Author Archives: Raizen

Body sprays are cheap, and so are the people that use them.

throw that stuff outResist the marketing.

You may have noticed that the people who use body spray are slow-witted knuckle-draggers. This is not a coincidence, because these are the people that this garbage is marketed toward.

They think that they are so cute for spraying this stuff all over themselves, as the rest of us are left gasping for air and actually tasting cheap perfume on our tongues as we attempt to breathe through our mouths in places such as shopping malls, trying to find bread that isn’t ruined by the fragrance in grocery stores, and filling up our cars with caution at gas stations as their body sprays pose a greater ignition hazard than the gasoline itself. In some cases, you can literally smell them coming from hundreds of feet away.

As amazing and tragic as it may sound, they have no idea. The reason for this is due to a phenomenon known as olfactory fatigue.

Olfactory fatigue is what’s happening when you become so used to a smell that you lose the ability to notice it. When someone uses a new kind of body spray on themselves, usually they stop with a brief spray. But after about a week of wearing it, they’ll start to go heavy on it, thinking that the spray is somehow getting weaker.

To make matters worse for the rest of us, body spray manufacturers encourage douchebags everywhere to nearly bathe in the stuff. One brand even encourages users to spray it on their clothes. Some canisters even have a diagram showing a person spraying it all around them. Isn’t that a marketer’s dream come true? Consumers that grossly over-apply their products so they’ll head back out to the store to buy more of it.

body spray

Using body spray comes off as a cheap substitution for taking a shower. Stop telling the world that you take cheap shortcuts and instead practice proper hygiene. I know that some that use body spray will attempt to justify it by saying “But Raizen, I do shower.” Whether you shower or not, the perception that people who use body sprays don’t shower still exists. If you apply body sprays after showering, people will think you didn’t shower. Stop defeating your own endeavors.

And while you’re at it, throw out all your body sprays. You don’t need them, marketers convinced you that you do. Prove to them and everyone else that you can think for yourself by throwing out all your body spray, and don’t buy any more.

Further reading: When I got into writing this article, I did some research, and was surprised at just how dangerous body fragrances can be. For one thing, there’s the fact that fragrances used in body sprays have been linked to a decrease in virility and fertility, which I’m pretty sure is the exact opposite of what the people that use these things are going for.

Then there’s the fact that there are thousands of ingredients that give body fragrances their smell, some of which are carcinogenic and can cause organ damage. These ingredients don’t have to be individually listed on labels, either. They can simply be referred to as “parfum” or “fragrance”.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find cancer sexy.

They can even be the cause of your inexplicable headaches, as explained by this article written from a more personal perspective. Then there’s the obvious problem with chemical sensitivity, which may be less of an allergy in the traditional sense and more of a survival mechanism that your body uses to inform you that something is not right with your environment.

When it comes right down to it, humans are not supposed to smell like aerosol and diluted industrial waste. If you want to smell like a field of flowers, go buy some flowers. What’s that? That’s expensive? Yeah, it is. But the things that are worth having sometimes are. But as for those cheap cans of body fragrance, just get rid of it.

Metroid Prime 4: The logo that won E3

metroid-prime-4 pwnage

A while back, I told someone I knew that if Nintendo would make a Metroid game for Nintendo Switch, I’d buy one. Metroid Prime 4 was announced at E3, and in less than a week, I responded to this announcement by going out and ordering a Switch bundle at Gamestop.

I know that I said before that buying a game when all you know about it is the title isn’t a good thing for the games industry, but there are exceptions. Games developed by Nintendo and Pokemon games are the safest bets out there. Of course, there are also games like Metroid Prime Federation Force, a game that I only recently started playing, and I’m disappointed with it all over again.

I kind of feel bad for Microsoft. They’ve worked so hard on a new console with 4K resolution (a technical spec which, if you didn’t know about it, you wouldn’t care about because all current-gen consoles look graphically identical). Then, on the day of their big announcement, Nintendo comes along and steals all of their thunder just by announcing a game and showing nothing more than its logo.

