I hope you have a good time here. Thanks for dropping by.

Favorite

Consumer Goods

• AmazonBasics 8” Chef’s Knife (Kitchen workhorse at an unbeatable price.)
• ASUS ROG Strix 27” 4K Monitor (Gaming and web surfing as they were meant to be.)
• Custom Molded Earplugs (Attend music festivals your whole life without hearing loss.)
• De’Longhi Portable Air Conditioner (Makes working in the summer bearable.)
• Element 26 Self-Locking Weight Lifting Belt (Belt: $35. A healthy back: Priceless.)
• FEECCO Weighted Jump Rope (Who needs a treadmill? Free up a room in your house.)
• Kitchen Mama Auto Electric Can Opener (Opens up a whole world of canned goods.)
• iBUYPOWER Pre-Built Gaming PC (Basically mandatory as software becomes more bloated.)
• Men’s Barefoot Zero Drop Shoes (Cheap shoes to maintain natural running/walking posture.)
• Mitchum Men’s Deodorant (Anti-perspirant to keep workouts focused and dry.)
• Motorola G Power (Cheap smartphone with two days of battery life.)
• Nature’s Bounty Fish Oil Softgels (Essential omega-3 fats for healthy gums and joints.)
• Nike Men’s Air Max Shoes (A 1.5” height boost to 5’11” makes life much nicer.)
• Optimum Nutrition Whey Protein Powder (Six scoops daily while bulking. Two while cutting.)
• Raw Milk (Pasteurization ruins milk. Get yours straight from the cow.)
• Rfiver Mobile TV Cart (Take your TV anywhere and adjust it to the optimal viewing height.)
• Rogue 22lb Training Bar (Useful for learning proper form on new lifts.)
• Rogue 45lb Stainless Steel Ohio Bar (Gold standard barbell.)
• Rogue SML-2C Squat Stand (Perfect for a garage gym. Don’t forget the safety arms!)
• SABRE Pepper Gel (Self-defense you can actually use without being charged with murder.)
• Sensarte 12” Nonstick Skillet (Tacos, fried chicken, pasta sauce, pork burgers, and more!)
• Sony Bravia 65” 4K Mini-LED TV (Perfect blend of cinematic and portable.)
• Sulu Organic Avocado Oil (Healthy vegetable oil. Eat fried foods without feeling sick.)
• Vive Wrist Brace (Theoretically type for ten hours a day. Don’t actually though.)
• ZNHIS Magnetic Bookmarks (Avoids the mess of disposable paper bookmarks.)

Lifestyle Books

• Deskbound by Kelly Starrett (You’re sitting, standing, and walking all wrong. Fix it fast!)
• Double Your Dating by David DeAngelo (She said yes to the date! Now what?)
• How to Cook Everything: The Basics by Mark Bittman (Most of my diet is recipes from this.)
• How to Make Love to a Woman by Michael Morgenstern (Being present goes a long way.)
• Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe (Squat, press, bench, deadlift! Get coached online!)

(If you can only read one, pick Deskbound. Poor posture, which is the norm, ruins most people.)

Hobbyist Books

• The Age of Movies: Selected Writings by Pauline Kael (Will transform how you watch films.)
• The Great Movies by Roger Ebert (Pair with a free Kanopy account. Also read II, III, and IV.)
• Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman (Physics! Read the full lectures and do the problems.)

Philosophy Books

• Certain to Win by Chet Richards (How to outmaneuver and defeat much larger enemies.)
• The Collected Works by Arthur Schopenhauer (Hindu wisdom distilled through German eyes.)
• The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti (Nobody actually exists.)
• The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene (Either exercise power or have it exercised on you.)
• Straw Dogs by John Gray (Giving up hope of “ultimate meaning” is the secret to happiness.)
• The Trouble with Being Born by Emil Cioran (Resignation is only the beginning.)
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel (Push the boundaries of what’s possible, or don’t even start.)

Economics Books

(I loosely define economics as “the study of scarcity”. It’s a very broad field.)

• Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (“Work” is more about societal control than actual work.)
• The Death of the West by Pat Buchanan (Demographics are destiny.)
• Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt (This cured my PTSD from years of degrading office jobs.)
• The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao (Everywhere you go, the strong exploit the weak.)
• How Civilizations Die by David Goldman (Birth rate collapse is leading us to war.)
• Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich (Giving the old chemo for slow-killing cancer is idiotic.)
• River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins (Suffering and scarcity are built into reality.)
• Screen Schooled by Joe Clement (Post-smartphones/AI, formal education is meaningless.)
• Untrue by Wednesday Martin (Female sexuality is a terrifying, unstoppable force.)

History Books

(I’m interested in the things they won’t teach you at school. There’s at least two sides to any story.)

• The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell (American cultural decay from 1964 to 2015.)
• A History of Hinduism by Gagan Deep Bakshi (Reblooming after a millennium suppressed.)
• Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (50 million forgotten murders.)
• Montaillou by Emmanuel Ladurie (Based on actual interviews with medieval peasants.)
• A Republic, Not an Empire by Pat Buchanan (U.S. history from a pre-WW1 point of view.)
• The Shadow of the Great Game by Narendra Sarila (Pakistan’s Cold War origins.)
• The Unnecessary War by Pat Buchanan (Unredacted analysis of the world wars.)
• Varna, Jati, Caste by Rajiv Malhotra (The “caste system” is mostly a British invention.)

Novels

• The Long Walk by Stephen King (Metaphor for any competition where most participants lose.)
• Microserfs by Douglas Coupland (A highly paid office drone is still an office drone.)
• Pet Sematary by Stephen King (Death makes a mockery of everything.)
• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (Hypnotic in its intensity.)
• Submission by Michel Houellebecq (Whoever becomes a lamb will find a wolf to eat him.)
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Surreal reflections on Western imperialism.)
• The Witches by Roald Dahl (A boy and his grandmother against the bankers.)

Short Stories

• “American Gold Mine” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Any professional can relate.)
• “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin (You can’t outsmart physics.)
• “Fleep” by Jason Shiga (If you lose your memories, are you still the same person?)
• “Frost and Fire” by Ray Bradbury (Man that is born of a woman is of few days.)
• “A Full Life” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Society peaked decades ago. It’s all downhill from here.)
• “Golden” by Nick Bostrom (Natural selection makes the world a horror.)
• “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka (The best gifts find the fewest admirers.)
• “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (Allegory for Judeo-Christian God.)
• “To Build a Fire” by Jack London (One is always only a few mistakes from death.)
• “Yellow Card Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi (In the end, you’re alone.)

Comic Books

• Amar Chitra Katha by Anant Pai (Immortal wisdom from better times. Why I’m a Hindu.)
• Buddha by Osamu Tezuka (This charismatic idiot ruined India, China, and Southeast Asia.)
• The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (You have free will. It’s never too late to be a hero.)
• Here by Richard McGuire (100 years from now, nobody will care that you existed.)
• Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy (Be born, mate, die. There’s nothing else to do.)
• The Sandman by Neil Gaiman (Refusing to grow can be fatal. Ironically, Gaiman is a rapist.)
• Swamp Thing by Alan Moore (It’s better to be a plant than an animal.)
• Watchmen by Alan Moore (Our leaders are even more misguided than we are.)

Click the pictures!

Movies

(Hollywood is run by Weinstein types, so be careful. You are what you consume.)

• Angel’s Egg by Mamoru Oshii (Borrowed time, borrowed eyes, borrowed world.)
• Aniara by Pella Kågerman (Viruses on a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.)
• Chhaava by Laxman Utekar (Heralds a Hindu revival a thousand years in the making.)
• Devi by Satyajit Ray (When men make war, it’s always women and children who suffer.)
• Don Juan DeMarco by Jeremy Leven (Living without illusions is a fast track to depression.)
• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner by Stanley Kramer (Still radical 60 years later, sadly.)
• The Maltese Falcon by John Huston (Invented “film noir”. James Bond but cooler.)
• The Shining by Stanley Kubrick (Eerily beautiful and built on genocide. Just like America.)
• The Sound of Music by Robert Wise (Catnip for women. Every girl loves this film.)
• Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman (Trying and failing to make sense of life.)
• Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock (Perfectly embodies disorientation. San Francisco at its prettiest.)
• Watership Down by Martin Rosen (Moving depiction of the universal “will to live”.)

