Sorry, busy for today. Here's a link for too much information about Voldemort.

Since playing Dynasty Warriors, I've noticed there are a lot of women as playable characters. I'll admit I haven't read The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but I highly doubt more than two in the entire work are mentioned as fighters, and I even think that's a gross overestimation. I'd be surprised if even one is listed. After going through the names and looking up their real historical significance, I was pretty much right: They're either a wife or a daughter of an actual soldier. Most are mentioned in passing, but even those who contribute much to the story are never on the battlefield themselves.

There isn't a lot of diversity in gaming to be sure and many boundaries have to be broken. I feel though this isn't one of them. Unlike something like Street Fighter or Final Fantasy where you're creating something from scratch, this is actual history. I'm willing to forgive a lack of female representation. I'm expecting people to be sexist c.190-c.240. In fact I wish they were removed from the game altogether. There are so many people I have to keep abreast of -- their alliances, their roles, their relations, their time period -- that I feel I have to learn the War of the Roses all over again. Please do not start adding more characters who didn't actually appear in the story.

Super Mario Bros. Aquarium

I used to have an aquarium, a nice one on top of a wrought-iron stand. Its last occupant was an angelfish called "Fishie" who had brutally murdered the rest of its comrades. After dying itself around 2005, I drained the aquarium and left it empty until the fire.

When I see cool shit like transforming your fish's home into a Super Mario Bros. level, I think, "Man, I kinda wanna get a tank again and do that." I have this weird position where I want a pet, but simultaneously I know it's gonna be a pain in the ass I don't want to deal with. Definitely not anything like a dog because that requires training and walking. No cats because of my ailurophobia. So I think something that can be contained in a cage like a guinea pig or chinchilla, but I still have to wipe up their piss or provide dust baths. So maybe something low-maintenance like a snake or tarantula but then there's mom's ophidiophobia and my own severe entomophobia. And I return to fish because you feed them once a day and clean out the tank maybe once a month, maybe every other month. Except then I have flashbacks of the horror show it was to vacuum that tank. So here I am petless, but that's probably for the best.

Watching these are helping with my entomophobia somewhat. I don't know why, but they are.

My neighbors were running late this evening and asked me to babysit their kids and put them to bed. Of course like most households, I had to read them a bedtime story. What did these kids hand me? It's a book that explains where babies come from. OK... so I thought it would be like, "The baby is growing in mommy's tummy! Look how big her stomach is!" And then the parents head to the hospital and bring back the new baby sibling. Or something.

I was fucking wrong. It explained in graphic detail the reproductive system. With diagrams. These kids I was babysitting were chanting, "Scrotum! Penis! Rectum!" repeatedly ten pages in. Once the authors started describing that sperm is created in the testicles, I had to stop. I had no idea where this road was headed, but I wasn't about to let it lead me to describing how sex works to a five- and seven-year-old.

I put the book back on the shelf and tried to pick something innocuous, but now that I know what the parents were buying for their kids, nothing seemed safe anymore. Would truck-nuts be nailed onto The Little Engine That Could? I had no fucking idea anymore.

I texted mom and dad about this, and when I got home dad greeted me with a shout of, "Scrotum! Penis! Rectum!"

My neighbors love shopping at Costco, but usually their bounty is too much for their two-person household so they give the extra to us. When it's stuff like limes or apples, that's OK. But they just handed me twenty-five tulip bulbs. Tulips are gorgeous, but holy shit they are a pain in the ass to plant since you gotta dig deep. I can feel a headache coming on thinking about doing this, but hey maybe these are the flowers I need to populate the lower garden.

Me: I downloaded an app that's basically you chatting with hot anime boys. I will give you a report shortly, but so far I'm not impressed.
Me: Mostly because they haven't sent me naked pics yet.
Me: Where are these dick pics men usually send right away?
Paul: Hahahahaha!
Paul: It's called "pic4pic" dude. That means to get a picture you need to give a picture.
Paul: Of your dick, I mean.
Me: I have many anime dicks in supply I could offer.
Paul: That is... honestly not surprising in the least.

