Outlooker

Humans are not free to desire anything - as posted above, we can do what we want, but we cannot want what we want, only give in to our wants or not, which takes willpower, which is very limited in supply, and therefore people, sooner or later, act out most of their genetically pre-programmed desires. Desires are programmed as actions or states that arouse pleasure. And I would argue that cooperation itself does not arouse pleasure in humans, only (positive) results of cooperation, things like security, food supply etc. Question: If an average human would become "Supreme King of The World" - getting everything he wants from his fellow humans in an absolute way - would he still want to "cooperate",even if he does not need to? I think not. Therefore, I think cooperation is sought by humans only as remedy to individual weakness and lack of resources or abilities, not as a positive value on its own - more of a tool, a crutch, because external circumstances make cooperation the look like the best route to go. If a human would be "perfect" - all-powerful, all-able, without the need of others - there would be no cooperation with him. Even "sub-perfect", that is, just especially strong, tall, intelligent, beautiful, competent and/or rich people exhibit lower agreeableness and willingness for cooperation than humans who, based on their lower attributes, must show more humility and therefore increased willingness to cooperate - powerful people tend to be more commanding and demanding, be it a young female supermodel or a young male multimillionaire, compared with their peers with much lower social status. "...they need to survive." - AND successfully reproduce - survival alone is worthless. Organisms have to pass natural and sexual selection, failing in either one means termination of the genetic line. And while some utopia-stuff like "Communism" may somehow be able to deal with natural selection (resource inequality), the problem of sexual selection is still crucial: wealth could be distributed somehow, but sexual reproduction can not - especially not with the most valuable mates, because humans differ in genetic quality, and therefore the resulting offspring will differ in resulting genetic quality, too. There is roughly one woman for every man; but there are not nearly enough top-attractive women for every man and vice versa - therefore, social competition, which is basically a more or less hot war for reproduction with the few superior gene-carriers, must go on - and it should, because it is, evolutionary, a life-or-death struggle. No, I think I can prove that "tievery, robbery, rape, torture, murder" and "competition" and "social status" are very much the same thing. The need for individual success natural and sexual selection - BY ANY MEANS - is already discussed above. Some additional points: Do you are pro-rape? No? But rape is often a damn good evolutionary strategy for men, at least has been (the advent of abortion and contraceptives complicate the matter - but men of today are the way they are because men with their traits/instincts successfully reproduced in the past, by methods who are not seen as particularly nice by many today) - consider two ideas: - Do you like being alive? What if you are only alive "illegally" or "immorally", because among your ancestors was a man who only reproduced because he stole/murdered/raped? (Actually, we can statistically be certain each of us has many such ancestors) - do you want to kill yourself now because you are not "lawfully" alive? The ugly truth of life and reality is this: Reality does not care for morals and laws, only for results - success- by any means necessary. - Genghis Khan is probably the most successful man in history - by executing a most ruthless, but also most efficient sexual strategy: Kill/enslave/castrate all other men outside your tribe, rob all fertile females you like and rape them and store them in a harem for later re-impregnation. A straightforward, basically uncomplicated undertaking - as long as it is successful - but so it was. Genghis Khan owned a personal harem with 50,000 women he robbed from millions of men whom he mostly just killed. His sons also were allowed harems of comparable size.Result:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan"8% of the men in a large region of Asia (about 0.5% of the world total)" are his descendants. He was sexually the most successful man known, by a long shot. It's not cooperative, not nice, not civilized - but one cannot argue that it outcompetes flower bouquet gifts, dating, marriage and rising of one or two children by a rather spectacular degree. But now to why I am so often mentioning competition and social status.I recently figured out that humans are actually vampires!Before you send me brochures for the loony bin, let me explain my metaphor (which is frighteningly literal):(There are three points that further that idea, the third probably the most interesting.) 1.)Money has many properties, and one way to see money is as a representation of human work, life time, hardship or human energy.Those who have lots of money and do not need to work, or even make very much money with low or no personal effort, can buy from other humans basically their life time and energy.If you have practically unlimited money (say you won 100M$ in the lottery), you can consume the energy and life time - work - of other humans without trading your own life time and work and energy in exchange - if one has only enough money, an individual human can consume the equivalent of many human lives in terms of life time and energy without giving back any of his own (he cannot buy life time literally to have a longer life itself,but can buy the equivalent of, say, thousands of years of human life/lifetime/work/energy in goods and services).Because money can make money out of money, there is a vampiristic element in capital income, interests, rents, profits and dividends. 2.)https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23331184-300-old-blood-can-be-made-young-again-and-it-might-fight-ageing/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/04/can-we-reverse-ageing-process-young-blood-older-peoplehttp://www.businessinsider.de/young-blood-transfusions-aging-disease-ambrosia-2017-1We'll see what exactly comes from that.Another point is organ donation - clearly vampiristic in some way; and knowing that rich people can order specific organs from tens of thousands of Chinese prisoners who are not executed but kept alive for the financial value of theirorgans by the Chinese government - as soon as a paying customer is found they are executed and harvested for their organs - the vampirism argument is furthered, especially in combination with point 1) (first a human would get theequivalent of life time - money - from other humans, and then he would use that money to actually and literally increase his own life-time by buying replacement organs when needed). 3.)Not to the connection with social status.People desire to live long and healthy. Four of the central needs to achieve that goal, as identified by medicine, are1)No smoking 2) No drinking 3)Avoiding being overweight 4)regular exerciseThose four points are, if applied to the general population, robust predictors of health and long life - individually, and more so in combination.That is true - but not the whole truth. There is a factor - social status - that is even much more predictive of long and healthy life than all of those four factors combined!You may say something along the lines that rich people can buy better food and living circumstances and therefore live longer. But the isolated effect of money seems very much - and very surprisingly - irrelevant!In comes the thehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_StudyI'll give a simplified short account:British rail workers - studied for health over decades - those guys earn low wages - therefore 1) cannot buy much to smoke 2)cannot buy much booze 3)cannot buy much food (stay slim) 4)exercise regularly (walk the railways for miles to check and replace rails and railway switches) - then some of them get promoted to overseers - now they do not walk the railway anymore, can sit in a nice warm room all year and are paid much better - result: 1)they buy more tobacco 2)they buy more booze 3)they eat more and become fat 4)they do not "exercise" anymore - now what? According to theory, they should fall more ill and die sooner than their "healthily living" non-promoted pals;this did NOT happen - instead, those promoted to overseers lived up to 30% longer than their peers, and not only longer, but did not fall sick and diseased (infections, strokes, heart attacks, cancer etc.) - they lived much longer ANDenjoyed better health!Weird, isn't it? Their health-related lifestyle worsened in every way, yet they were in spectacularly better health?Why could that be?Scientists, also based on status-related observations in chimps, wondered if the social status alone - as an isolated factor - could be behind the observed effects? But how to measure it? There would be needed a human societyin that personal wealth is not related to social status - can something like this exist and be found? It turned out it can - in some tribes in Papua New Guinea, and in some tribes in the Amazon jungle, for example the Tsimané people of Bolivia.https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/how-social-status-affects-your-health.html?