I woke up the other day to hear a thumping noise near the ceiling, which meant some weird shit was happening around the front garden. It turned out two dudes claimed Con Ed sent them to caulk up our driveway around the cement squares over our new gas line to the house. They had no identification and we were not informed of this, but I let it go because they were caulking the driveway and I can't imagine some rogue dudes do this for no reason at all.

Still, this brings up a lot of questions. First, the gas line was installed over a year ago; why are you suddenly very concerned about it? Did you guys confer and say, "Wait, did we caulk in between the cement squares on that random house in upper Manhattan? We should double-check that." Second, and this is most important, thanks for asking permission to do this? Seriously, how did you guys think it was cool to just show up randomly at someone's house and do work on it? It's weird to wake up at seven in the morning to find construction workers acting as if everyone agreed on this course of action. What if it weren't caulking? What if you had to dig something up? Or lay cement in my garden? Where the hell does Con Ed think it has the right to just randomly do shit to people's homes?

Good job sending a subcontractor too so none of these questions will be answered.

In the months leading up to this from the beginning of part 2, people were joking that Sasuke would be wearing a stupid outfit. Those were all facetious statements not be taken seriously. Not only was Sasuke donning something incredibly idiotic, it was beyond all of our imaginations.

And the yaoi fangirls go wild...

I was really disappointed at Sasuke's reaction to learning about Kyuubi. For years I had pondered what would happen if Sakura and Sasuke found out about it, much like Remus dreading the rest of his crew discovering his lyncanthropy. But Sasuke was really nonchalant about it. I was expecting, I don't know, some questions. "What the fuck? Why is this here? How did this happen?"

Meanwhile, all this shit is happening. How the hell did Sasuke multitask entering Naruto's head and sealing Kyuubi whilst simultaneously fending off the rest of them?

Yeeesh. Is this the best scan this group had? This is what happens when you don't use Japflap.

"It's not like you're going to get stronger overnight, like the main character of some novel"? Please, that's exactly what happened.

How the fuck did it go from this to getting married?!

Some people liked the dynamic between these two, but to be honest I think they were the least interesting duo of Akatsuki, which may be why Kishimoto killed them off so quickly. Also, for some reason Kishimoto could not draw Hidan's chest properly.

Did we ever find out who Konohamaru's dad was? I would've liked to see Asuma and him playing as kids in one of those splash pages.

Okay, I'll admit: This was a brilliant plan.

This was the picture used for Jen to see how to paint that dildo.

God, Hidan's chest again looks weird as fuck.

Indonesia has some of the strictest drug laws in the world, and recently they entered a diplomatic tizzy because they decided to execute nine foreigners involved in a heroin-smuggling ring. Amongst the nine was a Filipina named Mary Jane Veloso, who was spared at the last minute due to an appeal from the Philippines president.

Ate Neneng asked me about it today because, according to her, Veloso was innocent. I asked how did she know, and she responded because Veloso and her family said she was. They claim Veloso didn't understand the language and didn't realize she was moving drugs around. I pressed Ate Neneng further: How do you know she's not lying? Because the family says so. How do you know the family's not lying? Because she was tricked. Do you know her? No. Do you know the family? No. Do you know if they're good people? No. So how do you know they don't take drugs? No answer. How do you know they're not liars? No answer.

Again, Veloso may be telling the truth, but considering the punishment for your actions is a firing squad, I would lie too in that situation. Both she and the Indonesian government have believable statements. Can I see an innocent immigrant looking for work getting caught up in a drug gang? Yes. Can I also see a Filipina selling drugs? Yes. That's why I have no opinion on the case.

I feel though people don't usually think things through and just identify with random people because they share some common background. Ate Neneng only cared about the Veloso but did not show any concern for the other eight prisoners, who were actually executed. But she's not alone: People will stand behind someone because they go to church, are black, are women, are the same nationality, attended the same school, are from a small town... I usually try to give people the benefit of the doubt in most cases because I don't like seeing the worst in people, but simultaneously I admit shit happens. If both sides seem reasonable, I can't just agree with one because we're similar.

