond. It can waver, but exists as an absolute. No matter how much my dog might annoy me, I’ll always love him. Even if my family becomes estranged, I will still love them. In saying that, I feel like my dad and I never had love, so just because he’s my family there was never an initial love to tether the storm he brought upon my family. There can be other variables to your family not being people you should love, like if they are abusive, but usually families are the people you will always have in your life. And so, if you want to live a good life, you must love your family accordingly, if only at first for personal harmony.
There are many forms of love. You have the above mentioned familial love which can extend to friendship love, then you have general love for humankind, or a sports team, or your country, or some other form of people you will never meet per se. Then you have a deep ass love. That’s the meaning of life kind of love. Deeper than any love you could have otherwise. This type of love might actually branch to best friends, depending, but is usually reserved for a romantic life partner, and for your children. This is the love that keeps giving. It’s the daily love and drive of one’s existence. Ain’t no love like a lifetime love! It’s the number one love sought after by most. For this reason, so many people jump into marriages and end up divorced because it’s not what they thought it would be. Love still takes work. It’s not some unconditional coddling of a parent figure, it takes two. Expectations usually ruin relationships, like: poor communications that make one believe the partnership was going to be one way and ended up another way completely. This can also happen because people are still growing and they might end up becoming a different person than the other thought they would have for life.
Love is love. What can I say? Does true love exist? It does depending on the person. The thing comes in so many forms. How about I give you guys some fun facts at the end here. Did you know the shape of a cartoon heart is two real hearts together? Another one! Did you know that kissing was invented as a greeting, and later became incorporated as a romantic gesture? Before this it’s hypothesized that cave people we would sniff each other if they were romantically interested. Another fun fact, the drug of love that most people feel when they meet someone new that’s cute (hot) is an actual chemical, known as oxytocin. Oxytocin, not to be confused with oxycodone the pharmaceutical drug, releases naturally when we social bond. It becomes active during pregnancy too and plays a role in post birth for breast feeding, for some reason. It also has a negative side effect known as jealousy. The feeling of jealous is this hormone.
So there you have it! My weird take on love. It’s the best of things, it at times can be the worst of things like when you’re love sick with a crush you’re too shy to talk to. But either way, it’s undeniably us. Thank you so much again for reading. I freakin’ LOVE you all, and I’ll see you next time. Stay lovely!
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Welcome to episode 57 of Joe Van’s Secret Podcast! Today I have another 2nd time returning guest come back from the top of the year to discuss their experience during Canada’s quarantine time. We talk about Black Lives Matters protests, films to watch, Jay-walking, what the odds are that we live in a simulated reality, and what we’re scared of. Enjoy!
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In episode twenty-six of Thoughts, I discuss the sensation of fear, where it came from, why it lives within us and what one does with it. Enjoy!
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Strength! Power! Austin POWERS. What is strength, and what is power? Strength is physical, and strength is emotional. Power is external control and authority, and control is an illusion. So what does that say about the people seeking power? One could say they’re chasing a fleeting dream, like chasing the pink dragon- something they might grasp for a moment or two before it disappears into a wisp of smoke. These two concepts of strength and power serpentine through each other, meeting in one field of thought and being completely separate in others. I was originally only going to write about strength in this thought piece, but figured it would be best to include power as well.
The word strength is defined as… wait. Oh my God. There are too many definitions. I can’t one-off this, you guys. Okay! So, let’s run off the list here. There are twelve definitions separated into five sections. SECTION ONE. 1) the quality or state of being physically strong. 2) the influence or power possessed by a person, organization, or country. 3) the degree of intensity of a feeling or belief. 4) the cogency of an argument or case. 5) the potency, intensity, or speed of a force or natural agency.
SECTION TWO. 6) the capacity of an object or substance to withstand great force or pressure. 7) the emotional or mental qualities necessary in dealing with situations or events that are distressing or difficult.
SECTION THREE. 8) the potency or degree of concentration of a drug, chemical, or drink.
SECTION FOUR. 9) a good or beneficial quality or attribute of a person or thing. 10) a person or thing perceived as a source of mental or emotional support.
SECTION FIVE. 11) the number of people comprising a group, typically a team or army. And finally 12) the number of people required to make a group complete.
So, what do these sections tell us about the nature of strength? The first two are pretty general, but the last three are separated properly. Third section is potency, the fourth describes an emotionally secure and mature person, and the last details military force. Who’d have thunk these vastly different fields would have such a core connection? Language is interesting in this regard. Strength means so many things! It as a concept really gets its worth. You could say strength is a STRONG ass word! Luckily, there are adjectives to help describe its many forms: Brawn, supremacy, intensity, force, stability, resilience, stoicism, aptitude, magnitude, anchor. We have body builders and we have mothers. We have Keanu Reeves, a man who has lost so many loved ones and still holds a positive demeanour, and we have life itself! Life is stronger than anything; throw asteroids at the Earth and life is still here!
Now where does power intersect with strength? Brute strength has power over another in a tug-of-war. In a fight, a lighter person could out-maneuver the heavier one but in something like tug-of-war, it’s done before it begins. In a game of wits similar to how polite neighbours might be nasty to each other, the one who best holds their emotional stability wins the power. To contrast, there are many cases where the weak can have more power, like in politics. Authority is where the abuse of power is found with individuals that may have never had a sense of control before. Strength is not needed to sign papers or bark orders, but great power is housed in it.
It’s a curious thing to have strength or power, and all the more to lose it. People who have just attained either, or have yet to lose one often look down on others without in however mildly disdain. Only when you lose one can you have a better perspective on life. Most people with more money than they need who give to specific charities, do so because they had someone in their life go through whatever the charity is aimed at. New people coming into the game of life as independent adults seek riches either because they were taught to, to compensate internal anguish, or because they grew up with very little and want their kids to have the opposite kind of life.
