CN Leak Reveals Plans For Scrapped Powerpuff Girls Z Adaptation

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A huge leak has hit Cartoon Network, and even now, people are sifting through it.

But one thing I’d like to bring attention to is that that the leaks contain internal materials related to Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z, and apparently would’ve localized under the same name.

That’s right, there was an anime adaptation of the Powerpuff Girls. It debuted in Japan in 2006 on their own Cartoon Network, and it even had some anime stars working on it, including Emiri Katou as Hyper Blossom, and Ryusei Nakao as Kare (Him), who previously had voiced Frieza from Dragonball Z! What’s more, the henshin sequences in Powerpuff Girls Z (PPGZ) were planned out by the same talent as the ones who did the henshin sequences in Sailor Moon (a big deal, considering that these took up a bit of screen time). So they really brought on the star power for this one. And appropriately so, considering that PPGZ was intended to commemorate 50 years of Toei Animation.

PPGZ was originally announced in 2005, and here were some of the public promotional materials:

These characters look much different from the ones that ended up going into PPGZ. This is because it was originally planned for the girls to be High School students, rather than the Middle School students that they ended up becoming.

However, a lot of people suspected that it was a joke. Mostly because the studio went quiet on the projects for months afterwards. It didn’t help that the announcement was made on April 1st.

PPGZ made its debut on July 1, 2006, to mixed reception. The debut episode showed as the girls, who already had their superpowers, rescued kindergarten students from Mojo Jojo, who wanted to steal their snacks, or whatever. There was an ice cream break at some point, for whatever reason, which told us the viewer what the characters favorite ice cream flavors are, as if we cared. After this, the anime began telling us the girls’ origin story. In this adaptation, the three girls themselves are ordinary girls, named Momoko Akatsutsumi, Miyako Goutokuji, and Kaoru Matusbara. They gained the ability to transform into the Power Puff Girls Z after being hit by beams of light that were emitted when Professor Utonium destroyed an iceberg with a beam. However, the light beams also turned ordinary people in the setting of Tokyo City into monsters. So, PPGZ was a majou shoujo (magical girl) anime, except that one of the catchphrases of the anime was, “It’s not magic! It’s science!”

For those who stuck with the show, the episodes were basically hit-or-miss. There were long stretches of time in which episodes seemed to alternate between hit or miss, on a weekly basis. The anime wasn’t exceptionally good, but it was still enjoyable for its quirkiness.

As the recent leaks show, the anime was being prepared for a US release. It would’ve been appropriate, as the original Powerpuff Girls did originate in the States. There was even an English version which aired in places like Australia, so it’s not like there wasn’t a complete localized version, ready to go.

From what little I’ve seen of the English version (one episode), I think people would’ve been happier watching the Japanese version with subtitles. 2007 was the time of the initial anime boom in the west, but cringy localization efforts were still rampant.

But even though a localized version was ready to go, Cartoon Network didn’t air it in the US. And that’s disappointing, because I think that it would’ve been enjoyed, in spite of its flaws. But it seems like Cartoon Network would rather air a bunch of insipid Scooby Doo movies that nobody cares about.

People can speculate as to why Cartoon Network didn’t air PPGZ, even though it was ready to go. But I think there’s an aspect to this matter that isn’t being considered.

In the mid-2000s, anime was huge in the States. One would think that, because of this, CN would air an anime adaptation of what was one of their biggest hits. But, they didn’t. Because, when it comes down to it, CN didn’t much like anime. Sure, they had a Toonami programming block. But it’s easy to understand this block when you know that it acted as a sort of containment, and stuck to the mostly safe stuff. Stuff such as Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura (albeit briefly), Naruto, and heavily edited versions of One Piece and Dragonball Z. While these are hit anime, purists largely turned their noses up at them, a big reason being that they know what localization has done to these anime. At the time, unedited anime almost felt like contraband.

The fact is, western media companies like having control. And because anime is made all the way over in Japan, Cartoon Network had no control over its content.

Have you ever wished that you could make your own cartoon? If you’re an American, it’s probably not going to happen, unless you sign over creative control to whatever studio that will be producing it. Then, after that point, the studio will pretty much write your cartoon for you. And if you disagree with whatever it is that they decide to do with your characters, then they’ll probably just give you the boot, then either cancel your cartoon, or continue writing it in ways that are against your own wishes.

But in Japan, this problem is almost non-existent. In Japan, any creative work must be according to the wishes of the artist if it’s to be considered valid.

Some of the most successful anime are adaptations of manga (comics) that were highly successful. In that sense, the script is already written, and any adaptation is considered valid inasmuch as it’s consistent with the source material. The will of the artist is already expressed, and any animation studio that’s worth working with is going to produce an anime adaptation that’s consistent with the manga. And throughout the creative process, the author is the one who makes creative decisions.

There have been exceptions, but they usually don’t go well. A famous example was Dragonball GT, which was Toei’s attempt to fill in a certain number of remaining episodes after Dragonball Z had already concluded, so they attempted to come up with a story, themselves. Dragonball GT was universally panned, and since Dragonball Super was started, Dragonball author Akira Toriyama declared GT to be non-canon.