I remember when the first Metroid Prime was announced. People dissed it because they didn’t think it would turn out well as a first-person shooter developed by an American company. As it was being developed, I remember reading stories about drama involving the developer itself. Retro Studios was working on four games when they started on Metroid Prime, and by the time they were done, the team was down to half the size that it was when they started on it, with each one of them focused on Metroid Prime. Also, at some point along the way, Nintendo acquired Retro as a second party developer. As it turned out, Metroid Prime blew nearly everything released that year out of the water.

When Metroid Prime 2 was announced, there was doubt as to whether it could outdo the first one. But not only did it do that, it was actually better. And a third one was released for Wii, and it’s one of the best games on that system.

Considering the track record of the main Metroid Prime games up until this point, it might not be a bad idea to invest in some fresh boxer shorts. Because when Metroid Prime 4 drops, it’s going to demolish every pair within a 10 mile radius of it, and every child far enough from a game store to avoid it is going to run outside to catch the fallout on their tongues like snowflakes.

And it gets better. A 3DS Metroid game has been announced as well, with a trailer to go with it. Apparently, this is going to be a souped up remake of Metroid 2: Return of Samus. The new one is going to simply be titled, Metroid: Samus Returns. I went out and preordered the special edition, and completely paid it off. So yeah, if I haven’t gotten it across already, I want to play it.

This makes Nintendo’s move of going after AM2R make a little more sense, considering that they may not have wanted their game to compete with a similar fan game.

And yeah, there’s going to be new Metroid Amiibos, as well. I only recently gotten my first Amiibo, and it’s of Samus. I’m not really a huge fan of Amiibos, but I went and got one, and used it with Federation Force. It gives the mech a Samus-themed color, which aesthetically makes the game more bearable as well as give a missile bonus.

Metroid fans, lean times are nearly over. As you wait, perhaps you can give a classic Metroid game a go. The first three are on 3DS virtual console. Yes, even Super Metroid. Or, if you can find a copy, Metroid Fusion or Metroid Zero Mission. Or you can play any of the first three Metroid Prime games, if you want to catch up. Other M actually isn’t the complete unmitigated disaster it’s been made out to be. Or you can try Federation Force on the low likelihood that you’d find something to like. Not that I strongly suggest that one.

metroid fusion awesome video gameMetroid Fusion. This is what an awesome video game looks like. No 4K required.

TWAT News: Russia Russia LOL.

Today, dismissed FBI chief James Comey testified saying that any possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia didn’t extend to Trump himself. This takes some of the heat off of Trump.

To me, this really wasn’t a surprise, because as pointed out by Zero Hedge, Comey had already testified under oath that he had faced no political pressure to end an investigation, and that if that did happen, that would be a “big deal”. It’s not likely that Comey would have reversed his position and faced possible charges of felony perjury just so some left-wing college-dropouts-to-be can see their daydreams of a cheap victory come true.

What you can count on at this point is for the corporate mainstream information media to attempt to spin this against Donald Trump, considering that they have had an incentive for quite some time to do this, for some reason.

george soros

For most, it would seem as though the corporate media has gone completely insane. After all, one might assume that the job of this corporate media is to inform the public, not to incessantly comment on a conspiracy theory for which no evidence has yet been presented.

In April of 2016, it has been found that only 6% of Americans trust the news media. When you have an approval rating lower than that of Congress, there’s a problem. When people become aware that people hate them and the job that they do, that tends to have an effect on them. For one thing, it’s the tendency of people to resolve the cognitive dissonance between what they do and people’s opinion of it by simply dismissing them as idiots.

But that’s not the only change that takes place. Like Congress, the corporate media has discovered that they have lasting jobs and steady income in spite of anyone’s opinions of them, and they have therefore come to the realization that they don’t need anyone’s respect.

In light of this, if they were to go full-tilt and turn their position as informers into a veritable sludge factory of left-wing narrative, what do they have left to lose? At this point, they know precisely what’s expected of them, and they’re going to give what audience that they have what they want, because it’s precisely the kind of horse crap that holds their attention.

Sure, Trump is off the hook for the time being, legally speaking. But even now, as we speak, the corporate media is hard at work trying to get the Russian collusion conspiracy theories to stick to him, regardless of just how silly that they sound.

They don’t need to convince the brightest people among us, of course. After all, the brightest among us don’t have votes that count any more than anyone else’s. Their goal is to convince enough idiots to make a difference. To that end, they’ll go non-stop to pump as much garbage into as many minds as possible.

