My mom often commented when she heard people whining about cubicles, she'd say back in her day everyone was lined up in desks and the boss sat in the front. I've noticed in the past decade offices are moving back to this model, especially in tech start ups. My brother's office for example is exactly like that picture I linked. But whenever I visited him, I thought, "God, I would fucking hate working like this." I'm not talking about not being able to surreptitiously look at porn — even I wouldn't do that when I'm supposed to be working — but just the lack of privacy in general. Part of the reason why I flee to the library, Starbucks, or the Citigroup Building instead of studying at home is because I just can't concentrate in this house with all the distractions. Literally every ten minutes someone's coming in to ask me a question, tell me a pointless story, or ask for me to do something. It's not a very good environment to enter "the zone." And that office seemed to me just like home: There are people chatting with you every five minutes just because you're simply there.

I guess I'm not the only person who thinks this way.

As I said before, John is very laconic. This lack of flow leads to conversations that I personally find absolutely hilarious. Let's look at this from the second chapter (my translation from the Vulgate):

And three days later there was a wedding in Cana, Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there, and Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding, and they lacked wine.
The mother of Jesus says to him, "They don't have wine."
And Jesus said to her, "What is it to me and you? Woman, my hour is not yet come."
His mother said to the servants, "Whatever he will say to you, do it."
And there were six stone water pots positioned there following the purification methods of the Jews, holding two or three measures each. Jesus says to them, "Fill the pots with water," and they filled them all the way to the top.

I feel this is the equivalent of my family driving on the road and suddenly the battery going out, and then mom turning to me, snapping her fingers, and saying, "Okay, fix this." And me, knowing I'm Lamb of God that came down onto the earth to save mankind, saying, "Mom, my appointed time is not yet upon us." And she replies, "Yeah, yeah, tell me when you're done." Mary just completely ignores Jesus' statement. She doesn't even deign to give him a response. I can totally imagine her rolling her eyes after he says that and then turns to the servants while Jesus seethes in the corner, grumbling, "Geez mom, you're so pushy. Fine, where are these pots? Fill them with water. Man, I can't believe I'm doing this..."

This week Rep. Michael Grimm from Staten Island pleaded guilty to tax fraud, although there are plenty of more charges he has to deal with. Considering that he was handed these indictments before the elections, that he threatened to throw an NY1 reporter off a balcony, that he couldn't remember the last book he read during a debate, and said that the crowning moment of his tenure was the opening of an Applebee's, you wonder why the hell Staten Island voted for him. Of course this is where I insert jokes about the idiocy of that borough, but the voters during the last election were facing a choice between him or an idiot, Domenic Recchia, who said he had foreign policy experience since he was an exchange student in Japan. Staten Islanders weighed their choices and decided to go with the guy who at least knew what he was doing, even if he was a criminal. Now they're facing a possibility that their representative will be in prison, especially since the constitution has no guidelines on what to do in this situation. Which makes you wonder why they didn't. Well, okay, the line is, "The President, the Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States," but that last statement is really fucking vague and some say the legislature doesn't apply. I remember as a child reading about the debates they had during the Constitutional Convention about what to do with a shitty president, but it never occurred to them you could have rogue congressmen? Right now the impeachment process is done by congress. As we all know, having a body police itself is one of the stupidest ideas in the world. Admittedly I doubt Grimm will stay on if he's convicted because the House wouldn't want an actual prisoner to tarnish their already terrible image, but I'm certain if there was an independent body watching these fuckers we wouldn't have so much corruption in congress.

Wow, they were already posing Sasuke with snakes as early as chapter 24? How far ahead was Kishimoto planning because god knows whatever he had in mind got severely derailed.

It's funny how much emphasis they put on seals and shit early on, and toward the end of the series no one gave a shit.

...Shit, ten years later and I still get emotional during this scene.

I remember the anime episode ended with this scene too, and I was totally pumped to see what the fuck would happen next, but unfortunately regents were happening and Harlan told me I couldn't watch any more until I was done. Honestly he made the situation worse because instead of concentrating all I thought about was Naruto.

I always found it weird how Kakashi needed a scroll to summon his dogs whereas people like Jiraiya and Naruto just needed some blood. Actually, later on I distinctly remember Kakashi just summoning one like it's nothing. Why did he need a scroll at this particular moment?