Ideally, the author should remain in creative control of his work. It’s the author’s vision, and the author should have the final say.

But CN doesn’t respect that, at all. They want to be the ones in control. If you’ve created characters that they want to air on TV, they want to take them right from you, to do with as they please.

To give you an idea of why you shouldn’t want that, here’s an example of the kind of dreck they already pinch out:

A lot has changed in the last couple decades. Now that ordinary people have creative tools at home, and the means to reach a potentially unlimited audience, people are finding out that we don’t need Cartoon Network for entertainment. Like many other media outlets, CN now has to compete with abundant, unlimited, and free.

If I wanted to write a comic, or make a cartoon, I can just do it. It would be some work, but it’s easier than it’s even been to do. And when I’m done, all I’d have to do is uploaded it, and let you either read or watch it. I don’t have to run it by any publisher, because the publisher would be me.

What’s more, Japanese producers no longer have to run anime through the likes of CN to get it to us. Through official outlets, it’s available for us to watch. And there’s nothing that CN can to do stop us from watching it.

And better still, it comes with no dubious agenda. Japanese anime is made for entertainment, not to push politics. Entertainment should be entertaining.

While I could leave it at that, I’ve got an opportunity to bring up something you might have tried to forget. There was a 2016 remake of the Powerpuff Girls.

They would’ve been better off just airing the PPGZ anime.

Child escapes a sadistic tormentor by clawing through two layers of sheet rock

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I get the idea that I’ve just read a superhero origin story. Here’s a link.

Chloe Lyn Jackson-Jones is a 39-year-old woman who adopted a young boy, then proceeded to abuse him for years.

If science finds a way to successfully execute a person more than once, Chloe is just the kind of person who deserves it. But as it is now, she’s just been sentenced for a long list of charges related to her abuse and torture of a child.

I had an idea of how I’d structure this article, and this would have been the part where I would have described the conditions that the boy escaped from. But I’ve decided not to go much into that, here. If you’re up for getting pissed off, follow the link above.

What I do want to point out is that Chloe sent photos of the abuse via text message. Did none of the recipients report the abuse to the proper authorities?

At the time of the boy’s escape, he was 11-years-old and weighed only 61 pounds. The average weight of an 11-year-old boy is about 79 pounds.

Now, for his escape. His sadistic tormentor tied him to a chair, and left him in his bedroom closet with the door locked. No light. No food. No bathroom. No awareness of the passage of time.

But he had hope, tenacity, and plenty of both. After having undone his bonds, the boy then proceeded to dog through the wall between his closet and his bedroom. By the time he was done, his little fingers had clawed through two layers of sheetrock!

After having made the sheetrock yield to his indomitable will, he wasn’t done proving that he was a living legend. He then opened his second story window, then jumped to freedom. And he did this as a severely-underweight 11-year-old. He was later found by neighbors, asking for something to eat.

If you find yourself in a situation that you think sucks, remember the boy who escaped from Chloe Lyn Jackson-Jones. His situation was hellish, but he mustered his tenacity and escaped. What are you doing to change your situation for the better?

The boy is currently in a loving home with his sister, and is a straight-A student. And he’s probably a few years away from wearing a cape, assuming he hasn’t donned one, already.

But then there’s the beast, herself. She pled guilty. Considering everything that was against her, she didn’t have much of a chance in any effort in her defense.

When you hear about cases like this, people tend to get into creative punishments. But I’m going to give that a skip, because it might not even be legal to say what I want to see done to her. Chloe received the maximum sentence of 40 years of prison, 20 of which she will be required to serve before being considered for parole. Assuming she serves the maximum sentence, she will be 79 years old at the time she is released. It is likely that Chloe will die in prison.

But probably not because she’ll be getting her ass kicked on a daily basis. As much as we’d like to think that people who abuse women, children, and family are singled out for the worst treatment in prison, what I’ve gleaned is that this is a myth that those of us on the outside tell ourselves to help us sleep at night.

Prisons are filled with people who beat their wives, who refuse to pay child support, and who beat their children nearly to death. In prison, Chloe will be in the company of her own kind. Oftentimes, they’ll join a prison gang for protection. Or worse, they’ll convert to a religion that believes that child abuse is normal, which in prisons functions as its own gang. You know which religion I mean.

So, no, I’m not counting on “prison justice”. But, who knows? She might just learn firsthand why her kind of abuse is FUBAR.

France has lost control of its migrants.

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Sometimes, someone asks a question with an answer that’s so obvious that you pause because you suspect that it’s a trick question.

The question is, what happens when a civilized society opens its borders to mass migration from a less civilized place in the world, where education is seldom guaranteed to any but the wealthy, the little education that there is comes with a flavor of religious extremism, and behaviors that we consider outrageously illegal might get a male offender a slap on the wrist (if that) and get a female offender death?

