I think the annoying thing about crochet hooks is they come in millimeters, letters, and numbers. So for example, the most commonly-used hook is the 5mm, but in the UK it's sometimes called a size 6 hook. But in the US it's sometimes called an H hook. What's aggravating is every hook I've seen always has just the damned millimeters, and usually they have the UK or US system on the side as an after note; it's usually patterns that rely solely on the letters and numbers. Instead of all this confusion, why not just have the millimeters?

You know, years later, I have no idea why my brother started calling me Dun, and why that has remained my nickname.

You've probably seen some pages of a medieval manuscript but never really considered how they were perceived the Middle Ages. First, paper hadn't been invented yet so the pages were made of vellum. Literally a flock would have to be slaughtered to make a full book, which was expensive. That's why it's rare to find a whole Bible in a medieval library; it's just too much for the whole thing. Then someone has to sit down and write this shit down. Go find some random book. Now copy that entire shit by hand. And remember, you can't use your shit handwriting; this has to be exemplary. Also, there's no premade loose leaf paper back then; you had to measure out the lines yourself. Oh, and do this in a room that has no heating or air conditioning. It's really fucking long, painful, and annoying.

Then consider everything you're copying is in Latin. With abbreviations because the scribe before you was too tired from this shit to write out the full word yourself. So you come across something like "ei" or "i h l." If you don't know Latin that well, how the hell are you supposed to tell from context that stands for enim or in hoc loco? Or even if you did know Latin, how would you know this particular abbreviation? And even if you did have all that knowledge, how are you certain the book you're copying from actually had a learned scribe for that and hadn't made mistakes?

Hence books were sacred things. Some so sacred, they weren't actually supposed to be read but rather just be a holy object in and of itself, like the Book of Kells. Remember, about 99% of the population couldn't read at that point, particularly in the early Middle Ages, so all this shit was just mystical to start out with.

Therefore you can imagine people are pretty possessive of their books. One for the price, one for the labor, and one for the power: You have knowledge from this book that few other people have. That's what happened with St. Columba and St. Finnian, two Irish monks in the 500s. Columba was visiting Finnian's monastery and noticed they had a Psalter in their library. He asked if he could borrow it to read for the night, and during that time he hastily copied the whole thing. If you believe Columba's supporters, his fingers started shining so brightly during the procedure that it filled the whole church. And when a kid came to see what was up with this light show, Columba's pet crane pecked out his eyes for interrupting him. But I digress. Finnian was so pissed off that this had happened and went to King Diarmait to complain, who judged the copy must be returned to Finnian. Columba refused and actually instigated the Uí Néill clan to rebel and have a battle at Cúl Dreimhne. Because so many people died, Columba had to leave Ireland altogether. All this for a Psalter.

So when I hear about copyright issues today, I think: "Well, at least no one's having a pitched battle against the MPAA or RIAA. Because we've gone there."

Saw the lunar eclipse tonight~!! It was super red!!

A recent trend amongst scanlators recently is to put shit in .pdf form. Yep, instead of getting a .zip and looking at all the images, you can get the full chapter in all its glory as a .pdf. This is another method to limit distribution, but I've noticed it doesn't work that well because I still find jpegs in zip files on forums or posted all over online readers. To be honest I don't care about it that much because at least that means they've stopped this stupid password nonsense.

You can see signs that people are writing less letters everywhere. When I was a child, I had a plethora of choices for stationery; now at Barnes & Noble the other day I could only count five letter sets. It's becoming hard to find invitations for my parties. But nowhere more than international fucking stamps. In theory I can buy this, but I cannot fucking find it anywhere. Instead every single post office has international stamps for Christmas, interestingly dated 2013 or even earlier, showing how few people are buying this shit nowadays. That one with the sea temperatures? That's literally the only one USPS is offering that isn't holiday related. I don't want to use Christmas stamps; it's not the fucking season yet!