Greene beat Metal Gear Solid 4 for me recently. Looking back at my Metal Gear Solid review, I think my critiques apply to this game and to the series as a whole: Kojima had lots of interesting gameplay ideas, a compelling plot, and intricate characters, but I don't think he's the best person to present them. I can understand why people love the series and simultaneously why they would hate it.

What would be best is if they remade the original two NES Metal Gears, but considering what happened with Kojima, that's doubtful.

I played some Final Fantasy VIII over the weekend. There are big, gaping holes in my memory about this game, and one aspect in particular is the battle system. I vaguely recalled you could equip summons to people and during the animation sequence you could mash a button to increase the damage points, but that was about it. Now that I'm playing it, I realize this was a terrible fucking concept and it's no wonder why they never used it again. Magic is consumable. That's already kinda weird, but I could deal with that if you didn't attach that magic to your stats. So for example, fire increases your attack. Or Cure and Life increase HP. The more magic you have stocked up, the higher the stat increases. Let's say Zell's base HP is 750. With 100 Lifes added, it raises to 2500. With such a large difference, you have a huge incentive to stock up on magic.

Except doing so takes fucking forever. You can "draw" the magic from enemies, and if you want to sit around for an hour that's great. Even if your people are pulling nine a turn, that's still ten turns. And usually they don't; five is the average. Considering that's out of a hundred, that's insane. There are other options, like turning items into spells, but those aren't too many and are depleted quickly. And then of course once you stock a hundred, you move onto the next area and find enemies with the better version of the spell so you have to start the process anew. So most of the fighting is spent doing tedious tasks just to have the basic stats you'd have in any other game. God almighty, my complaints were about the storyline and characters. I didn't realize the battle system was going to be part of it too.

[12:56:23] gattsu456: Yo.
[12:56:34] gattsu456: I had a dream that I had to fix up an oil rig.
[12:56:52] gattsu456: So I stuck some gum into this crack, and then I climbed to the top and started dancing.
[13:00:23] Dun 4 Hire: I was trying to figure out how I could tie that into FFVII, but I couldn't.  However it sounds like it would be a perfect minigame for that.
[13:00:39] gattsu456: Oh man, that would be amazing!
[13:00:47] gattsu456: The Turks are at the top blowing that shit.
[13:00:56] gattsu456: You climb up a completely different reactor and start dancing.
[13:01:07] gattsu456: At the end, you get 50 gil.
[13:02:13] Dun 4 Hire: Probably because you pressed the wrong buttons.
[13:02:23] Dun 4 Hire: Yo, remember when you had to do drills in front of Rufus?
[13:02:26] Dun 4 Hire: If you fucked up just a little bit
[13:02:29] Dun 4 Hire: You fucked up so bad.
[13:02:31] Dun 4 Hire: So fucking bad.
[13:02:34] Dun 4 Hire: There was no way to recover from that.
[13:02:41] Dun 4 Hire: Especially if you pressed the wrong direction.
[13:02:54] Dun 4 Hire: You're showing Rufus your back while everyone else is facing left.
[13:02:59] gattsu456: Yo, fuck that. Remember the march?
[13:03:58] Dun 4 Hire: Honestly I found that more difficult.
[13:04:09] Dun 4 Hire: I was never able to get a good score on that.
[13:04:11] Dun 4 Hire: I don't know how.
[13:04:23] gattsu456: I never once got a good score.
[13:06:13] Dun 4 Hire: Has anyone ever?
[13:06:27] Dun 4 Hire: I had the old BradyGames strategy guide, and they were explaining the possible prizes
[13:06:41] Dun 4 Hire: And I went, "Surely you got that from Squaresoft directly because I refuse to believe you figured that out on your own."
[13:07:51] gattsu456: I'm fairly certain they made the other solders walk at a different rate than you could.
[13:12:21] Dun 4 Hire: On top of that you're supposed to be moving your gun too.
[13:12:30] Dun 4 Hire: AND the ratings change when you're talking with your superior officer!
[13:12:59] gattsu456: ... YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO MOVE YOUR GUN??
[13:13:54] Dun 4 Hire: Yeah, press O to move the gun!
[13:14:05] gattsu456: WHAT.
[13:14:16] Dun 4 Hire: You're supposed to mimic the dudes there too!
[13:14:18] gattsu456: I DON'T THINK I EVER KNEW THAT.
[13:14:22] Dun 4 Hire: 'Cause they're moving their guns!
[13:15:28] Dun 4 Hire: I got a video of a guy getting 69%.
[13:15:29] Dun 4 Hire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFAzMuiLEd0
[13:15:36] Dun 4 Hire: But yeah, the guns are moving.
[13:15:49] Dun 4 Hire: So it is fucking possible.
[13:17:33] gattsu456: I love it.
[13:17:43] gattsu456: Usually when you upload shit on youtube, you upload your best possible shit.
[13:18:08] gattsu456: This shit's so hard he only got to 69%.
[13:18:13] Dun 4 Hire: Hahaha
[13:18:15] Dun 4 Hire: Honestly?
[13:18:20] Dun 4 Hire: I don't know why the ratings are going down.
[13:18:32] Dun 4 Hire: If shit is fucking up, you'd think more people would tune in to see that shit crash and burn.
[13:19:38] gattsu456: Yeah!
[13:19:45] gattsu456: The botched scenes are the ones you see on youtube.
[13:19:50] gattsu456: With millions of viewers.
[13:21:21] Dun 4 Hire: Who the hell says, "Oh man!  That guy can't dart out from an alley and join a fucking unit properly.  Fuck this, I'm gonna watch soap operas."
[13:21:33] Dun 4 Hire: ALso, I love how each one of those blocks conveniently had a space open for you
[13:21:37] Dun 4 Hire: As if they were expecting this fuck up.
[13:22:17] gattsu456: "Okay, make sure you leave a spot open on each line so the guy that fucks everything up has a place to be when he comes to fuck more shit up."
[13:24:01] Dun 4 Hire: "Let's have him be one of three people in front of Rufus so he can fully appreciate the extent of this guy's fuck ups."

