Wait, wait, wait, hold up:

"

"Commander Fistfight" needs to start being a thing.

Oh god.

Rizhall: Yo, son.
Rizhall: So I made like a bunch of tiny paper cranes.
Rizhall: I'm thinking of places I can place them in the house to freak everyone out when they wake up.
dundun: 1. What the fuck is wrong with you?
dundun: 2. Do you guys drink tea or coffee?
Rizhall: Usually tea.
dundun: Leave one in there.
Rizhall: Aight.
dundun: God.
dundun: I remember I made 1000 of those for Ate Neneng and she hung them by her window.
dundun: Then two months later the house burned down.
Rizhall: Shit.
dundun: Never again.
Rizhall: Maybe I should reconsider.

dundun: What's hood.
Rizhall: Son.
Rizhall: Nobody's said anything about the cranes yet.
dundun: r
dundun: No one's found anything
dundun: ?
Rizhall: They've been moved around.
Rizhall: So they're seeing it.
Rizhall: They're just... not saying anything.
dundun: So basically what you're telling me
dundun: Is you do bullshit like this so much that people don't even care anymore?
dundun: "Oh, it's just another one of those toothpicks in a tube things again."

Catholics have "days of obligaiton," i.e. days you must attend Mass, and one of them is the Immaculate Conception. I used to think it was celebrating Gabriel meeting with Mary, but then I realized the feast day was December 8th, so either Jesus was impossibly premature, that was the fastest pregnancy known to man, or Mary was part whale with a gestation period of a year. But no, it's actually the immaculate conception of Mary.

Let's go back to original sin, a doctrine that we are sinful from the moment we're born because of man's sin back in the Garden of Eden. (On my xanga I explained the logic behind this; maybe some day I'll do it again.) Back in the Roman Empire days, Christians didn't think of it as a spiritual blemish on our soul; it was a literal biological thing kinda in our DNA. Augustine wrote about how it's passed through the semen.

For Jesus to be sinless, he needed to make sure none of this original sin blemished him. Well, on the father side he's cool because that's God, but Mary still would contain her own original sin from her father. Nowadays the official church doctrine is God cleansed Mary's soul in the womb (hence she's now "immaculate"), but a long time ago before the Biblical canon was laid down, the Gospel of James mentions that Mary too was born without a father. Not that her mother Anna was a virgin, but because she was childless she prayed to God and suddenly became pregnant. Hence Mary did not receive original sin from her father either.

So much emphasis is put on Jesus' virgin birth that when I first read the Gospel of James it astounded me that there are other fatherless births floating around. I mean, yeah, in other religions there's Athena popping out of Zeus' head or Amaterasu from Izunagi's eye, but in Christianity I feel there should only be one, Jesus. And lots of people agreed with me, which is why the Gospel of James isn't found in the Bible today. It was simply too problematic. And this was a mild gospel comepared to the others in the apocrypha; at least there wasn't any crazy Gnostic theology in there.

Sorry, was writing a long post and realized I had no time to finish it tonight, so you get this:

...I should probably finish up Final Fantasy XV at least before I start Tales of Berseria... but there's so much fishing to be done...

You probably have heard of Elizabeth I of England, the Virgin Queen. And you may wonder why she decided to remain unmarried for most of her life, but you just have to look around her. The 1500s was an interesting time because there were many women in high positions of power, and it demonstrated to her the problem with marriage: Although a woman may be a monarch, at that time being a submissive wife took priority. Let's take her older half-sister, Mary. Her reign was only five years long, but it was a fucking disaster. She decided to marry a foreigner, Philip II of Spain. He got into some wars with France, and being his wife Mary was expected to join in on it. The whole affair was a fiasco and in the process England lost its last territory in continental Europe, Calais, as well as a shit ton of money. Money that Elizabeth was still paying off well into her own reign.

Then there as Elizabeth's cousin, Queen Mary of Scotland. She decided to marry someone local, Henry Stuart.^* Unfortunately because he didn't have his own crown to fall back on for power, he kept on trying to usurp hers. She spent years trying to fend him off as he plotted literal rebellions against her, even murdering her secretary right in her presence. And eventually she did lose her crown and spent the rest of her life in imprisonment in England.