_r=1Long story short: Social status in those tribal people has no influence on access to care/property/food etc. - one could almost say they are "natural communists" - everybody gets the same share of food from successful hunts,everybody is cared for with the same effort when falling sick, and everybody has the same housing and property (exception: personal trophies from war and hunting small enough to carry on person all the time).But while there nobody is "rich or poor", those tribes still put huge importance on social status - usually based on personal success in tribal warfare and hunting ability. The outward sign of social status, or "face" is not more than theparticular sitting order in their main house or around the fire - and the prestige and social influence that sitting position brings with it.And the influence of that social status on the longevity and health of the tribesman can be observed in a longitudinal study - because war and hunting luck changes, position on the table/fire changes, and therefore social status fluctuates.So Western scientists started expeditions and brought lab equipment - they tested, over many years, the health parameters of the tribespeople (blood pressure, C-reactive protein, cortisol as stress indicator, immune system indicators,infection and disease rate and duration, pulse rate at rest, even sleep quality (REM phases) and many other parameters directly connected to health, and, of course, health related survival rate (some tribesmen would be killed in war or during hunting, those were excluded of course)).Result:Social status is an INDEPENDENT predictor of health and longevity - and a much stronger predictor than the known four points above combined! This compares well with other observations:Chimps (98+% genetically identical to humans) showed huge sensitivity to social status; for example male chimps kept for a few months isolated from the other chimps by a transparent barrier - provided with the same food etc. - but impossible to mate with other chimps and (in chimp "society") therefore lowest social status - DIED just from the artificially enforced lowered social status (they were well fed and cared for, but showed signs of increasing stress andanxiety, later even aggression, and their biomarkers (cortisol etc.) went all through the roof.)Chimps are highly susceptible to social status in terms of learning and bartering:Scientists changed pictures of low- and high- status chimps for "chimp money" (grapes or small amounts of fruit juice) - the chimps traded much more "chimp money" for pictures of chimps who were high-status; and no money at allfor pictures of low-status chimps of the group (Remember us humans? Boulevard press? Pictures of supermodels, actors, sports stars and politicians, businessmen etc. - but nobody pays for pictures and stories about garbagemen and ugly or old females?).Another similarity: Learning, or better put, "adoption speed of ideas":Scientists taught chimps a very valuable skill (for chimps) - how to open CapriSun juice-bags with a pointy straw and suck the delicious juice with it.Complication:If they showed how to do it to low-status chimps, it took MONTHS until the skill was learned by all the chimps in the group.If they showed it to high-status chimps, it took mere HOURS before all chimps of the group learned to open the bags correctly and suck the juice.Now compare to us humans - what direction do fashions go on the social ladder? Always top to down, too! Good manners and etiquette, table customs, taste in art and fashion - all those things go down from the aristocracy/upper class to the middle class until they hit the lower classes much later, if at all. There are other interesting explanations for other observations regarding the huge impact of social status:Powerful people tend to live longer and more healthy - even if they have extremely unhealthy habits!Two examples:German chancellor Helmut Schmidt - for over half a century, until his death by 96, he smoked multiple packs of cigarettes daily - and boozed up regularly, and never exercised.British Winston Churchill - famous for "no sports" - was an extreme alcoholic, obese, and a smoker - lived to 90.Both men (and many other powerful, that is, with superior social status, people) lived very long- and healthy lives - they were mentally and physically in very good shape, despite their old age. Another aspect:Social status of the father influences the ratio of male/female offspring.Evolutionary psychologists developed the hypothesis that male and female children have not the same reproductive value - boys are better for spreading genes if the father is of high social status, and girls would be better if the father is of low social status - because a boy would probably inherit the winning genes and traits of his father, and, at least theoretically, could impregnate high numbers of women (many of those would cheat their partners to access the superiorgenes of the boy) - while a boy from a man with low social status would inherit the losing genes of his father, therefore would be able to mate with fewer females, or none at all - so "nature" would play it safe with low-status fathers and have them get more girls than boys (because girls get practically always to reproduce, because they are sexually desirable to men independently of their success in social competition EDIT: but girls cannot have the potentially huge number of offspring boys can have because girls always must use their own body for reproduction, while boys can utilize the bodies of countless women and are therefore, theoretically, not much limited in the number of offspring they can have).They checked their hypothesis - by counting the children of the people in the "Who's Who", an publication that lists the dominant people of the countries of the world (military, science, politicians, business, religious leaders etc.).And they counted the sex rate of the children of those men who could be said are those with highest social status globally - the US presidents.They found:In the average population, father's girl:boy proportion is 100:100.In the men listed in the "Who's Who" it is 100:115.In the US presidents the proportion is 100:150.Somehow, "nature" managed to indeed have socially superior men have more male offspring! We see:Social status is a centrally important way to increase one's life time, health and even reproductive success!And social status is, because it is relative, positional (one can only get what others must lose) quite a bit vampirical! I think that the huge importance of social status also gives insight why people show certain behaviours, especially those who are directed of pushing other people down in the social hierarchy, for example byslavery, exploitation, mobbing, bullying and all the other socially aggressive behaviours - because of the relative nature of social status, one can not only rise by becoming better, but also by making othersdeliberately worse! It could be argued that mobbing or bullying are tactics to transfer the "good energy" (health, reproduction,...) of others to oneself by aggressively pushing them down - taking their "positionalenergy" for oneself, which, because it translates into health, life time expansion and mating success, could be called "vampiric" in nature. (Damn, I wrote too much, I am so bad at being concise, and I wonder if that stuff realyl interests anybody - sorry for grammar mistakes and such, I kind of used all this writing also to order my own thoughts;I hope you gained some new perspectives at least.)