In the US military realistically the highest rank one can aspire to is a four-star general. We do have a five-star rank, but those are generally reserved for wartime, and by that we mean World War II. Out of the nine people who've received it, seven were World War II generals.

There is a rank higher than five-star, and that's General of the Armies. It was granted posthumously to George Washington in 1976 because people realized he was technically never more than a three-star general, and it seemed awkward that someone no one's ever heard of like James Harbord held a higher rank than him. You can argue whether Washington was that amazing of a commander — some historians frown on his French and Indian War actions as well as his obsession with New York during the Revolution — but for the sake of a beloved figure, it seemed like a good gesture.

What blows my mind though is there's another person who has the rank of General of the Armies. Okay, so who holds up to Washington in American mythology? Dwight Eisenhower? Douglas MacArthur? George Marshall? No, it's Pershing. You're probably going, "Who the fuck is that?" but he was big shit during his time. He's the head of the US military during World War I. That's fine, but that wasn't whom I was expecting. Sure, at least he's not the commander during some minor war like the Spanish-American, but you'd think Eisenhower would get that rank before Pershing, especially since the US entered literally at the last minute during the First World War. So what we've got is Washington > Pershing > MacArthur. Completely surprising.

Next on my Gundam/Macross list was Macross Plus, which I had watched probably about twenty years ago when it was first released and remembered almost all of it. There were some subtleties that somewhat went over my head because, although I was aware of it, the idea of rape hadn't quite coalesced fully into my mind as a concept. As an adult, when you see Guld fully remember the incident, all the pieces throughout the series fall into place and create a comprehensive picture. As a kid, I knew on some level what had happened yet really I just conceived it as "Guld did something bad and blamed Isamu for it." The love triangle, Guld's seesaw emotions resulting from guilt, the jealous hatred... I didn't understand it with full appreciation.

