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  Michael Mersault did a much better job in The Silent Hand that in the previous book of the series. Character development, world building, pacing, action, writing, everything is better. It's not perfect, but by the end of the book I despaired the third book is not available yet. Hopefully I will remember to read it when it does get published.

  Anyway, I believe the author planned to place Inga front and center, while Saef was going to take a more minor role. However you can't do that when your lead is the right hand of the guy, so we got flashbacks. A lot of them. I wasn't bothered that much, because I wanted to know where Inga came from and to see more of the world that Mersault created. Still, all that backstory ate from the actual story, which made the book feel at the same time too long and too short. Just when things were getting fun, the book ended.

  Bottom line, I am curious how this will all turn out, yet at the rate at which things are being revealed, I don't know how Mersault will be able to tie it all up in just one more book.

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  There is a type of sci-fi that I will probably never hate, even if it's corny as hell, and that's space opera. Spaceships, interesting yet cliché characters, military honor, strong men, sexy women, that kind of stuff. Yet, having just read another underwhelming military space opera, I was not happy to start reading The Deep Man, as I thought it would be more of the same. Maybe less. I mean, it started with a human space empire, nobility families bound by honor, space navies and so on, but focused so much on the various aristocratic rituals in the beginning that I thought it's going to be just as average, only more boring.

  But as I was reading the book I started to warm up to the it and the writing also improved, becoming more focused on action, story and character development. I enjoyed it enough that I immediately started looking for the sequel - which is not easy, because apparently no one heard of this. Let's face it, it's a fun book, nothing great, but it reminded me of David Feintuch and a little of Herbert by some of the ideas inside.

  What I didn't like was the title. It refers to a sort of psychic conditioning of nobles to find "the real man" inside them, kind of like the Gom Jabbar trial in Dune. So when I saw that, I was really looking forward to some form of exploration of the strength of will and identity. Only most of the book is not about that at all, so the title felt misleading. Also it started slowly enough that I almost didn't want to continue reading.

  Some interesting ideas in the book, though, barely touched upon yet. Already mentioned the Deep Man, but also the system of government divides the population into full citizens and demi-citizens. The full citizens have to pass some tests and fulfil some conditions to demonstrate they can take responsibility for their actions and shoulder the risks of true freedom. The demi-citizens are not slaves or anything, they are just protected by the state from themselves and others. For example two citizens can declare a duel and fight to the death for some perceived honor slight, yet a citizen cannot harm a demi-citizen. Same for drugs or anything that might be perceived as dangerous or risky.

  I found the idea fascinating. Basically what we now do with minors, only just passing a certain age is not the (only) requirement. Conversely, it is taken for granted that a citizen is fully responsible for their actions, but also more free to take them because of it. And it's not just empty elitism I am taking about, because the book also explores the abuses and decadent aristocratic corruption that comes from it. If you think about it, isn't the same with society now? Adults being complacent, corrupt and uncaring while holding all the power and kids ineffectual protesters against a world they don't yet fully understand?

  Michael Mersault is a competent writer and I felt I knew where his influences for this book came from - and I approve. This is one of those books that you read for fun, but it hides some unexpected depth from place to place and I enjoyed that.

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  The Cruel Stars is a typical military space adventure, complete with reluctant military commanders, gruff retired Scottish admirals speaking with an accent, space pirates, space royalty and nobility, princesses, space Nazis, snarky AIs and criminals with hearts of gold. It's the first of a series, naturally, which means that even if you enjoy it, you will not feel you've reached the end of the story.

  John Birmingham's writing is competent, without being anything special. The plot is bit inconsistent technically, though, with technology that sounds futuristic, but is basically what we have now with whistles and bells, and which is used differently depending on what the story requires. The world building is minimal, with some hints on how the different human empires work, but no details.

  Also, no aliens, yet. The book starts with hints of an old and nebulous threat to humanity, that one assumes some exotic alien race, but it's quickly revealed to be an AI phobic and race purist republic of humans.

  The book was good for a palate cleanser, although it was a bit too long for my taste, and as fun as it was, I won't be continuing to read the series. It's space pulp, basically.

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  Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a really good work of writing. Maybe sometimes inconsistent, like Marlon James wrote different parts of the story, then stitched them together, but it is a huge book with a lot of archetypal African tribal mythology, a lot of symbolism that probably flew over my head and complex world with interesting magic and creatures and vibrant characters.