If you answered that we’d all get together for obe big happy powwow of diversity, you’d be hilariously dead fucking wrong.

You might be thinking that that’s just one city block where a “fiery but mostly peaceful protest” got slightly out of hand.

Nope. It’s worse.

Multiple schools are among the structures which have been set ablaze after students protested budget cuts. The migrants, including second and third generation migrants, had their own idea on how to address understaffed and underfunded schools: by destroying those schools and whatever else they could get away with.

When fire trucks responded, they set fire to a fire truck, as well. The rioters even set fire to a fireman.

Historic schools were among the many destroyed, as was a new school named for Nelson Mandela. Did the protesters understand the obvious irony? Or did they not care?

The riots are not isolated to Paris, by the way. If you live in a major city in France, odds are, you’ve already seen smoke.

By the way, I’m grateful for the social media platform that we now know as X. If Twitter weren’t pulled from the hands of leftists, we’d only be seeing these events from the occluded lens of whatever bullshit spin that leftist old media would be applying.

Because X is in the hands of a free speech advocate, try as anyone might, no one could deny the widespread devastation of these riots, or the parties behind them.

What we are seeing in real time are the consequences of mass migration. And no one is going to come along and ban the citizen journalists who are pointing it out.

All it really takes is one European country to decide that it’s sick of this shit for all the rest of Europe to follow suit. For a long time, the left has been trying to trick people into thinking that they’re all alone in noticing that mass migration is self destruction.

The fact is, the western world has an excellent culture, and it’s worth preserving. And to the end of preserving it, we need to send the people who are corrosive to it back to their home countries. And there would be more work to do after that, especially concerning the traitors who brought us to this point.

I get the idea that France is going to be right-wing next year.

It’s another special one.

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I’ve heard it said that it’s always the ones you most expect. But sometimes, it’s the combination of what you’d expect that’s the most surprising.

Such is the case with Jonathan Kramer, an ISIS supporter from Butler County in Pennsylvania who plotted to poison synagogue food in an effort to wage war against “unbelievers”.

https://x.com/WPXI/status/2100251951577419871

And if Butler County sounds familiar, that would be the place where Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate Trump, but failed.

So, he’s another failed terrorist. But if you would’ve guessed that he was a Reddit mod, there’s another square on your bingo card. But you might be surprised at which Reddit board he moderated. Or not.

It’s r/ppnojutsu (source). And if I were to guess what it was about just based on its name, it’s probably about adding male features to depictions of female characters.

What lends to this guess is what Reddit accounts he was connected to, which included u/i_love_femboys6969 and u/ILoveGayRobloxPorn (source), which were among those with which he shared extremist content.

If all he was was some guy who was into weird stuff, we wouldn’t have heard of him. But he went the terrorist route, so now we’re making fun of him.

But it’s easy to see a sort of dissonance between his interests and his Islamic ideology, considering how Islam regards the gays. I know that there are some who try to make the case that Islam isn’t against homosexuality, but try telling that to Muslims who throw gays off of buildings.

There’s also the fact that the Islamic prophet, Muhammad, touted the Torah, which contains the first five books of the Bible, and includes an injunction against homosexuality.

As it so happens, the Torah that Muhammad endorsed contained other teachings which conflicts with Islam, including a rejection of idolatry, which would include bowing towards a rock idol in prayer five times a day. That Muhammad touted the Torah, which is against some Islamic teachings, has resulted in what is today referred to as the Islamic Dilemma.

That people today are killing each other because of Islam, a religion that is easily demonstrably false, is just sad.

No word yet on a possible accomplice.

By the way, I first heard of this story from Not The Bee, a boomer news/humor site that shows how hip it is by using teh memez, but refuses to go anywhere near too much edge.

I bring this up because I refreshed this story on their page after it had been open in a tab for a while, and this replaced their embeds:

Monetizing content that they themselves did not produce, which includes the sources that they reference? Interesting move.

Maybe they should try putting their own words behind a paywall, and see whether anyone cares to pay up?

This is the most depressing video I’ve seen in a long time.

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One of the sad things about knowing a few things about Japan is that you don’t get to indulge in the fantasy of a nerd paradise on the other side of the world.

Sure, not everyone over there has it as difficult as the person in the video below. The point is, his situation is not as rare as one might think. And that’s especially jarring considering that it was just three decades ago that Japan enjoyed a brief stint as the world’s number two economy, due in large part to electronics manufacturing.

Here’s the video:

The video shows a man, after having nearly fallen asleep on a train after a long shift, picking out a container of ramen as a meal before he seeks out a net café to spend the night in.

Which itself is a fascinating topic. Japan has a culture of net café refugees, where working class men rent out a cubicle overnight in a net café because that’s the cheapest form of lodging available.

And it’s not for lack of employment, either. The guy works overtime for a company that’s barely staying afloat. There’s a culture of loyalty to one’s company in Japan in which people regard their company as family, but that’s not the stated reason why the man is trying so hard with limited means. The reason he gave was to support his parents, who are too old to work.