Octavia Hill was a nineteenth-century social reformer, who particularly worked with public housing. Growing up in poverty herself, she felt the only way to help the poor was for them to become self-reliance instead of receiving government hand outs. As such she herself managed several buildings in urban slums as a sort of experiment for her views, and her method became quite famous in the latter half of the 1800s. It heavily involved personal relations: Hill was the rent collector but also served as a social worker. Ultimately both Great Britain (and other countries like the United States) rejected her ideas and used governmental methods instead, like rent control or whatnot.

I was listening to a podcast about her today, and the show ended with a comment that her reputation since the 1980s has improved as people noticed problems with our current system, but I don't think her methodology was the best either. Remember, her idea was self-reliance. She worked out with the landlord that he would get a 5% cut from the rents and everything else would be invested in the building itself. And to show the tenants where the money was going, they themselves were personally involved in its upkeep. One person whitewashed the walls. One person was in charge of the flowers in the windows. One person fixed broken stairwells.

Nowadays we've become so specialized it's hard to imagine everyone living in a building having all the skills needed for this. Hill would approach a tenant and ask, "What do you do?" "I work at McDonald's." That's great for creating delicious French fries, but not so great at installing new windows. Also, we're so damned busy now. After coming home from a long day's work, the last shit I need is someone telling me I need to repaint in the lobby. Even on my days off, that shit sounds terrible. There were also social requirements, like communal after-school programs for children.

And if you didn't like it, you couldn't get away because they were all up in your business. Remember, Hill served a a rent-collector/social worker. She would literally enter people's homes thrice weekly to inspect it and ask about your family situation. There was no way to hide. Even though nowadays people are open with their lives on social media, I think we'd all freak out if your landlord's representative was having a long chat with you three times a week about why you aren't furthering your career better.

Doing this required a large staff; compared to the system nowadays which just needs one dude stamping paperwork, you need an army of people who can talk to parents, chase down truant children, find doctors and such for the sick. Although I guess it did create a community, I think nowadays people would just find that exhausting.

I want you to imagine for a moment a horrible disaster happened somewhere in the United States, and the only place for people to flee is a Native American reservation and they were expected to remain there for a long period of time, perhaps years and years, as they waited for their home to return to normal. I think we can all agree we'd be understanding if the Native Americans, who experienced great brutality at the hands of white settlers, were pretty upset at this prospect and were not very welcoming.

Although the analogy isn't exact, that's what came into my head when I looked at the situation in Hungary. I'm willing to bet no one reading this knows Hungarian history that well, so I'll give a run down: The Hungarians were originally an Asian-steppe people who settled in modern-day Hungary some time in the 700s. As the Middle Ages progressed, a confederation of tribes coalesced eventually in a kingdom, which later flourished during the Renaissance.

And then the Ottoman Turks came.

For about a period of two hundred years, Hungary became a battlefield as the Ottomans pushed into Europe. The Hungarians suffered from deportations, massacres, loss of land and urban centers. Even after the Ottomans were expelled, the Austrians annexed them until the end of World War I. They briefly had independence until World War II, after which they were under the auspices of the Soviets.

So you can understand why these guys are particularly protective of their country. For about five hundred years now they've been battered by other people. And now suddenly tens of thousands of foreigners, who are either descendants of or similar to the Ottomans who ripped their country apart for two centuries, are showing up on their doorstep, demanding access. They're not like Great Britain or France who almost always were in control of their own nation and even were conquerors overseas. Most of Hungarian history and culture has been on the defensive.

Like the Native Americans, morally the Hungarians should be the bigger man and let them inside. The people who are suffering now at the borders have nothing to do with what happened in the past. But it's still understandable if they're not.

Starting in iOS 7, the iPhone and iPad had something called the "control center," which was a little tab at the bottom of the screen that allows you to easily turn on the Bluetooth, control your mp3s, or whatever without having to go to their individual app:

It's useful, yes, but at the time and still occasionally now I become annoyed because the way to access it is to swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Except often when I'm reading the newspaper, books, etc. I'm constantly trying to swipe up and instead I get this control center. Eventually I got used to it and it's not too much of an issue now.

