Playing the South Park: Stick of Truth game. Here's a sample:

In Rurouni Kenshin, a great deal was made of his weapon, the sakabataou or reverse-blade sword. It symbolized Kenshin's desire to never kill again because the blade was on the upper side that never hit people, meaning the wielder could not slash as easily to deliver a death blow.

When I was reading this over a decade ago, I felt this didn't make sense and I'm still unsettled now. Even if the blade is on the wrong side, you still have a fucking metal sword. That shit can kill people. It's like beating someone with a lead pipe. It's just as deadly, but now it's slower since you slash with a dull edge.

Back in the 1997 my dad took me to the park to observe the Hale-Bopp Comet. I recall being surprised that it was static in the sky and nothing like the shooting stars I saw on TV, not realizing that comets and meteors were completely different things. Hale-Bopp was named after the two people who discovered at about the same time in 1995, Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp. Bopp was an amateur astronomer, whereas Hale had a Ph.D. in the field. I say "Ph.D." and not "professional astronomer" because he wasn't working then. Using the publicity he received from his discover, Hale made several statements about how it's impossible for many scientists to find jobs. This did not make him popular within the scientific community, which is always trying to get people to enter the field.

I've been thinking about the STEM vs. humanities fight for a long time. For over a thousand years in the west (and I'd argue elsewhere) humanities reigned supreme to the point of ridiculousness; Galileo was silenced even with empirical proof. I feel the pendulum has swung too far the other way. You'll see lots of videos about how science is cool, which is totally is, but I think learning about medieval theology is totally cool too. With science you can discover how atoms form to create the world around us. Or why a platypus lays its eggs. Or how a comet works. But with theology, I can see how Christianity evolved. And how it helped Europe's transition from a polytheistic, Roman world into a fragmented, Romano-German one. And why the society I live in is how it is.

There's a perception of humanities' uselessness — after all, who uses their English major in their career? — and yeah, many of them are outside of an academic context. Before people who studied history, theology, philosophy, or whatever had wealthy patrons to support them, which we don't really do anymore. But simultaneously I want to say STEM faces the same prospects too. There are so many mysteries out there in the universe that we should have tens of thousands of astronomers working round the clock. Except, like having a specialist of Kierkegaard's ideas on faith, our society doesn't think having lots of people studying the Oort Cloud to be particularly useful, particularly when it's much more expensive buying an astronomer his fancy tools. Yeah, there many fields in STEM that are great and profitable — doctors, engineers, chemists, programmers — but going into it doesn't necessarily guarantee you're going to be successful. There's still the question you have to ask: How much does society feel it needs you?

Mom on the Bible:

"Even God hates vegetarians. He rejected Cain's offering and accepted Abel's! He didn't want his dumb vegetables and grain. He wanted good meat. And you can't trust vegetarians. Cain killed his brother when it didn't go his way."

dundun: FUCK THESE DOGS
dundun: WHAT FUCKING DOG AM I MISSING
dundun: WHAT FUCKING DOG DID YOU NOT NAME, COLETTE?
Slidikins: THE CLASSIC

An hour later:

dundun: FUCKING ISELIA
dundun: IT WAS IN FUCKING ISELIA.
Slidikins: wow.

Fuck snow.

I think the worst part of today is shoveling for three hours to clear a path on the sidewalk and driveway, and then that shit being covered in less than half an hour.

That's it. I've decided. Finnish is a fake language. Now, you may protest, but I can assure you it isn't real.

This week I went to buy my French textbooks. I've been studying it for years. I've read academic papers, watched news programs, and played video games in this language. I can figure shit out. But I'm still too nervous to use it in real life. So when I went to the clerk I asked for the book in English. And the guy just gave me this look that said, "Seriously? You're in this advanced class and you're still communicating with me like a bastard Englishman?" and spoke to me in French during the entire transaction as I sweat nervously.

