Pretty much all of the furniture in the house comes from Stickley Audi, an update New York-based company that's been around for more than a century. Although mom knew of them, we specifically chose their services because she was reading The New York Times and saw their advertisement for a sale. When I went to the store, I was really impressed with the quality of the work and the excellent service.

Sometimes I think what we would've done if mom hadn't glanced at that advertisement; perhaps we would've gone to Macy's and bought different sets at a higher price that wouldn't even match nicely like we have now. Because I grew up in the Internet Age, I've grown weary after years of being barraged by ceaseless advertisements and just ignore them altogether. But mom showed me that not all of them are scams promising a new iPad or better mortgages on the house; they actually can deliver something worthwhile. I wonder if my time on the computer has made me cynical and closed doors for me without giving them a chance. AdBlock always removes them completely, but what if they offered goods I've actually been looking for?

I'm actually thinking about buying a small bookshelf from Stickley Audi to put next to my clothing cabinet, but then I have no idea where to put the beanbag chair. The only other place is at the foot of the bed, where I'm planning to put either a bench or series of ottomans. Does anyone have ideas?

Thietmar of Merseburg was a bishop in northern Germany in the late 900s and early 1000s, and wrote a history of the events in his area. Because of his prominent position, historians have always been interested with his work because it's very possible he was an eyewitness to important events in the imperial court. I've finally gotten around to reading it (I tried tackling the original Latin years ago, but he clearly had no skill in that language and I got a headache after just a few pages), and this is literally on the second page:

Dear reader, know that the initial foundation and building up of the city [Merseburg] and its territory were undertaken by the people of Romulus who were formerly led here by Julius Caesar, the all powerful son-in-law of Pompey who was illustrious in both capabilities.

There then was a footnote by the translator:

Illustrious in both body and mind. Julius Caesar was actually the father-in-law of Pompey as the latter had married his daughter Julia. Thietmar's assertion that Merseburg owed its foundation to the Roman is a bald-faced lie probably intended to give his see a history comparable to those of the much older dioceses of the Rhineland.

Well, we're off to a good start. Literally opening up the work with historical inaccuracies and falsehoods.

^* Thietmar of Merseburg, The Chronicon, trans. by David A. Warner (New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 68.

For years I've been using variations of "Dun" as a username, but sometimes they've already been taken. Seriously though: DunDunny, DunnDunn, Dunster, Dunlicious, DumbDun, Dunination, Dunified, who are you people and why the hell are you calling yourself that?

Alex: when i get back i'm making a beeline for dollar pizza
Alex: i will pay the $5.50 or whatever it is now train fair just to have dollar pizza
Me: What, there's no pizza in Korea?
Alex: in name only
Alex: there's corn on it!
Alex: what kind of pizza has corn, i ask you
Alex: and usually it's too sweet
Alex: like, i'll order the spiciest, meatest pizza i see on the menu just praying it won't be sweet
Alex: and then it will be covered in corn and like... sweet pickles
Alex: there's a decent place called New York Pizzeria in Gangnam
Alex: they actually have a brick oven
Alex: but you gotta pay 30 bucks for a small cheese pie that's about the same or lesser quality than any NY corner pizza store
Alex: i could write a small book about korean pizza and my feelings towards it
Alex: but i'll summarize it this way
Alex: Korean pizza ingredients: Dough, cheese, corn
Alex: oh i forgot to mention
Alex: they put sweet potato on pizza fairly often too
Alex:
Alex: is this what god wanted?

Mom's friend: For Lent I'm only eating sweets three times a week.
Me: Oh, I'm sure Jesus would love that. Forty days out in the dessert, and you're only eating sweets three times a week.
Mom's friend: I also gave up chocolate!
Me: Yeah, Jesus must've been thinking when he resisted the Devil: Thank goodness in the future people will remember this by not eating chocolate.
Mom's friend: Oh, be quiet.