As I understand it, women need two things from men: Resources (food, protection, housing,...) and good, ideally superior genes. A woman's ideal reproduction partner therefore would be, translated into contemporary attributes, a very rich man with superior genes (health, height, handsomeness, IQ etc.). This is not what women really can get - all those traits combined in a single man are so rare that we can imagine such a man to basically not exist. There are, however, many men with resources (good job usually, and there are even a few million millionaires) OR superior genes. Because women ideally need both to successfully rise a competitive child (resources for bringing it up well and also having the child carrying good genes), they seem to mostly trying to get a financially at least stable man (who can be of generally lower genetic quality) and then "shop" good genes by adultery. This may not be the norm, but it is still widespread. How widespread? All studies taken about the subject show that the frequency of illegitimate children are a function of social class: Upper class has about 0.5-2%, middle class 2-5% and lower class 5-30% illegitimate children - the different amounts are probably a result of the fact that the higher the social class of a man, the better his genes on average anyway, and also the mother has more to lose in terms of resources if she cheats a upper class man instead of a lowly worker. The "peace, stability and decent income" are only desired in the child-rearing phase - to ensure a good development and steady flows of money to rise the child well. BEFORE a woman selects for a man she is much more finding pleasure in male competition, violence, chaos - because it allows to identify a man with superior ability, and therefore superior genes. If a man became rich by his own work, the competition mostly is already done and won by that man - more of a thing of the past than of the present and the future. I have to disagree: I think we humans are more automatons with very small amounts of free will. Basically, we can not want what we want. We can only do or not do what we want, but cannot change what it is that we want. And the "do not do what we want" - option is very limited by our willpower, which is in notoriously short supply: You cannot decide what you want in terms of appetite, sexual orientation, if you like a smell or taste or not, if you want to rape a little girl or not, etc. - all you can do is to give in to your urges, or not. But most people cannot resist, and the obesity crisis is a proof of this fact. Also, generally, I think that people are genetically programmed to seek pleasure and avoid displeasure - and that is the true driving moment of almost all acts they do. Even the whole economy is basically a system to give people pleasure while avoiding displeasures: Products and services that arouse no pleasure in people hardly exist at all. Mostly (not absolutely) people therefore act and life like "on rails", doing just what gives them pleasure and avoiding things that are painful - while the selector what brings pleasure and what pain is genetically "hardwired" and cannot be changed by mere willing. Yes, that is true, because organisms "want" to spread their genes, and in sexual selection this is optimally done by finding a mate who has, on average, mostly the same set of genes than oneself. (Important specific exception in humans: Women tend to select men who have a different immune system than themselves, which women detect by smell cues - the microbiome on human skin is a function of the specific immune system of a human, and therefore different kinds and quantities of bacteria settle on the skin and chemically produce different chemicals and proportions of them from human skin cells and sweat, which leads to each human having a different smell - that is to optimize sexual selection itself, because it exists - among other things - to mix up the immune system genome of the resulting child so that diseases and parasites cannot easily adapt to the new human's immune system - this is critical because humans have an inter-generational distance of decades, and disease-causing bacteria or viruses, for example, of mere minutes - and therefore many more generations to adapt to a host). Recently it was even shown that most people fall most quickly in love with themselves - if pictures of their own faces are feminized/androgenized by morphing algorithms into the opposite sex (done in a way the test subjects would not recognize themselves consciously in the morphed pictures). Self-confidence is a result of personal successes. If one wins or succeeds at something significant, be it a fight, money, a job, education, dating etc. - there is a mood change with more optimistic outlook and increased self-efficacy. You do NOT "either have it, or don't" - it is a result of one's success. (Sidenote: High testosterone is highly correlated to high self-confidence - but then again being successful, winning in some competition, rises testosterone.) "Pushovers": It comes down who people desire to have as allies, as friends. We choose friends who can be allies, that is, are rather young (old people die soon and are a bad social investment), competent, strong, smart, resourceful - like love, friendship is based on personal utility in the future; indeed, "pushovers", that is, weak/stupid/poor/diseased/ugly/etc. humans are a bad investment to make in to keep as allies for potential conflicts or needs in the future, so people tend to desire to get friends who are the opposite. I have to contend: Doctors: I think most people who try to become medical doctors in reality do so for the social status, income and job security. It's one of the most certain ways to become solid middle class. You can observe the sexual/social motivation even in university - here in Germany we have a kind of, well, dancing/dating event in universities called "Medizinerball" - it's full of medial students - and, importantly, also full of attractive females who want to "catch" an aspiring medical doctor - for some reason, engineers or scientists, who also sometimes have such events, are not at all full of those attractive young females looking for a mate ... The same applies for teachers (at least in Germany and some other EU countries) - it's a very well-paid job, with top job security (public servant status) with not much competition in the daily routine - especially women are seeking this kind of job. I think neither doctors nor teachers do their jobs altruistically, but mostly for the social status it brings. And that means being in a superior social position over other humans - being socially dominant, which is driven by aggression and therefore a drive to conquer/kill/subjugate - ruling over other people, effectively.