On the other hand, there was Catherine de Medici, Queen Mother of France. She lived through three of her sons' reigns and was essentially running the country during most of it because they were too young to rule in their own right. However until her husband Henry II died in a tournament, she was out of favor since he couldn't stop sleeping with so many mistresses. In fact he had one favorite in particular, Diane de Poitiers, who was the most powerful woman in France. It was only with the death of the king that Catherine was able to take control.

For a woman who spent so much of her life insecure — her mother executed and she became a bastard, her half-sister imprisoning her — it's understandable Elizabeth avoided marriage. She flirted with the idea several times, but ultimately her head probably told her it wasn't worth it. That's why she was able to remain a prominent figure throughout her life since she didn't have to share jack shit with anyone. And even today that remains somewhat the same: Elizabeth II's husband was not given the title of king, but remains merely as Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

^* OK, yeah, Stuart was actually English. But he decided to stick around in Scotland and after the marriage never returned to his homeland.

Sorry, busy tonight:

Back in the 2nd century B.C., there was in Rome two brothers, the Gracchi. Before them for most of Rome's history it was just a city-state in Italy. Oh, it controlled most of the peninsula, but that's not really an empire. Eventually it came into conflict with Carthage, a city in North Africa, and fought four wars — the Punic Wars — until it won completely and thoroughly. And suddenly Rome wasn't just an important city-state anymore. As a result of this war it expanded its territory significantly, and it now had to maintain an army to defend portions of it. So the Gracchi tried to implement land reforms that they believed would help the lower classes and replenish the military ranks. Until finally one day instead of debating about this as they usually did, a group of senators politically assassinated the elder brother in 133 B.C. The younger suffered the same fate in 121 B.C. This set a very dangerous precedent, and it wasn't the end of the matter. Whenever someone seemed to be sticking his neck out too much, he was killed. Or a civil war would spring up between two different sides of the senate; Sulla and Marius were fighting each other long before Caesar and Pompey were on the scene.

I don't want to say that political assassination and inability to talk things through in the senate was the sole reason why the Roman Republic crumbled and the Roman Empire took its place — there was the fact it was damned-near impossible in those days to manage such a large territory without quick and direct orders from the top — but it was part of it. Once you've moved into "violence is OK against anyone I disagree with" territory, although it may seem right in some cases it shouldn't become the norm.

That's what I think about when I see the quarrel about Richard B. Spencer. He's basically... I guess two steps away from being a Nazi. He doesn't argue for violence or death camps but he definitely wants all the minorities out. During the inauguration as he gave a televised interview someone punched him in the face. I'm not going to say this is on the level of Roman assassination, but I'm not going to condone the action either for the same reasons. I don't want violence to be used in general as a way of silencing your opponent. If Spencer were inciting people to go out and kill the kikes and niggers, then yeah the authorities need to have a serious talk with him. But saying I don't like non-WASP whites, as distasteful as it is, is something he's allowed to say. That's part of our free speech. And to be honest he does deserve a punch in the face. But if you normalize violence, little things like one dude getting decked start evolving into larger things. Like institutionalized violence against those we don't agree with. You start off with two outlier brothers being assassinated and about a century later you have a general crossing the Rubicon to exert his own authority.

You'd think waking up early every day to feed these cats would fix my sleep schedule to something normal, but instead I'm just tired, miserable, and take random naps at 22:00.

Because the OST was so sick, I decided to try out Final Fantasy Record Keeper. Basically you replay all the Final Fantasy games through fourteen and Tactics. It's an old-school type ATB and all the enemies are in SNES-sprite graphics. I'd say it's a brilliant idea with all this nostalgia; they were very detail oriented: keeping each game's sound effects, how in the early games you wore sunglasses with the blind status ailment... However Record Keeper is really boring because it's so easy. They literally have an auto button at the bottom of the screen because there isn't much to think about as you play. I guess they figured the character roster is so huge they couldn't maintain any semblance of balance, but this all seems like a wasted opportunity.

