Books Are On the Way Out (But Reading is Thriving)

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old books mildew.jpgPictured: Old media collecting mildew

New media is consistently vilified as contributing to the stupidity of users and is presented as a sort of Pied Piper, hypnotically leading children away from books. Currently, the target is cell phones, and in times past they went after television and video games for the same reason.

But let’s take a step back and look at things critically: books are far from ideal as a form of media. When one considers their inefficiency, it’s easy to see just how great it is that they’re on the way out. They’re cumbersome to carry about, especially in quantity. A trip to the library is inconvenient, and the library charges a fee if they don’t get books back on time. A trip to the bookstore can quickly get expensive if you buy books new, and if you go for used books, you risk purchasing a book blighted by mildew which, if it slips your attention, can damage your entire collection. In light of all this, and the existence of alternatives, books have become impractical.

Those who would disagree with me might bemoan how difficult it is to get children interested in reading, imagining the days in which children would happily take a trip to the library. Their main motivation appears to be a quaint rustic feeling that comes with doing anything unsophisticated. But the fact is, cell phones and visual media are the reality of the present time, and it’s better to prepare children for the world that is, rather than some notion of what someone would prefer it to be.

Fast fact: reading is thriving. There is more reading today than there ever has been, and this is because it’s more efficient to get reading to people than at any other point in history. And here is the device instrumental to this reading revolution:

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That is a cell phone. Say “Hi”. It’s a wunderkind when it comes to reading. How so? Assuming the average size of a Kindle book being 2631 KB (source), 256 GB of storage on one of these can hold 102,027 books. A 1 TB MicroSD card increases that amount to 510,139. This is comparable to the most generous estimates of the size of the Library of Alexandria. And you can fit it into your pocket.

What’s that? Your cell phone doesn’t have that kind of storage? That’s okay, because you still have access to a boundless ether of literature if your cell phone (like most) has a simple program called a “browser”. You can use it to browse the internet and read countless pages filled with news articles, research papers, stories, discussion threads, advice columns, encyclopedia pages, and on and on.

While those desperate to justify their fix of outdated media may turn to public schools as champions of books, that’s not going to help them very much, as schools are increasingly turning to tablets for education. And why not, considering the ubiquitous use of screened devices in the adult world? Again, the idea is to prepare children for the real world, which involves familiarizing them with devices that are actually used in workplaces, both today and in the years to come.

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The fact is, books, textbooks, and libraries are on the way out. I, for one, welcome tablets as their academic replacement, as I have memories of continually lugging heavy textbooks about at the insistence of teachers and professors, in spite of infrequently needing to actually use them, which I understand to have been a typical college experience. Having to carry a small, glowing display screen that fits in my pocket is an excellent alternative to a bunch of cumbersome, expensive books.

One might ask, “Okay then, what if your phone breaks? Where are your books, then?” The answer is, I still have them. The books on a person’s phone or tablet are associated with the account that purchased them, so if a person loses their tablet or decides to buy a new one, their previous collection is available on their new device. To most of us, this is pretty obvious, but evidently not to the person who had to ask this question, which really goes to show how poor a job that person is doing keeping up. While the rest of us have access to a boundless sea of ethereal literature in our pockets, they’ve been assuming us to be senseless just because they don’t comprehend what we’re doing.

Even when I’m playing games on my cell phone, it’s helping me to be a smarter person. I’ve been playing an RPG that challenges players to work with limited resources over a long period of time, so that getting a single character to the point of being adequate could take as long as months. While playing this game, I’ve planned out my moves months in advance using careful calculations on a spreadsheet. My planning paid off when I barely unlocked a rare character within a strict time limit. This kind of care when it comes to resource management is something that a person can learn from if they’re not that great at managing their finances. Even those farming games that we’ve been making fun of can be played well with some careful planning. It’s too bad it’s much easier to assume that someone on their phone is playing some vapid bird-flinging simulator with all the depth of a puddle of rainwater.