I noticed that during normal child/boy development quite obviously the boys train to murder: They play "hide and seek", which is basically a playful version of an ambush. And most boys, even when no pre-made toys are available to them, tend to craft themselves or imagine the tools of killing as toys - today, of course, guns, but also spears, bows and swords. The wooden sword is a stereotypical boy toy of the past. Those tools are clearly instinctively used in a way not to train hunting animals, but to fight and kill other humans. There are many reports of pacifist parents who tried to avoid access of their children to toy weapons only to be frustrated by their children's ability, talent and desire to use common household items as imagined toy weaponry and play fighting and play killing with them. I also observed another basic tendency young people, especially men, display: The (instinctual) drive to kill male peers while competing for female mates - in adolescents and young adults there are many ritualized bravery and competence contests - to prove their social (and sexual) value and qualities. Example: Dangerous stunts with (motor) bikes, especially when (young) women are onlooking. Such sexual signalling is the leading cause for death in young boys and men - death by peer-group-driven competence display accidents. How do I see this connected with "people trying to kill each other?" It is common that boys are seen egging on their peers "Coward! Pussy! Wimp!" to do such dangerous competence and social status displays of the sort that could get the executant killed or (permanently) crippled. There is a clear evolutionary advantage if another guy driven in doing such acts gets killed or crippled - he is removed as competition for mates or resources! Of course, peers egging on their opponents into such acts of proof of competence play a gamble: If the guy gets killed or crippled, the other men rise and status and get closer to the females or resources. But if the guy succeeds, they are (at least temporarily) reduced in status and mating chances, because the successful guy has proven his superiority over them. This behavior is instinctive - just look what happens to men when an attractive women gets near - suddenly " muscled" breasts are presented, they stand taller, speak louder and with deeper voice, and show greater ingroup competitiveness (think of what happens to men on a sunny beach when a blonde walks by - most men become "peacocks"). It is proven in monkeys/apes, and quite obviously witnessed in humans, that women specifically enjoy and induce this kind of behaviour in men/males- because they (instinctively) must screen them for top quality genes, and the best way to show which male is best is to make them fight each other - directly, tooth-and-claw in animals, by social competition and social status display (usually) in us humans. The point of all that - the underlying true motivation - is still to get rid of the competition for resources and sex, therefore, at least in an evolutionary sense, kill/terminate/make go extinct the loser in these fights. I think the real underlying motive is different: IIRC, Dawkins pointed out in "The Selfish Gene" that organisms, say, wolves, have an evolutionary need to kill the other wolves because they are opponents/enemies/competitors for everything they want themselves - resources and reproduction partners. (The more similar organisms are, the more they are competing for the very same resources, and therefore are opponents/enemies.) It is not happening - instead we see "packs", a kind of social organisation of wolves. Why? If one wolf would attack and fight another wolf to ensure his access to resources and mates, that wolf would lose time - during fighting - and may get injured himself. While he is fighting, he would allow other wolves to mate with the female wolves, and if he gets injured, he loses his grasp on resources and mates even more. Therefore, while organisms are "unhappy" that their social competitors exist and ideally would like to get rid of them, they cannot do so easily because it would allow their opponents to exploit their distraction to acquire their resources or mates. Ways out of this dilemma are -getting and defending a territory - one (usually) male claims all the resources/prey and mates on it -social hierarchization (pecking order) - like packs in wolves, or society in us humans. Human males are still not happy to allow other men to mate with women, especially desirable women, but are supposed to endure that. Social cooperation is only tolerated because if the need of specialization (greater productivity if people do one job, get better at it, and then exchange their goods and services in an economy which allows for greater general wealth) - but people do not really desire cooperation - they just do it because they have to: No baker is baking bread because of his altruistic desire is to feed bread to other humans, but because of his egoistical desire to have goods for exchange for the goods and services of other people ("making money"). I think they are not NOT enjoying it, they enjoy it LESS. Action movies and the like seem to be quite universally liked. But I think you are correct by stating it as: People are competitive to different degrees and in different ways. But somehow, I think, all people compete, and therefore all people try to gain social status - which is, inherently aggressive, because unlike property (which could at least theoretically equally distributed) social status, the individual rank in the social hierarchy, is not absolute, but relative - every time somebody's status rises, somebody else's status is lowered. (I keep mentioning the concept of social status because it is central to social animals, and very much so for us humans.) I think there are more subtle ways of "war and killing" in us humans. You are right in pointing out that only a part of people enjoy war and fighting and killing or depictions of it directly. Maybe those who see themselves as weak and therefore unable to successfully compete in such open aggression displays try to find other fields of competition, for example more artistic, creative or cognitive challenging ones. But still - they compete socially, and the core of all that competing is to win, and to win means to produce losers, and losers are humiliated and dominated and lose social status. The winners, in whatever competition, usually still earn prestige and bragging rights and improved mating chances than the losers. So, while not directly a bloody affair, the fascination, the motivation is still to attack, conquer and dominate other humans - if only in Tetris, indeed. Another group of people not enjoying war and combat and fighting is women - simply because they are weaker than men, have no direct combat instincts, and evolved to avoid open conflict for being the weaker sex. But women still 1)care a lot about men's competitions/wars/fighting 2)compete themselves among women 1: Women care not for weapons and tactics and the technical aspects of such competitions - but they sure do greatly care for the very results of those competition among men - the male winners are very much sought after by women - be it in knight games, boxing matches, or the war among men for simply getting rich - women are attracted to the winning men to the highest degree. By exactly this behavior, women induce and perpetuate competition in men - by sexual selection for men who want and be able to win competitions. 2: Women tend not to clobber each other like men, but they also compete with other men intensively - just in other fields than men, concretely looking attractive and being popular (the other side of the same coin: Female aggression tries to sabotage the beauty of other women ("She has a fat butt") and other women's social popularity, even attempting social exclusion of other women (Example: Removing the socio-sexial threat from a more attractive or younger female by manipulating the group into ostracizing the female competitor). Sports seems to be a substitute for war people crave. Humans display a strong tendency towards tribalism ("Us vs. them"). I think elites use sports like football or soccer as a war or combat surrogate: People pick their favorite team, "us/we/good guys" and then there are "them/enemies" - and they fight,indeed, just with little balls instead of guns and blades. I think it is an emotional release for the instinctual desire for combat. Just look at how extremely emotionally and devoted many sports fans are for "their" teams - just like "brothers in arms." And then look at the hooligan phenomenon - after the "sportive war" with the ball, some men are so aroused by the competition, the fighting for dominance, that the sports game is not enough for them to satisfy their desire to beat/hurt/kill and they battle each other physically after the soccer match, often with lots of physical harm dealt out, sometimes even death. What everybody does every day anyway cannot be interesting enough to be the central aspect of entertainment. There can be no movies about breathing or sleeping. Even if war and killing has novelty value, and is therefore expected to be interesting for that reason alone, if there were no element of instinctual fascination for it, the interest in it would quickly subside. Talking socks could have novelty value and be interesting to some people, but the interest would end quickly, too. Mortal competition is something very different - it seems one of the very few things (like sexual displays) humans cannot ever really get enough of it - it stays fascinating. Simulated violence/competition has a constant demand - other novelties and entertainment genres (besides sex) not so much. Romance is also about competition, and therefore war-like. Usually romance entertainment has multiple people fighting over an especially valuable/desired mate. There is a struggle, often sabotage, spying etc. in some form - and clearly winners and losers, dominators and conquered/humiliated people. I think there is a good reason the sayings "Love is War" and "In Love and War Everything Is Allowed" exist. At least judging the content of romance novels, romance games and romance movies this is very true. Comedy: This is not as harmless as it may seem. What is funny? There is a basic, universal rule of what is funny or what constitutes humor: Somebody, imagined or real, must lose social status - usually in a surprising way. But the losing of social status is the prerequisite for something being funny. As a social species, social status is deeply ingrained in human instinct. Humans enjoy if others lose social status, and often enough that is seen as funny: Slipping on a banana peel : Such a clumsy idiot! - The person has lost dominance/power/status/prestige - and by the lowering of another person, the status of all other persons is automatically risen - because social status is relative, positional - and people are genetically hardwired to enjoy personal social status gains. Even if self-depreciative humor exists, others lough because another's status falls, and their status rises. Humor, therefore, is also socially competitive, and a form of war and aggression. Satire, for example, is often used with devastating effect to attack other humans. Of course, there are more harmless versions of humor, but still the core concept is aggression and competition to lower the social status of humans. And because social status, the position in the social hierarchy or "pecking order" in humans has, directly or indirectly, survival and mating value, even comedy is a subtler form of the desire to kill.