Zeta Gundam completed. It's an interesting sequel that expands well on the universe, and the new cast builds well off of the old one. However I think there are two large flaws in the show.

The first I had no fucking idea what the plan was, and I suspect they didn't either. Yeah, Titans are bad and AEUG is trying to stop them. It's just they didn't seem to know how to achieve this and were just wandering around having random battles with them on occasion. Every now and then they would have a major offensive like infiltrating Jaburo or Char giving his speech, but they never followed up on it and just focused on surviving. I think if the Titans' colony laser hadn't forced AEUG to join with Haman Khan, who then attacked Sedan's Gate and started the final battle, Agama and Radish would still be floating around in space, twiddling their thumbs. Compare this to 0079. Even when they spent twenty episodes flying around Earth doing complete bullshit, I still knew what the end game was: get to Jaburo to unload all the refugees, and then head to space to take out the Zabis.

The second is I think the focus of the series was more about the relationships between men and women than the actual war itself. Just as much time if not more was devoted to sexual tension than actual battles. I lost count of how many times Camille would cease fighting to jump out of his Gundam and start chatting with a woman. I guess that would be fine... if it were better written. It's the same problem I had with Resident Evil 2: It's hard for me to believe you've formed this deep, emotional attachment if you've only known them for an afternoon. The only one that struck home deeply was Reccoa since we've had time to get to know her and feel the depth of her betrayal... but conversely she left AEUG for Scirocco, a dude she met for about five minutes.

My third gripe (which I don't think is as fundamental as the other two) is I can't figure out why this was the AEUG crew. The circumstances in 0079 explained its ridiculousness. Zeon attacked Side 7 and killed most of the soldiers, so all the civilians jumped onto White Base and got the fuck out. Bright had to pull young men from the population who showed capability to fight, but in the end they weren't trained soldiers and were prone to talking back, making stupid mistakes, and weren't disciplined. Meanwhile you have the civilians running amok all over the base, causing chaos and disorder. It was a crazy situation.

This shouldn't be happening in Zeta. Why are there two children rampaging everywhere? It's not like they keep to their rooms too. They will barge into the bridge to bother Bright in the middle of a battle. They start locking themselves into mobile suits that need to launch. And then AEUG seriously couldn't fucking hire anyone else besides angsty teens? Camille, OK, he's a Newtype, so you need him. And he actually keeps a relatively mature head on his shoulders, particularly when you compare him to Amuro in the first half of 0079. But Fa and Katsu? Half the time Katsu was just doing whatever the fuck he wanted. That is not how a soldier should behave. If you fucking disobey an order, you're fucking out. But no, they let him do it. And how the hell was he storming out in a mobile suit without permission? How the fuck is the launch pad not controlled by the engineers in Agama? Why does Bright not have some sense of control over his own damned troops? See, he wasn't slapping people enough in this show. Even fucking Kai got into line in 0079 after a while. So why the hell couldn't AEUG just get professional soldiers instead of these idiots?

So those were my complaints. On the positive, I think plot-wise it's nice see how the world changed in the aftermath of the One Year War. Personally I would've liked greater involvement of the people from White Base, particularly Amuro, but I accept many of them wanted to move on with their lives. Char's ample screen time is nice, but he's not as cool as in 0079. He did the best he could given the terrible name and horrible fashion sense. To be honest the most excited I got was whenever Amuro and Char were on screen simultaneously and I was hoping they'd start fencing or something. It also had some of that trippy shit I disliked in 0079 but it wasn't as much or as freaky so it was palatable. And at the end of the day I liked Camille. He stepped into his role and dealt with war as best he could, but really all of this shit could've been avoided IF HE JUST WENT TO FUCKING SCHOOL LIKE FA TOLD HIM TO.

Overall it's not a bad series. I think 0079 was better, but in some ways Zeta was superior to its predecessor. Of course it's necessary if you want to keep up with what happens in the UC timeline, and as I continue this project hopefully I won't take as long. Next up, Zeta movies.