With the most recent iOS 9, they added this "split screen" feature that allows you to use to apps at once. That sounds amazing for me because I'm constantly switching between my flashcard app and notebook app when I'm studying. Except there's a basic design flaw. You have to swipe from the right of the screen toward the left to open it. That's exactly the same motion as when you have to delete something, like an email or note. It's not like the control center; to scroll down it doesn't matter where my finger is on the screen, so I trained myself not to touch the lowest part so as not to open the control center. In this, both motions are on the far right. And why do that? Why not make it the left side of the screen? There's literally no motion on that side. Why disregard that?

I have a thing where I hate the "greatest hits" edition of games. In reality there shouldn't be any difference, but not seeing that black stripe on a Playstation game, or the horrible cover on a Japanese game... it just bugs me. I've been wanting to buy Mario Kart 8 for a while now, both for having a Mario Kart game (the last one I bought was for the GameCube) and for its famous Luigi death glare meme, but I've only been able to find this greatest hits version with a red case that doesn't match the usual Wii U blue cases. I've literally been looking everywhere: GameStop, amazon, J&L, Target, Book Off... Then I find out it actually was released with a red box. For a moment I got angry for lack of uniformity but then I'm like, "Well, I guess it's like those NES gold cartridges back in the day." I should try to see the better side of things. For example, at least it's not the Arkham City Game of the Year Edition cover.

If [a woman] wishes to conceive a male, let her husband take the womb and vagina of a hare and let him dry them, and let him mix the powder with wine and drink it. Similarly, let the woman do the same thing with the testicles of a hare, and at the end of her period let her lie with her husband and then she will conceive a male.^*

Considering what we know of modern medicine and the impossibility of ancient man to understand the mechanism behind chromosomes, I've seen dozens and dozens of different methods to conceive a son ranging from staring at statues of men to drinking bull semen. What was stated above is one of the more mild procedures out there, although still crazy when you think about it: "Would you like to drink this wine spiced with hare womb and vagina?" Still, what threw me through the loop is when I did some research into this and found people are still doing some crazy shit even though we all know by this point how the baby's sex is determined. Oh well, humanity is humanity at the end of the day.

^* Medieval Science and Technology, Elspeth Whitney (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004): 181.

Learning crochet reminds me of World of Warcraft. Instead of knowing what "shammy lvl 60 LFG BRD" means, I now know what "hk 3 times, *sk 2, Thdc tbl in next ch 4 times" means.

I was thinking today: Right now I'm playing Tales of Hearts R and Tales of Symphonia. I'm not done yet with Tales of Xillia 2, and after Tales of Symphonia, I have to play the second game. That is, after at least four playthroughs of the first to get 100%. And Zestiria is coming out next month.

And Greene wonders why I don't play Persona games. My soul is already fucking consumed.

So here's the problem with water-based decals: They move so long as there's water on them. That seems pretty obvious, but that almost means after you're done with one and you're adding a second one right next to it, like literally they're overlapping, the water from the second decal will go onto the other and then you have two moving around all over the place like assholes. I have no idea why anyone thought these would be a great idea.

Footnotes are tricky to pin down because the general idea is "cite something that you yourself took from something else instead of creating it on your own." That's great and all, but considering a huge portion of our knowledge is learning from someone else, that's kinda hard to figure out. For example, let's look at this paragraph:

During the American Revolution in 1776, George Washington was Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. He faced funding difficulties and many times his soldiers were without pay or proper equipment. After being forced from Boston and New York, he won some victories against the British in New Jersey before culminating his victory at Saratoga and Yorktown with the help of the French. Later he became the first President of the United States and served two terms before retiring to a quiet life in the country.

I could literally put a footnote on every single sentence because I never personally did the research into any of that; I just got it from history class. And even if I did, I'd still have to cite all the letters and papers from the 1700s to prove my point. So usually another rule states, "Don't put a footnote on common knowledge." Except "common knowledge" is really vague. I knew all that shit off the top of my head, but knowing students and history I doubt most of them would be able to. So for that audience would I have to write that down?