  At first I was a little annoyed. The main character is this African boy who becomes a man. He's always boasting and challenging people in this strange literary kind of Black English and he's also sexually weird... I didn't know where it was going. But in my head I was imagining this annoying little kid from the Galvanize video Krumping around. I don't have anything about Black folk, but I am triggered by loud mouth assholes.

  And then it hit me. This is like an African Conan the Barbarian. Only it never bothered me when it was Arnold in a Dark Ages kind of setting and speaking Austrian English. Am I racist? I didn't think so. Anyway, the character never actually grew on me. I followed his journey with great interest, but he remained annoying through sheer will power :) 

  What I loved was the world. A lot of cities and tribes and witches and ways of looking at life. It felt like Iron John, but written by a Jamaican Lev Grossman, A lot of archetypes who make the hero grow. Sometimes the opposite. Not a typical hero's journey and always surprising, which makes me consider reading the whole series, but I also felt it took me a looong time to finish the book and I am not sure I want to invest that kind of time in the continuation of the trilogy.

  Bottom line: this takes some effort, but it's worth it. I feel it was the most different book I've read in quite a while. I don't know if I am going to read the next books, though.

  Yep, it's is that easy, thanks to code added by the Chromium devs. You just make sure the focus is on the HTTPS error page, then type "thisisunsafe". A lot more details here: thisisunsafe - Bypassing chrome security warnings.

  Is it a good idea? Probably not. Will it be remove by Google devs some time in the future? Probably yes. But sometimes you just need to access that site and don't care about other stuff.

  Hope it helps!

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  Metamorph is a fun little book that doesn't seem written in 2016 at all. It features what are basically fearless space pirates with a heart of gold, energetic young people living their lives to the fullest and even some romantic tension between a man and a woman who mutually appreciate each other. The technology is basic, the politics and the portrayal of alien contact are naive and overall it's all a hopeful lively adventure that throws back to the age of Star Trek Deep Space 9 or maybe Firefly. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this book was a repurposed DS9 fan fiction draft.

  Chris Reher is a decent writer, I can't complain. The characters are quite basic, though, they only reveal themselves through their actions and occasional thoughts, so you either like them or ignore them. Luckily, no flashbacks in the book, which is a relief. Better to have cardboard characters than flesh them out with past histories no one cares about.

  The plot is classic space adventure: aliens, pew pew, clumsy plots in barely built worlds, a lot of action. I realize that when I write it like that it doesn't feel like I endorse it, but it was actually a pleasant read. It wasn't great, though, by any means. It's pulp: if you go in without expectations you're going to have a good time.

  Bottom line: when the book ended, I kind of wanted more, like a light sci-fi series that I am curious to continue watching, even if it's not great. I probably won't, I have too many books in my list, but maybe give it a try when you don't feel like a book that requires effort to read.

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  I am not a big Friends fan. I mean, I know of the show, who doesn't, but I never got into it. Likewise with any Matthew Perry movies: maybe fun, but not memorable. You can then induce that I didn't know about his personal life or his addiction issues either and you would be right. Therefore when reading Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, I was just a guy reading what another guy had to say about his life. And it was brutal, I kid you not, but it wasn't that much fun.

  Coming from a self proclaimed funny guy, the book is very serious and direct. It focuses primarily on an honest depiction of his inner demons and the alcohol and drug addiction plaguing him. It goes through successful TV series, movies and celebrity relationships almost like they're afterthoughts in the big terrible story of his need for attention and drugs. I understand why one won't joke and jest about something so terrifying and personal, but it makes for a rather insipid reading.

  That's why I personally liked the book, appreciating Matthew's honesty and openness a lot, but I didn't love it.

  I guess not knowing anything about the guy also made me oblivious of the fact that he had died, of ketamine overdose, just a year after he published this book. One quote stuck with me: "I was never suicidal [...] But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept."

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  I've read Nature's Nether Regions, a book about penises, a while ago. It was funny, well documented and, most of all, entirely about male reproductive organs. So I thought I would read a book about butts and have just as much fun, right?

  Wrong. Butts, A Backstory is written by Heather Radke, a feminist writer using the idea of the butt, in her mind specifically the buttocks of the human female, as a pretext to explore the gender and racial context of history and her book has almost nothing to do with asses.

  Not only was I not interested in the subject, but the bait and switch angered me. How come all of these brilliant liberal writers who write just one book in their whole career need to trick readers to even start consuming their work? Is it maybe that their uncreative over serious surfing of the outrage zeitgeist is ultimately unfulfilling? That when the five minutes of "OMG, I can't believe they got away with that!" end, most people realize they either won't do anything about it, thus becoming part of the problem, or that their rage is just as impotent as any other of their emotions? Because I hate these overhyped books that say nothing and even when they do, they do it badly, yet no one seems to do anything about it, because how can you go against social agendas, regardless of how badly written?