Mom and dad's printer wasn't working properly when printing from the web, and as I doing diagnostics I pulled up the first site I could think of with large blocks of text and would repeatedly print the first two pages. After a fruitless hour of work, dad came in and said I had screwed up from the beginning because I wasn't using a "real webpage." What was a "real" one? According to dad, the Union for Reform Judaism. So now you know. If you ever need to see if your printer is working properly, use that.

Every child is taught when Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, the Europeans thought he was crazy because he'd just fall off the side the world. They thought Earth was flat with edges, and it wasn't until he collided with the New World that they realized there's more out there.

I thought that too until as a child I read about Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician. He had heard at noon on the summer solstice in Syene there were no shadows cast in the well. However there were in Alexandria, where he lived. From that he posited the earth was spherical. From calculating the angles of the shadows in Alexandria and Syene and the distance between them, he was able to figure out surprisingly accurately the circumference of the earth.

So what happened in between? Well, the excuse is after the fall of the Roman Empire, scientific knowledge disappeared in Europe and only started up again during the time of the Renaissance. All right, but as I started studying the Middle Ages this didn't work either. Aristotle, the one ancient philosopher everyone read, said the world was a sphere, and other prominent medieval writers like the Venerable Bede agreed with him. But there was also the belief the world to be a disc, and the sky is a dome called the firmament above it.

Which one is it? Probably a little of both, depending on the time period and the location. I said before Aristotle and some medieval writers said the world was spherical, but that didn't mean everyone read their works. In a time period where many monasteries didn't even have a complete Bible, it's believable that many didn't have access to this knowledge. But in 1492 did people think Columbus would fall off the edge? Nope, they did not. At that point most upper-class people were educated to some extent and knew we lived on a ball, not a disc. What they didn't know about was the Americas, so they just thought Columbus would run out of food in the middle of the ocean before he hit eastern Asia.

What is interesting about this all is Columbus wasn't the first European to discover America. It was the Vikings. By jumping from Greenland, they were able to create some temporary settlements c.1000, but the journey wasn't worth it so they abandoned the project. The New World remained in Icelandic sagas for generations, a hidden gem no one knew about.

If you ever hang out with Moham and me, chances are you're going to hear the two of us quoting something from this. We spent weeks watching it over and over until I felt I had to buy it. My only experience with Dynasty Warriors is mostly Hyrule Warriors and a bit of the eighth installment I played at Wong's house. Number three came out in 2001, which is a huge throwback. I'm fine with shitty graphics. It's the controls that freak me out. You can't move the camera unless if you block — then it swivels behind you — but it's so unwieldy I rarely use that. Speaking of blocking, that never works. They literally shatter my defense in the first or second hit. And my god, the difficulty curve. In the campaign the first battle was all right. But then it took four or five tries to finish the second one. I have a jump button, but I'm still trying to figure out what for other than mounting a horse. In Hyrule Warriors, your troops aren't really necessary other than to slow down powerful enemies. Here, you need them. Stray too far from the front line and you're fucked. It's a completely different mentality.

I can see Toei hadn't fully tweaked and polished the game by this point. But now I kinda wanna go back even further to the PS1 and play the first game to see how this mess was an improvement from before.

Rizhall: Son...
Rizhall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOzM4ClFG1o
dundun: ........
Rizhall: THE ENTIRE SOUNDTRACK.
dundun: That's a lot of time devoted to make this.
dundun: At some point
Rizhall: THE ENTIRE FUCKING SOUNDTRACK.
dundun: Did the person wonder what he was doing with his life?
Rizhall: I CAN'T STOP FUCKING LAUGHING
dundun: It won't fucking stop.
dundun: I'm skipping around.
dundun: It just won't stop.
Rizhall: Now I must ask.
Rizhall: If there was a live concert with Tidus' voice actor singing these songs out to an orchestra...
Rizhall: How much would you be willing to pay for it?
dundun: .............................
dundun: A considerable amount of money.