Let's take another example: My professor complained that I didn't have a citation for 1000 AD as the year Iceland converted to Christianity. I countered practically anyone even remotely acquainted with Icelandic history would know that since it's an easy date; being a medievalist he should've known that. Because then what? Should I prove 1066 was the Battle of Hastings? 732 was the Battle of Tours? 800 was when Charlemagne became emperor? Yeah, none of those dates are "common knowledge," but considering this paper is between myself and my medieval history professor, I thought this would be a given.

To this day I still have no idea when I should add these because you have to make an assumption about your audience, which is a very tricky matter. I've seen papers go overboard and have more space dedicated to footnotes than actual paper. Or those that have too few and I can't check out the source. So I suspect no one really knows and it has to be by discretion, which leads you to having arguments with your professor over whether 1000 AD is a thing.

Found this off of Failbook

I've seen this type of statement floating around the internet, and I don't think it's really fair. If you try to use modern moral standards, there's no country on earth that's ever been great.

Take Italy. Their great time was the Roman Empire... when they invaded and slaughtered millions of people to create it, then used most of the POWs to generate slave labor. On top of that most of even the native Roman population couldn't vote. Women definitely didn't have equal rights to men.

Egypt's great period also employed slave labor (as well all well know), was subject to the whimsical desires of a pharaoh and his family, which often used incest as a method to keep the bloodline pure. God knows they committed war atrocities.

What about the Turkish great period? You mean the part where they invaded another kingdom to create the Ottoman Empire? Or how they would often forcibly take Christian babies from their parents and convert them to Islam to be part of the sultan's elite infantry, the Janissaries?

Or what about the Aztecs? We don't even have to fucking think that hard. Their goddamned religion meant they killed a goddamned person at least once a week to keep the sun moving.

China's had several great periods, and pretty much all of them used Confucianism or something similar to keep women in line. They also demanded the majority of the population to give free labor as part of their taxes, and many of them died in the process. Bribery was pretty much a thing, which meant even with a meritocracy most of the population couldn't get ahead since they didn't have the cash.

You can't look at history from your own position too hard because then there's really nothing good about pretty much anything. What society hasn't put women in an inferior position? Or been prejudiced against another religion/ethnicity? Or had some form of slavery? Or condoned child abuse? Or unjustly conquered another land? Or did war crimes in the process? No one can say they've done none of these things at some point. And although we're getting better than before, it's not going to end anytime soon. If you're thinking we've had a utopia out there at some point in the past, you're delusional.

For me The only real appeal of tablets over laptops is it's easier to browse online manga readers in bed. I remember back in the day I would literally take my entire Dell Inspiron and would figure out the ideal position on my chest as I lounged in bed; occasionally I would even lie that huge thing on its side when I wanted to change positions. Tablets streamlined this process being small, lightweight, and the ideal proportions for a manga page, but I've been countering problems in the past year.

Apple and Apple fans tout that iPads cannot get adware or viruses, which I guess technically is true, but their adblocker is a piece of shit. When you literally can't view a website, you know something is wrong. Literally loading the page would pull up a pop-up page, which then immediately sends me to the app store. If I try to return to the page, it just does the shit again. At one point, I literally had to delete my entire history and cookies because I was caught in an infinite loop of moving me to the app store.

Admittedly some websites are better than others. Batoto, for example, doesn't have this problem at all, but it's nonprofit. Many online readers now are for-profit, so they're willing to pull in crazy advertisers who makes these sorts of annoying "features." Unfortunately they're the ones which usually have the largest libraries (they give monetary incentives for uploaders I think), so they're the only ones worth browsing. I don't mind advertising, but just not the ones that prevent me from doing what I wanted to go to the website for in the first place.

In case you're wondering, water-based decals are hard a bitch to apply. Wow. Jesus Christ.