  There, you've got my outrage! DNF!

and has 1 comment

  I finished Wind and Truth as quickly as I could... because I just didn't care. This book was something that I almost disliked, despite the great writing and smart ideas. Most of the many many characters I didn't care about or even remember that much and the ones that I did like were doing stuff that had little entertainment value. Even the big storylines make no literary sense if you think about it. What was that, Brandon Sanderson?

  From the reviews of the previous four books, I think the first and the third were the best. With such a disappointing fifth entry (in a series of ten!) I wonder if it makes any sense to invest in the story and characters for the next ten to twenty years.

  In this book, the worse symptoms of modern American writing rear their ugly heads. First, the all connected cinematic universe, just for the sake of it, the Cosmere, a concept that I hate with all my heart. How does a great writer like Sanderson not understand how limiting it will become? Second, the psychotherapy angle becoming part of a story. Listen, man, if I wanted to confront my inner drives and contemplate my emotions I wouldn't read fantasy stories, OK? And still, if I did and still read fantasy stories, I wouldn't want my main character go unto a pointless side quest doing therapy to other heroes. Any emotional trauma can be solved with a big big sword! Third, the noble family, where everybody is related to everybody, at least through adoption and alliance if not blood, and they all get special powers - as if high birth and implausible situations bestowing them with power were just a natural evolution of such special individuals. I am starting to get where Moash is coming from, now. And fourth, new magical mechanisms that no one knew about or cares much about, coming out exactly when the story needs them, like Dragonball level ups.

  As for the story I can't tell much about it without spoiling it. There is a deadline and everybody is doing their own thing until that deadline, some are ignoring it, some are actively influencing events, even if they shouldn't be allowed to and a lot of the stuff they are doing is just... pointless. Even in the eventuality they succeed, nothing much is changed. This is a book about McGuffins.

  And then there is the ending, which pretty much says "whatever you liked in the books so far, the next five books will be completely different". What's the point of announcing a ten book series, then, if you're going to split it into two five book series that have little in common?

  Bottom line: I waited four years for this. I am not happy. At this point I can't even say I am angry or anything, just severely disappointed. There is no bang, just whimpers.

and has 1 comment

  When I first stumbled upon this variation, I thought I would name it something simple, like the Kiselev variation or Butcher the Sicilian, because Miodrag Perunovic wrote a course covering it and GM Vitaliy Kiselev played a lot of it against the Sicilian. Even Gotham Chess and Will Graif recommended it in some videos. But then I realized that most people won't read the blog unless I have a beautiful woman as the thumbnail, so for the purposes of views and likes, I will call this variation The Beckinsale. I bet Big Mio wishes he'd have thought of it.

  Now, other than the poster, this is no joke. This reply to the Sicilian sidesteps most theory and is, statistically, the best weapon against the Sicilian on Lichess. And I mean it for ratings above 1800, games that are not bullet or even blitz and that were played in the last year. Serious stuff! While Mio would probably explain it better, I can tell you that following these lines leads to some really cool ideas, but also very simple ones. Yes, the Beckinsale is as easy on the moves as it is on the eyes.

  So how does a total noob find something new in what is probably the most theoretically examined defense for Black? Well, simple: use the wonderful Lichess database, maybe with my own LiChess Tools extension installed to help you out, and look not for the best Stockfish moves, but for the most winning moves, or maybe the sharpest. Yes, there is a huge difference. Positions where the evaluation of the most played move is terrible is what keeps YouTubers fed.

  Have you tried learning the Sicilian? With its many variations (uninspiringly) named after ugly male chess players, long theoretical lines which "win" because some extra pawn in the end game? Not only is it horrible, but it is boring as well. If you are a grandmaster, surely you don't care about what I have to say, but if you are not, you probably know that the most common form of the Sicilian is the so called Open Sicilian, consistently played six or seven times more often than the Closed Sicilian. Well, guess what we're going to play? Nc3! Bye-bye, OS!

  Black will play Nc6, the "Traditional, Closed" variation, because they are boring and uncreative, and we will play Bb5, threatening to capture the knight and double Black's pawns. Why are we even bothering threatening stuff that won't really matter at our level? Donno! But everybody is hung up on these pawns and their structure, so Black will reply by moving the knight away, attacking our bishop and threatening to take it and be the ones keeping the bishop pair. For some reason. So they will play Nd4. To which we will play The Beckinsale! Back when she was all dressed in leather and hunting werewolves: Nf3.