I'm decades late, but I just found out about Quattro Vagina in Zeta and I can't really get over it, so I've been informing everyone:

[20:45:57] Turinturambar200: so let me tell you about way back in the past when 4chan's /m/ had a Saigar competition
[20:46:03] Turinturambar200: well, /m/ and /a/
[20:46:14] Turinturambar200: and at one point, it was Char vs Quattro
[20:46:25] Turinturambar200: and Char ultimately won out because "no one wants to vote for a Vagina"

dundun: Most of SFII's music was done by Shimomura Yoko?
dundun: Kingdom Hearts girl?
dundun: Did not know that.
Rizhall: It's surprising when you look up all the old composers and shit.
Rizhall: ... Except Uematsu.
Rizhall: Everyone knows everything he's done.
dundun: I don't think people knew he did Tom Sawyer.
Rizhall: That's true..
dundun: Man, I really want to hear the music from that game.
dundun: What the fuck happened in that game?!
Rizhall: I wonder if there's a battle theme for that shit.
dundun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHceFHU7d3g
Rizhall: ...
Rizhall: 0:36: WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT.
Rizhall: HOLY SHIT.
dundun: That, my friend.
dundun: Is the black man.
Rizhall: JESUS CHRIST.
dundun: You know what?
Rizhall: We gotta show Reggie.
dundun: I don't think a white person can draw a better caricature.
Rizhall: Yo, imagine if this game came out in America.
dundun: I think we now know why it didn't.
Rizhall: Jesus.

If you hadn't been paying attention to the news, the Powerball lottery reached $1.5B this week. What was funny is reading analysts saying after taxes you'd only get something like $900M. Bitch, only $900M? I'd fucking be happy with $10K.

I keep on freaking out whenever I see there are live actions for yaoi manga I used to read back in the day. Man, this shit used to be pretty underground, and now it's popular enough to get actors to do this shit? And sometimes I wonder why that particular series was chosen because it's definitely inferior to another, or I wonder whether some subpar manga was actually popular enough to justify this. Either way this situation is bizarre.

Robert A. Caro has written several massive volumes on Lyndon Johnson, and I suspect that his books will be considered the pinnacle of Johnson biographies for the next few centuries. Not only are they thoroughly researched (he spends about a decade writing each volume), but because he's a journalist and not a historian, his prose is gripping and interesting for the masses. That being said, what I've learned about Johnson is he was a massive asshole. I would never, ever want to work for him because he's so terrible to the people around him.

However his dickishness is sometimes hilarious:

When, during his presidency, a woman reporter wrote critical articles about him, he would tell White House counsel Harry McPherson, "What that woman needs is you. Take her out. Give her a good dinner and a good fuck." And, McPherson would learn, the President wasn't kidding. Joseph A Califano Jr., to whom McPherson related about the incident, writes that "Periodically the President would ask McPherson if he'd taken care of the reporter. Every time she took even the slightest shot at the President, he'd call Harry and tell him to go work on her." .... Califano writes that, "LBJ made a similar suggestion when I advised him of the problems James Gaither, an aide on my staff, was having on Edith Green, the irascible Democratic congresswoman from Oregon.... Johnson became irritated with our inability to deal with her. In exasperation one evening he said to me, 'Goddamn it! You've been trying to drag me into this thing when I've got a hundred other problems. Well, I'm going to tell you how to get our bill. There's no point in my calling that woman. Gaither is a good-looking boy. You tell him to call up Edith and ask her to brunch this Sunday. Then he can take her out, give her a couple of Bloody Marys, and go back to her apartment with her. Then you know what he does? Tell him to spend the afternoon in bed with her and she'll support any Goddamn bill he wants."^*

^* Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 147.

Okay, new rule: If you have a pseudonym on a social network, you are required to keep it forever. I am fucking sick and tired of people completely changing their icon and name simultaneously and I have no idea who they are and why I'm following them.

I can't think of a single historian who thinks of Elizabeth the Virgin Queen of England as a bad monarch. She's generally praised as being able to steer England on a moderate course as the Reformation tore up Europe and usher in an epoch of English culture that's now referred to as the Elizabethan Age. There are some who criticize her actions on occasion — she was prone to procrastinate making decisions and her steadfast refusal to name an heir could've unraveled the peace in the country — but overall most consider her to be one of the greatest rulers in English history.