Here’s a few facts to put some things into perspective:

  • It’s possible for a hacker to mask their IP address so that it appears to come from a different location. Popular patsies to pin illicit web conduct on are countries with a known history of non-cooperation with American investigators. China is a famous example. North Korea took the blame for a particularly famous bug just last month. And yes, Russian IPs are especially popular among hackers. Even trolls in my comment sections do this, and they think I have no idea.
  • The DNC’s email server wasn’t hacked. I’m not revealing it here, but their password at the supposed time of hacking was so simple, that a grade-schooler could have guessed it in a matter of seconds. It’s as bad as setting the combination to your luggage as “12345”. I’ve already commented on the technical ineptitude of the left, so suffice to say, you should be very glad that someone so terrible at keeping things a secret lost the election. Unless you hate America.
  • That last fact was so compelling, that I forgot what I was going to put here. But you’re welcome to go back and reread that last one. There’s a lot of weight to it. Like, imagine if the launch code to the US nuclear arsenal was something like “00000000”. Oh, wait…
  • The aforementioned grade-schooler would have easily been able to post what he found on WikiLeaks. So yeah, it’s quite possible that a child with the age of a single digit could have prevented Hillary from abusing even more power. There’s even a WikiHow article on how to do so.

Have fun looking on as the corporate media collapses into lunacy. So far, it’s been quite a show.

Webcomic Review: Yuyuko Likes Hot Pockets

save yourself

Can we agree at this point that randomness alone doesn’t make something funny? I understand the mechanics of humor: it involves building up a person’s expectations and then presenting them with an unexpected outcome. Randomness involves unexpected outcomes. But when randomness is the only element used, it loses its effect.

The webcomic we’re looking at today is Yuyuko Likes Hot Pockets. My first problem with the comic would be its name. Hot Pockets suck. I’ve spent much of my adult life living like a Spartan, so for me, something like Hot Pockets was a “too-rich-for-my-blood” kind of thing. But one day, I tried them, and I was disappointed. They come with those weird cardboard boxes that are gray on the inside, likely to use to attempt to heat the things evenly. They fail. Usually, one bite can be as cold as ice, but the next is so hot it burns your mouth so that nothing tastes right for days. And if you made the sad mistake of getting the kind with pepperoni, have fun having the skin on the roof of your mouth stripped away by the hot oil.

hot pockets yuck.png

Yuyuko Likes Hot Pockets doesn’t star Yuyuko. It stars a couple self-inserts named Xephious and Dzelda. That’s right, this comic has two authors. When we get into just what this webcomic is made of, it’s going to be apparent that the authors were sabotaging each other every step of the way, and the result was Yuyuko Likes Hot Pockets.

One of the authors has their age as 28 on their profile, so at least one of them was college-aged when they started on this webcomic. The profile of the other one includes the following tidbit:

dzelda's profile

That’s an endeavor that definitely failed. And considering that her webcomic is Yuyuko Likes Hot Pockets, it’s safe to say that she’s done enough to contribute to it.

Yuyuko Likes Hot Pockets takes place in the fictional realm of Gensokyo, which is the intellectual property of ZUN of Team Shanghai Alice, the creator of the Touhou Project series of video games. Obviously, the authors aren’t going to go professional with this, but it is a common mistake among webcomic artists to believe that they can go professional using someone else’s copyrighted material. What’s more, characters from Touhou are also used, further anchoring this webcomic to an intellectual property that the authors don’t have rights to.

clone cap

The picture above should give you a good idea of what to expect from this comic’s artistic style. While the chibified anime style comes off as a cheap shortcut to begin with, this comic uses what appears to be the same template for every individual character. I feel I’ve seen the same style used for Touhou characters before, which makes me further suspect that the authors are using yet more properties that aren’t their own.

Like I’ve said already, this webcomic is random. There’s practically nothing in terms of storytelling. There’s something about clone capsules and Utsuho having her arm cannon stolen, but that’s about it. There’s even a random demotivator thrown in there for good measure. May as well; just about everything else about this comic is template driven, just like this meme was when it was relevant over a decade ago. I have my doubts that the art used for it was their own, though that part doesn’t seem to be from any cut-and-paste template I’ve ever seen.