In the end, though, we lose everything. Any kind of power or strength you gain, will leave you before the end. It doesn’t matter how much you work out, how sharp you make yourself, how much you make or how many things you name after yourself, in the end we all lose to death. One can hope for a future world where we learn the humble lessons of past peoples and gain their perspective of what really matters in the end. We could maybe finally mature as a species, instead of one at a time and often too late, but that kind of thing is only a hope. I don’t want to write it off, but our minds are clearly wired to compete. And compete we will. Maybe we can compete to a point to equanimity one day- who knows.
One thing we do know, is that with all things, time will tell. Thank you again for reading. I love you all, and I’ll talk to you next time. Be good.
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In milestone episode twenty-five of Thoughts, I discuss the pursuit of happiness and how to live a generally good life. Enjoy!
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In episode twenty-four of Thoughts, I go over time in all of its complicated simplicity as it draws us ever forward. Enjoy!
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There will be people that can argue to a good point that human consciousness is a part of evolution, but my intuition says it just ain’t! Hence my title: The Follies of Consciousness. First, what is consciousness? Consciousness is the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world. In shorter words; self-awareness. I am of the strong belief that human consciousness happened by mistake.
I think evolution, as a process barreling forward with whatever it got, sharpened our ancestors social game and mathematical problem solving to a point where we started knowing it was us in a river’s reflection. I think it happened as a side effect of making us so smart. What started with cognitive growth for survival’s sake, like the ability to plan for the future, morphed into contemplation about why we’re even here.
Here are some examples of follies of consciousness. 1) Suicide. Suicide does not help our survival, so clearly that wasn’t programmed into us by evolution. It’s a disorder of the mind when looking inward and forward, and not wanting to live anymore. 2) Obsession. Wouldn’t it be easier to distribute our DNA if we didn’t care about which mate we did it with? What about workaholics that literally work themselves to death from a lack of sleep and nutrition? Jealousy and fixation are another example of defects of consciousness that holds no survival advantage. Paying attention does but not at such high levels. And lastly 3) Religiosity. Fanatics do wacky shit. They’ll dance like they’re being possessed by the holy spirit just because some dude with a microphone is swinging his arms. Old people will stop taking their medication because some fraud said Jesus is with them and will heal them. Young virgin boys with rage issues get sucked into believing the end of the world is coming and join ISIS to partake in a holy war.
In general, depression and anxiety are like really crappy side effects of being smart. You get the best brains on Earth but it comes with this baggage. We can let it tear us down, or we can use these faults to excel us forward. That’s the great thing about where we’re at as a society now. 100 years ago if you wanted to talk about your anxiety you’d just be called weak. Now, we’ve done the research and realize it’s something we’re all going through and ought to help each other out with it to be our best selves. Being self-aware of the follies of being self-aware is a step in the right direction. It allows one to course correct whenever finding oneself descending into despair. It can be the thing we use as motivation to keep working, keep striving, and vent about on the weekends.
I’ve always been a palm-sweater, prone to silence in frantic situations. I clam up. But instead of me accepting or being owned by these defects, I learn what causes them and work on either avoiding those situations or teaching myself to lessen the impact it has on me. The fact that we are self-aware is the luckiest luck a living creature could hope to have on this planet, but it doesn’t come without cost. We must all learn to cope with our defects and continue to help each other out when needed. Thank you for reading dear viewers. I love you, and I’ll you next time.
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In episode twenty-three of Thoughts I go over the heavy subject of substance abuse, what factors play into how it develops and how breaking through mental walls is all part of living a better life. Enjoy!
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In episode twenty-two of Thoughts, I talk about the concept of identity, what it is, what it means, where it could come from, and what we make of it. Enjoy!
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Is determinism the truth of reality? For starters, what is the idea of determinism and what are its counters? Determinism is the philosophical belief that all events are determined completely by previously existing causes. Causal determinism in physics is known as cause-and-effect. It is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state (of an object or event) is completely determined by prior states.
Now, there are two main counter philosophies: indeterminism, and predeterminism. In science, most specifically quantum theory in physics, indeterminism is the belief that no event is certain and the entire outcome of anything is probabilistic. Predeterminism to determinism is like Christianity to Catholicism. It’s the philosophy that all events of history, past, present and future, have been already decided or are already known (by God, fate, or some other force), including human actions. It implies that there is a conscious reason behind every event and a story to tell. Determinism tells no such story, other than: events happen because the previous thing happened.
When talking about determinism we have to start with the human aspect. Humans are us. Humans are smart. We develop our minds over time and grow in autonomy. This shift, from complete dependency as babies and children to general independence within society as adults, is the reason most of us think we have freewill. As youngin’s we have almost no control. Then we go through a ‘mine’ phase. Slowly we develop friendships, like with our cousins, fellow neighbourhood kids and classmates. It teaches us that there are others just like us and we should consider that in our actions, but we maintain holding on to our confused idea of control. It doesn’t help that most religions teach this too. To give the example of Christianity, they teach BOTH that we have free will so it is on us if we sin or not, but then completely contradict that idea by saying everything that happens both big and small are all a part of God’s plan. If every action you take, both big and small, are preordained through God’s plan, then you don’t have freewill. You’re actions are prepared and carried out as part of HIS will, not yours.