It's weird how a partisan bias affects people. Yesterday dad said he was going to miss having an articulate president, to which I replied although Obama is amazing at delivering speeches, he's really fucking terrible at talking extemporaneously. It was physically painful listening to him sometimes because of those long, awkward pauses as he uttered, "Uhhhhhhhhh" or "Ummmmmmmm." Compare that to Clinton, who also was great at delivering speeches. That man could talk all day without skipping a beat. But when I mentioned that to mom and dad, they immediately leapt to Obama's defense, which I knew if Bush or Trump pulled the same shit they would've slaughtered him. Mom in particular surprised me because as a child she always scolded me for saying either uh or um because I would "sound like an idiot." But because it's a Democrat and Obama, suddenly all that shit is forgiven.

I think I've perfected my print to my satisfaction with its tiny size, but I've been trying out script recently. Supposedly the advantage of cursive is it's faster to write because you never have to lift up the pen to do multiple strokes. However I'm finding that not to be case, probably because I've spent the past twenty years or so writing print. I suppose it's kinda like when I initially switching to touch typing; writing with two fingers staring at the board was so much quicker. I'll have to get back to you on this experiment of mine. I can say I'm displeased that I seem to be unable to write as tiny though.

As we're wrapping up the Obama presidency, I'm reflecting on the past eight years as I'm certain many of us are. I'm probably less enamored of him than other people, but I don't think he was either of the extremes of terrible or amazing. Unfortunately he was dealt a very bad hand, coming right when the financial crisis hit. As he said during his victory speech, recovery would take years and possibly longer than this presidency. So whatever he's done is always shadowed by how he had to try to pull us out of this shithole. Considering he was voted in for being amazing at making and delivering speeches, as well as seeming cool compared to Hilary Clinton, he did relatively well for himself. Only three years in Congress and I think six or seven in the Illinois senate doesn't really prepare you for being President of the United States.

On the domestic front his signature policy is Obamacare, which had major, major flaws. Right now the talk of the town is how the Republicans are undoing it, but honestly it may have failed anyway even without their involvement. Several insurance companies were pulling out of the program because they simply couldn't afford to take on all the sick people signing up. I don't understand why the Democrats couldn't hash out a more coherent law considering at the time they had a fucking supermajority. Bush was able to do it with almost anything he fucking wanted. Why couldn't Obama corral his people?

On the international front, he's made serious fuck ups. Thankfully he closed the war in Iraq and somewhat for Afghanistan, but consequently ISIS just grew out of nowhere. A large portion of that is probably because we pulled out of Iraq, but then again the American people were demanding for those two wars to end. However he didn't do well in Syria; we definitely lost in this proxy war with Russia and our influence has decreased. Perhaps the most worrisome legacy is the rising tensions with Russia, which I'm hoping Trump will alleviate to some extent.

I think that was his biggest problem: forcefulness. My impression from the first term is he and his team thought if they gave a rational argument the American people would just follow them. That's noble and all but when you have the Republicans marching on CNN talking about death panels killing your grandmother, most people aren't going to listen to whatever logic you have. Obama was never able to really control congress to the extent Bush or the legendary LBJ had, even his own people. It may have been out of his hands with the hyper-partisanship, however I've never heard of any direct policy he's tried to alleviate the problem. In the later part of his presidency he found his teeth to an extent, but no one will ever recall him for that.

Yet he's done good. For all my complaints about it, many people have received healthcare. He's taken large steps in normalizing relations with Cuba and somewhat with Iran (although our deal with them is really not that great), both of which should've happened years ago. Out of all the presidents he's pushed the most for LGBT rights. He got Osama bin Laden, Bush's great embarrassment. He pushed for environmental policies that would curb climate change, like the Paris Accord, something that many nations like China and India are really trying to meet.

As a president I've found him to be mostly centrist. He does lean left in many areas — support of LGBT, taking over Ford — but then again he did many things the right would applaud — massive deportation of illegal immigrants, constant drone bombing of Pakistan. What interested me the most is when I read other historians weighing in on his legacy, many of them commented how he's going to be remembered for being the first black president. Which don't get me wrong, that's great and we're still all proud of that moment, but there's still the other 364 days out of the year. If the most memorable part of your presidency is the pigment of your skin, I'm not certain what that says about your actions. I really hope his blurb in high school history textbooks will be more than that.

