Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 06/10/2026The reddit page for this game keeps records on a bunch of metrics, here is the world record for fewest command cycles: 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 06/10/2026My first crack at the final puzzle in the main campaign. Realizing that I could almost triple the efficiency with well-timed rotations (building multiple compounds at once). I totally get why the community around this game has lasted a decade, always cheaper, faster, more compressed ways to build. 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 03/10/2026Did a bit better with the poisonous lipstick; I love this game so so much. 110
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 03/10/2026The null hypothesis that "Scott is average at this game" has been falsified. 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 03/10/2026I had gotten stuck on the "Unstable Compound" puzzle in Opus Magnum, totally gave up and stopped playing for a year. Pulled the game up this afternoon to solve it with the ugliest machine I've ever made. 120
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 01/10/2026I was fortunate to develop the work I did during my master's program and submit it as a chapter in this volume. The cover is so lovely ❤️🐟🛰️ www.bloomsbury.com/us/esoteric-... 011
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 18/08/2026This is why my imagination is solely occupied by the Greendale Human Being. 011
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 15/08/2026"The ancient Mediterranean world's vegetarianism was always about purity and asceticism, not about moral concern for Nonhuman Animals." Plutarch: 110
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 01/08/2026Going to refer to all my speculative claims as "heroic extrapolations" for now and all eternity. Hartmann, Betsy. "Rethinking Climate Refugees and Climate Conflict: Rhetoric, Reality and the Politics of Policy Discourse." Journal of International Development 22, no. 2 (2010): 233-46. 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 10/07/2026One-boxer can open a new Sangha, thus quickening the achievement of the Bodhisattva's vow to end suffering for all sentient beings. Two-boxer is caught in an egoic illusion. link.springer.com/chapter/10.1... 020
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 07/07/2026!!! Javanese culture has such an incredible aesthetics of monstrosity and evil, psyched to check this out. 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 12/06/2026This is actually so funny. I'm sorry, Christian Korean Nationalists, but when your equivalent groups in America tell the same sort of story, only two countries are included in this list. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 4130
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 09/06/2026Plutarch's letter to Timoxena about their child dying is brutally sad. 020
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 07/06/2026Printing this off and putting it above my desk, I reckon the fish-men are a pretty good mix of horror and wonder 😅 020
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 05/06/2026Call for papers for the Oxford Symposium of Occult Studies. I will be presenting on how scholarship about demonization in politics generates a sort of secularized grimoire, i.e. political theology is a way of binding or negotiating with the "demonic." philevents.org/event/show/1... 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 03/06/2026I just passed my final milestone before dissertation submission! Very excited to join the ranks of Verified Marx Understanders. 010
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 29/05/2026Here's part of a prayer to deliver one from the Octopus Spirit, from an online deliverance ministry. I find it so funny and charming that the demon takes on so many actual octopodal traits, down to the ability to shoot ink. 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 29/05/2026Could Discovery or the History Channel please give me $8.2 million to make a documentary about finding Cronus' slumbering cell in the Isles of Scilly? From Plutarch's De defectu oraculorum. 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 15/05/2026I love that Spinoza took the time to express sympathy for Devils, even while thinking they don't exist. It makes me think of Zizek on how the counterfactuals we make explicit are an extension of and give shape to our norms, values, concepts, "the symbolic order," etc. 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 12/05/2026When they posit that movement and change are absorbed into the immutability of the rational as forms of mere appearance. 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 10/05/2026You have more in common with a naive free will believer than with a philosopher who supposedly agrees with you ✊ 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 09/05/2026This is the passage. "Strongly suggest" could be read as him saying that only the sources suggest it, but "let the real be what it sometimes is— rapturous" makes that a pretty strained reading. Is Kripal just inconsistent here, or am I misunderstanding? 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 09/05/2026This passage in Kripal's Superhumanities confused me. Here he claims scholars shouldn't take superhuman experiences "absolutely or literally," but elsewhere he seems to say Teresa de Avila levitated. How to reconcile? 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 04/05/2026Laycock's monograph is a lovely introduction to Satanism; it goes over the key historical moments and considerations well: Romanticism, LaVey, cops making up cabals, etc. I learned the animal shelter I used to work with in Salt Lake started as a Satanic splinter group. I had no clue, very funny. 111
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 03/05/2026without downloading anything new, where are you mentally? 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 01/05/2026I did a quick search through my archive of Platonic materials and nothing came up either, though I did get this much less cutesy passage from the Laws (spoken by the Athenian stranger). 121
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 29/04/2026Early depictions of the Devilfish, the demonic and monstrous representation of octopuses, were almost always negative and used for political demonologies. One of my favorite exceptions is from Stalin's obituary for Lenin. 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 29/04/2026When the Teams call ends without you embarrassing yourself. 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 27/04/2026Humor about Mormonism is indiscernible between 1874 and today, this style of joke could be found today on r/Exmormon or in a Post-Mo meetup in Salt Lake. 010
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 26/04/2026William Jennings Bryan's 1900 presidential campaign represented corporate trusts as a Devilfish wrapping itself around key American industries, with Lady Democracy wielding an axe against it. 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 25/04/2026The Irish Devil-Fish is a recreation of Gilliatt's battle with the octopus in Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea. The Irish Land League becomes The Monster, Prime Minister William Gladstone becomes The Hero. Published in the magazine Punch, the image mimicked other representations of the book. 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 24/04/2026The earliest Russian Octopus was a direct update of the "threat of the Russian bear," with early records including Austro-Hungarian newspapers and this map most likely printed in Haarlem. The "tentacles" of the octopus threaten to subsume European nations, an expression of Tsarist power. 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 23/04/2026Exploring @publicdomainrev.bsky.social for pictures to promote this term's demonology reading/research group, this image of a witch feeding blood to her familiars is so adorable. publicdomainreview.org/essay/woodcu... 000
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 03/04/2026I pulled this tarot card to check on the war, is this good? 230
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 20/03/2026I don't think Johnston's book got much play outside the psychoanalytic/Zizekian sphere, but it's relevant here. I'd love to give it a second read soon to think through its demonological angle in more detail. 100
Scott Maybell @haliphron.ink · 07/02/2026Most Satanist groups embrace principles like respect for bodily autonomy and nonviolence. The Satanic Temple has been attacked by the right wing in US and Russia. @dropsitenews.com should not perpetuate Satanic panic; those being critiqued are Christian and secular billionaires. 010