In the realm of science, freewill is proposed to exist in the multiverse theory. To extrapolate, if we are to choose left or right, two timelines branch out. We exist in the one where we chose, say, left and an alternate version of us exists in the other universe where we chose right. The issue with this idea is, how and what would constitute this branching process to happen in the universe? Are human minds so powerful that we rip portals in the fabric of spacetime, creating two universes to house the alternate choice? Isn’t it easier to propose that there is no alternate universe where you chose right instead of left? Because how did you chose something different? Let’s take a step back from where you chose left. What precursors lead your mind to make that decision? You might say nothing, that no influence affected that decision and you just thought about either or, and came to the decision of left through your freewill. People think they have way more control over themselves than they actually do. We are influenced by how other people treat us, both strangers and loved ones. We are influenced by childhood nostalgia and traumas. We are influenced by self reflection, and responsibilities. We are influenced by our diet, the last time we were sexually active, and literally every other factor. Were you stressed when you made this decision, or calm? Were you aware of the importance of the decision, or was it inconsequential? These factors will lead your mind to making the decision you make. If it is said as, not that our minds cause this branching phenomenon, but every interaction both human related and not human related have equal and opposite reactions in the infinite multiverse, then to that I say Occam’s razor. I understand quantum physics is trippy as hell, and when attempting to observe interactions we notice how particles can be in two places at once until we look at them (superposition). But what are the chances that reality in this regard is ‘boring’ and it just seems that way, and the particles are actually always only in one position?
A natural disaster like a flood is something that, in theory, we could predict days, months, or even years beforehand according to causality. All we would need is an entity like a computer to calculate every atom on Earth and beyond that would influence the weather. Today, we as a species have created a golfer robot that can calculate distance and wind to make a perfect hole in one, every time. What does this golfer robot tell us about how the universe works? It tells us that we live in a deterministic universe. That every action has a reaction, and that in theory we can predict these future actions because of the fact that they are determined through previous actions. Predeterminism or destiny is like the romanticized version of this. The only thing that makes reality a little colder than the idea of destiny is that, what is destined has no promised growing element to it. Imagine villagers who live under a volcano and one day it suddenly erupts. The villagers are destined to die, both adults and children. There is no sense to be made of it. It was just an awful event. Meaning comes from us because, to our core, we are social and pattern seeking. So we’ll say things like, ‘that terrible thing happened to those villagers to teach US not to live under volcanoes.’ And that’s fine, but it’s important not to be confused about the matter of fact.
The world isn’t cruel because of natural disasters. It isn’t cold because of evolution leading to predator and prey species. It just is. Racists, rapists, and murderers will always exist due to mismanaged human nature, but does that make what these people do non-committible offences? Of course not. It’s still actions against humanity. People who use that as an argument to the absurdity of determinism are as confused as those obsessed with control. The principle factor of punishing people has nothing to do with whether or not they were in complete control of their actions, it has to do with whether or not they committed the action. Our systems of punishment just need to be updated to accommodate the fact that people are crazy AND need to be jailed.
Is it more important to be deluded and happy, or aware and sad? I say it really shouldn’t be up to those two things. Sugar coating is fine in moments of emotional distress, but we as a species should overall have the same understanding of what the real world is and find a way to be okay with it. Santa is not real, but it still feels good to think we are being rewarded by our good deeds. Events happen with no teaching behind it, but we can still find silver linings without having to say ‘it happened as a part of God’s plan.’ Happiness and good will exist with or without a world view of us being in control or us being coddled by cosmic parents. Like I said earlier, to our core we are social. That’s where morality comes from. That’s where true happiness is found, in relationship with those around us.
Being kind and finding peace are not exclusive to predeterminism (kindness) or indeterminism (freewill/peace). We can understand what happens was always going to happen, without a story to it, and still be good people at the end of the day. It’s not paradoxical to understand freewill is an illusion AND understand your choices still matter. Being self aware of determinism ought not give you supposed free rein to act like a fool, but I mean, act however you want. Your reaction to these ideas was always going to be what it was, without cosmic good or bad intentions behind it. How to live a life with meaning ought to come from your own PERSONAL idea of your life and your place in others’ lives. Even if it’s not real, it still comes from collected, agreed upon perceived places of control. The concept of karma is interesting in this regard because it’s like karma does exist to a fault within society. If you’re a dingus, people will catch on and treat you bad in return. Karma, bitch. But that doesn’t extend to nature, meaning it’s not a fundamental law of reality.
When it comes down to me concluding this thought piece, think whatever you want about reality because the only ACTUAL important thing is that we all treat each other good. Even if you are confused about reality, so long as you aren’t hurting anyone, you’re doing a-okay. Security, harmony, and peace are the truly important things in life. It’s only once you have those, can these aspects of philosophy become something worth diving into. If you guys don’t know about the motivational psychological theory of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it goes as such:
As always, thank you guys so much for being here! I love y’as, and I will see y’all next time.
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In episode twenty-one of Thoughts, I talk about the theory of Dyson Spheres, their potential origin in myth, and what it means for us looking out in the universe. Enjoy!
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Hey everyone! Here’s another video of me reading a sample of my writing. This time it’s the very beginning of my first book: Deviance. I hope you enjoy! For those hooked and want more, if you google smashwords and search my full name: Joseph Van Landschoot, you can find Deviance as an ebook for free!
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Fear is tucking your daughter in for the night only to realize once you’ve closed the door that you don’t have a daughter. Fear is laying in bed as a figure walks into your room from the hallway and you can’t move. Fear is being three hours into a hike and hearing a crunch beside you, seeing a mountain lion crouch in preparation to pounce. Fear is the dark, fear is the unknown. Fear is the uncanny, or inhuman. Fear is the alone, and always being watched.