One question that immediately came to mind was, what about children of his own? He was already at the point in life in which he could start thinking about his own family. Yet, he was a single guy working to support his parents, and otherwise living in destitution.

If a situation like his isn’t rare, it would go a long way in explaining why Japan’s birth rate is so low. There would also be the fact that, in a sense, Japan’s relatively high IQ is counting against it. Smart people tend to wait until they’re ready, while stupid people jump right into what they want to do, thinking little of the consequences.

As the guy walks the streets, he passes by people who seem to be living relatively well in comparison, some with smiles on their faces. But when you understand the tendency that the Japanese have to put on a smile in spite of their circumstances, even those smiles become easy to doubt.

But going to the topic of the video, the guy stops by a convenience store, picks out a cup of ramen, a cheap candy bar, and a bottle of green tea, finds a convenient place to dine, and does so. He picks out the cheapest cup of ramen, carefully noting the calorie content, as this is where he’d get much of the energy from this meal.

He’s got me beat when it comes to sheer patheticness. But this does remind me of back when I worked retail, and attempted to live off of what little I made. I walked to and from work, and had pasta to eat nearly every day, just because that was cheap. But at least I lived in an apartment.

And while I’m getting nostalgic about difficult times, there was a time when I was a dormitory student, and had arrived back at the campus right when the dining hall closed for the evening, and wouldn’t reopen until 10:30am the next day. So, I searched cushions in the dormitory lobby for change, then went to a nearby grocery store for a pack of ramen.

But when I see a video about some guy in Japan living a difficult life, I can hope that there will be a time when he can look back on the situation he is now in as a nostalgic time of his own.

Digimon Up? More like, Digimon Down.

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Better yet, don’t.

The recent release of Digimon Story: Time Stranger to Switch 2 had me on a bit of a nostalgia high. And, on the search for a bit of a paracosm paradise, I decided to check the app store to see whether it has a Digimon game.

And, to my surprise, it had one which released just days ago!

When you imagine a Digimon app, what would come to mind? Don’t be afraid to give the obvious answer, because we’re likely thinking the same thing, which naturally suggests itself when thinking about Digimon.

Did you maybe think of a simulator of the classic keychain from 1997? Or of the Digivice featured on the first season of the show? Or of the D3 Digivice?

Available as of this posting, and no, I’m not kidding.

I couldn’t blame you for thinking that, because that would be a proper use of the license. But sadly, what I found instead was Digimon Up.

All that you need to know about Digimon Up is that it’s yet another insipid autoplayer mobile game. What makes this one different is that it uses Digimon assets.

Remember when the Digi-destined took turns beating up Myotismon? Why not watch that, instead?

While that in itself is a disappointment, what gets even worse is that you need to have the game open in order to progress through the stages.

Even though Digimon Up is just days old, it already has many game systems, which all serve the same purpose: to bring damage output up so that more stages are cleared as your phone is sitting there with the screen on.

Obtain clothing customization items? They somehow bring your Digimon’s stats up, though they don’t wear them. Farming? Just a level of complexity to the Eat mechanic, which randomly determines which stats come up. Exploring a digital world? The point is to collect tickets to spend on a skill tree, which also ups stat points. Camp? It’s for attaining a currency that can be spent on digivices that also ups stats. Customizing those also increases stats.

And on, and on, and on.

They put no effort into this.

While most RPGs have different stats to the end of encouraging different playstyles with your characters, in Digimon Up, there is only one playstyle: bring your stats as high as possible so that your Digimon can whallop anything that dares to confront it even harder.

All those different game systems that accomplish the same thing collectively create the illusion of complexity. Unless your wrangler is reading this to you, you’ll figure out what’s going on.

Also, don’t wrack your brain over which starter Digimon to pick, because statistically speaking, they are all exactly the same. There are no type categories, the differences are purely superficial. There will be a point where you can choose more to raise, but the stats will carry over, regardless of digivolution stage, so it would only be a cosmetic choice.

It looks like there’s a lot going on, but it all accomplishes the same thing.

By now, you’re probably excited to learn how this game makes money. If you farm your social media clout from posting about gachas in mobile games, Digimon Up makes it too easy for you. A limited banner does allow for a limited amount of pulls per day using a free currency that can be earned in-game, so they incentive pulling every day before the banner ends. There is a guarantee of pulling the featured item on the 200th attempt.

But that’s as nice as the banners get. There’s no carryover of pity to a different banner, so when the banner expires, the pity is gone. What’s worse, different banners have different durations, and if a banner runs for only a few days, you won’t be able to reach max pity from just free pulls, meaning a completely FtP player might be entirely at the mercy of the draw when it comes to pulling an item. While other games have similar gacha systems, Digimon Up is notable for how merciless it is. And it doesn’t look like it’s worth paying real money, considering how little you’d be getting in return.

Only 140 attempts as a FtP player. It costs $103.97USD to bring the number of attempts up to the guarantee.