Yes. But why might this be? I think we have good evolutionary reasons to have developed a sense that other people try to "get us", are even trying to kill us. Were you ever walking through woods alone and in the dark? You very probably felt a bit insecure, fearful even - every little noise you thought could be a human or animal on the prey trying to kill you, every grey shape you saw grew into a monster or attacking human or prey animal in your fantasy. Why? Because, evolutionary, erring "one times too often" has higher survival value than "erring one time too few" - in which case one would be dead. It's better to have an over-cautious nervous system which sees threats where there are none, than to miss one single serious threat. Now compare this instinct with the usual desire of most people to try to see conspiracies everywhere - I see a pattern: Because humans compete socially, one could even say there is an outright social war for status, resources and mates, there are usually other people plotting and trying to attack, or at least exploit or trick, us - in other words, us being an intelligent species, other people are really "out to get us" - if "only" to make us buy things, vote for them etc. Therefore, people who always scan their social environment for conspiracies are at an evolutionary advantage, and seeing one possible conspiracy too many is clearly better, too, than seeing one actual conspiracy too few.

Notice that there is a media strategy called something like "information poisoning" - when an information got out in the public, and cannot be directly censored anymore, that information can be "poisoned", that is, have lose its credibility, by putting out lots of similar, almost identical, minimally modified other info like the original one out, but added with lots of huge nonsense. Example: Some guy has made real photographs of a secret, ultramodern aircraft the public is not allowed to know about, maybe because it is nuclear powered and dangerous for the environment or something like that. The photo is out, the damage is done. But now the agencies "poison" that correct information by putting out through many channels nonsense info - like dozens of versions of the original photography that is doctored, like showing an angel, or UFO/Alien stuff etc. - suddenly the public sees dozens of versions with clearly faked, nonsensical elements - and loses the ability to know what is true or false, and begins to generally consider "everything of that sort" to be fakes. This technique is not restricted to photography, of course, but practically every kind of information, which the public shall not believe in or at least have serious doubts about its correctness. You have public evidence leaked out that a top politician had pedophile sex and killing some kids? If it is in "national interest" to keep the politician, the whole affair can be neutralized by putting out lots of modified obvious fake stories containing the original evidence and information, for example, "leaking" info that the politician is one of a secret organization of satanical lizard people aliens (along with blurred photos), or other subtle or outrageous falsified information. Suddenly, all of the affair becomes unbelievable to the public, and it even looks like a deliberate attack on the politician, who suddenly feels more like a victim than an offender.

I am not pro or against "conspiracy theories" as such, but 1) there exist proven conspiracies 2) there are extremely suspicious events (see below) 3) the phrase "conspiracy theory" is pretty much a tool to ridicule inquisitive thinking and action For example, consider the Belgian Marc Dutroux case: Shot summary: Dutroux supplied Belgian upper class members with children to have sex with and kill. A series of improbable events leads to the whole affair becoming public. The whole thing takes off really from here - basically, 27 witnesses in the affair are killed directly, have accidents, or "just die" in a short time. Outrageous stuff happens - the 1st prosecuting attorney to deal with the case is found hanged; in a police station a gunman enters at night, shoots the cop who is on duty, and removes evidence from the evidence storage room. 27 witnesses to the case dying in short order is very well beyond "conspiracy theory". If you want more info about that, here are some good links: http://www.whale.to/c/murders_re_marc_dutroux.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Dutroux This is a "conspiracy fact", as factual as it can get. If I google it today sources seem to have removed from google, especially about the 27 dead witnesses. While you may not have noticed this affair, the Belgian people sure have - millions of Belgian citizens protested what happened - not so much the child sex slaves or killing, but how "invisible forces" achieved to sweep it under the carpet. Governments and other powerful organisations have all the resources, tools, science - means and methods of getting rid of people, and they have developed that black art at least for centuries. Generally speaking, with the advance of technology, a person can not even any longer detect if he his decisively attacked - a bullet, explosion or knife or obvious poison speak clearly - but how can one know if one's cancer, heart attack, stroke etc. has natural causes - or is the result of stealthy, deliberate action? In East Germany, the intelligence agency "Stasi", while not being as sophisticated as agencies of more advanced states, practiced "Zersetzung", basically clandestine psychological sabotage to render people dysfunctional or push them into commiting suicide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung That info about those state programs is even available is only due to the fact that in the reunification of Germany in the early 1990s was a lot of chaos, and a few documents about intelligence agencies' activities slipped through concealing or destruction efforts. Another undeniable fact that slipped through censorship: The CIA poison gun, aka "heart attack gun", which fires a silent and unnoticeable tiny poison dart that will dissolve in the victim and release a toxin that is undetectable and makes the assassination appear as natural death. This verified piece of tech is almost half a century old - imagine what they have now available as tools and techniques for the "dark arts". http://www.globalresearch.ca/cia-targeted-assassinations-by-induced-heart-attack-and-cancer/5326382 http://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-heart-attack-gun/2555371072001 Also, more generally, trying to ridicule ideas as "conspiracy theory" is laughable from the beginning: The definition of a conspiracy is that multiple people conspire to plan or execute criminal acts. It is already a full-grown, legal conspiracy if three kids plan to collectively steal cookies from their parents' cookie jar. Now imagine what is happening in the whole society, companies' board rooms, etc. - real conspiracies are legion, almost all of them actually go undetected.