How would you describe fear? Seeing a face dart out of view from the corner of your window in the night? Or an elderly woman entering your personal space to whisper how you die? Fear is a guttural thing. Are you a fan of horror movies like me? It would make sense if you’re not. Fear is our instinctual mind’s response for survival. Avoid that thing, FEAR IT, so that you may live. In ancient times, predator animals and diseased people were the things to fear, and uncomfortable body language from potential killers. Try to imagine how evolution could warn us any other way than to use the uncanny valley and the dark as precursors or triggers. Evolution does not think. It cannot see or hear. It developed its method of fear for survival through trial and error.
Why fear spiders and other creepy crawlys’? Because they could be poisonous! Why fear big things with claws? Duh. Why fear the dark? Because we are at a disadvantage. It all makes sense, but one: Supernatural fear. We have somehow over the generations developed a fear of ghosts, demons, and specters. Should they suck our souls from our bodies? It’s one heck of a unique fear to have. I was raised Catholic, but was never enough of a believer for it to stick, yet every so often I have a fear that grips me, usually in my dreams, related to ghosts. In my dreams they are real. They are an enemy that would take my life and I cannot fight back against them! I can only run away and hide.
Ghosts are kind of like the ultimate fear. They check off the dark box, the unknown box, the uncanny or diseased box, the predator box, and the socially uncomfortable box. Some say dragon were the amalgamation of the ultimate predator to fear, but I say it’s ghosts! And just like dragons, ghosts aren’t real, or are they? Let your own fear response tell you!
This has been another thought piece by Joe Van. Thank you for reading, and I’ll talk to you guys- LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!
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In episode twenty of Thoughts, I talk about the nature of sexuality and our relationship with it. Enjoy!
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Welcome to #56 of Joe Van’s Secret Podcast! Here I talk to another returning guest about her early past, quarantining with friends, what the point or lack-there-of is regarding the theory that reality is a simulation, and virtual babysitting among other things. She was a treat to have on and I hope you all enjoy!
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In episode nineteen of Thoughts, I wax poetic about our understanding of existence and how little we will ever know. Enjoy!
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In episode eighteen of Thoughts, I talk about attention and what makes us give it. Enjoy!
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This is visual poetry, not brought to you by myself but by NASA. I just thought I’d share it on my website. These images have been rendered in all their beauty for free to the general public; the ones below are my favourites of the bunch. You can find all of the posters by searching ‘Posters of the Solar System’. Enjoy!
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Welcome back to #55 of Joe Van’s Secret Podcast! I talk with a returning guest about how the current quarantine has affected his plans, what scares him most, and states of the mind. Enjoy!
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In episode seventeen of Thoughts, I talk about a hypothetical blob entity that exists within all of us. Enjoy!
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What constitutes living a good life? While individual happiness is particular to each person, general well being is quantifiable. A good life includes a healthy diet, or healthy enough for you to still enjoy what you’re eating, a moderate fitness regiment, an open dialogue with your inner circle of loved ones, and having a life purpose. I touched on how life purpose and moderation lead to longevity in my piece: Longevity, but in this thought piece I wanted to touch on the particular issue of the pursuit of happiness, and how so many people seem to be lacking general happiness in their daily life.
I’m sure you’ve all heard the golden advice: manage your expectations, but in what way can we apply this concept to our daily lives? We can’t help but want things, so how are we suppose to trick ourselves into not minding if we don’t get said things? A strange thing about the mind is the subconscious. It directs our emotions, knee-jerk reactions, dreams, and general worldview. People born in a third world country are people who have only known that life. They want far less than us and would be far happier to receive even a sliver of what we consume regularly. They may have a general sense that life ought to be more, but most people simply accept every day as another gift to be alive. Somehow, hardships make individuals extremely appreciative. People tend to strive after undergoing something hard. It doesn’t mean you HAVE to suffer in order to be happier with what you have, but simply being self aware makes a big difference.
I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the greatest things to happen to me in my life was when I had a slipped disc. At the time it was just awful and misery-inducing, but afterward I couldn’t help but feel more alive than ever. I was inspired to write! I didn’t know in what medium then, but I knew things would never be the same. I’ve also had other accounts of difficulties, (not to be compared to anyone else of course but just to use as examples,) of having an ego death after taking too many magic mushrooms, falling into a K-hole, and having my already half-absent father leave my family. My most recent difficulty was quitting drinking, and since then I couldn’t be happier with my life. It’s made me more honest than ever after admitting to everyone that I had a secret addiction. Regardless of the current quarantine Canada is under, every day in my eyes has been like glistening golden honey under a shining sun.
So to expand on the idea of being honest, secrecy is a unique form of internal toxicity that no one can truly manage. Sociopaths are the best at lying and then sleeping like a baby, but it doesn’t mean their existence isn’t torture. Living double, triple, quadruple or whatever-the-heck lives makes a mess of your unseen subconscious. Honesty will set you free, as many have said over the ages. It may seem like telling the truth is impossible. I mean, why mention things from years ago when the person never found out? Because it may be eating YOU inside. Could honesty ruin relationships? Yes. But if you truly seek happiness, you must let it go.
I’m not yet thirty, so proper life advice can’t really come from me. It doesn’t mean that I haven’t discovered certain insights into the human condition, though. Even back when I was a teenager, I remember uncovering elements of the mind that struck me as such an easy thing to care for yet so many people seemed to have problems with. The difference time makes to insights, I have found, is coherence. It is the difference of information, to knowledge, to wisdom. So I still very much have growing to do, but for now just remember that your own happiness is predicated off of your ability to look inward and see what you can see that may be hindering daily harmony. Thank you as always for reading. I love you, and I’ll see you next time.