Worse yet, the game is broken. Not in the “a certain character is favored in a heavily lopsided manner” sort of way. Again, all partner Digimon are pretty much the same. It’s broken in the sense that certain things, such as initiating certain battles, or pulling for crests, might not work.

Which is shameful. After all, the exact same style of game has been done on mobile many times. When other developers have already done the legwork of making a game system, why would things go wrong when the assets are flipped for Digimon?

You know what? Let’s do what Digimon Up stumbled on, and put the license to work: The game makes me want to become the Digimon Emperor so that I can prevent it from digivolving past its rookie stage.

If you don’t get what that means, then the takeaway is this: just because a game is free doesn’t mean it’s worth playing. And if service for Digimon Up ended, Digimon fans would welcome the news.

Gather around, The Atlantic is talking about how Democrats can be more manly.

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Okay, this is rich. The Atlantic published an article trying to sell the Democratic party as a place where manly men can belong.

And if you think I’m being overly sardonic in my use of the phrase, “manly men”, their article is literally titled, The Return of the Democratic Manly Man.

The splash image is that of an unshaven man in plaid whose default expression is a cold scowl, as seen through a rear view mirror with a fuzzy die, which does a lot to confirm the suspicion that leftism’s perspective of manliness as being insufferable hasn’t much changed.

Apparently manliness is when you always look ready to punch someone in the mouth.

Before getting into this, I’ll first state that my expectation is that leftism believes that manliness is when your purse is made of leather instead of linen. Also, I expect that they believe that manliness is expressed through what they eat, even though they make fun of where their food comes from, because living out real virtue is hard.

Now, for the opening.

Brian Poindexter had just finished wolfing down a Reuben sandwich in a deli outside Cleveland…

There it is. It didn’t take them long to get to the food. By the way, no, you don’t get to ruin the Reuben sandwich.

“There’s nothing wrong with being masculine,” Poindexter told me. It’s okay, he said, to be “a manly man.”

It’s okay to realize what the right has understood all along. Of course. But notice how, when a leftist says it, it’s considered a controversial statement that requires an explanation.

Poindexter’s own manliness credentials are fully in order.

“Hey guys, I’m manly. So you can totally believe what I have to say about manliness. Did I forget to say how manly I am, today?”

Does anyone really take this seriously?

The 46-year-old started working in a machine shop as a teenager and spent years hauling furniture across the country before finding stability as a union ironworker.

I’m going to risk sounding like a dick here, but when a forty-something says that they’ve “spent years” doing a real job that they started in their teens, this implied that they haven’t spent the whole two-and-a-half decades since their teens working. Maybe they did, but we know how this sounds, especially coming from someone left of center.

He drives a Ram Big Horn pickup truck and built, with his buddy turned campaign manager, a shed in his backyard.

“He’s so manly, because he bought a pickup truck, and he helped build a shed.”

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with pickup trucks, or building a shed. But pointing to the truck as a credential is just pathetic. And men build sheds, not to impress people, but because it’s work to get done.

The article goes on to explain how the Democratic party has been failing among men (and at this point, it should be obvious that Democrats are The Atlantic’s intended audience), and how a candidate’s superficial show of manliness could somehow win a few over.

“It’s all vibes,” he said. “The Democrats have catered too much to, you know, the softer side,” he said. “We should be well-rounded people. We should be tough when we need to be. We should be soft when we need to be.”

There’s a reason why that kind of flexibility of mind is more characteristic of the right. It’s because the right knows that not every situation is the same, and some situations require a different paradigm.

The left, on the other hand, tends to attempt to resolve matters with a distinctly feminine approach. This is why the leftist state tends to focus more on providence on the part of the state to requite people’s needs, rather than any approach that might be economically expedient. It’s why the left tends to be more emotional in it’s language, calling it’s opponents fascists and Nazis, rather than describing them with values that they actually hold. Like women, leftists tend more towards the subject than the object.

See the part up above where Poindexter says “It’s all vibes,”? What that means is he doesn’t get it. When you’re a leader, there’s too much at stake to make decisions based on things like synchronicities, auras, astrological signs, feelings, or even vibes. Leaders should act on none of that bullshit. Real problems demand real perspective, and ascribing value to “vibes” is not it.

As the article continues into strategies for harvesting male votes for political influence, it should be evident that the likes of Poindexter and his fellow Democrats don’t have a sincere belief in the virtues of manliness, they simply see men as a demographic to win over in an effort to consolidate political power to themselves, and upon succeeding in this, they’ll no doubt go right back to pushing homosexuality onto our children and letting biological males compete in women’s sports, all while they can’t even explain what a woman is.

But in the meantime, they’re going to presume to tell us what manliness is.

A couple of months ago, I got a call from a party operative who pitched a story on the Democrats’ effort to “win back the manosphere.” The operative ran through a list of a half dozen candidates in key House districts who “are engaging culturally in male spaces”—a bit of gobbledygook that I took to mean “manly men,” or perhaps “guy’s guys,” but that also reflects the sort of anthropological distance that points to the depth of the party’s problem. After all, an ironworker probably wouldn’t describe himself as “engaging culturally in male spaces.”