That being said, Macross Plus is a solid little series. It weaves together both the immediate story of the three main characters and the larger examination of machine automation very well in a compelling manner. It doesn't add much to the greater Macross universe much, but considering it's so short I wasn't expecting that. My only complaint is the dude on Sharon Apple's team who allowed her AI to turn malevolent. He as a character was such a trope that it stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise interesting cast of characters.

Kanno also did the music, and this is a far cry from her best. The main song, Voices, is a great and played in my head for about a decade afterward, and the orchestral background music is nice although out of place, but everything else falls short. Particularly disappointing are Sharon Apple's songs like Santi-U because she's supposed to be the most popular singer in the galaxy. Well, I guess that just demonstrates the differences between the Sharon and Myung.

Howard Shore in The Lord of the Ring specialized in leitmotifs, which is essentially a reoccurring theme that has a close association with something. If you've ever watched the movies some can immediately come to mind — the Fellowship, the Shire, Rohan, Gondor, Isengard — and essentially the whole soundtrack is reiterations of these melodies. You can say something about this technique because instead of creating a completely new piece for each scene, he's just regurgitating the same stuff repeatedly, but it does allow the audience to immediately identify which player is currently prominent at each moment.

Shore did the same for The Hobbit and even kept some of the familiar tunes from The Lord of the Rings, like the Woodland elves, but of course he introduced new ones for this adventure. What threw me off is the dwarven company was associated with their song The Misty Mountains in An Unexpected Journey. And it played quite a bit throughout the movie! However after An Unexpected Journey it never showed up again and instead this song would pop up. It's not bad at all, but considering this entire series revolves around the same tunes endlessly repeated, it seems really random to suddenly abandon one that's engrained into the audience's ears and throw in another, especially since Shore made an effort to introduce it with that chorus and even place it prominently in the ending credits. It's a shame because I like The Misty Mountains better.

Jesus Christ, these uploaders need to get better quality stuff. I was wincing the entire time I wrote this post.

"You're stronger than anyone in your generation in the village?" Where the hell did Danzou get that from?

If you look at the data books, Akamaru is four years old during part 1, which means he's about seven during part 2. How the hell does a dog remain about a foot long during the first four years of life and then gain about 900% more mass after that?

I think I said this at the time on xanga, and I'll say it again: Naruto, you must have the eyes of a god to be able to see that tiny-ass Konoha symbol from such far a distance. It must from be from years of hanging out with Jiraiya and trying to peep at woman.

I think Kishimoto was trying to create an "oh shit" moment with Kabuto being the spy, but we all saw him actually siding with Orochimaru coming from a mile away.

Oh shit, Japflap! I forgot about those fuckers. Why the hell were we downloading from these French dudes? Toriyama's World, Inane, Japflap... Was it mangastream after that?

Kabuto, you're mad dumb. You're facing the incarnation of Kyuubi itself right now, and your first thought is just to charge right at him? What was the end game here? Try to sever his heart muscles like you did years ago? You think that shit is gonna work when this crazy bubbly chakra is there?

Orochimaru, you're not any better! "Lemme deck him in the face and see how that works out." Great fucking plan right there. That was the best thing you could come up with?

I wonder how Yamato trained for this. I mean, it's not like anyone else in the village has the First's ability to seal bijuu. Whom could he turn to for guidance?

Considering Sai's slutty clothing and Orochimaru's penchant for collecting young boys, I wonder if Denzou's game was to get Sai into Orochimaru's bed for easier access to Sasuke.

Kishimoto attempted to make Sai's book this mysterious thing that may have the answers to everything, and the following week we just saw it was stupid picture book. And even the solution to the mystery — him and his brother holding hands — was just dumb.

Also, Jesus Christ Yamato, can you look at something without seeming like you're about to rape a small child.

I usually don't like the colored splash pages because they're usually not very good, but I'll admit this one was kinda funny. I'm trying to imagine what sort of lesson that is. Must be serious judging from Iruka's expression.

And now that the weather's warm, it's a signal for the bugs to start appearing. Please let there be no cockroaches in the basement, please let there be no cockroaches in the basement...

