Requisite proof of life bump

get dunked

“Humanity can be quite cold to those whose eyes see the world differently.” – Eric A. Burns

Tumblr is a repulsive hive of rebloggers. I know someone whose entire page consists of nothing but reblogs. Reblogs, reposts, “shares” and their ilk are dumb, one-click actions that merely pass on interesting things others have made without offering any of their own insight or reaction on it. On the other hand, most people will have the exact same reaction to a given video or picture and it may not be necessary to repeat it. This opposite situation is found on Youtube videos where a stock reaction phrase like “lol” or “fapfapfap” is already posted in the comments section several times over. What I would like in an ideal social media website is the presence of an equilibrium between keeping the medium original, not repeating what’s already been said and making one’s own mark on the world, demonstrating your existence to others.  Those are ultimately the two conflicting causes it boils down to.

We’ve now moved into February, which I now dub the Month of Historic Black Love for a generalization. School is officially in session again for me, but I probably won’t feel the workload on my back for about another 2 weeks. I’m actually in the middle of a League of Legends ranked queue champion select as I’m writing this post (multitasking overconfidence) so this short ugly rant will be all for now.

Pastoral Bliss

This used to be a classic painting, but everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

“Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error.”
–Benjamin Disraeli

For a normal website I would make an FAQ section, but I feel that the About page is sufficient for the meager reader base this blog currently possesses. I have not been asked any questions very frequently, and I wouldn’t mind if I was because I live a sad and boring life so I would be delighted to converse with anyone. Instead I will posit questions in this post that are largely irrelevant(despite my prose having little direction to begin with) and answer them as unhelpfully as I can.

Q) You already made your own forum to share all the lame things you do and find, why make a blog?

A) You got me there, I am insufferably full of myself. Originally I sought to monetize this by spamming adverts but unlike Blogspot, WordPress does not have built in support for AdSense and the like.

Q) Wouldn’t your sites have more visitors if you actively promoted them?

A) Yes I do know quite a few workable viral tricks and I could be a marketing whore like squishguin but I don’t believe my sites have anything worth sharing or generating hype about.

Q) Are you implying that-

A) Sadly I realize that I’m basically giving him what he wants just by mentioning it, but I strongly dislike squishguin’s channel and “talking head” Vlog Youtube channels in general. It’s very fortunate indeed that he’ll never find out about this blog.

Q) Why are you so unique and special with your Snicket-esque tone?

A) I self-style myself as part of the “counter-culture” group, holding scorn and disdain for what the general populace obsesses over.  4chan’s /b/ is sort of an anathema to Facebook, where nobody is named and anything you say will be wiped away within hours. I’m far more kinder and forgiving than the vast majority of ‘us’ though.

Q) What’s with the fabulous new post format?

A) I’m always thinking of how to make things look better so now I have a random occasionally self-drawn picture and an inspirational quote in the beginning. Just FYI my quotes are NOT the ones that the WordPress UI spits out every time you make a new post, I handpick them myself.

Q) Are you a nerd/geek?

A) No, at least not the kind that uses it as a fashion statement because it happens to be trendy right now. I could go into a tirade about how “those pretenders aren’t real geeks like me” but the “fake geeks” do that too so if you’re looking for that sort of thing I suggest you go to tumblr and stalk teen girls’ posts. I am into sci-fi (not the now-defunct Syfy channel) and tabletop RPGs.

>>Bazinga le may may arrows lolololo i trole u problem

I return to press

A cool looking symbol I randomly made one day.

“A mind all logic is like a knife all blade; it makes the hand bleed that wields it.”
— Rabindranath Tagore

Another whole year has passed and I’ve forgotten this even existed. I would say that now the vibrant color and light has gone out of my life but I am unsure if there ever was any in the first place. Part of mental maturity is introspection, looking back on the events you’ve experienced and how fun and joyful they actually were. My transition to “adulthood” was slightly jarring but otherwise nothing like the momentous occasion I envisioned in earlier years, similar to my high school graduation ceremony. Our society makes a big deal out of both, considering them major life milestones however it really doesn’t seem that way to me. They happen every year all over most developed countries.

Anyway, I’ve managed to shed off the deleterious influence of online browser games…for now. A few weeks back I finally finished reading Umineko Episode 8, the ending being very cathartic and somewhat bittersweet. Unlike most stories there is really only one big spoiler, which is that there are no spoilers. Anything you find unresolved, you must figure it out yourself, the clues were in previous episodes. The riddle party game and culprit select part were fun though.

In this surprisingly lengthy winter break between semesters, I haven’t been up to much: playing League of Legends with friends,  Stargate SG1 marathon, making a futile attempt to revive dead forums.

I was quite surprised when I saw this video by PBS where they regarded Homestuck as an actual work of “literature” similar to the novel Ulysses. The latest animation though makes it quite clear that Hussie does not want his creation to ever be subjected to serious literary review.

I’m still alive…I think

More than 2 weeks too late for New Year, and 2 days late for Chinese New Year, procrastination is the greatest invention anyone ever put off. I did not put off fixing my computer though when it broke down. Stupid Vista apparently BSODs when the hard drive is almost full, I just upgraded to Windows 7. I understand I’m a bit behind the curve. But if I were that concerned about having the best operating system I’d just switch to a Linux distro.