I think we can broadly say the fantasy genre relies heavily upon the European Middle Ages. When I watch The Lord of the Rings, I always imagine the departing elves as the fall of the sophisticated Roman Empire, whose empty buildings, decaying buildings, and advanced knowledge are viewed with awe and suspicion by the men left behind. But it also reminds me of something my professor told me, "The nineteenth century created our perception of the Middle Ages." In Great Britain in particular, Europeans suddenly looked back at that time in nostalgia, as was reflected in the Gothic architecture at Westminster or Sir Walter Scott's book Ivanhoe. But oftentimes they were demonstrably wrong in their depictions — our current vision of Robin Hood's men in tights are an adaptation of nineteenth century stage costume for instance — and I see it continuing into modern-day fantasy.

That's not to say it even remotely tries to claim to be historically accurate, but something very, very important is always missing from the genre. It never really struck home for me until the other day when Jennifer asked me to recommend her some books on the Middle Ages. Knowing there's literally tens of thousands out there, I tried to get her to narrow it down until finally she settled on druids. I paused for a moment before I told her druids aren't medieval history; they're Iron Age. Roman times and before. Why? Because druids ceased to exist by then. Christianity had come in.

I made that pause because I tried to figure out why on earth would she think druids and the Middle Ages had anything in common before I realized that shit is all over fantasy. How many fucking books have you read, games you've played, or movies you've watched that involved some sort of druidic ritual? And then it hit me that I can't really think of any major work, even in high fantasy, that involves Christianity. Which is insane considering how much it was intertwined with the Middle Ages. It's really hard to study anything, even pagan groups like the Vikings, without some mention of a bishop, missionary, papal policy, saint, whatever.

I'm guessing (and what I'm about to say is completely not backed with research) the fantasy genre cut out Christianity for two reasons: The first, in the English-speaking world at least, it was influenced by those earlier nineteenth-century writers, who tried to downplay the Christian aspects as much as possible to return to the Anglo-Saxon or Celtic roots. (They were kinda embarrassed Protestant Scotland and England were faithful Catholics at one point.) Second, a lot of people working in the industry today aren't religious Christians, and if they are, given the American demographics, probably not Catholic.

Again, this doesn't bother me because fantasy isn't saying it's mimicking the Middle Ages; it's an interpretation. God fucking knows there's no medieval source that lists orc "blade masters" with names like "Jubei," "Samuro," "Daisho," "Mazuru," and a flag attached to his back like he's a Japanese samurai. Or that elves were associated with bows and arrows whereas dwarves used axes. It's all make believe. But I guess it would be interesting for once to see one that tried to take in Christianity in a big way. It's hard to create a universe when something so deeply attached to our world is involved, and to be able to pull it off would be fascinating. Actually, is there? I don't read a lot of fiction, so does anyone know of one?

I notice every week when I put out the recycling that our family has a significantly larger amount than anyone else on the block. Mom and dad say it's because they're retired so they consume more at home, but it's not just extra soup cans and milk bottles. It's cardboard boxes. Every week I find myself collapsing endless amounts of these fuckers.

Dad mentioned the other day we needed a flashlight for the basement, so I went on amazon and bought one. I leaned back, stared at the screen, and pondered this for a few moments. I literally am requiring someone to drive to my house and hand me another cardboard box for this single product instead of me just walking to the store and buying one myself.

The New York Times had an interesting article about the environmental impact of e-commerce, but it said it only talked about instant gratification being one of the pushing drives behind it. I have Prime, but I didn't really need that flashlight right away nor did I particularly care whether it came in two days or two weeks. It's just a good LED flashlight cost less there than whatever I could find at Staples or Home Depot even if I factor the built-in shipping costs. And I highly suspect a lot of people are like me. With things like amazon's reduced price for pre-ordered games, why the hell wouldn't you get delivery instead of leaving your house? I started off this post with complaining about cardboard boxes, but that consumes less of my time than walking to 207th or commuting downtown. It's a logical decision to make.