I don't think I realized how ridiculous this looks until now. What the hell is up with those two biting his legs? One looks like it's high and the other is being raped. And seriously, one's going after his sword? Doesn't it realize it would just cut up its fucking mouth if you bite a sword like that? And no one knew this at that time, but the useless one hanging off in the front would be Kakashi's main dog.

Honestly, these chapters were some of my favorites of the series. It was just a complete emotional roller coaster. You had Sasuke awakening his sharingan, him "dying," Naruto flipping his shit, Haku's sad story, and this was just the cherry on top. God, I remember when Haku lurched forward in the anime and all his fucking guts and blood just fell to the floor. They edited out Kakashi actually puncturing his body, but I think it more graphic just because of the moving blood and the sound of it splattering everywhere.

Since Vesperia, the Tales series has allowed you to put on the outfits of characters from previous games. It's a cool way of reminiscing about games past. That is until recently when I realized they just recycle the same people over and over. When the new costumes for the newest game Zestiria were announced recently, I saw at least five that were done already, three of which appeared at least twice before. Seriously, this is the fucking Tales series. I literally have a 2" thick book of character design on my shelf. It's not like we're bereft of characters here. As much as I love Luke from Abyss, there were tons of other people from that game. Why not try Jade? Anise? Peony? Yuri from Vesperia was awesome too, but this is ridiculous. You've been giving his costume to people it doesn't even fit because they have really short hair. I know Lion's won the Tales popularity contest like three times in a row, but you can stop putting him in now. How about Woodrow? He was fucking cool.

The whole point of this was for Tales fans to feel nostalgic, so why not open the field a bit so I can really remember shit instead of these particular three characters?

I don't think I've have greater moments of self-reflection than when I talk with my cousin's daughters. It all boils down to this question: "How old are you now?" When one of them said ten, the first thing that popped into my mind was, "Oh, that's about the age when I started my porn addiction." Then I look at her childlike, innocent face and think to myself, "What the fuck was wrong with me?"

Also, the other was born two weeks before September 11th and is entering high school next year. Christ.

I'm reading a book right now that looks into the break down in the 1st platoon of Bravo Company that led to the 2006 rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family. One of the perpetrators, Steven Green, expressed racist opinions from the start of the war, which were only exasperated as members of his platoon were killed. At one point he was encouraged to see a therapist:

Green told [the therapist] Marrs he was having suicidal and homicidal ideations, especially thoughts about killing Iraqi civilians. One his one-page intake sheet, Marrs noted his wanting to kill Iraqis four separate times. One entry states, "Interests: None other than killing Iraqis." She diagnosed him with Combat and Operational Stress Reactions (COSR), an Army term to describe typical and transient reactions to the stresses of warfare...As one Army journal article puts it, "Those with COSR are not referred to as 'patients,' but are described as having 'normal reactions to an abnormal event.' " Thus believing Green's psychological state to be normal, Marrs prescribed him with a small course of Seroquel, an antipsychotic drug that also treats insomnia, and recommended that he follow up with another visit...and sent him back to his unit. ^*

We all understand that anger is a natural part of the grieving process, and the combat stress unit no doubt receives lots of soldiers who express frustration and hatred toward the Iraqis, but I think I'd be concerned about any soldier who says he wants to indiscriminately kill any Iraqi. Of course we're expecting our troops to kill Iraqis. That's our job. But the Iraq War was like the Spanish-American War: The point was not conquest but to help another nation. Although in hindsight we're upset at many of our actions, being nice to the Germans or the Japanese wasn't necessary part of WWII. That's the exact opposite for Iraq. If you don't have the populace on your side, you've lost the war. And if there's a crazy fucker running around shooting at random Iraqis, it does the exact opposite of what you want.

Then again, in Marrs' defense, I don't think anyone really knew what the hell we wanted to do with Iraq.

^* Jim Frederick, Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death (New York: Harmony BOoks, 2010), 157-58.

Sorry, Paul came over. I beat Tales of Xillia 2 last week. Its existence exposes the first game's main flaw: It just simply wasn't finished. Let's compare it to Tales of Destiny: That was a full game that could've stood on its own; Tales of Destiny 2 just expanded the story. Xillia is like as if in Symphonia we had just discovered about Tethe'alla and about a dungeon later solved the problem of the mana tree and the exspheres. That's a lot of plot you're missing. Namco tried to throw the vestiges of the first together to create the second game, but it wasn't entirely satisfactory. The episodic system just seemed silly, and in particular having to pay off a 20,000,000G debt off the bat is just insane. I'd turn to Atlus if I wanted a lot of grinding.