They will take. a6, d6 and g6 are also moves, but they won't play them. It makes little sense, they want the bishop pair. Even before, they didn't have to play Nc6, they could have played d6, e6 or g6, and they often do, sometimes it transposes, because where else is that knight going to go? And after Nxb5 and Nxb5 your moves, as White, are 90% of the time THE SAME! No theory, no complicated rules. Everything simple, like this:

They will probably kick your knight back Nc3, you will play d4, they will take and you will take with the queen Qxd4 - go Kate!, since there is no queenside knight on the board anymore, then castle short O-O. Four moves you don't have to think about, winning time that your opponent has to spend thinking. And there is more:

  • on Nf6, you play Bg5
  • on b5, you play Bf4 or a4
  • on Qc7 or Bb7, you play a4.
  • if they attack your queen, Qb4, even with the risk of a discovered attack on pawn push
  • your knight will go Na4! How dim is that? But it will coordinate with the queen to attack the hole on b6, a perfect outpost.
  • if the dark bishop is out, you can even castle queenside O-O-O
  • if they don't kick your knight on b5 away, then the queen and the knight will be unstoppable on c7.

The ideas are very simple:

  1. induce the only developed Black piece to exchange itself
  2. capture the only forward pawn of Black
  3. get your pieces out quick
  4. attack the vulnerable queenside as fast as possible
  5. block Black's attempts to develop

Meanwhile, Black has moved just pawns:

The situation is as follows: White has three pieces out, a centralized queen and a safe king. Black has... long term plans. Which one would you pick?

And I know I will get comments like "A Sicilian player would never..." or "Stockfish says the position is equal" or even "You went Nf3 and d4 anyway, how is this not an open Sicilian?".  You will probably not defeat Caruana with it, but most Lichess players will fall for it and Stockfish doesn't count here.

But even so. For all Lichess players for all time, this variation wins for White in 57% of the cases, to Black's 38%. Restrict the database to 1800+, Rapid+ and the last year and you get 51% over 39%. For 2200+ it's 47/41. For the Masters: 54/31 . Against the Sicilian! In the four games played at 2500+ level on Lichess in the last year in serious games, three games were won by White.

Enough teasing. I wrote a study about it, based on the most played moves on Lichess and what the best responses are. Then there are some really fun lines and games, for your entertainment.

How to handle the Sicilian as White

Let me know how you CRUSHED with it, or whatever is memeable now. And as always, have fun!

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  For a long time, the narrative of the human race was space exploration and expansion, a story usually predicated by a total globalization event that turned us all from warrying tribes into one planetary nation or rather race. However, they always kind of skip over this. Star Trek did a decent job explaining a devastating global war followed by a first contact with the Vulcans, but most of the books and TV series and film franchises just assume that somehow we just forget about millennia long national concepts and unite.

  I won't discuss the validity of this idea, let's just say I am skeptical, but I want to first contrast it against another concept, one that seems to be the exact opposite. But is it? I am talking about stories like Silo, Fallout, Metro 2033 and so many others that go the other direction: after a devastating conflict, the world is fractured instead of united, leading to very different groups of people. True, this is mostly related to stories about terrible apocalyptic events from which humanity has never recovered. Because, the idea goes, to be recovered, humanity needs to rekindle civilization and reunite, presumably towards its final goal of space exploration and expansion.

  Yet, when you think about it, the two stories quickly seem to blend together. The united federation of humans often meets alien races, with which they enter in complex relationships of either conflict or cooperation. These stories usually also contain very diversified groups of people which work together, each using their special skills, for the better of the team. Lift a bit to view the story from a little higher and you get diverse cultures engaged with each other, often interested by the same resources. Go lower, into group dynamics, and you find the same pattern. Similarly, with the stories of tribes of people who get separated and thus grow different, there is always some moment of contact, where either the main characters or the tribes as a whole have to meet with other cultures.

   Neither of these opposing patterns, which in the end converge, seem to ultimately accept the concept of cultural unification. They reject one culture being superior to another, even when trying to somehow separate the good guys from the bad based on how similar their principles are to the people writing the story and those consuming it. I postulate that there has to be more to this than just a simple reflection of our species' tribalism.