I watched Alex play Resident Evil 2 for me, LeonA/ClaireB. (Thank you Alex.) I played pretty far into the original Resident Evil and saw the beginning of Resident Evil 3, but 2 was a giant blank for me so fortunately I didn't suffer from the same problem as Metal Gear Solid and everything was new and refreshing. And it was nice to see a person who knew what he was doing so we didn't have to devote several hours figuring out puzzles.

For its time it should've been a fun game. There are serious problems with gameplay — being unable to turn efficiently remained from the first game — but I reserve the biggest problems for the plot. Why did Leon and Claire form such strong attachments to people they literally just met? Leon was defending Ada's integrity as if they had been dating for a while even though their total interaction time probably clocked at ten minutes. Sherry was two steps away from proclaiming Claire her new mother, even as Claire led her through a dungeon room with the ripped torso of the police chief prominently displayed on the floor.

And then there's the case of William Birkin. Why did he inject himself with the G-virus? Yeah, it has regenerative properties, but he knew damned well what that would turn him into. Or even more glaring, Umbrella Corporation. How the fuck did they think they could get away with this? One isolated mansion incident, all right. But a whole city? Considering they sent Nemesis to kill S.T.A.R.S. members to silence any potential witnesses to their crimes, they seem to be totally cool with creating a shit ton more people to testify against them.

I heard from Alex the plot is really different if you switch the scenarios. It depends on whom you select to play as first. ClaireA/LeonB may make more sense, but I doubt it would answer my questions substantially.

At the end of the day though, it's a fun game. It's great to dodge zombies, crows, and god know what else as you solve puzzles. The atmosphere is tense and claustrophobic. The bosses are fun to combat. And the backgrounds are interesting to look at and explore. Even with its flaws I still say it's a solid game worth checking out if you're into that genre.

Also, according to Resident Evil 2, the term for this is "manhole opener."

I wanted to remind myself to look up an anime opening so I emailed myself the title, except autocorrect wrote it out as "Le Shin." Can any of you figure out what the fuck I meant by that?

Me: Where do you keep your dueling gloves?
Peguero: Next to my coats.
Me: Greene needs it.
Peguero: What happened to his?
Me: He isn't a lawyer so he didn't get one.
Peguero: It's a common misconception that only lawyers can get dueling gloves.
Me: Then who else gets them?
Peguero: Anyone over the age of 18.
Me: I haven't gotten mine!
Peguero: It's not like it automatically arrives in the mail on your 18th birthday! You have to apply and pay the application fee.
Me: That sounds like more government bullshit. What as a lawyer are you doing about this?
Peguero: Nothing. I support background checks for dueling gloves.
Me: But people would just use jock straps otherwise! Do you want a jock strap thrown at your face??
Peguero: Dueling gloves are dangerous, we can't let convicted felons and violent people have access to them. It's impossible to control the illegal use of jock straps, but that doesn't change that we must be careful about dueling gloves.

OK Greene, now you know.

Back in about 1996 my brother pushed a new cartridge into the SNES and said I would enjoy this. Coming off of Chrono Trigger, I had mixed feelings about Final Fantasy VI (or Final Fantasy III as it was known back then). Why was I teleported into another screen when it was time to fight? Why were we standing in a row? Why were the enemies much larger and more detailed than my party members? Why did these battles seem to happen randomly instead of me touching an enemy wandering around the screen? Don't even get me started on the giant chickens and these white ghosts called "moogles" that were only capable of saving "kupo kupo."

But then I reached a point in the desert where this crazy clown tried to capture the girl. And this glorious music was playing in the background. Up until that point, I was like any other child and hadn't fully developed my taste in music, rather mimicking whatever I heard around me. Listening to The Magic Flute on my parents' record player. Popping in Harlan's Wu-Tang cassettes. Even watching music videos of NIИ on MTV when Harlan was into them. But for the first time in my life I alone without any outside influence thought this song was fucking amazing. I would start the game from the beginning and proceed to that point in the desert just to have that song in the background as I did other activities. Before I started acquiring MIDIs, this was all I could do: I had several strategic saves before great songs. I racked up so many hours on my saves from listening to music alone. And when I got the ability to have my own MIDIs (and later mp3s), I wasn't downloading the latest Backstreet Boys but rather the entire Final Fantasy VII or Chrono Cross OST. To this day if you look at my song library, classical and video games dominate everything else.