I witnessed Ate Neneng humming to whatever was playing from her iPod and I realized it was Barbie Girl. Liking to tease her, I asked if she knew what the lyrics meant and told her it was about sex. She vehemently protested this and explained she was listening to a Tagalog version and began to sing it. The translators looked at "kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky," and thought the best way to bring this to a Filipino audience was to make it a list of food. It's not what I would expect, so you can imagine my surprise when she said, "Bananas, potatoes, and barbeque." I only managed to get a few lines from her, god knows what the rest of the song was like. Maybe deep frying. ...Actually, that sounds awesome. Can we get that version in America?

I finished 0080 over the weekend (thank you Greene) and have mixed opinions about it. The intent is to view war through a child's eyes, but I don't really give a shit about this kid. Yet I appreciate how it focuses on the nature of warfare: A rookie stuck in an impossible mission, who ultimately dies for no reason at all. In that way I enjoyed it more than MS 08th Team, which felt sort of forced like Metal Gear Solid: Do you think love can bloom on the battlefield? Well maybe, but considering you've met this person once for about three hours, it's doubtful. 0080 highlights the decisions soldiers had to face: how to fight, how to be brave, when to flee, and what to stand for. And how all of that could be for naught. It's just cruel that Chris killed Bernie and that the nuclear attack was intercepted. But that happens constantly. People die for stupid shit like bureaucratic fuck ups or in Bernie's case bad timing. For that I think 0080 shines, more so than I've seen in this series, and that poignancy is what I'm expecting from Gundam. Whether Al detracts from that... eh. I don't mind him as a character, I just wish the show didn't revolve around him so much. Well, again, that was the intent, but I don't know if they handled it in the best way. I can't really give an unbiased statement considering my abhorrence of children.

On a Gundam note, why the hell have a non-newtype be a test pilot for a newtype mobile suit? Now THAT'S a bureaucratic fuck up.

I went to see a live concert of The Return of the King, i.e. there was an actual orchestra playing with the movie above them on a screen. I don't think I've been more infuriated during a concert in my entire life. Clearly this was not intended for the classical music crowd so I wasn't expecting the audience to know the etiquette, but that doesn't mean you should be an asshole. For example, this isn't a movie theater. You know how you get up after the film ends because you don't feel like watching the ending credits? Music is playing during that. As in, the orchestra. Do you know how disrespectful it is to leave during the middle of a performance? Particularly when the vocalist is about to make her solo? And seriously, what the hell are you doing? You paid money for the live music, not the movie. Hell, I must've spent only 5% of the time looking at the screen; the rest was eagerly watching the orchestra. If you just wanted to see the actual movie, why not watch it at home instead of spending hundreds of dollars for a ticket to Lincoln Center?

Sorry, midway through my reading for this week I realized I hadn't been saving pics. Oh well.

Actually for Naruto that's pretty specific.

Sasori says this after a whole chapter of Chiyo explaining to Sakura about puppets. Those types of things drive me insane because 1. why the hell didn't you say all this shit before the fight? Yeah, you haven't seen him in years, but you still should have some idea of what's in his arsenal. If you're doing a coalition operation, you don't leave your allies in the dark. 2. Don't fucking do this shit when you're standing right there in front of your enemy. Sasori, for reasons I don't know, was generous to wait for Chiyo to finish talking. Any normal person would just fucking attack right away. Imagine nowadays if two patrols came into contact with one another, and one group waited as the commander of the other group explained to his subordinates the enemies' guns and how to work around them. That would never happen.

You have no idea how this one panel lit up the female fandom. No one was expecting him to be this pretty. Panties were soaked. That week a deluge of fanfics and fanarts poured across livejournal and the forums.

I wonder if these are collector's items now. ...Nah.

People were pissed at Gaara coming back to life, and to some extent I am too, but then again we wouldn't've seen him being awesome in the final battle.