   Believe it or not, this series of thoughts started from something John Hands said in his book Cosmosapiens, when he was criticizing the theories trying to explain altruism and cooperation. He rightly noticed that sometimes animals from a different species were helping out others, with little chance of the same help being reciprocated. And while personally I think that behaviors like altruistic cooperation can stem from a vague desire that someone would reciprocate in the future, just as selflessly and independently from any foreseeable reward, I had another idea. What if there is no simple in-group/out-group logic at work here, but something more subtle, like the uncanny valley? What if this is actually part of most organisms, perhaps even unicellular ones, a sort of peer pressured mechanism of preserving identity?

   Hear me out. When you think wars, who are the sides usually fighting? Neighbors. You don't ask your neighbor "hey, man, I need resources. Can you please let me pass through your country and get them from that asshole far from us which has a different religion and culture?". Instead you find something so alien and utterly unsufferable about your neighbor, something that will motivate you to make the significantly smaller effort of attacking them. At the personal level it's the same thing. You don't go out of your way to go into conflicts with unknown people in some other town, instead you fight with your neighbors or relatives or people at work. In most of these cases, they are people very similar to you.

   What if an animal would have no issue helping one from another species or one that is kin and part of the group, but have a strong and instinctual dislike from the one of the same species yet at the very edge of that group? What if the uncanny valley phenomenon, the strong feeling towards things that are very close to something, yet not quite it, like humanoid robots or artificial plants, is a mechanism evolved to keep an identity safe from corruption? You see it in kids, tormenting the one in their own group who is least like most of them, what if the reason species stay stable for so long, only to suddenly turn into another or go extinct, is that the species works collectively, instinctively, against divergence? Only when extreme events allow this divergence does a group break, split into two different entities.

   Let's discuss another formula for science-fiction: the dystopia. Something that usually starts making sense or being enforced by other people who believe it makes sense, only to turn into an oppressive force against self expression and evolution? The solution for this is "the revolution", a word that literally means turn-around or rotation. But isn't it the same story? A group of marginalized and oppressed people, finding the opportunity and resources to break away from the main group, maybe even take over the reigns? Normally the revolutionaries are so similar to their oppressors that they routinely pretend to be one another, the only difference being a subtle divergence of ideology. The larger and more powerful the oppressor, the lower the chance to get free.

   And this is the rub, isn't it? Generalizing - maybe to unhealthy extremes - these stories tell just one: beings naturally attempt to diverge, filling all evolutionary niches, unless their group reigns them in in order to preserve the identity of that group.

   So getting back at the stories of separate and vastly different groups, they are basically a respite, a fantasy escape, from the ideas of globalization, against the tyranny of the vast majority. It's a maybe unconscious revolt against stagnation, a curious attempt to explore what would happen to people if they were allowed to try out things by themselves. Many terrible things, for sure, but the general idea of freedom of expression is a good one. Perhaps the resurgence of this kind of stories just goes to prove there is a strong natural pressure against the arrogant declarations for "the only way" of existing. It's a zeitgeist thing.

   A long time ago I was a strong believer in globalization, in the abolition of borders. They seemed idiotic to me. Why would you separate the intelligent beings on this world with abstract and artificial walls? What is the point? Wouldn't it be better to all just live in peace together? And then I found my answer: we need the borders, just like we need individual privacy and walls in our houses. Because not being able to live differently means you are not allowed to live. In this light, all attempts to culturally overtake the world are the short path to dystopia. A world of American democracy, European social bureaucracy, Russian oligarchy or Chinese collectivism would be just as bad. It's the one we have, preserving all of these and more, that is the superior world.

   So in that vein, we need more stories like the Expanse, where people did conquer the stars, but continue to be tribal. Where every asteroid is its own country, with its own rules and social norms. Not a world, but a loosely coupled multitude of worlds. It's not about Dwarves, elves and humans - although now you probably recognize the pattern - but about releasing the cork and letting humanity flow and fill all corners of possibility.

   Yet, as clear as this has become to me, I have little hope it will happen. Look at the Internet, the closest thing we have to a simulation of the future. Instead of having the freedom of choice, we have coalesced towards large corporate oligarchies who collectively control what we are supposed to feel and think. Instead for each having our little corner of paradise or abysmal hell, we are being corralled like cattle through the narrow paths allowed to us and which will eventually lead us to  slaughter. We live in a world where even the so call liberals - a word derived from the Latin for free - actively campaign and collaborate to destroy dissent.

   Can you imagine a narrative of vastly different groups of people, all equally free to exist, being popular today? A world where Nazis burn Jews alive, of Chinese reeducation camps, with Americans living free and/or invading Greenland, cannibal tribes living on islands, Israelis and Arabs kill each other, nuclear war is something that just happens occasionally, entire nations starve to death while others live in gluttony. A world of eternal atrocity and bliss, sometimes at the same time...

