Thank you for that very kind comment!

Don't worry, I haven't really left. My production goals for the year were massively interrupted by a set of severe health problems I began experiencing in late February (as I was finishing up work on this SpaceChem video). But I have been recovering significantly since early June, and should be able to slowly phase back in work on new videos in the next couple months.

Thank you for taking the time to write such an extensive comment, but I think you’ll find that the disagreements or dismissals of aspects of relevant work by Berkeley and Lokey presented here come from from my familiarity with both. And if you'll grant me an extensive comment of my own, I'm happy to explain: For Berkeley, it is not merely by _virtue_ of some greater Mind that things may cohere; the greater Mind is what _underlies_ the lesser. Just as I report in the video, Berkeley's position is that God is the cause of the ideas in the mind (if you're unclear on that point, see section 3.1.3 of the SEP entry on Berkeley: plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/#3.1.3 ). My objection to him, then, is that God, or the Mind of God, is a form of (lowercase ‘m’) mind-independent or mind-transcendent “world.” And that conclusion, however rigorous, is speculative. In other words, he ends up straying toward the combination of empiricism and rationalism which Kant adopts, aggressively pares down, and formalizes. Now, regarding this overlap between Berkeley and Kant, many of the apparent distinctions between them may be terminological rather than conceptual. For more on that subject, see Nicholas Stang’s summary in sections 2.1-2.3 of the SEP entry on Kant’s position ( plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/index.html#FedeGarvRevi ). My overview here is as much a disagreement with Kant’s posturing of his work as it is with Berkeley’s conclusions. The role given to God in Berkeley’s system is, in Kant’s system, fulfilled by what Kant calls an 'unknown X’ or (in other contexts) the ‘Thing-in-itself.’ At a glance, it’s easy to mistake that as an assertion of particular mind-independent objects (especially when folks like me use the plural, ‘things-in-themselves’), but if we have read and understood Kant’s arguments then we won’t make that mistake. Rather, Kant affirms that, while this unknown ‘something’ may be God or the Mind of God or one or more mind-independent Objects . . . we have no certainty whatsoever about any of that. We know absolutely nothing about it. All we know is the phenomenal world (the world of what Berkeley calls 'ideas,' of what Kant calls 'phenomena' or 'objects as they appear to us'). Any details of any underlying unknown X would be outside the scope of all possible knowledge. As regards Lokey, by the time this video was published I had read every word they had written on Demon’s Souls. I found a lot to respect and appreciate there . . . but a lot to disagree with as well. Lokey positions their work as the definitive source on the lore of FromSoft games (“What You Didn’t Know”), and this frequently leads to them ignoring, reducing, or contriving a way around some of the deepest ambiguities in the games. Not to mention their willingness to incorporate abstruse information from defunct region-specific marketing websites as evidence or even canonical information regarding the worlds within these works. As well as their insistence on dismissively referring to all instances of English-language material in the games as ‘localization,’ even in the many cases where the English-language material lacks a Japanese version and was present in the original Japanese release of the game. And the points you’ve mentioned here are directly related to these postural issues. My exact phrasing of my discussion regarding the Northern Regalia, if you listen closely to what I’m saying there, correspond to Lokey’s translated words rather than the English text from the game. That is, I use the “due to malice” phrasing rather than the “for malicious purposes” phrasing. Yet Lokey seems to think that somehow the “due to malice” phrasing not only lacks ambiguity regarding the source of the malice, but even ultimately points to a judgment made by God regarding human behavior and the soul arts (despite neither God nor the soul arts being mentioned in the description a single time, and despite the entire description being set up as an assessment of dubious origin). There’s simply no clear evidence anywhere in the game of there being some benign deity behind the world of Demon’s Souls, and frankly an absolutely tremendous amount of evidence against. This is the substance of my disagreement with Lokey, which is found further along in my analysis when I say: “The world of Demon’s Souls is one that factually contains innumerable bloodthirsty demons and exactly zero angels, yet worship of God as a source of Goodness and Justice carries on just the same. Any interpretation of the God of Demon’s Souls as simply some kind of benevolent or just Deity fails to appreciate the game’s overwhelming emphases on incomprehensible realities, Lovecraftian horror, and Berserk-style dark fantasy.” As for Astraea, is she taking souls from the people of the Valley? Yes, absolutely. Is she a corrupt villain calling for the deaths of women and children? Nope; that's neither said nor implied in the game. I'm aware that Lokey interprets the lack of living women and children through most of the level and the Filthy Woman's remark about how she would be attacked if found---as meaning that the depraved ones decided to kill all of them to offer their souls to Astraea. But the depraved ones are attacking _everyone_ with a soul to offer it to Astraea. And there's no straightforward or canonical reason whatsoever to believe that this was Astraea's command or intention. Not even Lokey, who offers a unilateral negative interpretation of the character, thinks Astraea specifically called for them to do it. The best Lokey can muster along those lines is to say that, even though she probably doesn't intend it, Astraea "can’t be ignorant of this fear and death which she has sown." In the end, I see Lokey as a very similar creator to Hawkshaw (whose work I quote in a similar capacity in my analysis of Dark Souls), in that they set out with the noble goal of providing careful and accurate lore information, and as a result have provided a lot of worthwhile insight and have corrected a few common misconceptions . . . but that, the deeper they got into their respective projects, the more time they spent extrapolating wildly from bits of arguable subtext, minor elements of environmental design, and material outside the games themselves. Now, if Lokey wants to present an interpretation of the lore of the game as offering something like a Christian morality with Shinto purity undertones, I am totally fine with that. If they want to drape a critical moral layer over the actions of Astraea, that is also alright by me. And if, in the course of those endeavors, they want to emphasize the positions of the Monumental and certain lines by Yuria over the positions of Freke, Urbain, the Maiden in Black, and other lines by Yuria, that’s fine too. But to act as though those are the True and Final Interpretations of the game is a mistake. _No_ art works that way, but least of all art with as many mysteries and ambiguities as this art. They should be clear, then, and not try to position themselves as a provider of ‘pure canon.’ As long as they set themselves up that way, Lokey would have served their stated goal far better if they had presented their work as simply a series of charts with three columns-one for English dialogue or text, one for the corresponding Japanese subtitles or text, and one for Lokey’s best attempt at an accurate English translation of the Japanese. Instead, they opted to present their work interspersed into a series of narrative essays in which they engage in lengthy acts of interpretation and interpolation. Yet the attitude of the project is as though they had merely done the former. Their feelings about the religious dimensions of Demon’s Souls are a potent example of that.