Humans are going to be humans; we rarely look at the big picture and focus on the immediate. I felt a twinge of guilt as a I bought that flashlight, but I know I'd do it again in a heartbeat. (I did actually; dad liked it so much he asked me to order three more.) And I think many people who promote causes — environmentalism, animal rights, etc. — forget that basic part of human nature. We're too fucking busy to care about every single big issue until it affects our every day lives. Yeah, we all know coal and oil are bad, but we're not going to switch over until it becomes too expensive and there's a cheap alternative. So instead of putting most of your energy decrying such things, perhaps a better method of pushing agendas is to intertwine it with that lazy, cheap part in all of us.

Quick Guide to Latin Pluralizations in English that You Never Asked for:

If it ends in a -us, it becomes -i:
radius → radii
alumnus → alumni
nucleus → nuclei

If it ends in an -a, it becomes -ae:
alumna → alumnae
formula → formulae
vagina → vaginae

If it ends in a -um, it becomes -a:
stratum → strata
medium → media
datum → data

If it ends in an -is, it becomes -es:
axis → axes
crisis → crises
genesis → geneses

Exceptions (Well, not in Latin. It makes sense in Latin):
opus → opera
appendix → appendices
stigma → stigmata
index → indices
corpus → corpora

Questions I am actually asked:
1. Yes, penis ends in an -is, so the plural is actually "penes," but no one will know what you're talking about if you say it aloud.
2. Octopus is not actually Latin but Greek, so the real but completely unused plural is "octopodes."
3. It's cacti.

Sorry, waited too long to start writing a post, so here's a vine:

Babysitting:

Kid: Let's play farm!
Me: OK, what do we do?
Kid: I'm the pig, and you're the farmer!
Me: OK. Whew, it's morning time! I gotta feed my pig. What does the pig want?
Kid: Bacon!
Me: Uh.
Kid: The pig wants bacon!
Me: ...Why does the pig want bacon?
Kid: Because bacon is delicious!
Me: Can't argue with that.

I just realized I forgot to write a post about beating South Park: Stick of Truth. I was reading an announcement about this game's sequel, Fractured But Whole, and I think they summed up the game pretty well: "Stick Of Truth was developed by fan-favorite RPG studio Obsidian Entertainment (best known for making games that everyone likes even though they occasionally run like shit)." Usually games based on movies or shows are pretty crappy, but this was actually good. The battle system was fun, the dialogue made me laugh, and the plot was as ridiculous as any South Park episode, but still interesting how they managed to intertwine a children's game with the outside world. I noticed a few parts that were pretty buggy, the battle system could've been balanced a little better, but I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who likes South Park.

Le concept a été lancé il y a trois ans par la très célèbre université américaine de Harvard. Looking at this sentence makes me fucking love that I'm an English speaker because we don't have to deal with this accent bullshit. To write this, I would have to use the number pad as so: "Le concept a é(alt+0233)té(alt+0233) lancé(alt+0233) il y a trois trè(alt+0232)s cé(alt+0233)lè(alt+0232)bre université(alt+0233) amé(alt+0233)ricaine de Harvard." THAT is fucking annoying. It's not just French; German has its umlauts; Danish has Æ, Ø, and Å; and god help you with Slavic languages. Even a French keyboard needs alt+A or ` or ^ to pull out the accent. It really ruins the flow of typing. I'm so fucking glad being born an American.

Moham and I got Street Fighter V today and tried the story mode, and there's literally two or three fights per character. I admit I'm not expecting much considering it's a fighting game, but at least back in the day you had to go through the all of the characters before the final boss, and then you get the ending. Moham told me they're still developing the "real" one, but again it's a fighting game. You get the characters to say some shit (the mouth movements should already be programmed in for the battle quotes) and then fight. That's how these things work. If we gotta wait for this shit, I'm going to raise my level of expectation for plot now, but I'm willing to bet it's the same level of incoherence as most fighting games.