   Hey!, you will say, isn't that more or less our world today? And aren't we always complaining about it? Complaining is part of it. Of course, the limited resource of one planet is also a big factor. Human empathy against suffering as well. However, I believe this world to be superior to any ideological closed garden from which we are not allowed to exit.

   Note that I am not advocating for anarchy here. I do believe in consequences for actions, I just don't believe in a world where some actions become impossible to even contemplate.

   Perhaps war itself can be explained by this absolute necessity of breaking apart before we merge together into amorphous blobs. And if that is true, war is already very near. Or it was never over to begin with.

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  The true meaning of science is to examine who we are, where are are coming from and where we are going. In Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe, John Hands examines the state of scientific knowledge on these matters and finds it lacking.

  It's not like we don't have ideas of what the universe is and where it came from, but we cling to the "orthodox" belief in some theory or conjecture rather than use the scientific method to examine evidence and refine our understanding. The modern trend of financing research only in the largely accepted knowledge areas doesn't help.

  John Hands argues that regardless what the truth is, evidence should drive our choice of theoretical hypotheses and not dogma. Alas, monkeys be monkeys and science monkeys will also be monkeys. More often than not, only currently accepted theory research is funded and dissenting views are socially ostracized.

  The biggest problem with Cosmosapiens is its length. John Hands could have stopped at any time, wrote four books with the same material, but instead he insisted on covering cosmology, evolution, consciousness, artificial intelligence in a single book. That makes his material repetitive and feeling, ironically, dogmatic.

  I just talked to a friend about this book and he felt strongly that the book was about intelligent design and creationism. I don't agree. Hands made a huge effort of cataloguing the various theories, both accepted and ridiculed, exposing at every step the agreeing and disagreeing evidence towards every one of them.

  The author decries the dogmatic resistance to any new ideas, the false certainty with which orthodox belief is presented as absolute truth: the Big Bang, Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution, the nature of consciousness and so on. Theories are supposedly falsifiable, but so much of the fundamental underpinnings of modern science are just unfalsifiable conjectures.

  Moreover, the complexity of the universe is simplified to absurd levels in theoretical research, using Occam's Razor as another dogmatic constraint of what we can imagine the universe to be. In reality, the universe, life and everything has a much more complex dynamic, where intricately small networks lead to emergent behavior that can't be explained by simplistic models.

  Bottom line: science should be carried on scientific principles, not egomaniacal or dogmatic tribalism. We might not know the exact answer to how the universe, our solar system, our planet or life on Earth started, but we owe it to ourselves to be honest about it and carry on with seeking the answers while honestly accepting what we know and what we don't know.

and has 1 comment

  I will tell you the truth: I am scared of the Scandinavian Defense. I don't know about you, but when you start learning chess you know you have to take space in the center with the pawns and develop pieces and not come out with the queen, right? So what is Black doing? What is that d5 move to my e4 ?! What do they intend to do when I take the pawn? Come out with the queen? Didn't we just say it's a bad idea? It's like I am being trolled. And I have no idea what to do!

  Well, Adamisko did it again! He found out a tricky reply for White which is ridiculously fun to play, easy to get into and hard to get out of as Black. He presented the main ideas in his YouTube video, but I've gone ahead and created a study for it, with some games I found in the Lichess database and various extended ideas.

  So what's the deal? What do you do after Black plays d5, attacking your e4 pawn? Do you take? Do you advance? No. You calmly play d3. Note that you can start with d3 and to the rather predictable d5, play e4. That's like saying "Go ahead, punk! Play the Scandi! Make my day!". The balls! Yet, in a weird way, you are playing chess based on the principles I listed above: you push a pawn to control the center and, when attacked, you protect it, so it continues to control the center.

  And if they take, which they normally do? Well, again with the principles: develop a knight on c3. And if they take again... err... develop the other knight on f3! And if they take again?! OMG, you just gave up the two center pawns and entered the Michael Jackson gambit!

  There are three types of replies from Black. To the green ones, you answer with Bg5. To the blue one, you answer with Bf4. And to the really bad Bg4 you just do Ne5. What were you trying to do there, bishop, you pin-head?

  The best thing is... no one seems to play these lines. The most common reply, Nf6, has been played in just 13 1800+ Rapid+ games. Just 3500 games have been played in all, with a 55% win rate for White, a statistic that keeps true regardless of rating and time control, for this variation as well as most of the others.