Thievery, robbery, rape, torture, murder etc. are forbidden by law because it is human nature to want to do those things and derive pleasure from them - otherwise there would be no need to forbid them. I mean - look at what humans enjoy in entertainment, like TV, Movies or video games - theft, robbery, murder. People come home from work tired after a long day, and they relax by enjoying watching killings and murder in TV, or enjoy killing in some video game. If entertainment and video games would be only about winning and "beating the game", puzzle games, reaction time games or other such concepts would be vastly more popular. Instead, war, shooting, weapons, killings, murder is the most popular aspect of both TV/Movies and video games. Therefore, humans SPECIFICALLY enjoy and derive pleasure from the act of killing, murdering and raping. Contemporary example: Game of Thrones. Wildly popular, and besides sex scenes, it's mostly a series of detailed murders. Today, with more advanced technology, the gore, weapon, shooting and rag-doll killing effects are ever more detailed. They only cut back on detail and killing glorification to also sell their games to an sub-18 y.o. audience, so the murdering and maiming is not as detailed and intense as it could be and people would desire. Proof: Gore-based games like Doom and other ultra-violent, ultra-realistic shooters which are officially forbidden for kids are especially sought-after by said kids and also especially enjoyed by players 18+. The same applies to Movies - horror movies are sought after, and especially enjoyed; people would desire much more detailed and long-winded murder, torture and killing, but normal Movies are made to sell to the max. number of people, and that includes kids, so they have to officially cut back in detailed violence more than the audience actually likes to see. Example: Game of Thrones; people especially enjoy detailed and gory killing, rape, murder and torture scenes. You can see it in the audience's behavior, how they fixate those scenes, how they are mesmerized by them, how they derive pleasure from them. Even in a more "family-friendly" Movie like the Lord of Rings the battle scenes were they showed extra cruelty in detail, like the riders' charge on the orc army, were especially pleasurable and memorable for the viewers. Also, globally and contemporary, we in the West live like in a violence-free bubble - in many parts of the world, for example Africa, Mexico and parts of Asia torture, maiming, killing and murder are a daily, regular, yes - normal - , occurrence. And, as pointed out above, it is human nature to desire that violence so much that even in the West the dominant aspect of public entertainment culture is violence, murder, rape, and killing. If people would really desire peace, friendliness, loving each other etc. - wouldn't they enjoy those things in their entertainment products? But there is virtually nothing of the sort, only the opposite.

Even the experts only have a limited understanding of technology and science - the deepest reasons for the way reality works are also unknown to them, as for everybody else. But they have something over their fellow humans - a much higher degree of control over science and technology, from a higher relative understanding - they may not know why something works the way it does, but they can quite reliably make it work like they want to their interests. And from that difference in control over science and technology results a difference in power over people, that is a, maybe today THE, basis of ruling power (In German "Herrschaftswissen", quite hard to translate the meaning into English, maybe "knowledge for the sake of action or control"). And as you said - yes: "People are the same as they ever where." - that is, human nature did not change. Technology changes. And with technological changes, some aspects of gaining and keeping power over other people. It mattered not so much if people by this process were ruled by the threat of clubbing them with a tree branch or killing them by machine gun. They still had the capacity to understand what was going on, what and who influenced them. Not today anymore, I fear. In the past, ruling people was achieved by fear of force or by propaganda, that is, exploiting informational and cognitive differences. Today, the ruling power seems to be on the way into people's selves, their brains, identities, cognition itself. Many people share all their lives, provide a complete communication, location, opinion, intimacy, shopping, earning etc. history - data bases and algorithms know more and more exact attributes about them than they are knowing about themselves - beginning to allow rulers to force people into doing their bidding not by external, but internal forces. And exactly the people who are most threatened by this understand it the least - they feel their lives - nothing less is it that is practically contained and stored and transmitted in and by those little boxes they carry with them - is secured and controlled by themselves because they have some physical control over the device by keeping it always close to themselves; women and kids seem to treat it like a personal diary, of sorts - a sanctum, which actually is an analytical espionage machine. In the past, most people realized when they were subject to external pressures and control. Even already today, that realization is lost to more and more people. They become slaves of the most hopeless sort - slaves who falsely think they are free and in control over themselves.

I had just talked about this with a colleague, and he told me that when his (17 yo) daughter's smartphone broke, she was literally crippled and panicked, because she would not really what to do ... she could not instantly google for an answer, she had no phone numbers to contact friends and family from a regular phone, she could not "message" friends and family, she could not call a cab, did not know how to use public transport without checking their website for how tram lines run and when etc. - she felt completely lost and almost tried to get help from a police car that happened to drive by. To her credit, at that time she was in an unknown-to-her city as a newcomer and knew neither people nor infrastructure there, but still, she WAS basically crippled - out of ideas what to do and how until she bought a new smartphone. Maybe this is just an extreme example. But people have been basically grown to their smartphones, at least that's how most of them seem to use them. What if that vastly complicated underlying infrastructure - electricity, data networks - for some reason break down for some time? I have the suspicion that would be a greater shock to a lot of people than one would expect.