I was thinking about this when the Princeton and Woodrow Wilson thing blew up. Wilson was briefly president of the university before entering politics, and Princeton honored him with several buildings in his name. Black students in the college were upset because he maintained the rule of accepting only white Christians, and felt it was racially insensitive to celebrate him.

Wilson did a lot of shit during his presidency. He helped end the First World War. He along with Clemenceau and Lloyd George practically divided up the world map afterward. He tried to found the League of Nations. He helped start the Federal Reserve. He did a lot of trust busting. He advocated for increased ages and benefits for the working class. Because of that I wouldn't say that he was a bad president. On a presidential scale I'd actually say he was a good one even if he failed on several fronts. Definitely no one would say he's shit like Harding.

Which brings me back to Elizabeth. Remember, she's in a Protestant country during the Reformation. Although she said she wasn't willing to form an Inquisition to ensure the populace was Protestant, if you were caught being Catholic it could turn out really bad. Like physical mutilation or execution bad. If Elizabeth lived in today's age, she undoubtedly would be denounced on the human rights front. But as a Catholic I'm not that pissed at her. Considering the tone of the time, again she was a moderate. And even if she weren't, that was the tone of the time. The shit Protestants and Catholics did to each other is regrettable, deplorable, and reprehensible, but I'm not angry at them. They're part of the progression of human society. We went from slaughtering an entire city of people for no reason at all, to killing someone because they believed in praying to saints but not killing his wife and kids, to today. And even today we have problems, but we're also part of the progression.

That's why I felt it was unfair on Wilson. On the racism scale in the early 1900s he wasn't terrible. Yeah, he preferred segregation and definitely didn't think highly of blacks, but he didn't want lynchings or slavery. But I'm not really expecting him to toe the line of the early 2000s. He was a person of his time. And I don't think his views on race outweighs everything else that he did. It's like Elizabeth; I wish she didn't persecute Catholics, but her other actions outshone that. If she were only known for her religious persecution like her older sister Mary, then that'd be another thing. It'd be like having a dorm in Princeton named after Hitler.

But if you start nitpicking every single person from history with our levels of morality, then there will literally be almost no one left on earth to admire. I'll admit I don't know much about Mary Wollstonecraft's views on race considering she wrote about feminism, but I'm willing to bet because she was English and lived in the 1700s she wouldn't invite them into her house. Ashoka is renowned in Buddhism for being a just king in accordance with its tenents, but he got that position by killing all of his brothers. Geronimo is hailed as one of the final warriors against the white invasion, but he's also credited with killing Mexican children. People from history haven't lived in our time. I'd be surprised if they were like us. I can frown on their actions, but I also have to look at it through the lens of that period.

There was at least one moment of greater drama still, when an enraged [Senator Thomas] Benton left his desk and advanced on diminutive southern Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi during an especially angry exchange, and Foote drew a pistol; the old frontier brawler did not pause but continued striding toward him, shouting, "I have no pistols. Let him fire! Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!" until finally Senator Dickerson of New Jersey took the pistol out of Foote's hand.^*

When members of the legislature are moments away from shooting each other, that's a bad sign the government may be unraveling. The moment described above was on the eve of the Civil War, so it can show how it's a rapid descent to the nadir of a country. Although we're all complaining about how poorly congress is functioning today, at least with all their partisan bickering no one's killed anyone else. That was one of the first steps toward the end of the Roman Republic: The Gracchi brothers tried to change the property laws in Roman to favor the poor and other members of the Senate literally beat them to death on the street. Once you've stepped over that line, political assassinations became commonplace until finally an emperor had to come out on top to stop all this quarreling and Rome never went back.

Still, when I read this I couldn't help but feel this shit would've been much more entertaining than anything I see on C-SPAN today. Man, Benton had fucking balls. I'm trying to think of a single senator nowadays who would just walk toward a guy pointing a gun at him and I'm not coming up with anyone.

^* Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 21.

It kinda freaks me out knowing I'm older than the Notorious B.I.G.

You know what I never really understood about Issun from Okami? When you're large he's bouncing all over the place like a bug, but when Amaterasu meets him face to face he walks around like a normal person. I was looking forward to seeing him make long jumps like a crazy person.