But I feel Xillia 2's greatest flaw is its lack of expansion. Going back to that Symphonia comparison, if they made a Symphonia 2^* you'd expect it to be about all that Tethe'alla shit you missed. Xillia 2 did not give any of that: Only four dungeons and one town are original. That means literally you're walking through all the same shit you did in the first game; they didn't even change the graphics at all. I played the two back-to-back over the past couple of days with Paul, and it was somewhat frustrating for me to have explored a place and then finding myself having to do it all over again twenty hours later in another game.

If Namco had just gotten its shit together and made a complete game, I feel Xillia would've been one of the best of the series, but they fucked it up. That's why I gave it such a scathing review last time; they teased me with greatness only to fall short.

^* Okay, yeah, they did. But bear with me here.

These're the headphones that come with your iPhone or iPod. (iPhone has a microphone on it to make phone calls, which aren't in the iPod version.) That part with the + and - obviously is the volume control, but that space in between the two is actually a third button. Three years ago when I got my first iPod I played around with it and discovered when you pressed the middle button once it stopped or started the music and pressing it twice would move onto the next track. Simple yet functional.

Harlan bought me a new iPhone during the Thanksgiving break, and considering the problem with my iPod is the increase volume button is broken I thought I could use these headphones to work around the problem. I noticed Apple did some tweaking in the three years since I last used them. Before it had a minimal amount of features because there were just three buttons. Since then they've added fast forward/rewind, switching to the previous track, and ... I don't even fucking know what this is, but sometimes when I try to stop the music, instead this voice comes on that tells me the name of the track (and considering I listen to a lot of anime music she usually completely butchers the pronunciation) plus the names of all the playlists. What was working before is just a goddamned mess because half the time when I want to move to the next track I'm suddenly fast forwarding or having this motherfucking voice telling me what I'm listening to (as if I can't see the screen) and my playlists (as if I forgot what they were). I should probably go onto some website to tell me what the hell I'm doing — Is it the speed that I press twice? Is fast forwarding pressing higher up and not in the middle? — but I really shouldn't have to do that. Before I was able to intuitively figure out how this works, which is how good design should work. For a company that prides itself in such matters, they completely screwed this one up.

I beat Octodad, which is one of the most ridiculous games I've ever played. The plot is you're an octopus masquerading as a human and you do everything in your power to prevent others from noticing this. The developers purposefully created terrible game mechanics so that you'd have difficulty moving about and could possibly raise suspicion. That is essentially the game: Doing things that would be simple in any other game, like walking up the stairs, in a normal fashion so that no one realizes you're an octopus. Of course this raises several questions, like how does your wife not realize she's married to a mollusc? How did you even procreate?

It's been a pretty normal semester in French. My teacher's more friendly than usual and really young, but he always answers my questions seriously and in an easily-understandable way. That was until last night. The running joke about French movies is the first ten minutes is sex and the rest is just them constantly arguing. The movie we watched never got past the sex part. About twenty minutes in, I realized it was just porn. There was no allusion to what was happening; you could see everything. The "plot" was essentially an hour of guys cruising by a lake. At some point I wondered why the professor wasn't stopping this, especially since all the men were not very attractive. Why are we watching this then if out of six dudes only one is palatable? I guess to teach me how to say, "Your cock is beautiful," because god knows they wouldn't stop saying that.

I was always was kinda fuzzy on this. Are the hunter-nins a subsection of ANBU or a completely different organization? Or are they part of the police force that the Uchiha headed? Either way they're shitty because non-hunter-nin are always the ones taking the rouge ninjas out.

Naruto is the type of person who learns through action instead of words or reading, but I'm still surprised he managed to graduate. Forget not knowing bunshin; how the fuck did you pass the final exams? It'd be like me taking a math test and not knowing what a variable is.

And that was the first and last time Sakura seemed impressive in part 1.

The anime really cleaned Haku up; he's virtually unrecognizable here. Everything is just wrong with the proportions and his face almost seems smushed. I'm glad they decided to completely revamp him, much like Square did with Amano's character designs.