A recurring theme of the article is that author Russell Berman speaks of manliness as being something that Democrats struggle to comprehend. Most men don’t see themselves as putting effort into “engaging culturally in male spaces.” It’s just something that they do. I don’t feel imposter syndrome every time I go to work. I imagine that that’s how it is with most people.

One thing that can be handed to the article is that it does mention the jobs of the Democrats who are attempting to win male votes, which is a nod to the tendency of men to ask each other what they do for a living, as our perspective of a person tends to be heavily influenced by their contributions to society. But in the context of this article, it comes off as tokenism.

By the way, if you’re unemployed and someone asks you what you do for a living, you can try calling yourself a Cyber-Simulated Warfare Specialist, and see how long it takes them to figure out that that means that you play video games. Marxist policies have made the economy rough; a sense of humor goes a long way.

The article mentions Graham Platner as an example of a manly candidate. You know, the guy who had a literal Nazi symbol tattooed right on his very chest.

I actually had no idea that the skull he was tattooed with was a Nazi symbol. But for as many times as I’ve been called a Nazi, I’m ignorant as to what their symbols are, aside from the obvious ones. But the left seems to know what they are.

You might remember the time when a Republican had a stage designed for him that was shaped like a Nazi glyph, but the Republican had no idea until it was pointed out to him. But, as it turns out, the stage was designed by a leftist who was a world-class troll.

At some point, I might just find a leftist to tell me just what all these symbols are.

I did a CTRL+F in the article just now, and found that Hasan Piker wasn’t even mentioned. That’s sad, considering how hard he tries. I guess you have to do better than being featured spread-eagle on the cover of GQ to be the left’s exemplar of manliness.

Centering a campaign on authenticity can fall flat in other ways. There’s nothing more cringey than a candidate trying too hard to be a man (or woman) of the people. “You really can’t fake it,”

As unintentionally funny as this article may be, that doesn’t mean that they can’t sometimes be right. Even if you struggle to explain what manliness is, most know it when they see it, and can generally see the difference between a uniform and a costume in that regard.

But, in the context of an article about political strategy, don’t their words sound like a confession? It’s already established that they author is writing about manliness as something that they struggle with. So then, what can they do about it besides fake it?

The article gives many examples of the left’s brushes with manliness, as well as failures. One would think that the article would get funnier at that point, but no. Much of its funniness was unintentional, and as it often goes with such articles, there came a point when it fizzled out.

The article subtly suggests what they really have to do in an effort to get more manliness on their side in just a little time:

“All I can do is what my life experience has shown me, just getting out and talking with folks—shaking a man’s hand, looking him in the eyes, and saying, ‘Hey, I want to fight for you. I don’t care if you’re Republican; I want to make sure you put food on the table for your family too.’”

“And,” Poindexter concluded, “I hope I can get through to enough of them to win.”

That is to look for manliness where it is: on the right. Sure, they can try to cultivate it among their own. But it’s an uphill battle, and they don’t have much time.

Much of the rest of the article is about Poindexter, but I don’t much care, so I’m going to skip.

As I pointed out already, manliness is something that’s difficult to explain, but a person tends to understand it when they see it. The left’s struggle with manliness comes from the fact that they have an intrinsic femininity in their nature, as I’ve also pointed out. And with the left seeing feminine traits as closer to the ideal in everyone, not just women, I don’t have much expectation that the left will solve their identity crisis any time soon. If most of them don’t even consider it a crisis, would they?

But if it’s baby steps they want, they can try maining as Zhongli in Genshin Impact.

While manliness can be difficult to explain, I can at least try. Manliness is not a style choice, nor is it the food you eat. And it’s certainly not a line of merchandise. Manliness has been cultivated through the ages based on what’s practical for survival on the part of men. That’s why it’s not going anywhere. Despite the efforts of any weirdos who attempt to redefine it, there will always be real virtue that is conductive to survival.

When you know this, it’s easy to see why true manliness tends towards success.

The left struggles when it comes to manliness, and it has been especially so since the left’s chique alliance with Marxism. Marxism appeals to the less successful among us, often by reason of a lack of virtue conductive to success. But, for one reason or another, they cannot comprehend their own shortcomings. Thus, to the have-nots, the haves are a mystery. And due to Marxism, the difference between them has been filled with resentment.

As long as the left has Marxism, it will always lack true virtue, and thus it will lack true manliness. If the left were to drop Marxism, they may gain the respect of some men, but it will lose the interest of the have-nots that they’ve worked so hard to court.

The reason why the left is not manly is because the left has deliberately courted the resentful failures, and in so doing, the manly have felt alienated by them. Thus, if one were to seek out those who are strong, tough, adaptable, and adroit, the productive and the problem solvers, one would find the lions share of them on the right. The few who would be on the left seem to understand how out of place that they themselves really are.

If the left were to become manly, they would become fundamentally different to the point of no longer resembling themselves as they are today. And if it weren’t for the political capital that might motivate them, probably none of them would want to do it.