  Plans are pretty easy to remember, too:

  • you have no c, d or e pawns anymore. So bring the rooks to the d and e files - often with tempo or pin on the enemy queen or king
  • castle short to free both rooks
  • your queen is already on the c-file, eyeing that juicy c7 spot
  • get your bishops out immediately, attacking and pinning the same center squares in the enemy territory
  • bring your knights out and attack the c7, d7 and f7 squares - often doubly attacked

  In other words: develop, develop, develop! If you like attacking chess, then this is the blood soaked, gore filled opening you've always dreamed of. Black wanted to troll you and get an early attacking position? You out-troll them!

  

  The video is pretty thorough and the study is even more loaded with stuff, so I will just present you some ending positions, just to wet your appetite:

  

  

Just look at those silly Black pieces marked with the yellow markings of shame! They are useless, blocked by their own pieces, stuck on the other side of the board or pinned and paralyzed. And look at the White attacking lines!

The funny thing is Adamisko is a Scandi player! And if the opponent plays something else, let's say we start with d3 and they do e5, a really ridiculous reply is... d4! , getting into a Scandinavian Defense with the White pieces!

And then there are the "refutation lines". With perfect play, Black manages to get... a half pawn advantage at the end. This is one of those "solid gambits" where you sacrifice material, but you are never behind.

Let's talk study. It has a lot of chapters, but most of them are game compilations with many lines - I've only selected the ones that generated an advantage, for various reasons. With the LiChess Tools browser extension you can even collapse the game chapters, as they are organized into one main chapter and many subchapters.

Here is the chapter list for the Michael Jackson Gambit study:

  1. Intro chapter with the main moves and plans
  2. Video chapter following the video exactly - with LiChess Tools you can play the video in a picture-in-picture kind of popup while you play the moves
  3. The reversed Scandi moves that lead to the many gambits Adamisko created as a Scandi player
  4. Game chapters, with real life games merged together for many variations
  5. The refutation line(s) and what to do

Finally, here is the video describing the gambit and its main lines:

[youtube:mIv7NPzihek]

Let me know how you used this in your games!

  A while ago I wrote a browser extension called Bookmark Explorer that no one used because it had such a banal name, but it was pretty cool. I just let it die when Google took it down for being a manifest V2 extension. I plan to modernize it and make it work for modern browsers. It is now also renamed as...

Bookmark Surfer Daedalus!

  OK, it's still a silly name, but you know how naming is the hardest part, right?

  This blog post will become the official web page for the extension.

  But what does it do? Well, it allows to easily navigate in bookmark folders. Let's say you have one of those folders with hundreds of links or you, like me, open a hundred YouTube videos that you plan to eventually watch (yeah, right!) and your main memory consumption is keeping those tabs in the background. Now all you have to do is just put all of these into bookmark folders and open the first one. From it, you can quickly go forward or backward with either mouse or key combinations. The next page in the folder will be preloaded while you read the current one, so that you switch faster.

  Features:

  • right click on a link and add it to the Read Later folder without having to open it (the extension opens it in the background to get the final URL and the title of the page, then closes it immediately)
  • click on extension button to get a popup with arrows forward/backward to navigate in whichever folder the current page is bookmarked in. You also get a button to move the current page to the end of the folder, so as to read it later than the others.
  •  use Ctrl-Shift-K/L for backward/forward navigation. You can also change the key shortcuts in the browser.
  • define patterns that determine what makes a URL unique. For example some web sites have different pages with the exact same URL, but a parameter changed, like YouTube or some blog platforms. Maybe even hashes. You can define the pattern for those domains. The normal pattern is just the domain and the path, ignoring query parameters and hashes.
  • manage the bookmarks in the current folder. You can select them individually, delete them, move them to the end or the start and so on.
  • see the bookmarks that you deleted - whether with the extension or some other mechanism - and choose which one to permanently remove or restore to their original location.
  • notifications of pages that you bookmarked multiple times
  • you can export the URLs of the selected items in an entire folder

  This extension is essential for people who read a lot on the Internet, like researchers or simply people who love information.

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Intro

  This post is about a crazy experiment that I undertook today: find as many decent chess YouTubers and create an Excel with their characteristics, with the purpose of finding the best chess YouTuber for 2025. I have to say the result is underwhelming, but the effort is real.