So, to summarize: If you want a book, you have to take a trip to the store or the library for it. After that, you have to carry the cumbersome thing around with you if you want to have it wherever you go. Also, the library will want it back, and will charge you a fee if you don’t return it within a time limit, and in a condition that’s to their liking. However…

You can store hundreds of thousands of books on cell phones, not that that’s even necessary because these same phones have a browser that grants access to boundless information, whether a person is at home, sitting on a park bench, at a supermarket, or on a lunchbreak. Also, you can look at bright, colorful pictures on them, and even set one as your background. And you can ask some of them questions (verbally) and get answers (verbally). Also, movies and games. Also, navigation. Also, photography. Also, a bunch of other features so numerous that I don’t feel like listing them all.

In a sense, it’s like the old choice between beef jerky and celery. Most people would go for the sweet tasty delicious beef, and enjoy every bit of the experience. It’s one of life’s easy choices. However, there are a few who would go for the celery. They’d be more bitter for the experience, and afterwards stew over how much happier the people are who went for the beef jerky. So it is with technology: the people who embrace it get to benefit from how much better it makes their lives, while those who refuse get to savor whatever vacuous platitude that prevents them from being happy.

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Books have had an important place in history, what with the invention of the printing press expediting the propagation of ideas. However, for the propagation of ideas, books and the printing press have long-since become obsolete. The obsolescence of old media may make people feel like they are being left behind, but the reality of the matter is that they are only doing it to themselves.

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Why Meat-Eaters are More In-Touch With Reality

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ccapp-theoutbackerburger-2x.pngSource: The Outback Steakhouse menu

While the rest of us live happy, healthy lifestyles, vegans go to-the-hilt trying to convince us that we aren’t really happy or healthy, and they attempt to make the meat-eating diet out to be the cause of our woes.

Their motives are not hard to understand. It’s obvious that their problem is with meat-eating, and they work hard to ensure that the choice that they’ve made for themselves is also the choice that they make for the rest of us.

To this end, they attempt to characterize meat eaters as callous and indifferent. As vegans see it, meat-eaters are low-IQ knuckle-draggers who couldn’t care whether our actions today burn the world to the ground tomorrow.

What vegans don’t comprehend is that meat-eaters are happier and healthier for some very good reasons. Among these reasons is that we understand our impact on the world, and the nature of the world that we live in, and these facts are something that we’ve come to peace with.

Among the fallacies common to vegans and to those obsessed with nature is the idea that nature is a personal entity concerned with balance and order. Such thinking is a clear projection of one’s own values onto a theoretical personal entity.

The fact is, nature is not a person. Nature is not a goddess, nor is it anyone’s mother. Because nature is not a personal entity, it is not concerned with regulation or with maintaining a balance. Nature is simply a broad term used to refer to the physical world around us. Nature puts no forward effort into replenishing what is excessively used, nor does it make a conscious effort to cull what has become too successful. Nature is a thing, and it’s a thing that we decide how to live in. When humanity makes a choice that impacts the natural world, that impact is weighed against the benefit to us, and we make the choice we deem to be more beneficial to us.

Most of us have come to peace with the reality of the world that we live in, and have accepted it. That acceptance is what enables us to live happily. As this happens, among the least happy among us are the outliers who stand in opposition to the choices agreed upon by the collective.

Another fact that we’ve come to peace with is the understanding that suffering is an intrinsic part of life. Livestock winces the moment it’s killed as it’s nerves send pain signals to its brain. Plants initiate defense mechanisms when we harvest from them. You feel upset when a motorist taunts you for deciding not to drive. The fact is, suffering is everywhere.

The way we experience the world can be positive or negative. A work of art can induce a positive emotion. To be spurned by a potential suitor can induce a negative reaction. A boxer receiving a left hook experiences a very obvious kind of suffering. To live is to experience, and that includes suffering.

While vegans are obsessed with limiting suffering any way they can, the rest of us have come to peace with the fact that living means sometimes experiencing suffering. While vegans worry themselves awake over the possibility that something they did caused a mouse they never saw to feel pain, the rest of us are aware of suffering as a part of life, and sleep well for having come to peace with that.

Our parents and grandparents have experienced suffering in one form or another, we’ve suffered, and our children will suffer after us.