I met Uematsu the other day, the man who started me down this long, long road. Thanks for everything. You made me into a fucking nerd who can't talk about music with anyone other than a select group of friends.

Referring to signing something for a fan and my unintelligible scribbles:

dundun: Yo son.
dundun: Imagine if I got famous and was in that situation.
dundun: Having to sign my name to shit.
Rizhall: Oh my god.
Rizhall: You would be absolutely fucked.
dundun: At what point would I just start writing "fuck everything" or "for Yan Liang" and no one would be able to tell the difference?
Rizhall: Yo.
Rizhall: That should be your signature!
Rizhall: "For Yan Liang!!!"
Rizhall: every single signature
dundun: Would YOU be able to tell the difference?
Rizhall: .... I...
Rizhall: The only thing giving it away would be the lack of horizontal line for the letter t.
dundun: I could possibly pull that off with the L.
Rizhall: What if you just crossed the whole thing out after you wrote it?
Rizhall: One long line.
dundun: "Nah, fuck this."
Rizhall: You could fool people into thinking that's the t.

Child: Shut your mouth please.
Me: Hey! You don't say that. That's really rude. Don't say that again.
Child: But I said "please."
Me: "Please" doesn't negate the rudeness. "Shut your mouth" is really rude.
Child: But I said "please!"
Me: I can say, "Please know you're really ugly." That's still rude!
Child: Hey, I'm not ugly!

I really love reading Churchill because he fucking makes anything sound dramatic. Here's him talking about visiting FDR and deciding the seating arrangement in the car:

We had a dispute about where we should it in the car for this three-hour journey. Alike by his rank and from his infirmity there was only one place for the President. Mrs. Roosevelt wished to sit in one of the small front seats, and put me next to the President. I would not have this, and the British Empire went into action. After about three minutes' conflict of wills I won, and Mrs. Roosevelt took her proper place by her husband's side. ^*

He fucking invoked the British Empire for this little incident. Just for this! Imagine him with actual battle scenes.

^* Winston S. Churchil, The Second World War: The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Hougton Mifflin Company, 1950), 795.

Here are the finalists for the worst post office in New York City

It's difficult for me to answer a question like this because I've never been to any other post office than my own. Yes, mine is terrible. I know that. It's improved somewhat in the past year or two, but it started off so dismal that any amelioration amounts to almost nothing. But I have no idea what the conditions are at Bushwick or Williamsburg. If I enter there, will I get punched in the gut? I don't know, it's certainly not happened at mine. That certainly would be worse conditions.

This type of situation plays out all over the place. I got into a debate with someone over rising college tuition, and my position ultimately was I have to first see what the college costs are and how they're allocating funds. I just don't have enough data to form an opinion. Or a researcher called the house and asked me how much of the city's budget should be spent on the arts. Well, first priority would be security, schools, social services, and infrastructure. I'm not going to say off the bat the percentage until I see how those other four cost.

We all throw out opinions without sufficient information, but if I really thought about an issue hard I'd probably revert to the "I don't know." Clearly other people did not agree with me because if this quiz tells you that people from Colorado, Idaho, and Texas are voting in for our worst post office.

Claude Debussy was a French composer in the late 1800s whose music is associated with Impressionism; it's a smooth, almost otherworldly type of sound that feels like you're entering a dream. Years ago I learned Children's Corner, a suite of six movements that are supposed to invoke feelings of childhood. For something about children, it's actually pretty fucking difficult and even today when I listen to it I get flashbacks like I'm suffering from PTSD or something.