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In episode sixteen of Thoughts, I lay out my list of the twelve certainties and suggestions about reality as a human on Earth in our lifetime… just to be specific. Enjoy!
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What is time? I’ll let you guys answer this one. For real, I’ll wait… and wait… and wait. Even if it takes a lifetime. Even when the stars burn out and matter is dissipated into a heat death of the universe. All will be dark, but you’ll still have time. Time is known to do things, like heal, be cruel, teach us lessons, and fade the past away. Time is fast when you want it to be slow, and slow when you want it to be fast. Time is a clock on the wall, and it is made up. Now you might say, ‘Made up, eh? What’re you talking about?’ Time, as a unit of measurement, is arbitrary! Seconds are just something we made up. If we wanted, tomorrow the UN could declare that one second will now be the length of two seconds, and nothing in the universe would change. We would all live with thirty-second minutes, that’s all.
Time as defined by Google is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. The truth about reality is in that PROGRESS bit. The motion of molecules are what we perceive as time. Time began at the Big Bang, according to the theory of the Big Bang. It leads one to wonder if maybe time needs matter to exist? Like time and matter are two sides to a coin; one cannot exist without the other. If we were to freeze time, we wouldn’t actually be able to gallivant around. There are examples in media of people doing this, like freezing time and stealing from banks, art museums, and such, but the movement of molecules are required for aspects like solid objects. If we stopped things from vibrating closely together, we’d fall through it. Or more so, we’d instantly die from the universe ending.
There is a temperature called ‘Absolute Zero.’ It is the lowest temperature that is theoretically possible, at which the motion of particles that constitutes heat would be minimal. It is zero on the Kelvin scale, equivalent to –273.15°C or –459.67°F. This temperature is out in space, and has been briefly reached in labs on Earth. Pluto is 44 Kelvin (-229 Celsius or -380 Fahrenheit) and is the coldest planet in our solar system. A reason science fiction stories in space have things like cryogenic chambers to hibernate its occupants is because of the real effects lower temperatures have on cellular motion. So, the reason I bring absolute zero up is because if such a temperature could either be found or created to DESCEND EVEN LOWER than absolute zero, would time stop? Would it collapse into a black hole? Who knows!
One thing we do know is that we can never go back in time. Forward, however, well, that’s relative. It has to do with gravity. The simplest example is this: Astronauts leaves Earth’s orbit, saying goodbye to their families and friends as they chart a course around the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. The trip takes them one year. They enter the dense black hole’s orbit and circle it once before heading back to Earth. One year had passed for them, but upon returning to Earth, 100 years had passed. It’s a strange and phenomenal effect gravity has on matter. Not just matter actually, but also light. The heavier an object is, on the astronomical scale, the slower time moves. I’m hesitant to say that the molecules vibrate slower, because even if that is what they’re doing, it wouldn’t as simple as that. Cold temperature does that, but doesn’t seem to slow time down. I would simply say gravity works as a dial, like fancy light switches! The more you crank it, the slower things get.
A thought experiment the glorious Stephen Hawking had, regarding time, involved a futuristic train. He wondered, or proposed, that say there was a train humanity created that wrapped around the Earth and traveled at near the speed of light. Matter cannot go or surpass the speed of light, but this train was designed to go just under as fast. He then proposed that a girl in the train decided to run forward in it. Would the laws of physics break? Or would they correct the matter at hand and visibly slow the girl down, making sure not to allow her to pass the speed of light. Individuals sitting in the train would watch as she slowed down, making each stride and seemingly hover in the air as she leapt.
Time is a trip, to conclude this thought piece. We have no control over it. It goes up and down, shrinks and stretches, but never stops or reverses. We are a slave to time and we are freed by it. Time is us and we are time. Make what you will of your slice, and I’ll make mine. Thank for reading, and I’ll see you guys next time!
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In episode fifteen of Thoughts, I talk about how snitches get stitches! Just kidding, I talk about how that phrase or concept doesn’t just work as a threat.
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How does someone find themselves at the receiving end of a destructive habit? No one plans to live a life of degradation. It’s something that happens slowly, like a frog in boiling water. One doesn’t notice that certain actions have a predictive outcome of addiction until they reach that point down the line. It can start with partying on the weekends as a seventeen-year-old, to drinking alone every night ten years later.
Many variables lie under substance abuse, like a bastardized clandestine iceberg of submerged painful memories and torment. The most understood variables are loss, and lineage. Grief is the most painful emotional state in life. We as a society have seen countless people get swallowed by substance abuse to numb the pain, and have overall understood that standpoint. Not accept it, but understood it. Lineage is also easy to understand. If you have the blood of a drinker, you may have drinking problems. The actual science behind substance abuse says that genetic predisposition plays a role of fifty-percent to an individual developing a problem.
Other factors that are harder for people to understand are childhood traumas, and general stressors. The reason childhood trauma is hard for people to understand is because those people in the individual’s life were most likely there in their childhood, so it’s a matter of coming to terms with something they may have had a role in. The human mind is a survival mechanism. Children absorb experiences like a sponge so when something distressing happens, their mind will go to great lengths to bury the event in order to keep the lights on.
General stressors can be otherwise described as school, family life, friendships, or work. Coping with life’s hardships can be as easy as taking a hit. You may have started just once or twice, but soon fall into the habit of ritually needing the substance. It can get to a point where you’re blowing off your friends and other engagements so as to continue the ritual you’ve started one lonely night.