A vegan might respond to this by asking whether you’d be okay with suffering if you or someone you care about is hit with a brick, this would lead pretty well to the next point: Meat-eaters are healthier and more mentally sound because they’re primarily concerned with the state of human lives, rather than animal lives.

Humans stick with human kind. Humans respond more sympathetically to the pains of our fellow human beings. Humans are inclined to dine with fellow humans. Humans seek sexual relations with other human beings. Humans socialize with human beings.

Animals are much the same way, with animals of one kind usually preferring the company of their own kind. When a wolf dines, they are likely to do so in the company of other wolves. A cat does not concern itself with whether it’s treating a fish humanely before it eats it. A rabbit that desires to copulate seeks out another rabbit as a partner.

While a vegan might seek out a rare outlier in an attempt to defeat this point, the fact is, it’s impossible to deny the tendency of most animals to stick to their own kind, and the efforts of the vegan would stand out as an obvious attempt to deny the reality of the natural world.

The fact is, meat-eaters understand the reality of the world we live in, and have come to peace with it. This makes meat-eaters happier and more sound-minded, as we’ve embraced reality for what it is, rather than what we prefer it to be.

If veganism were nothing more than a choice that one made for one’s self, I wouldn’t have any concern about it except for the nutritional deficiencies intrinsic to a meat-free diet. But because vegans are out to make veganism everyone else’s diet, and they’re willing to employ all manner of misinformation and deception to bring such an outcome about, there is a bit more urgency to respond to it.

Obviously, the belligerence with which vegans seek to change the world doesn’t lend itself the qualities of a peaceful mind that is better in touch with the world around it. It does just the opposite. At their best, these vegans maintain a veneer of serenity, even if only because they understand the value of maintaining such an image.

But the reality is, it’s meat-eaters that understand how things are, and as vegans have been climbing the mountain seeking wisdom, they’ll be surprised when they finally find meat-eaters waiting for them at the summit.

Book Review: Men’s Society: a Guide

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When you think of a self-improvement guide on how to be more manly, what do you think of? You’d probably think it would include, among other things, a few useful how-tos on tasks like jump-starting a car. Maybe you’d think to find an outline on an exercise regimen. You might even expect something philosophical to get you to consider what you stand for and how strongly.

If you’re expecting anything as useful from Men’s Society: a Guide, then you’re already set up for disappointment. Like it or not, there is a new kind of manliness in town; a kind that is obsessed with image and with defining your identity with what you buy, rather than your character.

Men’s Society: a Guide comes to us from menssociety.com, and it largely reads as an advertisement for items featured on their online store. I mean, their website, because their online store is their top page. The commercial agenda screams “ethics” as loudly as some energy scam kiosk right inside the doors of a grocery chain.

Let’s keep it real here: real manliness came to be because the traits associated with it were what was necessary for men to get by in times when resources were limited. Real men are strong, smart, skilled, nimble, adaptive, and strong of character. The new form of manliness that’s obsessed with an outward show of old-timey rusticness is nothing more than a sham that was crafted to get people to spend money on things.

Where does Men’s Society fit in the scheme of things? To find out, let’s look at the topics discussed in this book, one at a time:

  • Grooming – a few fundamentals and a list of grooming supplies for you to buy
  • Drinking – a list of alcoholic beverages for you to buy
  • Style – a few staples of outward appearance for you to buy
  • Culture – a list of books, films, and other media for you to buy
  • Travel – a few pointers about getting from one place to another, so you can continue buying things somewhere else
  • Manners – the part of the book that was rushed because it’s not intrinsically conductive to you buying things

Whether it’s consumption of media or consumption of products, the main point of this book, again and again, is consume, consume, consume. The commercialization of manliness weakens manliness in the same way that the commercialization of Christmas led to the weakening of the Christian identity. Commercialization is nothing more than a means to an end, that being to line the pocketbooks of a few with leafy greens at the expense of the rest of us. To the entrepreneur enriched by this endeavor, any identity weakened in the process is considered an acceptable expense.

The authors of Men’s Society are British, so the perspective of this book is from that of a British man. There are a few points in this book that indicates that real manliness in the UK is in serious trouble.