You know, I have to give it to Zelos: I didn't really suspect he was a spy until the last moments. As I'm replaying it I can tell he knows more than he's letting on, but it's not necessarily about his work with the Renegades or Cruxis. Sometimes it's to protect Regal's past from leaking out. In terms of spies though, Anise still comes out on top. You really didn't figure it out until the final moments.

The Associated Press works as a news agency that writes articles not for readers but rather for newspapers. Imagine you're a small town newspaper. You probably have a good enough budget to send a reporter to the capital and cover the governor's speech, but not enough to Washington for Obama's. That's when AP steps in: The small town editor can pay them for snippet about whatever Obama was talking about, tweak it a little to fit their regional interests, and publish it in that morning's paper. You've probably seen them credited before if not in articles than in photographs of important news because they're so widely used.

I've known about this for a long time, but I've never appreciated it more until I started reading lots of different papers. Before if you asked me the most important ones in the country, I would've probably listed The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. When I tried to peruse them on a daily basis, only half of them were able to provide detailed accounts of important international events. The articles they did produce were impressive and well-researched, but the narrow breadth of topics surprised me.

It all comes down to money. The internet age really did fuck up the news business and I'm worried a bit about our generation because we often receive news through social media, i.e. you're getting your articles from your friends, who probably already agree with your standpoint and have similar interests. What's great about watching the evening news or pulling up a paper during your commute is they have everything that happened right there, whether you care about it or not, and you're forced on some level as your browse headlines to know what's happening. But a lot of us aren't paying a monthly fee for a subscription and are relying on the free articles we're linked to.

In order to provide a certain level of news, you need enough people paying. How much do you think it costs to hire a reporter full-time to run all over Nigeria and see what Boko Haram is doing? Or an entire staff to uncover what's happening in Washington? Or get photographers to risk their lives and take poignant images of the atrocities in Syria? Or have an analyst explain Abeconomics and deflation in Japan? This shit isn't cheap. That's why why 24-hour news channels waste their time reading twitter posts or having a round table discussion of pundits; it's much less expensive than actually going out there and reporting the news. If we want to get good quality information, we're going to have to be willing to pay for it.

At hour five in the process of taking down the Christmas tree, I had an existential crisis about why the hell do we bother to do anything.

I'm behind on my diary entries, so each day I've been jotting down a few notes about what I've done so I can remember when I catch up. Usually it's something like "Zestiria extra dungeon Sophie and Jade" or "set up lights in the front." I opened Evernote to see what I needed to write about and came across this:

"Animal testicles."

What the hell does that even mean? What happened? What the fuck did I do???

*update*
dundun: I REMEMBER NOW
dundun: THOSE TOYS WE FOUND IN TARGET
dundun: WITH THE COCKS
Rizhall: OH SHIT
Rizhall: YEAH

Shortly after the fire I went through our homeowner's insurance pretty thoroughly and discovered precisely what we are and are not covered for. Insurance isn't a general safety net; there are different packages and you have to pay extra for stuff like expensive jewelry. One thing we were not covered for was earthquakes.

Which makes sense if you think about it. Insurance works if everyone pays even if they're not in trouble. The company is able to take the proceeds from everyone who doesn't have shit happen to them to pay for those who do. In my case it's easily coverable because I was an isolated incident in a city of millions of people. If that city with millions of people is simultaneously hit by an earthquake, the insurance company goes bankrupt sending checks for all of those destroyed homes at once. So if you want earthquake coverage, you need to pay a higher premium annually for it to be economically feasible for them.

And that's the problem Obamacare is facing today. Because of the bipartisan fights to get this out, the bill didn't require everyone to sign up and instead would just fine them in taxes. So the people who immediately joined Obamacare were sick people, whereas the healthy are choosing the fine because it's cheaper or their local insurer doesn't give good options. But that also means that some insurance companies are now going out of business because they don't have enough healthy people paying to cover the sick.

It's a tricky problem. National health coverage would be great, but financially it's not working out as smooth as we'd hoped. There are things we can try like trying to rein in health costs or maybe force everyone to sign up for health insurance instead of just fining them, although the latter was shot down by the Supreme Court. Republican governors are becoming more receptive to Obamacare, but that doesn't help the sick/healthy dilemma.