Failed storytelling aside, the wordbubbles suffer from “tiny text syndrome”. I’ve found myself using the zoom function on my browser to try to figure out what the tiny text says, but Xephious has found another solution on this page: to provide a transcript in the comments section. That’s nice, but how about getting the word bubbles right while you’re still in the process of editing your comic? Not that I’m expecting much in the way of technical expertise from someone who asks in the comment section “how to compress an image without stretch/skewing it”.

It’s about time to give this comic its score, and I give it a Nitori’s frog out of ten:

nitori's froggy

Which would be a 1.6. And I think I’m being generous with this one.

The botched reveal of Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon

pokemon ultra sun moon what

Nintendo just announced the next installments of the mainstream Pokemon games, as they showed in the following video.

Wait for it… Wait for it… Really wait for it…

There it is. Right at the end of a three-minute-long promo for the next Pokken Tournament game, we get twenty seconds about the next installments of the mainstream RPG. What earth-shattering new content do they have to show us?

It’s basically going to be a ROM hack. Only this time, Solgaleo and Lunaala have had chunks of Necrozma added to them.

If this sounds kind of familiar, that’s because this has already been done before. And not only that, the previous installment actually looked better:

pokemonblackwhite2

I know that most Pokemon fans out there that were disappointed by today’s announcement were disappointed for a different reason. They wanted to see a Pokemon Stars version on Nintendo Switch. Me, I was expecting remakes of Diamond and Pearl. The reason being, for several years, the mainstream Pokemon games, whether remake or not, have had a great deal of effort put into them (the new Kalos region, the revamped Hoenn region, the new Alola region). Because of this, I thought it reasonable to guess that Game Freak had moved beyond ROM hacks and that the next games would return to Sinnoh with a region that is completely redressed with a 3D engine.

At the very least, if Game Freak were to show a new Pokemon game, that reveal would come with something more interesting than showing the cover mascots with black chunks superglued onto them.

But, as it turns out, old habits die hard. And what makes this news potentially worse is that these may be the final 7th generation games and the final 3DS Pokemon games, ending the 7th generation of Pokemon with a pathetic whimper.

I know that there will likely be more to show with these games, but I’m still feeling a level of disappointment comparable to the reveal of Metroid Prime Soccer.

The way that they just tacked this announcement to the end of a three minute long promo for a different game makes it seem as though Nintendo didn’t want us to find out about these games. It’s like they knew that we’d be disappointed in it.

Genius restaurant owner bans children

carusos_1490441864319_9041914_ver1.0

A North Carolina restaurant owner got tired of seeing the experiences of his paying customers ruined by poorly-behaving children, so he banned them from his restaurant.

That’s right. A restaurant owner finally developed the nerve to do it. So, let’s hear a round of applause for the restaurant owner, Yoshi Nunez.

The restaurant, named Caruso’s, has banned children under the age of five from entering its doors. As you’d probably expect, this move has resulted in criticism from those who don’t understand why the rest of us would want peace and quiet while spending some quality time with our wives and suitors while eating a steak that cost several hours of wage.

That smug glow of righteousness that comes from virtue signalling about ageism is spouted by people that want to be sure that they can take their screaming children with them anywhere they go, be it to supermarkets, shopping centers, and even to restaurants where their undisciplined bags of ugly noise can deter the prospect of procreating for those of us who are better suited to it.

Predictably enough, once word got out that there was a restaurant that served as a haven from other people’s children, reservations for that restaurant went through the roof. While irresponsible parents may have taken to social media to complain, the rest of us have voted with our money and decided that a kid-free restaurant was just what was needed.

Of course, the many left-wing news websites that reported on this would likely be at a loss once they come to the realization that the restaurant owner that banned children was well within his rights as a business owner to decline service to potential customers for any or no reason. To understand why, remember that these same news websites had no problem with lambasting Christian bakery owners for not making gay wedding cakes in violation of the bakery owner’s religious convictions, in spite of the fact that nearly every other bakery one could have chosen instead is not principled when it comes to this kind of thing.

Of course, the pedophiles would likely be upset by this development, as it would mean one less dating option for them.

TWAT News: Time magazine delegates its job to social media

Sometimes, I suspect that Time magazine is optimizing its content so that people like me can make fun of it, so we’ll click on their stuff and get them ad revenue.