God, people need to stop hiring me to look after their homes. I take care of cats and sewage starts spewing from the basement drain. I walk your dog and squirrels form an army to eat all your plants. I watch your kids and a pipe bursts and water starts leaking through the ceiling.

Oh fuck, it's my brother's birthday tomorrow and I still need to get him a good present.

Congratulations to the bride and groom!

I don't know what's up with this recent trend of calling customers "guests." Go to the cashier and next time listen to them say, "Next guest, please." I guess they don't want to refer to us as "customers" because we may feel they want our money, but when you say guest, I think we're at a hotel or something. Surely there's a better term.

Sorry, busy tonight so here's a video:

I mentioned back on my xanga that the NYPL keeps about 90% of the books I want to read in the Schwarzman Building, which means I have to physically march down there to read anything and return it to the desk before I'm allowed to leave. I hate that, but I hate even more that the chairs there are super uncomfortable. I don't want to make several trips, so I try to cram as much as possible in one sitting, but my god my ass starts hurting after a while.

I forgot to mention I beat Gardening Mama 2. Most of the Mama games you're given a task — cook this dish for example — and each minigame is a step in the process — crack these eggs, flip this pancake. The original Gardening Mama was similar: dig up a hole, plant the seed, lay the fertilizer, water, remove the infesting insects, etc. This game is different. The minigames come from requests your friends and family make of you, and the actual gardening part is similar to Harvest Moon of all things. Also, your flowers/fruits/vegetables/whatever are then given to the locals in town who need them to maintain their shops. Grow oranges so the ice cream maker. Plant gladiolus for the florist. Produce roses for the parfumerie. It's a different approach and I actually like it. I only have two complaints: Nothing is as difficult as the original Cooking Mama and Cooking Mama 2. And each time you give goods to the shopkeepers, the amount of customers go up. However it's impossible to maintain these high numbers because you're only allowed to help one shopkeeper a day. But otherwise, not bad.

I think the whole country is waiting with baited breath for January 20th when Trump becomes president, and I'm worried this split in our nation will become much more divided in the years to come. Both sides have such strong stereotypes and prejudices of the other that there isn't much conversation. Of course the party lines always were there with political commentary, cartoons, and the such, but there were always centrists pulling us together. Now I fear those people are pushed out.

For example, I think we can all agree there were a motley of reasons why people voted for Clinton because she wasn't a popular candidate. So instead of believing her message, some voted for her because they didn't like Trump. Or because they're Democrat. Or they're for gun control. What disturbs me is the New Yorkers and other urbanites I surround myself with can't recognize that for Republicans. Trump wasn't a popular candidate either. Hell, he lost the election by two million. So people who voted for Trump also did it for a variety of reasons: They didn't like Clinton, they're Republicans, they wanted to shake up Washington and Clinton was an old guard candidate, they're pro-life. Yeah, there were definitely racists out there who voted for Trump, don't get me wrong, but if I hear someone say they did I'm not going to automatically assume it was because of bigotry. This is anecdotal evidence on my part, but when I went across country this year and I talked with people from Montana, the Dakotas, Kansas — very red states — they seemed very disgusted with Trump. But for them, just as for many people who voted for Clinton, he was the lesser of two evils.

Now for my standpoint, Clinton was an infinitely better candidate than Trump. She wasn't the best, but I've known her and the country has known her for decades. She was a competent senator of my state and an able Secretary of State for my country. Yeah, there were questionable practices around the Clinton Foundation, and if the Republicans were able to produce someone fucking normal maybe I would've considered that person instead, but anything she's done has paled in comparison to what I've seen with Trump. I can't imagine anyone voting for him.