Homeless heroin addicts were once innocent children. But bit by bit, one event after another things kept going wrong and getting worse, pushing the person down the path to where they are now. Substance abuse isn’t the end of the road, though. One in the pit of their deepest hole might say it is, but so long as one is still alive, there is a chance to get out. An optimistic spin might be to say, ‘If you’re at your lowest, then you have nothing to lose.’ Dependency is a construct of the mind. It is a damn tight construct, but a construct none-the-less. Joggers talk about a mental wall they hit at a point of deep exhaustion. It’s a moment when your body, instincts, and soul scream for you to let go. To know what it is, and know you can say no allows you to break the impossible wall and push past it. Once you do, a weight is lifted and everything becomes lighter.
It’s a hard truth to face but the fact of the matter is that life is a constant struggle. It’s not easy, but like working out, it gets better if you put in the effort. Let daily pessimism die under the light of a hopeful mindset. Ring it out to let the sober winds of realism breeze your cheek, and stand tall to let a ray of optimism shine on you every now and then. I hope this helped anyone reading to better sympathize or understand that many things go into how someone can fall from grace. We are all in this thing called life together, and all need to help each other out. Thank you for being here, and I’ll see you guys next time.
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Welcome to episode fourteen of Thoughts. Here I talk about when fighting is necessary. Enjoy!
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Welcome to episode thirteen of Thoughts. Here I talk about the concept of certainty, specifically in personal relationships. Enjoy!
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Identities! Also known as personalities made from a collection of memories. I’ve written about the concept of identities in bits and pieces throughout my blog, like in Duality and Perspective, but I think it deserves it’s own work down. Would the ninth grade version of yourself even recognize you? Are you still you if you undergo amnesia? What’s up with multiple personality disorder? Or the concept of reincarnation? It begs the question, what is the point of the soul without memories? It is culturally evident that identity takes the main stage in certain countries like the U.S. and China. So to expand on that, country identity has to do with government systems and how people are rooted in their historical philosophies and cultures.
China is housed to the creation of the concepts of Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. These are the top three, arguably. Confucianism is from the man Confucius, who derived his teachings from Legalism, and is in a nutshell: Xin – Honesty and Trustworthiness. Chung – Loyalty to your work, the state, et cetera. Li – includes ritual, propriety, etiquette, et cetera. Hsiao – love within the family, love of parents for their children, and love of children for their parents. Daoism, or Taoism, is a philosophical or religious tradition of Chinese origin which emphasizes living in harmony with the Dao. The Dao is the source, pattern and substance of everything that exists. And finally, Legalism, or Fajia which literally means “House of Administrative Methods”, is a philosophical belief that human beings are more inclined to do wrong than right because they are motivated entirely by self-interest. Today, the driving structure of China is Communism.
America, or the Western world including Canada, was founded and subsequently ruled through the religion of Christianity and the philosophy of Manifest Destiny. While most know about Christianity, with their testaments and beatitudes, Manifest Destiny was the idea that white Americans were divinely ordained to settle the entire continent of North America. The ideology of Manifest Destiny inspired a variety of measures designed to remove or destroy the native population, horribly. It was a widely-held cultural belief in the 19th-century and drove its settlers to expand across the land. Today, the driving structure of America is Capitalism.
If you grant me some more wiki definitions here, Communism is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and state. Capitalism on the other hand is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system and competitive markets. One can see just by reading their definitions, how individuals raised with either idea can form their identities based off of these ideas. They are both very practice-based and communal. Generally, Americans stereotype China as a country full of drones that work and die, and Chinese stereotype Americans as egotistic overweight blowhards. While everyone is an individual, statistics do show behavioral patterns among people under certain communities. But is there anything wrong with that?
Well the concern is all in the mind of the viewer. If we take a step back from nations and look at humanity as a whole, there are things we all do. We all want a purpose, want love, have good food, entertain ourselves and continuously grow with the people in our lives. When individuals like psychopaths, sociopaths, the morbidly depressed, or those with identities issues such as individuals who believe they are robots or animals in human bodies, go against common connective tropes, we as a society reject them out of fear.
As we all know, we don’t chose who we’re born from, what brain chemistry we’re born with, how we’re born, when we’re born, or where we’re born. These are important markers of our identity that we had no say of from the get-go. It begins to paint a picture of how identity works and what it really is. Could our personal identities be an illusion? I can say with certainty that no, regardless of if we have free will, it is certain that everyone, no matter how entirely they are influenced by external forces, is an individual with their own fingerprint of a mind. From a biological standpoint, even identical twins that look to be the complete same person, have different DNA.
So now we can talk about how individuals can go through identity crises. It’s known as a period of uncertainty and confusion in which a person’s sense of identity becomes insecure, typically due to a change in their expected aims or role in society. If you’re experiencing an identity crisis, you may be questioning your sense of self. This can often occur from advancements through life stages, be it childhood, school, or work. So many things are out of our control. How many people wish that they could just be a kid forever? People take care of you and you have no responsibilities, like a pet! Not to trash people who actively wish this, but it is important for one’s own sake of sanity to strive in their CURRENT situation. It is unhealthy to wish one was living a different life. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t want to change your life situation because there are many legitimate reasons one could want to do this, but while having a desire to depart one’s current life one must still make the most of their situation. Happiness is predicated off of it.
There are accounts of individuals who live to be fifty or older before realizing or admitting they have gender dysphoria. There are people who remain closeted homosexuals their entire lives. These points of perceived, or real, relationship expectations that repress one’s true identity are tragedies against all of humanity in my opinion. People are who they are. We shouldn’t have to hide that. There are outliers like serial killers and pedophiles, of course, but aside from those that would bring harm to others, we as a society are doing our part, individual by individual, to accept people of every possible identity. We are all our own people, and we are all one, however paradoxical that may sound. I am Joseph Van Landschoot, born of Jane and Carl, and you, reader, are you, with your parents, and lineage, and beliefs, and hopes, and wants, and dreams. We are all fellow humans beings, and we are all worthy of love.