Sony Screws the Pooch

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I’ll preface this by admitting that I don’t really know how to run a multinational media empire. But if you want to run one that upsets consumers over and over again, all while maintaining an extremely negative public image, look to Sony for an example.

You probably already know what this is about, considering the next-level backlash that Sony is facing: It’s their decision to discontinue physical installments for PS5 games as of January 2028.

But in case you’ve never heard of Sony, they’d be the company which suggested that gamers work more hours so they could afford a PS3. They also recalled every one of their laptop batteries because they explode. They’re also the company who made MediaGo, which stores huge thumbnails for files offsite, so you’ll see those thumbnails on a new device which doesn’t have those files. They’re also the company which made their gaming portable with a disk drive, wrecking its battery life. Or there’s the time when Sony attempted to justify installing rootkits on people’s devices by saying that most people don’t know what a rootkit is.

Now, in an age where media companies want you to spend on licenses rather than ownership, Sony wants their Playstation games to be all digital. They want you to own nothing, not even the disk the games come on, all while being the central hub for all the media which you purchased the licenses for.

What really surprises me about this is that Sony has fans. As in, legit fanboys who, upon hearing the news, were ready to defend Sony in their latest decision, presumably after getting up, looking in the mirror, and saying “How is this guy in front of me going to be a free shill for a media empire, today?”

Those fans are doing their own part to make sure that Sony doesn’t get any better. After all, if sales for their hardware is still measured in the tens of millions, is there much expectation that they’re going to improve?

I know that games these days are becoming more data intensive, and physical data storage is becoming more expensive. Thus, for game companies to develop a preference for digital downloads is easy to understand. But what’s really irksome about how Sony is handling this is how they’re abruptly going full-tilt on digital downloads, all while putting words in our mouths by suggesting that the change represents changing preferences, as though gamers who primarily download the games they play didn’t want a physical alternative for those who want it.

If you’ve read some of my other gaming articles, you might get the idea that I’m a Nintendo fan. I think that sounds accurate. And being a Nintendo fan is easy, for a simple reason: the games are fun. Which is the whole point of video games.

A Sony fan is probably vexed that there are as many Nintendo fans as there are, and that Nintendo’s Switch system has been beating the pants off the Playstation brand. It’s probably a mystery to them why a game system with nearly decade-old tablet technology has pushed Nintendo back to the point of being market leader, while Sony and Microsoft are pushing for photorealistic graphics on expensive hardware.

Nintendo fans have figured something out. That’s that a game can be entertaining, well-made, interesting, accessible, and even a masterpiece, and it doesn’t have to be photorealistic to do it.

Breath of the Wild was considered the greatest game of the previous generation, an honor it arguably shares with its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. It accomplished this with relatively-simple cel-shaded graphics. It didn’t devour space on a Blu-ray, nor did it need a supercomputer to run. Nintendo makes games fun to play, and they understand that that’s the point.

It also helps that Nintendo cares about their public image.

The ironic thing about all this is that Sony turned the Playstation brand into a household name by embracing optical media, while Nintendo insisted on cartridges. Since then, Nintendo decided to use optical media, but has then decided to primarily use game cards (a form of cartridge), and is back to being market leader, while Sony’s decision to ditch optical media (and physical media on the whole) may have destroyed the Playstation brand.

At this point, if you’re a gamer, the way to go is with a gaming PC, even with RAM as expensive as it is. And if you can wait for data centers to decide that they’ve had enough, prices on RAM are likely to plummet as the market determines the price of what may be overproduced. But even as it is, you can build a gaming PC that outperforms the Steam console for the same money. And it will be a sweeter deal when RAM becomes cheaper.

In fact, LinusTechTips has already built a gaming PC that demolishes the Gabe Cube:

Microsoft seems to be looking for a graceful way for Xbox to fail out, and now Sony is being disgraceful with how they’re looking to discontinue physical media.

So, the best configuration seems to be gaming PC plus Nintendo Switch 2 (if you care about Nintendo exclusives).

The UK is not a safe country.

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If you’re currently visiting the UK, consider leaving, quick. If you’re planning a trip, consider canceling it. It’s not a safe country. Hasn’t been for decades. And things might get a little rough over there in the coming days.

British politician Rupert Lowe has just published The Rape Gang Inquiry Report.

https://x.com/i/status/2066873370239537189

I didn’t read it, yet. But I did become aware of some of the data points. That alone had me depressed to the point that I didn’t want to do much of anything.

As many as 250,000 British girls were victimized. And that’s a conservative estimate. I was aware of the grooming gangs. I wasn’t aware that they were so pervasive.

The offenders were predominantly Muslim, and were heavily Pakistani. Around 90% of offenders were Muslim.

Law enforcement was lax in dealing with the problem, because they were afraid of being called ‘racist’. Social workers who reported abuses faced retaliation, from the state itself.

And there’s more. Much more. Just going by what I’ve heard, it just gets worse and worse.