Most bizarre is they have a cut scene and then start the match. And by start, I mean immediately. There's no "ready... FIGHT!" thing you expect in a fighting game. It's just talking and then a guy punches you in the face.

The Fed didn't exist in the United States until the early 1900s because Americans have had an uneasy relationship with central banking. We tried it in the early days of our republic, but Jackson nixed it and it never got back on its feet until the banking panics of the the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries made several people in high places very concerned. Even after it was created, we made twelve separate central banks for different regions of the nation, although nowadays it's more or less run through the D.C. branch. It's almost like the fourth branch of government; it doesn't really fall under legislative or executive and just chugs along on its own and occasionally appearing before congress to give a report.

What also disturbed me about that Sanders article was that sentence in the first quotation: "As a rule, the Fed should not raise interest rates until unemployment is lower than 4 percent. Raising rates must be done only as a last resort — not to fight phantom inflation." That worries me because politicians shouldn't be involved with the Fed so much. I said the Fed was like the fourth branch of government, and in a way I view it like the judicial branch: Like a Supreme Court justice, the president nominates someone to the Board, the Senate confirms it, and then that's that. They do whatever they want without politics being involved. Whether Sanders is right in his statement is irrelevant. It's the fact if politicians start trying to regulate what the Fed can and cannot do, then it's no longer apolitical and we may enter a situation like in other countries where one party tries monetary machinations to stay in power but ultimately fucks up the entire economy. Especially now with the way congress is; do you really think they have a good enough grasp on economics to have the right to decide our monetary policy? I certainly don't and I bet most of them are on my level.

Sanders may have a point about people being on the board, but then I'd say that's up to the president and the Senate to nominate and approve the right people. (I'll admit the example that Sanders gave is part of the NY branch, which neither the president nor congress has control over.) However no one currently serving on the Board of Governors has any investment banking background; Yellen was an academic before joining the SF Fed Branch, Fischer served in the IMF, Tarullo worked in government, Powell was in the Treasury Department, and Brainard also did economic counseling for the government. None of the top dogs really were tainted by being involved in Goldman Sachs or whatever.

For me his article seemed like a politician ranting to an angry crowd that's out for blood. The people who brought about the financial crisis definitely did not get their just desserts and that is atrocious. However what Sanders was proposing I felt just was a bunch of talking points that weren't well thought out. "Board positions should instead include representatives from all walks of life — including labor, consumers, homeowners, urban residents, farmers and small businesses." You mean like the different classes in the board? Class A represents banks and classes B and C represent the public; right now the NY branch has the goddamned president of the Met and the founder of the Freelancers Union on it. I don't really know how much more urban and labor you can get than that. "We should prohibit commercial banks from gambling with the bank deposits of the American people." Great, that's up to Congress, not the Fed. "We also need transparency. Too much of the Fed’s business is conducted in secret, known only to the bankers on its various boards and committees. Full and unredacted transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee must be released to the public within six months, not five years, which is the custom now." OK, maybe that, but it's not like most of us are going to understand that anyway. And that probably wouldn't've stopped the housing problem in 2009 like Sanders predicts.

Actually, returning to my first post, why is Sanders suddenly complaining about the interest rate? It's under 1% right now and has been since the fuckfest in 2009. We haven't been over 4% since the mid-2000s. Is he just making up problems that aren't there?

I've noticed that if a game has a mini-map on the screen, chances are I'm going to train my eyes to that about 50% of the time when exploring. It's easier to plan the most efficient path, but I'm definitely losing something in the process. After all, the developers spent all this time making a world that I'm not paying attention to, so I've been making a conscious effort to enjoy my surroundings. I was worried that ignoring the mini-map would create a Skyward Sword situation, but I realized the other day that Ōkami didn't have one and I never had a problem navigating in that world. Perhaps that says something about Skyward Sword; everything seemed so unremarkable that without a map I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Me:
These kids keep on asking me to draw farm animals for them even though I told them I can't draw.
Jane:
Me: Fuck you.