Thank you for listening, and see you next time.
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In episode twelve of Thoughts, I talk about the importance we put on things and how it makes us who we are. Enjoy!
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One one-billionth of the Sun’s total energy output actually reaches Earth. Of all the energy that does reach Earth, 34 percent is reflected back to space by clouds. The Earth itself reflects another 66 percent back to space. Wouldn’t it be great if we could harness even one percent of the Sun’s energy? That thought brings us to today’s topic, the idea of a Dyson Sphere. Not to be confused with Dyson vacuums, the definition of a Dyson Sphere is: a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. There are similar variations to this such as a Dyson Ring, Dyson Swarm, Dyson Bubble, and Dyson Shell. All these things would perform the same goal.
The original concept of the thought experiment was attributed to physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, though like most things, there was someone who thought of it first. It was surely unintentional but back 2 400 years ago, Plato the philosopher wrote about enormous subterranean tunnels both broad and narrow that made up the Earth’s interior. Later in the 17th century, the term Hollow Earth became a now debunked theory, claiming that there is indeed an inverted world inside our world, with it’s own light source! Such a thought experiment is not unlike a creative version of a Dyson Sphere. Its purpose ultimately being a power source which as we all know in a broad sense, our sun is. It gives us life! In vegetation and in vitamin D.
So the myth of Agartha, which is what some groups called the Hollow Earth, was really the first idea of a Dyson Sphere. But Freeman’s description of such a thing was humanity’s first good description of a truly conceivable version of it. To harness the sun in the palm of a species’ hands. It seems like pure theory now, that a race could build something so massive to wrap around the sun, a body in of itself that could fit over one million Earths in it, that it’ll never be possible. But ALREADY we have found anomalies through NASA’s Discovery Program of potential Dyson Spheres out in space made by advanced intelligent alien life.
Granted, reality is often disappointing and the anomaly these scientists are finding are most likely large planets obscuring the stars’ light, it’s still fun to think of the possibility. We often imagine aliens being almost just like us: bipedal, carbon-based lifeforms using air from their throats to communicate. If that is the case, it would take a civilization of China-levels of cooperation to construct such a device! But in a more creative sense, if alien life out there were something like silicon-based, or A.I. managed, construction of larger-than-star-sized devices could be a thing. Regardless, I just wanted to talk about this subject because things like this inspire my imagination, and if it could do the same to you, then the world would be a little brighter.
I love you all, and thanks for reading.
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In episode eleven of Thoughts, I discuss what makes a full life, and why it’s important. Enjoy!
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In episode ten of Thoughts, I talk about new terrain, and how we were built to thrive. Enjoy!
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Jumping stretches my aching body!
Here now I have some.
I can’t dance but I’d love to try.
The trees call me to climb them,
who am I to deny?
Eeeaaa do I love a good run
from sun rise to sun done.
Crackle like a fire when it’s time
and sing like a choir for a dime.
People love a good act
so strap your shoes for a tap,
see the light and hear the roar,
another day has given more!
Eeeaaa!
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In episode nine of Thoughts I break down perspective and how it can work wonders for living a good life. Enjoy!
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In episode eight of Thoughts, I talk about the nature of being alone.
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Sexuality is both praised and abhorred in society. It’s either handled with exuberance or repression, the latter form there arguably running both the show and amok in the western world. The current dominant religions are clearly against it, yet have their own twisted viewpoint on what it even is. Everyone remembers when puberty really changed them; there were the physical changes, but also a change in the mind. Hormones that were once not part of us became introduced, forcing us to change how we interacted in the world, forever. It’s the driver of life, but without any need for research I can tell you that most sexual acts don’t end with both parties producing life. So what gives?
Well, sexuality when it was first developed, was a game changer. Early life went from almost no diversity through asexual reproduction, to this new… thing, of mixing deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA, to create a new version of the hosts. It was shooting in the dark. As we all know, evolution ala natural selection is not a conscious process. It has and is happening through the mutation of genes. In the case of most mammals, we get ‘in heat’ and do the deed via organ in organ shotgun blast. But what makes us humans unique is that we don’t have a season for being in heat. Granted some people are nearly never in heat, the others are in heat on a daily basis.
We aren’t the only animals to have this opportunity, or curse, (depending on how you feel about sexuality and your own sexuality,) we know dolphins and elephants, along with bonobo primates and other species have sex any old time too, and not purely for reproductive purposes either. Sex, when done right, feels good. It can be the best feeling in the world. A lot of what makes sex feel so good comes from more than rubbing sensitive bits together, it comes from emotional intimacy, and niche pleasures being met with a trusting partner. There are a great many people in the world that have a fetish for stuff like leather, or feet, and when someone with that itch finds the right partner that loves them, having the same fetish is the cherry on top. Most partners once having created an emotional bond, will test out sexual positions and acts if it makes the other partner feel good, because at that point they truly want the person to feel good.
Sex is a lot like a dance. When you don’t know the basic steps yet, it’ll be awkward, but in time you will learn the moves. Some people are exploratory while others stick to what they know. Others are so free with the dance that they’ll try to create new moves with hopefully equally exuberant partners. So, at this point I have to key in that there is of course a great many evils in the world, and most evils are sexual based. Aside from stating the obvious that you must use more than perceived body language when not sure if someone’s down for sex, most cases when an act without consent occurs, it’s not by mistake. Nature is not conscious, so it has no conscience. If it did, there would be some kind of shield-mechanism in our orifices that would activate when attacked, but it doesn’t exist. Morality is a strange thing, because most people have instinctual morals, like they don’t like seeing people get hurt, but nature houses no such morals. There’s a term that exists now-a-days called toxic masculinity, and I think it exists to describe how male hormones work. Men with terrible parenting seem to think that because they’re horny all the time, it gives them a right to sex. While I don’t agree in the slightest that the western world has a rape culture, I think rape and violence in general is a touchy subject for most religious people of power because they themselves are repressed. It doesn’t mean they want rape to continue, but that they don’t know what to do about it. Programs and rehabilitation centres would be far better than one current model of just jailtime then out again only angrier. We have a long way to go as a society but I still feel that we are generally going in the right direction to better every person’s life within it.