I was talking with Greene today and about my c.2006 list of games I didn't beat and how I wasn't allowed to buy a new one until every single one on that list was finished. It failed miserably and in retrospect I don't know how I was gonna do that. It got me thinking though, and here is a list of the games I still need to beat (bold is games I owned before but still have not rebought):

• Assassin's Creed III
• Assassin's Creed III: Liberation
• Batman: Arkham Knight
• Breath of Fire III
• Breath of Fire IV
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
• Cooking Mama 5: Bon Appetit!
• Devil May Cry 1-3 (ehhh... I may have someone else play that at my house and I'll watch)
• Disgaea
• Disgaea 2
• Donkey Kong 64
• Elebits
• Fable II
• Fable III
• Feel the Magic
• Final Fantasy I
• Final Fantasy II
• Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Edition
• Final Fantasy XIII-2
• Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns
• Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions
• Gardening Mama 2: Forest Friends
• Grandia
• Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning
• Harvest Moon: Animal Parade
• Harvest Moon DS: Grand Bazaar
• Harvest Moon DS: Sunshine Islands
• Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley
• Hyrule Warriors
• ICO
• Kirby Superstar Ultra
• The Legend of Zelda: Link Awakening DX
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
• The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D
• Luigi's Mansion
• Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon
• Luminous Arc
• Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
• New Super Mario Bros.
• Ni no Kuni (just need to finish sidequests)
• Okamiden (...probably not)
• Paper Mario: Sticker Strip
• Patapon (yeah, I'm probably never going to beat that)
• Saints Row 2
• SaGa Frontier
• Sonic Generations
• Sword of Mana
• Tales of Destiny 2
• Tales of Hearts R
• Tales of Rebirth
• Tales of Symphonia 2
• Tales of VS
• Tales of Xillia 2 (just 100%ing it)
• Touch My Katamari
• Valkyria Chronicles
• Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth
• Viva Piñata (get the dragon...!)
• Wild ARMs 3

God... and this is just console games. This is probably double the length of the list I made about ten years ago. Wow, looking at it now it feels insurmountable...

Back in the day, maybe 2003ish to about 2008ish, I would actually get most of my BL from IRC. This was before the online manga sites like OneManga, MangaReaders, etc. became big or cloud services were offered by 4Share, Mega, or MediaFire. IRC died out thanks to these services, and I can understand why: Distributors didn't have to maintain a server and it was easier for the users to press a link instead of learning how to use IRC.

Still, I found it had its pros. Link decay is a really big problem in the manga world considering most scanlation groups die out after two years, and if no one's uploading it, you're fucked. It was also easier to just get a whole person's collection at once instead of tediously going to each group's site. Some people didn't just have manga but also anime or OSTs. I would spend about ten minutes queuing up everything and then the next hour just doing whatever as it ran seamlessly in the background.

I think the best system would be a combination of both, but when I went to the old IRC channels they're pretty much dead now. I may just not know the new ones, but I haven't seen groups proudly posting their channel on their main page in years; the only place I can think of that actively still uses it is Nipponsei, and they don't do manga. For BL at least I think it's recent obsession with controlling distribution because of online readers, so the thought of someone else hosting their shit on their own server probably wouldn't be attractive to them. Still, using Nipponsei recently made me realize the advantages back then that I've lost.

Metal Gear Ray completed.

It feels much more fragile and loose than the Rex, and most disappointingly whenever you want to put it in different modes (e.g. closed mouth, on its knees), you have to remove several parts and replace them with others instead of just having one part that can move around. Still, it's on the easy end of the model scale.

Why did Google change its icon? I don't recall anyone ever complaining about its design, ever. And now that they've done it, the general consensus is negative. Don't fix what isn't broke.