I mentioned in the last post that some things are not easily transferable to animation, but conversely animation can provide things that comics cannot. For example, voice acting. I fucking loved this moment in the anime: Instead of being a little side thing whilst the focus is on Sasuke, the director gave it a scene all of its own with Takeuchi Junko perfectly expressing the confusion in Naruto's voice. I spent many times rewinding these ten seconds over and over because I found it so funny.

Jesus Christ, they toned this own in the anime. At least he still had, you know, arms.

I asked my professor for suggestions of something easy to translate from Latin, and she told me the Gospel of John. One of difficulties early Christianity faced is its sacred text was not as impressive compared to the polytheistic religion. If you compare this—

The Levites asked him, "Who are you?"
And he confessed and did not deny. And he confessed, "I am not Christ."
And they asked him, "Then what? Are you Elijah?"
He said no.
"Are you a prophet?"
He responded no.^*

—with the melodic lines of Homer, Ovid, or Vigil, it's rather pathetic. People would sneer at the simple syntax and poor rhetoric, but that was the Bible's appeal: It used the common speech to connect with the masses. Still, I'll admit if I were an English teacher I'd give the writer of John a poor grade for repetition, bland writing style, and inability to construct scenes properly. It's literally the bare minimum to get the point across.

Which makes this line for me all the more hilarious. The disciples are starting to gather around Jesus. After meeting him, Philip runs to his buddy Nathaniel:

Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, "We found Jesus, the son of Joseph of Nazareth, whom Moses and the prophets wrote about in the law."
And Nathaniel said to him, "Can anything good be from Nazareth?"
Philip said to him, "Come and see."^**

Okay, I need to first emphasize how jarring John is. He has such difficulty making transitions from point to point. He'll be talking about one thing and with little segue move onto the next. It's really minimalist. Even though he skips things all the time, he somehow thinks insulting Nazareth is important enough to include in this book. Not how that interview with the Levites ended, not how Jesus heard about John the Baptist, not even the birth story mentioned in Luke and Matthew. John doesn't mention any of that. But having someone crack the line, "Is there anything good at all in Nazareth? Like, seriously. I doubt this guy is anything useful because he came from Nazareth." That got included for posterity.

^* John 1:19-21
^** John 1:45-46

I'm already perplexed at delivery men's inability to press a doorbell, but they've been pulling shit that's just infuriating me. For the past three or so months, they refused to deliver four packages because it's an "incorrect address," so I'm forced to go down to the post office or UPS' hub in the South Bronx to pick it up. And each time I look at it and see it's the right address and ask what the issue was. The reply is always, "You didn't put an apartment number." Of course I fucking didn't; it's a goddamned house. Are you seriously telling me you picked up that package, looked at the address, and decided it was pointless to deliver even without attempting? Once is okay. But this shit keeps on happening, and I'm about to flip my shit.

Harlan was helping mom back up her iPhone onto her computer. I went downstairs in the midst of this, and later found an email Harlan sent me from her address. It had no subject, no message, just an image called "riva_kill.png":

(123) 456-7890. Everyone knows the first three digits are the area code, but most can't name the other sections. I learned the middle three as the "prefix," but I've heard some people call it an "exchange." The prefix for my house number is 567 and for years I wondered why they chose that. As a child I could tell it was by neighborhood — all my neighbors and local businesses used 567 — but I could never understand why I was 567 and the next neighborhood over wasn't 568.

It wasn't until the other day when I asked dad what his telephone number was growing up and he replied, "Oh, it was WALNUT-519." There was a long pause before I said, "Wait, what?" It turns out the letters were the "exchange," which was basically your local telephone center that connected all the lines. Dad described a large building in our neighborhood with wide windows, and you could see the machines chugging along as people called. An area the exchange covered would be given a name, and your personal line number would be slapped on the end. Dad's growing up was WALNUT, and he explained there were many famous ones known nationally, like around Madison Square Garden was PENNSYLVANIA for obvious reasons, MURRAY HILL was the east side, and Morningside was UNIVERSITY. Ours was LORRAINE, which on a number pad is 5677243, shortened to 567. An exchange became influential; mom told me her stationery used to have her business' word on it, and around our neighborhood lots of places where called Lorraine: Lorraine Florist, Lorraine Butcher, Lorraine Fabrics...

People became upset when the exchanges were dropped in the 60s for a purely numeric system because the exchanges were easier to remember, but I can understand why: It's probably easier to just generate a number instead of a word. Still, it would've been interesting to be known as a Lorraine instead of a 567.