Getting it on is great, especially with foreplay. Music helps set the mood. Stretching is important, along with hydrating afterwards. What else should I add to this before finishing?… Love not war, people! Be like bonobos, not chimps! And until next time, love you all and be good to each other.
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In episode seven of Thoughts, I talk about the hidden magic found in people. It’s something ne’er discussed but potent to the meaning of life.
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In episode six of Thoughts, I discuss thought experiments on what it would be like to live forever. Enjoy!
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Hey everyone! I hope you’re having a safe and enjoyable quarantine period. To help you pass the time, I read aloud a section from my second book. Enjoy!
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In episode five of thoughts, I talk about the complex nature of duality.
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In episode four of Thoughts, I talk about intentions and how difficult they are to grasp.
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In episode three of Thoughts, I talk about the tool of introspection in regards to emotional stability. Enjoy.
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“Adults with ADHD who are undiagnosed and untreated in childhood are at greater risk of low self-esteem, substance abuse, anxiety and depression,” Labour’s shadow minister for mental health, Barbara Keeleyshe says. “Despite the serious problems that adults with undiagnosed ADHD face, many living with the condition say it has had a positive impact on their lives too.” I pulled that quote from the Guardian, under an article titled: ‘I assumed it was all my fault’: The Adults Dealing With Undiagnosed ADHD. My reason for this and the main inspiration behind me writing this thought piece, is that I’m pretty sure I have ADHD. ADHD is an acronym which stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I’d claim that I just have ADD but that no longer exists as a classification.
Attention, and retention. What makes us pay it? And what makes us forget? I joke that I have a terrible memory, but truth be told I remember things fine in the long term; it’s just the little things like dates made for next week that seem to enter one ear and exit the other. I don’t mean to not pay attention either. It just happens. We can find through evolutionary biology and psychology that our primate brains were made for the untamed savanna. We can feel a presence watching us from behind when nothing is there. Shadows in the night keep us up in horror. Negative acts or event reside permanently in our minds but happy ones can be easily forgotten. Why? All for the silly sake of old world survival. So many of our instincts now are not only useless, but actually harmful. Anxiety can make a person’s life a living hell. The fact that I’m an alcoholic, (though now recovered,) is clearly from a compulsion that if I don’t binge now I might not get a chance again. All of these defects in the human mind suck, to be sure, but the pros that come out of them may make the pain worth something.
I consider myself a very creative person. Flashes come to me of inspirations, ideas, and images from seemingly nowhere. I’m certain this experiential process exists in me due to my mental makeup; the fact that I zone out and daydream. I remember always daydreaming when I was a kid, but the flashes started happening in a serious way when I turned twenty. That’s also when my drinking habits increased to an unhealthy degree. It was unfortunate that I relied on drinking alone as much as I did, but though great fear came with it, once I stopped drinking I found that there was zero dip to my creativity. Lucky me. Many artists rely on unsustainable methods to keep the wheel spinning. My fear was that I’d lose it, but when I took my out, it hindered nothing.
I also figured once I stopped drinking that my attention to things and people in my life would improve, but that actually wasn’t the case. I seemed to pay just as much attention as I always did. I can’t say I wasn’t at least a little disappointed, but keeping an open dialogue about that helps keep harmony in my relationships. What one must do with their intentions as life continues to flow and form and mold one’s character, is take the time to try. I may have little attention span in my resting default mode, but during waking hours I must simply TRY to pay better attention to those around me. They appreciate it. I feel better about it. And everyone wins.
To close, pay attention to those you love because they’re worth the extra effort. I love you all… and, as always, thanks for reading.
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Welcome to episode two of Thoughts. Here I talk about late night thoughts before work.
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Hello everyone and welcome to a new little project of mine! Thoughts. These will be vocalizations of my Thoughts blog on my website, thejoevan.com. Enjoy!
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Friends and functions
make us proud.
Work can lull
but the nights are loud.
We band together
for hype and ooh rah’s.
Then factions break
by un-greased hoopla.
Piece it back,
we do it together.
Make others wonder
if they can have forever.
What we are is special,
under one’s boots and teeth.
Be the rod that keeps it steady,
and sweet and fine and neat!
What are friends for?
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Streaks of something yesteryear born
still may sit unattended on one’s cheek.
Made were things to use
yet now no light casts down for dust’s sake.
We pass the garbage in search for new
only to leave a slimy trail of destruction.
Making hair twisting screams
curdled by the few who care.
Where do we begin
except to not?
Brash are those born by brash
to brash they will go from brasher still.
A world engulfed by no second thought.
Ha.
What’s next?
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On #54 of Joe Van’s Secret Podcast, I talk with an old boss of sorts about her years of growth, identity, and philosophies about our species. What does the future hold? We know as much as we dare to.
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Hello adoring fans! I just wanted to make an announcement that future installations of the Joe Van Secret Podcast will no longer be named by season, and will no longer be weekly! I thank you all so much for tuning in, and appreciate your future time with us. This is the end of an era, but only the turning of a chapter for the Secret Podcast.
The Joe Van 