I'd really like to see how autocorrect was programmed because I get really confused at the results sometimes. We're/were is a good example; it doesn't seem that difficult if a word is preceded by you, we, or they, the following should not be "we're," and yet my phone often tries to convince me that's the case. I've heard that phones learn from what you write, e.g. if I spell my name repeatedly it'll recognize it as a word, but like Babelfish and Google Translate I feel technology hasn't quite gotten to where the computer has surpassed the human. Still, the little mistakes bug me because they seem to easily fixable.

Earlier this week I was working in the garden when a man came out of his pickup truck and beckoned me over. When I inquired what he wanted he said money, and upon replying I didn't have any he said he wanted to know if I'm selling the house. When I said no, he drove away and I shrugged it off as an odd yet minor incident.

Until today when I noticed he was standing across the street, watching the house. Not moving. For several hours.

It reminded me of a tumblr post I read several months ago of a woman complaining that a man was in his car, watching her work in her front lawn, most likely for sexual pleasure. When she approached him and said to knock it off, he said he could do what he wanted. So she took his license plate number and called the police, and became indignant when the police said the man was in the right; he legally wasn't doing anything wrong. She received support from the user base, who decried the police as useless and leaving women subject to stalking and whatnot.

I'm with the police on this one. Although I didn't like how the guy was just standing there observing the inhabitants of the house, he really wasn't doing anything but watching. He's not peering through my bedroom window as I change clothes. He's not walking up and down my driveway. It's weirding me out a bit, but that's within his rights. Because what is the alternative? Do the police haul you off for making someone else unsettled? That's why we have problems with blacks being forced out of parks or removed for loitering even though they're not doing anything wrong. Yeah, it may be strange that a ghetto kid is walking through this high-class neighborhood, but that doesn't mean he can't.

It's harder to prevent crime rather than react to one that's already done because outside of incidents with a guy wandering around with a gun, you don't really know the intentions of the individual. And even if they're thinking about it, they haven't have acted yet. And maybe if you think they have bad intentions, you've misinterpreted the situation. It's such a fuzzy thing that there's no way we can quantify it in a law that police can actually act upon.

So yeah, you shouldn't be creepy, but simultaneously I recognize your right to be creepy.

After I was done with the Shakespeare reading I had a conclusion post, but for Naruto I think I summed up my feelings for the series pretty well back in May. The only thing I should add is Harry Potter really does come out on top; it was never physically painful for me to continue on reading. I literally dreaded the half hour each week spent reading twenty chapters in the latter half the series. Kishimoto, what the hell did you do to your own work...?

I'm gonna have to take a break from this type of shit for a bit, but maybe I should do it again with something else. Harry Potter? Reborn?

The last funny moment of the series, which I think was aight. It was no Dynamic Entry, but still a good set up. Seriously though, you've spent more time on this than rasengan? How much time do you need to perfect a henge?

It's nice and all that Obito and Kakashi had a final conversation together, but I really fucking wish this happened before he died because now all I'm thinking is, "How the hell do you come back from the dead like that? 'Our chakra has the power to connect both worlds'? That sounds like a stupid fucking excuse."

I liked it earlier before Naruto became powerful, and he had a very limited set of jutsu but was able to use it in interesting and clever ways, but I'll say this is probably my favorite jutsu of his in the entire series. Pretty fucking cool.

God, that's gotta be awkward. He's in the middle of having sex with Hinata or something and suddenly there's a bijuu meeting inside of him.

There Sasuke, now you know what fucking friendship is. Before your family died you didn't have any goddamned friends at all? You weren't an unlikable kid. Why the hell does Naruto have to teach you this shit?

I love how they kept his mask even on the goddamn monument. You know, the point of the mask is to hide your identity. But if you're wearing a mask 24/7, it's no longer hiding anything.

You know what I didn't get? Why Naruto's kids have those whiskers. I thought it was related to the kyuubi and all considering neither of his parents had that.

...

...

Oh my god, am I done?

I'm done!

(/゜o゜)

Guess what really loves petunias? Fucking pill bugs. I learned that today when I started pulling some petunias out and got about three dozen of the little shits all over me. Mom thought I was being attacked by a rapist because of my screams.