Anyway, the movements are called:
Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum
Jimbo's Lullaby
Serenade for the Doll
The Snow is Dancing
The Little Shepherd
Golliwogg's Cakewalk
The last one sounded pretty different from the others, and for years I wondered who the hell "Golliwogg" or what a "cakewalk" was. Eventually I read somewhere that a cakewalk was originally a dance done by American slaves and became known worldwide after it was displayed on the Centennial Exposition in 1876 in Philadelphia. It wasn't until my piano teacher played Children's Corner for me the other day that I decided to look up who Golliwogg is.

Well, it turns out a woman named Florence Kate Upton published a children's book called The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg, and the latter is the name of a ragdoll. The book became a popular and companies made actual dolls named after the character, much like Raggedy Ann and Andy. In case you're wondering what he looks like, he's the dude on the right:

After staring at that for a few moments, I laughed and said to my piano teacher that there's no way this would fly nowadays. But what was incredible is she said, "Oh, why not?" ...Really?

Sorry, busy tonight so here's a vine:

I sent a physical letter to GameArts, the maker of the Grandia series, pointing out it's been awhile since the last installment. I got a response and the first sentence said, "Thank you for your email." Well, it's nice to know they were paying attention.

Even during the height of the Cold War, I'm fairly certain Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or whoever could take consolation that the US was never, ever going to invade Russia. It was just something that isn't done. Tchaikovsky even composed a song about why it's so stupid. The country is huge with little means of supplies in between major urban centers. It's hot as fuck in the summer. It's fucking freezing in the winter. And in between those extremes the roads are so muddy whole vehicles can get sunk in them. And Russia knows this. Their plan of attack is just to retreat and pull their enemy into their hinterland so deep that the supply column can't keep up and the land itself overtakes them.

So why did Hitler try it? Oddly enough he did study Napoleon's attempt very thoroughly, so he knew the possible consequences. It's just in between the Napoleonic Wars and World War II, one major event changed the world view of Russia: World War I. They did fucking terrible. Their army was shit and didn't have enough munitions. And even if they did, it was often outdated or they didn't have trained personnel to work the artillery or planes or whatever. Germany's plan in World War I was to basically send their entire army to France and take it out before Russia could appear on their Eastern Front. Unfortunately for Germany, Russia showed up faster than they anticipated. Fortunately for Germany, the tiny forces they did leave in Prussia completely wiped out the Russian Second Army in one night. Russia was so completely unprepared for World War I, they couldn't feed the population. Revolution happened and communism took over.

In 1939 the Soviet Union invaded Finland and although they eventually won, they did absolutely horribly in that war. It should've been an easy job; it's fucking Finland! I've never heard of them doing anything substantial militarily since the Vikings. How could the Soviet Union, whose army was three times the size of Finland's, do so poorly? Stalin had purged most of the army of its high command in his paranoia, the only people left were yes-men without much skill.

So Hitler looks at this and thinks the Soviets may have the numbers and the land, but in reality their governmental and military structure is weak. If he could just deliver a blow similar to what happened in World War I, he could topple the entire regime and win. Plus Germany's in a much stronger position; by the time Hitler invaded he had already taken out most of his opponents in Western Europe. The German army seemed unstoppable.

The end result was completely atrocious. More soldiers died on the Eastern Front of the Second World War than the rest of the war put together. You can include all the shit happening in the Pacific and D-Day and it still would not compare to the crazy shit happening in Russia. And who knows what would've happened if Germany hadn't fought the Soviets? Their troops wouldn't've been bled dry and the Soviets would've still been on the Axis side, meaning the US and UK would've had to fight Germany AND the USSR.

But these hypothetical scenarios probably wouldn't've happened: If you read Mein Kampf, it's pretty clear Hitler was planning on invading Russia as early as the 1920s. I suppose the real questions we should be asking is if Hitler was a better military commander (he as far from a genius), could he have actually done it? Could the Russian behemoth actually be tamed? If he had headed straight to Moscow instead of focusing on the Ukraine, would he have won in 1941 before the Soviets could get their shit together? Or would the truism of Russia still stand: his supply train would be impossible to maintain and the German troops could never capture the Russian army? Who knows, but I don't think anyone's gonna try it any time soon.