@Outsideness has been zapped by Twitter without any explanation (as of yet). It’s probably a useful hint that it’s past time to look more diligently for a censorship-resistant platform.

This prompted me to give minds.com a look. It’s still in beta, and will probably take a while to get used to, but there’s an @Outsideness account now if anyone’s tempted to experiment with exodus.

I’ve had trouble getting through to Gab.ai (might be a VPN / China Internet issue).

We’ll have Urbit eventually.

ADDED: I haven’t sought out a fight with Twitter, but had I done so it’s hard to imagine there could have been a way to hurt it more than getting Outsideness banned in this way. There’s simply no possible case to be made that this is about ‘abuse’. There has been nothing remotely like harassment in the history of the account. It’s naked thought control. The platform is an undisguised leftist ideological operation. First it collapses down to a partisan bubble with zero credibility beyond its own constituency. Then it dies.

ADDED: Twitter @Outsideness restored this morning. No explanation (or communication from Twitter of any kind) about what just happened. The word that comes to mind for this kind of arbitrary aggressive behavior is abuse.

Thing likely to get highly fragmented over the next couple of weeks, and especially over the next couple of days. Will aim to maintain a thread of continuity.

In the meantime, here‘s my favorite Christmas Song (embedded version).

Try not to do anything too radically evil in the comment threads, and to be patient if spam-filter clearance is slower than usual.

Yes, we’re in semi-comatose maintenance mode, but the three millionth visit merits some kind of acknowledgement. Thanks to everyone — however annoying — who’s keeping the nightmare alive (or at least undead).

In a Zhejiang mountain retreat for a couple of days — disconnected by my lousy disintegrating laptop rather than the wireless link here (which seems fine). The screen this is being pushed through looks like a piece of extravagant abstract expressionism cross-cut with destructive psychedelics. Impossible even to tell whether I am littering the thing with typos. Oh yes, and the quote marks key does not work. So basically, it is the view of a broken deeply stoned robot from inside a Jackson Pollack painting. (You are going to have to trust me on that.)

So consider it an open thread, and try not to be more obnoxious than strictly necessary.

ADDED: Daoist mountain bamboo forest (Siming):

Broken Internet here (which is driving me mildly insane). This is tapped out on my crappy tablet. If passing through the Great Gates of Kek starts like this, my enthusiasm is waning already.

Feel free to treat this as an open thread. Lots of interesting discussion on the Alt-Right / NRx gulf in the previous comment threads IMHO, so carry on …

(From the Occult NRx perspective, the Alt-Right can have the presidency, but it can’t have Kek — without a scrap … It’s, of course, a Brahmin thing …)

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Moved apartment today, from Jing’an to Laoximen (on the edge of the Old City). Nine-stories of additional elevation (up to 23), and a view over the Confucian Temple. Internet doesn’t come in until tomorrow, so a 24-hour Chaos Patch delay is unavoidable. Apologies for that. (Treat this one as an additional open thread, naturally.)

Should now be assisting with rifling through mountains of cardboard boxes …

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Arrived in Hanoi a few hours ago (first time in the northern part of Vietnam). Will be here a couple of days, then down south to Hoi An, and Hue. I’ll try to ad some notes pics, in stages.

One less than massively-inspired snap so far, of the Hanoi Old Quarter, (near our hotel):

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Turns out Xenosystems traffic was overloading the web-host account, so it’s been upgraded ($$$ *sigh*). Fingers crossed, the black-outs should be finished now. Apologies for the interruption of service, and thanks for causing the problem. (Top two days of traffic in the history of the blog happened just before the crash.)

I’m in Huangshan until Monday, with perhaps slightly patchier connectivity for the next couple of days, but it doesn’t look as if there’s much of an excuse for dropping off the grid. Going up the mountain tomorrow. Will spend the ascent thinking of something to talk about.

Trolls, don’t let the sun set on you here.

As most have no doubt noticed, every instance of the lower case ‘i’ has mysteriously disappeared from the comments here.

They are still all there in the back-end, except for one NBS comment March 3rd, 2016 at 7:02 pm. I’m not picking on that as patient zero, just noting. (Sending that particular comment to the trash didn’t resolve the problem, so I fished it back out.)

I’ve absolutely no idea why this is happening. I guess if it’s some point being made about the elimination of the empirical ego it’s vaguely amusing in a profoundly irritating way.

If anybody has ever come across anything like this before, please let me know. Hints at a possible solution would, of course, be even more welcome.

ADDED: Thanks to TJEL for helping to get this sorted out. (Not an especially proud moment for WordPress, it turns out. Relieved it wasn’t a maniac hacker. Carry on.)