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So it has been seven years since I was in Seattle visiting my sister and her husband?

One day we would go with my brother-in-law’s sister somewhere and when she didn’t show up we called her and she said: “You didn’t hear? Go and find a television somewhere!” (my sister didn’t have a television). So we went to the neighbours, who were Japanese, and sat on the floor watching the news; quite an unreal sight. Read More »9/11

I have known about this for about two weeks, but last night the extras newsletter was sent around, so now it is ‘official’: Koenraad Logghe has left the Flemish Asatru group that he founded. There are several reasons that can be mentioned, but the main reason is that Koenraad’s ideas drifted away from the ideas of other people in the movement, under whom the current chairman Stefaan van den Eynde. Not that they parted with arguments, not at all, but Koenraad concluded that Traditie would be better off without him and that he had to explore other horizons.
Unfortunately my ideas are much closer to the Traditionalistic ideas of Koenraad than to those of Stefaan, so time will tell if Traditie will get a new direction and if I can find myself in it. I will miss the walking encyclopedia and genuine esotericist and hope that his new horizon will not be too far away.
People who can read Dutch, can read the newsletter anouncing the depart here.

Just back from a week holidays. It had to be not too far and not too expensive, so we have spent a week in what is the skiing part of Germany in the winter and a sleepy holidays area in the summer, but ideal for walking and there are a few things to see too. Not too many prechristian sites this time, even though we were not that far from previous holidays locations, but we have seen a few embarkment forts (what do you call them in English?). In the Netherlands we usually call them “Hunneschansen” and sometimes “Huneschansen”. They are built walls with sand over them and used as a protected area in times past, sometimes (but not often these days) connected to the Huns. We haven’t been able to find the “Weleda Höhle” of Velmede and other than that it was more the normal natural sites such as the Externsteine-like rocks of Bruchhausen (but without carvings, temples and graves), the beautiful spring of Alme (nothing like a temple site here, so no Paderborn). Perhaps those ancient church ruins with the large lime tree could be something (folklore places a pagan temple there). Perhaps I should make some article with photos of such places that are interesting.

The attentive eye may have noticed that the lay-out of this website has slightly changed. Somewhere in the previous weeks, Gangleri.nl has been online for a year, but too much work with the new house made me totally forget about the fact. That, but also in general, I wanted to experiment a little with a new “theme”. I had the idea to have a clear middle part and two bars with an image on the sides. I worked at a theme that used grey and blue tones and it looked pretty nice. I was limited to shades of grey though, because there were a lot of CSS jokes in the theme that were no easy to change. My girlfriend found the theme a little boring… Then I decided to find another theme to edit which would give me a little more freedom with colours and in the end I came to the very theme that I started with a year ago. Instead of images in the sides of the screen, this theme only allowed me to add an image to the background of the whole screen, except the so-called “sidebar” (the navigation on the right). I noticed that I really nuked the theme in my early CSS days while trying to stretch the content-space. This time I played a bit more of a fair game and the result is not only better visually, but especially also CSS-wise. You may find the lay-out more or less the same, but believe me that I completely started from scratch with a blue and white theme with no images in it whatsoever. I messed up the theme so well the previous time that I couldn’t use anything of my reworked version without wrecking the whole thing, so this has been a good exercise for me. I hope you like the new design as much as I do. In the end I think the colours that I used (based on the image on the index of the website) give the website another atmosphere than the often-used shades of grey, so for the time being, you will be looking at something with shades of brown.

Wow, moving from one place to another proves to be quite a job. Besides the fact that I still haven’t installed my computer in the new place, there is way too much to do, preventing me from doing anything here. I guess you have to be a bit more patient for Gangleri updates…

Greetings,

The new Ultra website is now online, and can be accessed via:

http://www.radicaltraditionalist.com/

Titles published by Ultra, and by some of our friends, will be available for purchase. The site also features a news section, which we plan to update regularly. This section will feature updates about the TYR journal, as well as related projects and other items of note.

We encourage you to link to the site, and to forward this information to any interested parties.

Thank you.

A couple of days ago Maharishi Mahesh Yogi passed away. The name didn’t really ring a bell until the newsreporter said that this yogi was the ‘inventor’ of the “transcendental meditation” ‘system’. David Lynch is an avid supporter of this form of meditation and even has a foundation with the goal of spreaking it on schools and Lynch’s book Catching The Big Fish that I recently reviewed in the book reviews section is all about it as well. What I also didn’t know was that Maharishi actually lived in my country for the last years of his life and he even has a center in that place called Vlodrop. It’s a small world afterall!

No no, I am not planning on getting a new internetaddress again, but for all those who sent promo material sometimes and who read this, I’m currently very busy with getting a new home livable, so my address will change soon. Please contact me first before sending anything new.

When I laid my eggs on a simple html website, 99% of the work went in the content of the different pages. Every now and then I had a wish for improvement, but since html is pretty easy and practical, that seldom costed a lot of time. Now with a completely dynamic site, I find myself constantly thinking about how things can be better and trying to figure out how to do that. I spend a lot of time on the WordPress forum, trying to help out people with the little knowledge that I gathered, but also for looking sollutions with the next thing I come up with. In the recent weeks quite a few things changed on the background. Simple things, such as accessibility improvements; the “continue reading…” at the end of the so called “excerpts” in the article section, browsing links below articles and bookreviews, that sort of thing. More complex things, such as “site validation” that the builders of WordPress see as necessity. All this again made me learn more about coding in CSS and PHP, understand better why some things work as they work, but it is also pretty clear that I still don’t get the larger part of it all. But I am again happy with the improvements and I keep getting closer to a good website. Of course wishes remain and I wonder when the time will come that I focus more on the content than on the exterior!