A few materials from scientists: http://www.elmmagazine.eu/articles/what-exactly-is-digital-dementia/https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-change/201507/digital-dementiahttp://www.dw.com/en/talking-germany-manfred-spitzer-neuroscientist/av-17420648https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cdimarco/pdf/cogsci600/digital_dementia_lecture.pdfhttp://www.depa.univ-paris8.fr/IMG/pdf/5-_What_Is_Digital_Dementia.pdfhttp://sggroningen.nl/en/manfred-spitzer https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/dec/02/schools-that-ban-tablets-traditional-education-silicon-valley-londonKind of related, but it's only talking about silicon valley. Non-elite children are encouraged more and more to use a computer all the time in their lives for the sake of a higher quality Education!, while those working in this industry are putting their children in rich schools where they're only allowed pencil and notebook paper. Well, maybe I am wrong and this is indeed normal. One could argue that the last generation of Americans, for example, on average watched 8h of TV every day, that means 50% of their non-sleeping life time - if they live for 75 years, they slept 25 years, worked 25 years, and watched TV 25 years. Staring 12+ hours per day on some kind of screen to amuse oneself may be indeed not that much of a new destructive development, just an old phenomenon adopted to contemporary technological developments. I think you are right that people are first and foremost responsible for themselves and their children. Yet at the same times I think that the rich are pushing it, especially on the poor deliberately. Video and internet game addiction are no joke, people even died from this already. It seems to have a completely new quality - I know some "fights" in family over TV use and such - maybe this is normal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder But did people die from watching too much TV in the past? Were training camps necessary to keep kids from TV addiction? With social media, they now also have hooked girls and women to computers and screens by exploiting their socializing instincts. I have some citations above. Maybe there are just too many people who are not needed anymore, because of automation and increases in efficiency and productivity - simple jobs are done by a billion cheap Chinese who effectively are in many fields competitors to local workers - and further increases in productivity or just keeping competitiveness demand for only the smartest of the smart, leaving the middle and lower strata of people out of work - a few decades ago, an automobile factory was full of workers, now it's full of robots who are controlled by very few engineers - and the processes can only controlled and improved by engineers and scientists, low- and middle class people in terms of cognitive ability are economically becoming useless, only being needed as consumers anymore. May those internet and entertainment addictions just be the modern equivalent for neutralizing people, just as booze and TV were for the previous generations? In terms of food and entertainment, there is an utopia. Or maybe a dystopia. Food and entertainment are available in practically limitless amounts, skyrocketing obesity and entertainment addictions are a clear result.

Came to have a nice chat with an 71-year old psychologist, who also worked as a neurologist (he has two degrees), because we were both kind of bored by the rest of the socializers (65th birthday of some relative). Among other things he told me that the upper class is deliberately filling the brains of people with garbage to block them from thinking and keeping them as slaves. They purposely destroy the attention spans, working memory and knowledge base of people to keep them suppressed. He said that most people have some quite useful and potentially productive cognitive capabilities, even if they have only normal or even sub-normal IQs. With rigorous training, or even just curiosity about something, they could become good thinkers, experts in at least one field and notice much more of the world, living a richer life. Instead, this is actively prevented by the upper class - by filling people's heads with garbage - much like they fill people with too much and bad food, making them obese and ill. It works, because they exploit evolutionary desires - people like to observe other people (TV, series, movies) and they like energy-rich food (cakes, fastfood, sugar bombs). The food destroys their bodies, making them weak and ill; likewise, the entertainment destroys their brains. Literally! It can be seen in brain imaging technologies - the brain's complexity of people who are addicted to entertainment for hours per day, for years and decades, observably deteriorates! Their brains literally shrinks. The great mass of people, not only becomes weaker and sicker physically, but also cognitively. This is not what the future should hold for us: We have plenty of food, plenty of free time, plenty of money, plenty of access to every book and information out there ever written - at our fingertips, if we want, even by smartphone on the loo. Humans should become now stronger, smarter and more successful than ever, all restrictions of the past, all limits of resources being resolved? Free food, free time, free knowledge for everyone? The truth is: People are fatter, sicker, lazier - and more incompetent than ever. Maybe IQs rose a bit, or not, maybe because of the better nutrition for everybody. But actual competence - reasoning ability, reading and math and logic ability - are not a bit worse - they have fallen through the floor! 20 year-old cannot anymore remember a 10-digit number. Their working memory capacity is basically on the level of what would have been diagnosed as retards decades ago. They use their phones, but never must memorize phone numbers. They never must plan things - they all communicate in real time, never need to prepare or deliberately plan things. Everything is "on the fly" - eating, meeting friends, having sex, watching a movie - no thinking, zero memorization, no plannig is ever needed. They cannot even read and use maps anymore. It seems comical, but they all rely and navigation systems and GPS - the circuits in their brain for navigating in the world, knowing where north is, where they are and how they could get anywhere, navigating by a mental, internal plan to get around and reach a destination - GONE! They are on the level of toddlers again in such areas of cognitive ability - because they never used those functions, these brain functions got lost! Previous generations had in their memory a lot of geographical and scientific and practical data, which they used often to navigate their world and problems of life. Today's youth never had to deal with any of those problems - not with planning (everything, food, transportation, navigation, meeting with friends, sex, porn, movies, all kinds of entertainment) are there - instantly, always, unlimited with them, 24/7, by a technical device which basically does all their thinking for them. All they are left to do is just feeling what pleasure they want right now - food, friends, sex, porn, jokes, movies etc. - and they instantly get it, through the technical device. There is no delay, no need to plan, no need to think. The very moment they feel a desire, only a few seconds with the smartphone, and they can satisfy that desire. They live in an utopia - which machine-guns them with pleasure endlessly, but also cripples their cognitive abilities because for all their pleasure, they never need to do anything complex to achieve those pleasures. Their brains still have the same capacity as those of previous generations - but their brains are filled with garbage - they have loads of information stored about movies, videogames, entertainment of all sorts, even know dozens of porn stars by name - but cannot reason anymore, or plan anything more complex as buying a videogame. When one tries to hold a conversation with them - they often cry out "Yea, like X in movie/videogame Y, I've seen that!" - and that's it. They have seen and memorized information from thousands of movies all their lives, and from many videogames or other entertainment products, but this is all garbage knowledge, cognitive garbage that enables them to do exactly nothing at all. It's like their brains have been destructed on purpose, by filling it to the rim with useless garbage, and preventing them from thinking and planning and memorizing useful skills and insights - they have been reduced, neutralized, and they accepted it freely because it felt pleasurable. Thanks to cheap food and free knowledge for all - this and maybe future generations will be sicker, live shorter lives and will be much stupider - on average - than previous generations. This holds true for about 90% of the population - what we may call "Elites", on the other hand,do not let that happen to themselves - they are healthier, live longer and are cognitively more competent than ever, mostly because they avoid overeating, laziness and entertainment religiously: The social divide in cognitive class is greater, and becoming greater, than ever before.

Just a youtube video, but nevertheless I expect most of you will like the content.

This is probably well known already, but there may be some of you who have not watched it. It's damn good if you like this kind of adult cartoon.