But almost half of the voters did. People like Trump aren't elected out of nowhere. There's a reason. So you have to talk to the other side to figure out why. Maybe they are sexist or racist. Or maybe it's because Trump was the first person in a long, long time who addressed their issues. Yeah, poor whites don't face the same problems as blacks, but that doesn't mean their suffering isn't real too. Or maybe with the Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage and such is changing the country too fast for them. In New York we're complaining about gentrification as a change, so you can understand how it can be scary to see what you're accustomed to just disappear.

I'm not saying talking to the other side will necessarily change minds, but at least you're not looking at the person as a human being. For years and years I've heard people in foreign policy saying cutting ties with North Korea or Iran didn't help much and just led to decades of stagnancy. Maybe that's the case here. People are whining about the Electoral College, but you're not going to change the law without the support of smaller states, who are the ones who voted for Trump. It's a reality you have to deal with. Instead of saying, "If you voted for Trump, unfollow me" or "Anyone who likes Clinton is a traitor," ask why. Because we're all Americans. We have to live with one another. That's the beauty of a democracy. And if we're angry at congress that it's not compromising with the other side, how can we ask that of them if we're not doing the same?

As I said before because the center of my back is hurting I'm lying in all these strange positions just to get shit done. It's really weird to write a letter as you lie on your stomach. Or to crochet as you're on your side. Which is why I don't know how the fuck the Romans did it. The Last Supper probably looked something like this instead of that famous da Vinci painting of them standing on one side of the table for some inexplicable reason:

I've always known on an intellectual level that the Romans reclined as they ate, but now that I consider it, it sounds super uncomfortable. Like at some point my shoulder is gonna start aching during the process. And then my other hand has to extend itself way far if I ever wanna grab something from the table. It's a really inefficient way of eating. The more I look at it, it seems like the Japanese seiza: You have to fucking inure yourself to the situation.

I've been reading Korean webcomics for a while now, and many of them have exciting plots and riveting characters. It's just the layouts I have a problem with. See, with your regular paper comic the location, size, and shape of the panels are down to a science. They can be cluttered to show disorder. Or it can have a two-page spread to express an important moment. I'm not saying every artist out there is a genius at layouts, but there's a much greater variety than the webcomic, which is usually just one panel and then about an inch or two until the next one. I remember way, way back Scott McCloud tried explain how the digital medium could give an infinite canvas to an artist, but so far I think artists using webcomics are still figuring out its full potential. It's getting better, but not quite up to the level of a physical comic.

My back is in a lot of pain. I get a back ache every now and then, but this one only acts up when I fucking sit at a desk and it just won't fucking go away. So now I lie on my stomach to get shit done, hurting my shoulder and neck muscles in the process.

Sorry, busy tonight so have a video:

In comparison to the Old Testament, the New is rather short, having just these books:

• Four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
• The Acts of the Apostles
• Letters from Paul and others
• Revelation

I wrote years ago on my xanga that I felt the Pauline letters — which have been very instrumental in shaping Christian thought, particularly in the west — shouldn't be in the Bible. Half of them are spurious and they're always written as a reaction to something: Either people in the churches he founded were confused about the theology or they heard from other Christians not to follow Paul. He was a latecomer to the faith; originally a fervent Jew who persecuted Christians, on the road to Damascus Paul heard a divine voice and was struck blind until a Christian cured him. Since then he came into conflict with Jesus' disciples, who actually knew the man personally and his mission. Paul wanted to open the religion to gentiles; Peter and James did not.

Oftentimes the letters are contradictory or unsure as Paul develops his own idea of Christianity. So why add them at all? Well, first of all they're the most contemporary documents we've got. Mark was written at about 70AD, some forty years after Jesus' death. There could be some witnesses alive who saw the crucifixion and remembered his ministry, but most of the important players were probably already dead by this point. The latest we've got is John, whose dates range between 90 to 120AD. By then scholars believe the gospels were just a selection of oral stories of Jesus, already too far removed from the man. Paul was still alive and knew the ethos of the period.