And this fool makes his appearance. It just reminds me of this convo from 2012:

[23:36:58] gattsu456: [links to an awkward penguin pic that I can't find now saying, "Spent the last 6.5 years saying Tobi wasn't Obito, turns out he was Obito]
[23:43:51] Dun 4 Hire: ...
[23:43:51] Dun 4 Hire: ...
[23:43:53] Dun 4 Hire: ...
[23:44:05] Dun 4 Hire: ...It hasn't really been 6.5 years since they introduced Tobi ... right?
[23:47:03] gattsu456: ...
[23:47:08] gattsu456: You know what?
[23:47:44] gattsu456: Fuck everything.
[23:58:42] Dun 4 Hire: Okay, so Tobi came in at chapter 280...
[23:58:49] Dun 4 Hire: They're now at 599...
[23:58:50] Dun 4 Hire: ...
[23:59:42] Dun 4 Hire: ...
[23:59:47] Dun 4 Hire: ...I just did the math...
[23:59:51] Dun 4 Hire: ...It's 6.5 years...
[00:00:14] gattsu456: What the fuck, man.

And that was three years ago.

That is the ruling after Mattel sued MCA Records for the song Barbie Girl. The judge literally told them to chill.

Me: http://terracannon876.tumblr.com/post/115575169869/toward-eternity-supermattural-stabdaddroog
Me: Who the hell looked at Sherlock and thought, "Well, that's missing Pokemon"?
Peguero: This is one of the less weird things I've seen of Sherlock fans. I'll allow it.
Me: Truth. He and the Pokemon aren't having sex... yet.
Peguero: Let the hiatus get a little longer. They'll start sexing up Pokemon, no doubt.

Looking at all this cool shit I can make from crocheting, I really wanna to take it up, but Jesus Christ I don't have time for that. I've already got over a dozen cross stitch projects lined up, and I haven't even really worked on my embroidery that much. But dammit, I can make cute stuffed animals!

I love how Uchihas get this amazing ability and then just know how to use this shit. I'd need at least ten minutes to orient myself, maybe a day to figure out how this shit works. Then again, it's awoken from battle, so I guess there isn't time for that.

God, Obito seems so fucking cool here, and then you realize what he does later.

I think this is the last time Naruto pulled off a really sneaky, intelligent strategy. After this it was just mostly brute force.

I don't know what any of us were expecting but kazekage wasn't it. I'm surprised he was able to attain that position; Naruto had to learn he couldn't achieve the title in order to gain everyone's recognition, but rather he needed everyone's recognition to achieve the title. Considering people at this point think Gaara's still going to go crazy at any moment, it's odd they selected him.

It's funny how people didn't know how to handle that term initially. Nowadays we'd just translate that line as "your opponent is a jinchuurki."

Greene, remind me to look this up for you to translate later because this shit didn't make sense ten years ago and it doesn't now.

Ohhhhh yeeeaaah, I forgot we couldn't figure out if Deidara was a boy or girl at first.

This is the same scan I read in high school, and it really fucked me up. Whoever the original scanner was did a horrible job. The editor tried his best, but clearly there wasn't much to work with. What's supposed to happen is Deidara mixes his clay spiders with Gaara's sand, and they then emerge from the inside of his cocoon. You can't see jack shit here, so I remained confused as to what happened until I bought the manga.

Kishimoto really likes this weird perspective shot, and sometimes it's effective but at times like this I don't see the point.

Oh wow, remember when everyone was hating on narutofan? Stoptazmo.com came from that. Man, even that site has downloads anymore.

Chiyo starts yelling at them for relying on the Leaf, and I totally agree with her. You have an entire nation of ninjas. Why the hell did you have to wait for three Leaf ninjas to show up before you do any action? Why do you need to send them out alone? Where are all of your dudes?

So each time they extract a bijuu, they just have to sit like that for three days? They can't do anything else? That's kinda insane. Even a sniper needs to stretch at some point.

I don't really understand the rules of Passover. You're not supposed to eat leavened bread, i.e. no yeast can be involved in the process. Okay, that's fine. But then I can't have something like rice (which is just hydration) or popcorn (which is just evaporated water expanding). For that, the idea is those grains weren't known to ancient Israel, so it's best not to eat them at all in case the ancient Israelites would've imposed a ban on them. But the idea at the end of the day is still leavened bread; the whole point of the holiday is to experience the suffering the Jews felt as they fled from Egypt. If you're telling me it's okay to spend hours baking a cake and that passes because it rises using air bubbles and not yeast, but soaking rice grains is not on the off chance it would've offended the sensibilities of a people three thousand years ago, I think you're missing the point.