So after a really chill exam week in which I went to school for a total of one day the entire week, it’s time for 5S (Second SemeSter Senior Starcraft) the rest of the year. Yeah that’s right we have LAN parties at school u jelly?  I’ve almost broken into the top 1000 ranks in Kings of Chaos (join me http://www.kingsofchaos.com/recruit.php?uniqid=6id8t33s ).

Obtained the Mahou Tsukai no Yoru demo trial, I was pretty excited until I remembered it wasn’t translated and I can’t read Japanese.

Staying true to a concept

I think we’ve all experienced this kind of conflict before. Popular culture or just the people around you try to reference a concept like a meme or story, trying to take on the spirit, but to you, they are doing it wrong and misunderstand the original purpose/theme.

An ur-example is Greek Mythology. If you are simply reviewing it on how it adhered to the old Greek myths, the Clash of the Titans (2010) movie is horrible. The Kraken is not even from Greek myths(it’s Norse), and if it were it would have been Poseidon’s creature instead of Hades, seeing as how IT LIVES IN THE SEA. Pegasus was flown by Bellerophon, not Perseus, and he sure as hell did not get a lightsaber type sword to burn through monsters with. There aren’t even any actual Titans involved so the title is clearly just to make it seem epic, which I suppose it achieves for the uneducated. Then there is all that discrimination portraying Hades as evil just because he rules the underworld. Disney’s Hercules did it too(the actual ‘villain’ in Heracles’ myth is Hera), so that is pretty much a universal constant. The difference is that Hercules didn’t bother trying to stay true in the beginning and just modernized everything, so at least Disney was consistent and it was a good movie. I like to try and avoid hypocrisy, so I’m not going to say these movies are bad just on that basis, as my very own beloved Fate/Stay Night made Hercules a black dude in a skirt with different colored eyes and Medusa some hot pink haired chick, but I never say anything about that when I talk about how popular culture gets their mythology wrong. I’m digressing a bit.

This is probably a very trivial matter, but what I’m most concerned about currently is how people on the internet reference trolling and the trollface. Troll is not an adjective, so saying that something is “so troll” is just saying that “it’s annoying” while making it look like you’re trying to insert  ‘troll’ in every other thing you say. I have a friend who actually does that, it irritates me. I get the impression that most people on the internet don’t know that trolling is a deliberate act of trying to piss someone off, they think it’s just a funny word and the trollface is a funny looking face. The importance level of this is the same as people wearing Santa hats during Christmas(omg you’re not santa don’t wear his hat bluh bluh bluh), meaning not important at all. What I actually implore you to do is not consider the other meme faces spinoffs of trollface, they are internet memes, not “troll memes faces” or what have you.

 

New Fatal Zero Action Screenshots

Wow, it’s like I really don’t have anything better to do with my life!

Now with a shiny new logo that does not look like the Final Fantasy VII Logo

Fatal Zero Action is the latest game in development by the doujin(amateur) group Lights-Maguro, who also made the fighting games FATAL/FAKE and Crucis/Fatal+Fake, which used to be the fad among my gaming circle about 2 years ago. Like Crucis, Fatal Zero Action is based off of Type-Moon’s Fate/Stay Night visual novel franchise, except it looks more like a dungeon crawler where you fight off waves of enemies. I’m bringing this up now because they put up a bunch of new pictures. Playable characters so far look like Saber and Kiritsugu?

Early Update

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “whoa, it’s that guy who has a blog, he made ANOTHER post on the exact same day of the first! slow down man, I can’t keep up with the pure awesomeness output! *grovels*” Yes, I can understand your excitement.

Speaking of Homestuck*, I’m glad the Act 6 intermission went back to the old characters we know, I was getting tired of the post Scratch kid shenanigans before entering the game. In fact, I didn’t like the original kids’ herping and derping around in the beginning either, which is why it took a while for me to start reading. This is just my personal opinion, I’m not a big fan of MSPA.

Almost photorealistic fanart I discovered, part of a set. Good stuff.

*For the uninformed, MS Paint Adventures is an ‘interactive’ webcomic written by Andrew Hussie, hosted at mspaintadventures.com. The panels are advanced through clicking commands that follow the syntax of a text based adventure game like Zork, except this has pictures. The comic is divided into 4 ‘adventures’ the most recent of which is Homestuck, which incorporates flash animations and an original soundtrack. I think it very closely resembles a Japanese visual novel now, which is why I think it should be converted into one.

Greetings.

Hail and well met, countryman. If you wanted to know what this blog was about, go to the About page, that is what it is there for. In my opinion, it was *the greatest idea to create this blog and make the first post 2 days before Christmas. Cutting out single words from sentences and putting them in small footnotes at the end of a post is not very conducive towards communicating an effective message, although it is rather amusing when one word makes a world of difference, so to speak. Just a forewarning; I will take every opportunity I can to make puns and rub them in. I am somewhat of a grammar Nazi, so if you find any spelling or grammar errors, they are probably deliberate. I feel like every post needs to have some sort of deep discussion or at least some tidbit of the content I said I would write about to make it worthy of reading, unlike some people, so here we(you) go.

The Witch Hunt translation group has finally released the complete English patch for Umineko no Naku Koro Ni Episode 8: Twilight of the Golden Witch. Get it here ==> Witch Hunt Translation Project   Yes, Twilight is a bad name for the episode considering that Umineko is not related in any way to Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight saga. Now normally I would be extremely pumped about this news, but I am not, because 1) Making the About section of this blog just now bored me to death and 2)I already got it and started reading a few days ago.

*not