When we meet the girls in The Stick of Truth:

Paul: I remember this. I hated it when girls reached this age because they were so annoying. All my female friends were just like this.
Me: Thanks Paul.
Paul: You know you don't count as a girl.
Me: Thanks Paul.

I swear to god every single time iTunes updates, there's another fucking bug added.

NYT Op-Ed: Bernie Sanders: To Rein in Wall Street, Fix the Fed

I was pretty neutral about Sanders until I saw this article. I'll admit; I don't try to pay too much attention to campaign season until the end of the primaries because it's usually a gossip fest about people who won't even be on the Republican or Democratic ticket. This particular year has been crazy because of the incredible amount of viable candidates for the Republican nominee, so the Democrats have been mostly pushed to the background with only two major contenders. I know Clinton pretty well, both from her years as First Lady and the senator of my state, but I knew Sanders to be a socialist and that's about it. (And that tumblr would desperately like to suck his cock.)

This article is the moment I started to turn away from him, particularly these two lines:

Big bankers and their supporters in Congress have been telling us for years that runaway inflation is just around the corner. They have been dead wrong each time. Raising interest rates now is a disaster for small business owners who need loans to hire more workers and Americans who need more jobs and higher wages. As a rule, the Fed should not raise interest rates until unemployment is lower than 4 percent. Raising rates must be done only as a last resort — not to fight phantom inflation.

Since 2008, the Fed has been paying financial institutions interest on excess reserves parked at the central bank — reserves that have grown to an unprecedented $2.4 trillion. That is insane. Instead of paying banks interest on these reserves, the Fed should charge them a fee that would be used to provide direct loans to small businesses.

Ron Paul's End the Fed — and you should be able to tell from the title he's no fan of it either — came out in 2009, right when the banking and mortgage crisis was really starting to pick up. A good portion of it is him railing against inflation and his freak out about what he was seeing around him at the time. The Fed can create money out of nowhere, which is one of its integral functions as a central bank. And it created a lot right when shit was hitting the fan back then to keep banks afloat. Like, trillions of dollars' worth as Sanders said above.

Although everything is fine at the moment, this is a disaster waiting to happen. If the banks start putting that money into the economy, then we would have rampant inflation, and this was what Paul was really worried about. So what can do you do stop this? The Fed can basically take all that money back, but doing that quickly would start making the banks rattle again, so it's gradually pulling it out over a period of years. In the meantime, to discourage them from using the money, the Fed is paying them to keep it in their vaults, kinda like a savings account; why spend it when you get interest?

Sanders is proposing literally the opposite of what you want to do in this situation. You do not want to push the banks to spend that money on loans for small business owners because that would unleash the deluge that we're all trying to prevent. That would fuck up not only the small business owners, but all of us. Should the Fed have made all that money back then? I don't know; I think we all panicked during that time and were trying everything to prevent a worldwide, financial meltdown. But the situation is what it is, and this is the best solution we've got. It's not really just considering the banks are ones who got us into this mess years ago, but I'd take them getting free money over my dollar being devalued.

I'll discuss Sanders' other points at another time.

Fun times babysitting:

Kid: When you grow up, what do you want to be?
Me: I'm already grown up. I'm an adult.
Kid: No, you're not.
Me: I'm not? Why am I not?
Kid: You have parents!
Me: Huh?
Kid: When they die, what do you want to be?

God, I'm afraid for their parents when that kid reaches age eighteen...

I noticed one major difference as I play Symphonia from the old days: saving. Before games designed their own save screen, and on the PS2 or GC you could choose whatever slot you wanted. I employed that to my advantage; usually I would start in the second slot (a habit from the old days when I played with Harlan), then every successive playthrough would go underneath. However if I wanted to keep a particular save for posterity, say an important cut scene, I would throw all of those down near the bottom of the list. Since the PS3 almost all games just use the PS3 menu, which doesn't allow that level of versatility. It's a small complaint in the grand scheme of things, but I miss it a bit.