I think that the UK is likely to riot. That’s one of the reasons why I say that the country isn’t safe. The Henry Nowak demonstrations are likely to be small compared to what’s to come.

The other reason why I say that the UK isn’t safe is because it’s own police force and government has been looking the other way as criminal migrants have been raping hundreds of thousands of their own daughters, and it’s been going on for decades. Does that sound like a safe place to be?

If the British aren’t angry at their own government, I’d lose a lot of respect for them.

It’s so much worse than we thought.

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In light of the guilty verdict of Vikrum Digwa, there has been interest in the release of the bodycam footage of the wrongful arrest of Henry Nowak.

Be ready to hear the British teen’s name a lot more. Because it’s worse than we thought. Much worse.

If one were to hear the events of the footage described to them, a person might think that they were hearing the plot of a Monty Python skit. A difference being that Monty Python would not have been so crass.

A British teenager had been stabbed multiple times by a Sikh, who was permitted to carry a blade contrary to British law by reason of religious exemption.

The Sikh and his family then called the police, and lied to them about the teen saying something racially insensitive about them, knowing that this was just what they had to say to get the police to side with them. The police, being hyper-trained to over-respond to racism, exhibited a callous disregard for the teen that was bleeding to death, expressing disbelief that the teen had been stabbed, even as he pleaded for help.

The police then cuffed the teen, even as the color drained from his hands due to blood loss, and the last words that he heard were his rights recited to him by a callously indifferent officer.

As though it couldn’t get any worse, outside the bodycam footage, the Sikh tortured and taunted the teen for 10 minutes, in recording that was so disturbing that it was not played in court. This was all over the teen asking whether the Sikh was a “bad man”, because he was carrying a knife contrary to British law, while being recorded. The teen had no idea that his close encounter with a different culture would play out with that culture proving just how incompatible it is with the civilized world.

The Sikh murderer and liar was eventually arrested for his crime, by the way. But he was not cuffed during his arrest. It might even be that the killer was not cuffed, at all. In fact, the killer and sadistic tormentor was allowed to get something to eat by the arresting officers, before he was taken to the station.

I did manage to learn some history, in spite of the efforts of the education system. Going on what I had learned, an event like this is absolutely unprecedented. Unless you can tell me of one point in history where an authority figure expressed such misplaced outgroup empathy that favored an invasive ethnic group at the expense of an indigenous person, with the authority figure belonging to the same indigenous group.

As far as I know, such treachery is absolutely unheard of.

In light of this travesty, the people of the UK started to protest, and they started to riot. Yes, really. Caucasian people actually found their nerve. During these events, among the slogans chanted by the demonstrators was “I can’t breathe”, which was among Henry Nowak’s last words.

If those words sound familiar, that’s because they were also among the last words of George Floyd, a drug addict who died of a drug overdose while being arrested for attempting to buy a banana with a counterfeit $20 bill. In spite of the exonerating evidence, the arresting officer continues to serve a prison sentence for the death of the drug addict, all because the legal hold he used looked mean.

The death of George Floyd resulted in riots across the US. But if the rioters were being completely honest, they did not care about George Floyd, they simply used a popular lie about his death as a pretext for the mayhem that they had an appetite for.

And for leftists the world over, it was a pretext for the performative self-flagellation that they themselves have an appetite for. Even those as far away as the UK took a knee in honor of the fallen career criminal.

During the demonstrations for Henry Nowak, the protestors demanded that the officers present take a knee for Nowak, just as officers had done for career criminal George Floyd. They did not do that. But what officers did do was attack protestors, which should not be a surprise, because attacking their own people is what they have been trained to do.

If one were to ask me what I think might happen next, I’d be honestly surprised that anyone would care, for one thing. If my prescience were better, I would have made some different choices.

But, to be honest, I really don’t know. Not only was the arrest footage bafflingly worse than I could have anticipated, it’s also a bit of a surprise that the British reacted as angrily as they did.

Because, when it comes down to it, they, like whites in general, are way too nice. The British are highly civilized. And when people are highly civil, less civilized people will view that as an invitation to push the limits of what they can get away with.

It’s an interesting thing that the British authorities have betrayed their own people in favor of foreign invaders, because the British used to punish treason as a capital offense. And it makes sense why they did. After all, if a person’s heart turned towards the destruction of their own people, whom they should naturally have affection for, then they have become so warped and defective that there is no expectation that they could ever be rehabilitated. What could society be expected to do with such a person? What value could come from a person so bereft of virtue?

But now, it would seem as though the British system has turned against the British people. It would seem as though the solution would be a reworking of British policing, which would ideally be performed in a non-belligerent manner. But with people as angry as they are, it might not happen that way. As civil as the British are, it would seem that they may have reached a breaking point.

Like I said, the British are civil, to the point that other people are too comfortable with pushing them to their limits. The dangerous thing about that is that, when it comes to nice people, those limits are not clearly defined, and when exceeded, the backlash tends to be intense.

The world is not ready for the angry British.