Methodology

  So, I started with a list of 70 people! First the people that I already knew about and which I either followed or had decided are not worth it. Then I search on YouTube, via both YouTube and Google search engines, for the word "chess" and picked the channels that appeared with content in 2025. Then I started analysing on several criteria:

  • country of origin
  • language of videos (is it in English or not)
  • subscribers
  • professional or high rated content
  • discussing their own games
  • discussing other people's games
  • having content specifically about chess theory, openings, that kind of thing
  • is content generated with AI (like reading the prompt with a machine or showing only images and video that is generated by AI)
  • whether it is a personal channel or that of an institution of multiple people
  • if the videos feature the human faces of their owners (or are just audio or just video footage of other people)
  • a rating on how entertaining the channel is (the amusing factor, as separate from the chess content)
  • a rating on how instructive the channel is (based on chess learning)
  • how many videos they've uploaded in February
  • when was the last time they uploaded a video
  • if their videos contain sponsored content (not ads that you can skip, specifically, as much as banners of chess*com and stuff like that, which is not owned by the channel owner)
  • if they have click baity titles and thumbnails
  • if they have only short videos or they also have long ones

Note that these are calculated on recent videos and more on a fuzzy logic. If one video out of twenty are going to have a characteristic, maybe I will count as not there. Based on these criteria I've devised a score that functions like this:

  • 1 if the content is English
  • 1 if they have more than ten thousand subscribers
  • 2 if they feature some professional content
  • 1 if they analyse their own games
  • 1 if they analyse other people's games
  • 2 for chess theory
  • 2 if they don't use exclusively AI for the audio or video
  • 1 if it's a personal channel
  • 1 for human face
  • 3 for high instructive chess
  • 2 for high entertainment value
  • 2 points for having more than 2 videos in February
  • 1 point for having less than 15 videos in February
  • 10 for content this year
  • 3 for no sponsored labels on the video
  • 3 for normal titles and thumbnails
  • the country of origin and length of videos are just informational

State of chess and finding chess content

Before I reveal the results, a small detour. Google/YouTube search was AWFUL! It probably only found the channels that had paid for promotion. I went so far as the 20th Google page to create this list and the vast majority of the people that I had added manually were not even there! Meanwhile Top Chess was everywhere, which to be honest, isn't even a real chess channel. I tried Grok and ChatGPT and I got slightly better results, with Gotham first place (ChatGPT even helpfully informed me that his real name is Andrew Tang), Agadmator, Fins, Danya and Hanging Pawns being the common names in the list.

Also, I was sad to see some people I really enjoyed watching doing less and less and more rarely than before. Some even gave up completely. Such is life, but I miss those guys.

So believe you me, going on Reddit, searching on Google or asking some AI about this kind of stuff is much worse than actually caring about the game and looking for the interesting people yourself.

Results

OK, based on the totally arbitrary system above, these are the winners:

Third place:

Second place:

First place:

Considering I am the one choosing the fitness function, it's not unexpected, but GambitMan - the same guy I pegged as the best chess YouTuber two years ago, is still first place! Initially I've put a lot of points on high level chess and instructive content, so I tweaked the parameters a little bit with smaller values, but the winners were the same! And I am sorry, but I have no sympathy for click bait and sponsor paid subscribers.

Compare the subscriptions to these channels as compared to the ones that have the most followers:

  • GothamChess - 6M subs
  • GMHikaru - 2.8M subs
  • BotezLive - 1.8M subs
  • ChessTalk - 1.7M subs
  • AnnaCramling - 1.5M subs

The most active by numbers of videos in February are:

  • agadmator
  • GMHikaru
  • GMBenjaminFinegold
  • ChessBootCamp
  • ChessNetwork

It's a little bit unfair to them to have deducted a point for being TOO active, but I believe having to watch a chess video a day from the same person just to keep up is a bit too much. I guess penalizing people for no content in 2025 that hard is also unfair, but there is no way to determine if someone gave up or just likes to upload a video a year.

I am saving this Excel here: YouTubers2025.xslx, so you can alter the values and maybe get something else.

P.S. at the end of the file there is a list of 7 names that I had to exclude for various reasons: dead channels, not active enough, very few total videos, focusing on their chess platform rather than chess itself or not being the ones creating the content, like it's the case of Magnus himself. No blame there, he doesn't have time for stuff like that, but still.

Conclusion

I wanted to go for a more data driven approach, but the evaluations for various parameters were as subjective as before. I am pretty sure that the people at the end got screwed over because I got tired, so I encourage you to find the winners based on your own evaluations and fitness functions.

In a better world, I could have just listed the ones I like more, but in reality I don't follow most of the people in the first places because their content is going above my stupid head.

Hope you got something out of this. Cheers!