(Pro tip: Steam Link can stream pirated movies from your browser to your TV. Use a VPN!)

Video Games

(Gaming peaked ~2013. 90% of new games are bad remixes of older titles. Just play old games.)

• Arctic Eggs (Masterclass in setting and mood. Captures the nihilism of today’s youth culture.)
• Braid (“Modernity” is mostly just ruining the world while proclaiming you’re making it better.)
• The Case of the Golden Idol (Mad libs deduction at its finest. Treats Hinduism with respect.)
• Grand Theft Auto V (Easily the best open-world game ever made. Absurdly good story.)
• Half-Life (You are alone and everyone you meet wants to kill you. Average male experience.)
• Hotline Miami (With proper visibility, one man can defeat a hundred. Killer soundtrack.)
• Little Inferno (Our lives are brief candles and every day we burn a little more. No going back.)
• Pikmin (Ever wonder how politicians and bankers see you? Don’t be a disposable tool.)
• Poker Night at the Inventory (All the fun of gambling without the addiction and shame!)
• Sleeping Dogs (Grand Theft Auto meets Hong Kong cinema. The triad life is the life for me.)
• Spelunky 2 (Randomly generated 2D platformer – endless variety and perfect feel.)
• Super Mario Galaxy (Divinely inspired 3D platforming. It’s hard to believe humans made this.)

(Check out WoWRoms, Mednafen, PCSX2, Dolphin, and Wand. Endless fun!)

Background

Education

Click the pictures!

Political Views

I’m a U.S.-born Hindu. I’ve lived in Silicon Valley most of my life and got rich during COVID.^[1]

Now that I’m free, I may leave. But to where? Europe? An SEC college town? A big house in India? Like Warren Buffett, I’m presently invested in T-Bills in anticipation of an economic crash.^[2]

Most important things in life (your genetics, birthplace, economic conditions in your twenties, etc.) are out of your control. If you’re unhappy with how your life turned out, try to be easier on yourself.

U.S. politics is now decided entirely by bipartisan special interest groups, so I don’t vote any more. I encourage you to stop voting as well. Participating in the farce just legitimizes it.

We seem to be leaving an era of globalization and connectivity for one of war and atomization. The U.S. Empire (1945-2022)^[3] is in its death throes, and its successor(s) may be worse.

[1] By "rich" I mean I can afford a nice apartment and some hobbies in a high cost-of-living area while avoiding having to work during bad job markets (like the present one). When jobs are scarce, employees are worked to the bone and it's dog-eat-dog. Not my scene. When good jobs become easy to find again, you'll likely see me schmoozing my way into my own business or an executive position.

[2] I'm also investing in my health (strength training, running, swimming, boxing, yoga, acupuncture, raw milk, fish oil). You should too. Prevention is the best medicine. Most surgeries and prescribed drugs just kill you slowly. Avoid doctors, eat healthy, don't drink, live well. I'd like to take up tennis, golf, and beach volleyball for their social aspects. Outside sports, scuba, gardening, and filmmaking sound fun.

[3] 1945 as the start date is pretty obvious (World War 2). I picked 2022 as the end date for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the end of quantitative easing (which kept America chugging post-2008), and the rise of remote work/AI (which make tech hubs like Silicon Valley obsolete by enabling a truly global workforce). 2018 (U.S.-China trade war) and 2023 (Israel-Gaza war) were also big turning points. Other possible end dates are 2020 (COVID-19 lockdowns/PPP loans) and 2021 (a majority of U.S. children are now non-white).