When I first watched The Lord of the Rings, the impression I got was Frodo's adventure was so much bigger and spectacular compared to Bilbo's. And it is... if you think of The Lord of the Rings as a whole. Sure, the rest of the Fellowship went through crazy shit, but if you think about it Frodo's contribution wasn't nearly as exciting. Yeah, there were times he had to flee from orcs chasing after him or fight a giant spider, but the majority of it was him wandering through the wilderness with Sam and Gollum. Even in Mordor he just had to walk up a mountain. Bilbo on the other hand personally dealt with goblins, broke people out of prison, survived some crazy mountain battle, nearly was killed by a shapeshifter, did negotiations between the dwarves and the elves, and faced a fucking dragon. Frodo accomplished more for society as a whole, but if you look at him personally to Bilbo, Bilbo is the bigger man. Or hobbit rather.

At the beginning of World War I, Great Britain actually had very little to offer France because it was mostly a naval power. Their army in 1914 was probably the best trained and experienced out of all the major participants because of their colonial wars, but it was tiny in comparison to the French and German juggernauts. However it could impose a blockade on Germany and almost immediately wiped the seas clean of German shipping. Initially many thought this to be useless since most believed the war would be done in a few months, but by 1916 whatever food the Central Powers had went straight to the troops and the civilians began to starve.

Germany had one method to end the siege, and that was the U-Boats or basically an early submarine. Sonar hadn't really been invented yet, so the U-Boats could easily just destroy the most expensive of the British battlecruisers and dreadnoughts. There were only two things stopping them: First, they didn't have enough of them to launch an effective attack, so the Germans waited a year until they produced at least 200 of them. Second, the United States. American citizens and merchants were dying in U-Boat attacks, and the Central Powers feared if they pressed too hard, the United States would enter the war. The US hadn't by this point because it had a long, long history of nonintervention (which is incredible when you think about nowadays) and there was a large Irish and German immigrant population, who were anti-Allied.

The Zimmermann Telegram is what tipped the scales. Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Secretary, sent a telegram to his ambassador in Mexico, basically saying they were going to launch the U-Boats pretty soon. If that pisses off the US enough, this ambassador was supposed to approach the Mexican government and offer an alliance, as well as asking Mexico to help Germany convince Japan to switch sides (at that time Japan was with the Allies). Most explosively, Germany said it would help Mexico reclaim Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. The idea was the United States would be too busy fighting Japan and Mexico to help France and Great Britain.

At the beginning of the war Great Britain cut all of Germany's telegraph wires, so they had to employ American ones to send out foreign correspondence. The British figured out a way to tap into that and consequently were pretty much reading all of Germany's top secret messages. Once they revealed what Germany had planned, American citizens were outraged and President Woodrow Wilson, who hemmed and hawed about entering the war, finally did.

What makes the Zimmermann Telegram interesting is its timing. Without that impetus, Wilson may have dithered longer in deciding to mobilize or he may not have at all. If he waited just a few more months, Russia would've fallen to the October Revolution and Germany could turn its undivided attention to the Western Front. By then, even if the United States wanted to help the Allies, by the time it trained and got its troops over there, France and Great Britain may have lost. And then you have to ask all these hypothetical questions, like with a German victory would Hitler have risen? Would World War II have happened? Or paradoxically, would a dictator have appeared in France instead thanks to the reparations demanded by Germany? It's funny how one document changed the course of history.

I don't really mind pranking, but sometimes on April Fools' Day I just get tired. For example, Slashdot today had articles about V'Ger's source code and Martians demanding flu shots. Although they're funny, part of me just wants the damned news. I think places like GameFAQs, which usually had some sort of weird layout, are fine, but when your entire website is overrun with weird shit and I can't get to the actual content after my initial laugh, then it's annoying.