However the people developing the canon probably didn't know this; our current list of books started to shape in about the 200s and people genuinely did believe a person named Luke wrote the gospel of Luke. There's two important factors about the Pauline letters that the gospels don't provide. One is he actually gives some details about being a Christian. As I was translating John's gospel I noticed after a point that Jesus never really explains how to be a good Christian. It was continuous stories of him going into a town, he gets chased out, and the author smugly says, "And the unbelievers don't understand the true meaning of his words." The entire time I'm thinking it'd be great to actually espouse some of his sermons. It was only at the Last Supper when Jesus said to love each other that we got anything of substance. Paul was able to fill in that gap and talk about the do's and don'ts.

But even more so, Paul was the one who emphasized the crucifixion. Don't get me wrong, the gospels do too, but Paul is the one who created what we now think is the standard Christian belief. Much of the gospels are just a narration of Jesus' ministry and the events around his death, but they don't explain the significance that well. (Except maybe John, but that looks more to the trinity than anything else). Paul is able to say why Jesus needed to die on the cross for us.

Which may elucidate why Christianity is a mess of a religion with splintered sects all over the place. The New Testament wasn't a unified, coherent work. We have four gospels that often contradict each other or barely give us the information we need. (Historians try to use the to figure out a historical biography of Jesus but find it impossible since they're so vague and useless.) Then we have Paul who is just writing opinions he's not even sure about. Then half of his letters are definitely not written by him and often say the opposite of what the others say. Then we have a shit ton of letters by other people that give other opinions. And we end on, God help us, Revelation that looks like some sort of crazy acid trip. Never mind how it came to dominate the world, it's a miracle this religion took over the Roman Empire!

Child: Heeeeeey, sexy lady! Woppa gungam style!
Me: .....
Child: Heeeeeey, sexy lady! Woppa gungun style!
Me: .....
Child: I have three sexies!
Me: ....?
Child: Sexy, like sixty! Three-sixty!
Me: Yeah, sure, let's go with that.
Child: What does sexy mean?
Me: ...Uh... beautiful.
Child: Oh, we have really sexy flowers then!
Me: Oh god.

Grandia beaten too. I don't think there's been a game that's impressed me this much in years, possibly not since Ōkami, which is funny considering how old it is and I've griped about basic mechanics in the past. Let me just get out of the way all of my complaints before I get onto why I loved it so much:

-Magic was pretty much worthless in comparison to physical attacks, a balance problem that continued throughout the series.
-Characters were not particularly deep or amazing.
-The plot itself wasn't great either: Kid is bored of his life and goes out on an adventure to see an ancient civilization and saves the world in the process.
-OST was a hit or a miss, mostly the latter. For every great and memorable track like this, you got two of these.

Which makes the game seem pretty fucking shitty, and I'll agree that you need to be a certain type of person to enjoy what I liked about it: the fucking world itself. Remember, this game is about a kid bored of city life and wanting to go on an adventure. He starts out in what seems like a regular RPG town: industrial, steam pipes everywhere, a fountain and some green space. As he travels further and further from that point, everything incrementally becomes more and more bizarre. It's doesn't throw the crazy shit at you from the beginning. They give you some odd stuff initially so you get a taste to build up a tolerance. But with each new town and dungeon there's something new and surprising to examine. Even in the final dungeon I still was finding unexpected stuff. I have never in my life have seen and I doubt ever again will see backgrounds, dungeons, or character design like this. It's unique, it's weird, it's interesting, and I finished the game feeling like I did go on an adventure. I have no idea who was on this team, but they sure as hell were missing from Grandia II and III. For me this was pinnacle of the series and nothing ever compared.

Mohammed and I discovered to our delight if you text "Happy New Year" in iOS 10, fireworks start popping up. We spent the next fifteen minutes testing out different greetings — "Happy birthday" and "congratulations" were successful, "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Channukah" were surprisingly not. But of course this would naturally lead to the next step:

Moham: Here's what we gotta do.
Moham: We gotta get one of us the job that is in charge of this shit.
Moham: Then we make a "Cuglife!" one.
Me: Two things.
Me: 1. I love how we now have to hone our skills and career just to be able to get the managerial position to decide these things.
Me: 2. What graphic image would even embody the cuglife?
Moham: 1. It is our duty. Who else could do it?
Moham: 2. That is a very good question. Shit.