I feel the issue has become so politicized that each side is unwilling to see anything out of their own party's stance. There is a health problem in this country, and we should address it. Conversely talking about costs doesn't necessarily make you a demon. Unfortunately this debate has already gone into crazy territory on both sides, so I'm not really certain a solution is possible any time soon.

I forgot to mention something about Hearts: puzzles. Why did games start dropping those in dungeons? I've noticed many times dungeons are just linear paths with the occasional split between a treasure and the way forward, but that's it. Puzzles help ameliorate the monotony of walking forward. I'm not saying they have to be Wild ARMs level of difficulty, i.e. damned near impossible unless you have a FAQ, but a little block-moving problem would be sufficient. Hearts was the level of difficulty I wanted, and for that I give it props.

Old English's status in the Middle Ages is interesting compared to other lay languages. Latin of course was king and would remain so until shortly after the Enlightenment, but often monks would eschew their native tongue entirely for it. In England however there was a royal program to translate many texts into English to better educate the scholars who aren't very good at some language from a distant land. After all inhabitants of the British Isles were not as fortunate as those from France or Italy: They didn't speak a Romance language. Ælfric of Eynsham was a 10th century scholar who was one of these translators, and his preface to the book of Genesis is fascinating because he explains his hesitation to do so:

Once I knew some priest, who was my teacher at the time, and he had the book of Genesis and could understand the Latin in part; then he said the patriarch Jacob had four wives — two sisters and their two handmaids. He spoke very truthfully, but he did not know, nor did I yet, how much difference is between the old law and the new. In the beginning of this world the brother took his sister as his wife, and sometimes the father begat with his own daughter, and many also had more than one wife, and in the beginning one could not take a wife except from his siblings. If anyone wants to live after Christ’s coming just as men lived before Moses' law or under Moses' law, this person is not a Christian, nor is he even worthy of being able to eat with any Christian. Then uneducated priests, if they understand only a little of their Latin books, then would immediately think that they could be great teachers; but they did not know the spiritual meaning there however, and how the old law was a sign of coming things, or how the New Testament after Christ's incarnation was a fulfillment of the what the Old Testament signaled about Christ and his chosen.

If you look at the Old Testament, there is some pretty fucked up shit in there. Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy explains in detail laws laid down by God that any modern person would think is terrible. From very early on Christians tried to grapple with the dichotomy between what was socially acceptable for Jews in ancient times and what they would consider just in their own time. Some sects like Marcionism rejected the Old Testament outright and didn't add it to their canon. However its power placed it in mainstream Christianity, but most church fathers agreed that the laws stated no longer applied because Jesus created a new law that overrode the old. As the centuries passed theologians would see many of the crazy rules as either an allegory or sign of Jesus' coming. St. Barnabas in particular loved doing that; he believe that Abraham had 318 servants (Gen. 14:14) was a spelling for "Jesus."

But if you tell people that scripture is sacred, they're going to believe everything in it is. That's what Ælfric was worried about: If uneducated people start reading the Bible, then you're going to get a bunch of crazy people practicing polygamy or fucking their daughters or what have you. Part of the reason why the Catholic Church kept a very, very tight lid on the Bible and insisted it be read in Latin was to retain their power, don't get me wrong, but it was also a legitimate worry. Because what happened when the Protestant Reformation happened? There's only one Catholic Church, but there are many, many, many, many Protestant sects. Instead of leaving interpretation to the professionals, anyone who has a different reading can leave their church and set up a new one with followers. And occasionally Protestant sects did exactly what Ælfric warned about by taking the literal interpretation and running with it: execution for minor infractions, polygamy, etc. But even more it tore Europe apart in very, very violent ways.

When you look at Wikileaks or Edward Snowden, you have to ask: Is all this information worth it? Consider Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. By allowing anyone to read the Bible, not only were Catholics and Protestants killing one another, Protestants were also slaughtering their own when another sect's interpretation didn't match up with theirs. However it allowed Christianity to develop in new and interesting ways that would otherwise be impossible. Surprisingly our modern information dumps weren't particularly influential — US policy remained completely unchanged regardless of how much Assange tried — but that doesn't mean another tectonic shift isn't on the horizon.