As vexing as it sounds, it seems to be working. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain the recent spate of articles from them commenting on what “the internet” is doing.

If you suspect that I put “the internet” in quotation marks on purpose, you’d be right. It should be pretty clear by now that when Time says that “the internet” is doing something, it means that they’ve found a small community that throws memes around that they can use to put words into the mouths of the rest of us.

Let’s look at a few of their headlines. It pains me to link to them, because I don’t want them to have more ad revenue, so please make sure you have your ad blocker and Privacy Badger enabled if you plan to let their site hurt your eyes.

By the way, some of their sites automatically play videos when you click on them. You know the kind I mean; they’re the ones that move to the lower-right corner when you attempt to scroll down to read their content. This makes Time like that boy on the playground that tries to show his privates to you: when you look away, he tries to get your attention.

The Internet Is Freaking Out Over How Donald Trump Still Tapes His Tie Together

Oh, is it? I’ve already commented on this one before, so there’s no need to get into it again here. The author of this piece is Megan McCluskey, a name that will come up again before this article is over.

The Internet Is Having a Field Day Turning Paul Ryan’s Health Care PowerPoint Into Hilarious Memes

Really? I couldn’t tell because I was busy not caring. However, author Megan McCluskey cares, and she’s willing to use her paid professional position in mainstream media to tell the rest of us that memes are being passed around on the internet. That this woman gets paid to trashpost is encouraging to a new generation of talentless hacks that want little more out of life than to draw in a meager paycheck for insipid mediocrity.

Sean Spicer Wore His Flag Pin Upside Down and the Internet Freaked Out

No, it didn’t.

This article has Megan McClusky’s style all over the place, from use of weasel words to aggregation of other people’s content. So I would have guessed that this article was her own. Or perhaps Katie Reilly is a pen name she uses. I’m beginning to suspect that there’s a workshop somewhere for putting together half-baked news stories by collecting other people’s Twitter posts. If so, dark days are ahead for journalism.

The Internet Can’t Stop Laughing at These Stunned Luke Kennard Memes

I’ll give Megan McCluskey that, because a person can’t stop laughing at something that they weren’t laughing at to begin with.

Have fun with whatever it is you’re trying to do, Time magazine. You look for new content for your site, and so do I.

TWAT News: Deluded musician conflates fantasy narrative with real-life political climate

billie joe armstrong
This is Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. I did not alter this photo.

I’m getting real tired of defending Donald Trump, off all people. However, when taking on the BS of old media, it’s a difficult thing to avoid.

This time, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong made the news by comparing Donald Trump to Voldemort. That’s right, the bad guy from the fictional universe of Harry Potter.

What’s the scandal? What’s the event? Was there some major occurrence that makes this newsworthy? Nope. There was none. Just some washed up old musician firing his mouth off, and we’re supposed to give a care what he has to say.

That’s it. That’s the entire news story.

Surely this couldn’t have come from a news site that’s professional and relevant, right? There’s no way that a news outlet that’s been around for decades could have deemed this newsworthy and passed it along as news, right?

time-logo

Wrong.

That someone from the mainstream entertainment industry is expressing a view that’s so left-wing that he falls off the side of the plane isn’t really new. That the same guy thinks his audience is so witless that they’d nod assent with big stupid grins as he conflates real-life political climate with a fictional narrative isn’t exactly new, either (considering the people who actually still like Green Day, I wouldn’t put it past them). It’s also not new that he would directly compare someone he doesn’t like to the worst bad guy he could think of, consistent with someone who has never faced a true hardship.

So, what’s new about this? Absolutely nothing. And that’s exactly why it doesn’t belong in the news.

Maddox parodies SJW media, and it’s hilarious.

Each year, the web comedian Maddox does an April fools version of his site, in which he parodies something that’s popular at the time. The April fools version is an obvious joke, which he temporarily makes the main page of his site.

This year, he parodies the stereotypical social justice news site that looks for Hitler in just about everything. If calling everything Hitler is a fast way to wear Godwin’s law into the ground, Maddox is making sure that’s happening.

Here is a link to the page. (Update: the parody now has its own page.)

Considering Maddox’s history with April fools content, he’s likely to get quite a few emails from concerned individuals who have no idea what’s going on.