Another mission of generally high quality that was again very enjoyable . Instead of "small" I would call it "overseeable" - no great maze like some other missions, rather a cozy heist focusing on the heist and nothing else - no distractions and esoteric surprises, a professional job - straightforward and direct, playing as a cold-headed nightly logistics expert. Should and could be done most stealthily and ghost-like. Well, I failed at that. Initially I could not keep my fingers from those transparent loot display furniture boxes - pickety pick, grabety grab - and from there on soon all guards marched around with their swords drawn. Well, another thing learned, another complexity added for gameplay, another degree of planning needed for being stealthy. Great fun! I took special notice of the windows in the secret part of the house - the distortion in the glass and vista into the city kept me there marveling at it for a while. Wonderful little element. The bucket under the blood-weeping painting made me laugh - while I do not know if that was Sotha's intention, I much appreciated the funny aspect if the situation - no degree of horror, spookiness and supernatural dread can stop us from taking most practical measures to keep the carpet clean! Alltogether I found this to be a very tidy, compact and enjoyable mission with zero design flaws or things that itched me in a negative way - an all-around very well designed little mission but in no way short of nice design, gameplay, visuals and thievish pleasures. I will definitely play this mission again with intent to ghost it - and trying out new ways to deal with those transparent loot displays (maybe if I put something on them that blocks the guards view of the insides?) Also, I think this is a map most fitting to introduce newbie players to the Dark Mod - wonderful to look at, many nice details, simpler and clear but convincing and motivating story and readables, good ways to train and show off stealth skills, while lacking the vastness and intricateness of some much bigger missions that could intimidate new players. A small mission indeed, but in no way small in sophistication. Thank you, again, Sotha!

Thank you Dragofer! Again, a most wonderful mission! I expected a mansion mission, with a beautiful mansion to work in. I got what I expected in that regard, even more so, for many an aspect of the mansion design was most sublime - once again some perspectives and rooms made me stop and marvel at finely crafted interiors. I entered the mansion by climbing a tree, enjoyed the possibility to do that, and found myself in a moody bedroom, going further from there. I expected some two hours or so of domestic exploration - and found myself in a mission that led me quite a bit around the globe - what started as a mansion heist grew into something much bigger, and the mission just went on and on and it was and stayed so good and fascinating and I just could not bring myself to stop playing, even when I was already tired, because it kept me drawing in. Phew! (Something like that also happened when I first played Deus Ex - almost addictive) For those who want to play this mission I would advise to set aside a well-stocked time budget and some drink and food - those will be probably be welcome soon enough. Those who like really big and long missions will find themselves with plenty of booty. Especially impressive for me was the skillful design of the ambient elements - be it the moody fog, which worked wonders for immersion and mystical-shadowy vibes, or the noises and windows in the ship, which conjured skillfully the impression of cold and icy storm outside. I played on highest difficulty, and found myself rewarded with lots of demanding challenges, which always were fair and also allowed for ways to circumvent problem spots cleverly or rewarded observation, skill, patience and sometimes even a bit thinking out of the box. A delicacy for the larcenously minded, with a rich story on top of the thievish fun. Also - the paintings used in the briefings and loading screens - very classy. Exactly what is needed to bring oneself in a fitting mood right from the beginning.

A "loot sack user" would always know how "full" his loot sack is even when ignorant of the total available loot "out there". And, as I said above, even without use as an indicator of loot amount (that can be made optional) that loot sack really looks very good where it is - because I think the loot statistics item always looks so coldly "computer-like" and pulls me a little bit out of immersion when I look at it in a mission. That loot sack is, at least in my opinion, artistically very nice and fitting, alone for making the loot statistics item looking friendlier and more immersive.

Am I the only one who thinks that "loot sack" is a grand idea? So very fitting, cozy, classy, thief-like! Even when it would not be used to indicate the percentage of loot, and is only employed as a picture above the loot statistics in the inventory - I deem it a small detail that would make a great permanent contribution to the sophistication and style of DM.

You may pay attention at the lighting of some pictures, maybe a talented mission builder feels motivated to create something like an indoor garden with those lighting spots and high contrasts. Some pictures are big and detailed, do not miss detailed inspiration.

This is the source of my benchmark picture above: http://gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-tps/deus-ex-mankind-divided-test-gpu They seem to have used a pre-release version of the game; there already is a 1GB-patch.​Hopefully performance will get better, but I am a bit skeptical. Edit: After reading through some more benchmark reviews, it seems that some graphics settings (tessellation, shadow detail in distance, global illumination level) can be reduced without resulting in much visible difference, but yielding around +40% in fps in Full HD.

It appears to take a lot of computing power, even though its graphics seem not to be so super impressive.

Bump for news, see first post

This mission is wonderful, diverse, good-looking, detailed, BIG (it felt even bigger possibly because it made you not only have some area, but also a kind of vertical map in your mind), but felt very hard (at expert difficulty level at least). The mission statistics said I spent 9hours playing, but it must be more because of reloads. Because it was such a strain, I sliced this piece of thievish art into many pieces and enjoyed it over a couple days. Above all, this mission demands unusual attention and perception: Blackjacking around and picking locks to force your way forward is useless or unavailable. You are put in the shoes of a cat-burglar - the great theme is not only sneaking, but mainly analysing architecture and exploiting it by climbing up and in - and this is harder than it sounds, at least it was so for me. You need high attention/perception at all times - otherwise one quickly may overlook something important and get stuck, resulting in frustration. It can happen really quick that a hint or means of access is overlooked - but if you are really, really attentive, the mission shows you everything. Often I found myself stuck and frustrated. But then I pressed on and looked and puzzled and new ways forward opened up - resulting in a feeling of well-earned achievement. I think this mission is less suitable for a newbie thief, but especially challenging and therefore rewarding for the thief veteran: What seems to be impossible to access initially, is revealed to be actually not so impossible at all after careful, skilled burglar-eyed evaluation. Again and again, and that makes the mission so special and great. After a couple of hours playing I even found myself in reality noticing a way to climb in an open window in the second floor of a house by exploiting a tree branch and external lamp during daydreaming in a waiting-queue. To become richer now I only need to train pull-ups and lose a bit of weight...

I think the reason for this is that AAA-games have to appeal to a maximum of buyers, therefore have to cater to mass tastes, resulting in some averaged-out product. Smaller, especially not-for-profit projects, can satisfy more specialized tastes and therefore are much more pleasing to those smaller groups. McDonalds and CocaCola serve the most people, yet there sure are niche markets with much better (at least subjectively) food.

Now, with some hours delay, the GERMAN version is ready and everything is available for download and playing this weekend. http://enderal.com/ The English version should be ready in a few weeks.