For one thing, there is a section in this book on how to survive a flight. Fast fact: surviving a flight is easy. Flight is considered the safest way to travel, and it’s no mistake that nearly everyone who attempts flight survives the experience. All there is to surviving a flight is to sit down and not make too much noise. Do it right, and none of the other passengers will have much reason to throw you out a window.

There is a paragraph that discourages manspreading. Non-ironically. It opens with this gem:

MANSPREADING

This is a derogatory term that you don’t want used to describe you.

Sorry, Men’s Society, “manspreading” is a verb, not a noun. You have failed.

And it gets worse, as three pages later, the book includes a similar section on mainsplaining. Again, non-ironically. The term “mansplaining” was obviously invented in a cynical effort to shut down productive conversation because feminists can’t stand being proven wrong. A willingness to hold water for the intersectional agenda is a sign of weakness and isn’t a trait of one qualified to teach manliness.

When the advice isn’t bad or geared towards marketing, it’s usually lazy. One can imagine that a book packed with advice on men’s style would include at least a few informative pages about hats. Instead, there’s a short paragraph at the end of a chapter which says little more than that it’s acceptable to wear baseball hats and “street-style go-tos” (whatever those are), and that if you were to wear any other style of hat, “you’re a bold man.”

Really? That’s all that Men’s Society has to say about hats? What a cheap cop-out. There’s a lot more to say about hats, but I suspect that the brevity to this section is owed to the fact that I found no hats in their online store (but two pages of shaving products and three pages of haircare products). I imagine that they’d have more to say about the style of a derby or the protection of a bucket hat if those were products in their online store.

This is a bit of an aside, but Men’s Society has an obvious obsession with mint tin kits. I get it, pocket-sized kits are awesome. But here’s the thing: you don’t need to buy them. Mint tin kits are packed with cheap items that would usually set a person back just a few dollars altogether if one would construct them themselves.

Men’s Society understands the profit behind giving some trial-size products their own label then selling them for 25 British pounds (about $30), and here’s an example of one from their website:

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Yes, a beard removal kit. They think so little of your ability to accomplish the task with the items you have on-hand that they put together a kit designed to assist you toward that end.

Speaking of shaving, people can stop patting themselves on the back for using a razor to shave, as though that were any kind of accomplishment. Technology should be embraced as an expression of how adaptive and nimble men are, not shunned for that smug glow of superiority that comes with refusing to keep up. I use electricity to shave because I’m not a luddite.

You don’t have to pay piles of money for mint tin kits. You can make one of your own. Assembling one for yourself shows ingenuity and is rewarding when you finish one up. It’s so simple, I can give you a short guide right here:

  1. Procure a mint tin. An Altoid’s tin would work.
  2. Throw out those suspiciously non-Kosher Altoids mints and wash the mint smell from the tin. (Is there pork in them, or something?)
  3. Put what you want in them, whatever would reasonably fit. Fishing hooks, band-aids, twine, it’s up to you.
  4. That’s it. You now have a mint tin kit, and didn’t pay someone $30 to do it for you.

While we’re at it, here’s an article on how to make mint tin kits on Art of Manliness, a much better page on manliness than Men’s Society.

Part of the book that I found myself sometimes liking was the “Don’t Be That Guy” sections, which added a little bit of humor to an otherwise commercial experience. A couple of my favorites include “Don’t Be That Guy: You know, the guy with longer hair who thinks he’s Kurt Cobain?” and “You know, the guy who leaves the top four buttons of his shirt unbuttoned?” However, these are short blurbs in what is otherwise a paid advertisement (one that the reader paid for, not the marketer).

As it is, Men’s Society: a Guide could be more appropriately called, “Men’s Society: A Buyer’s Guide”. It’s written with the expectation that if you’d pay for a book to tell you how to be manly, then it can suggest a bunch of other things for you to buy, leading you down a deep rabbit hole of continual spending in a vain attempt to find identity. And that’s assuming that you’d want a bunch of posh blokes telling you how to be manly. Men’s Society brings to mind the words of an Asian proverb:

“The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.”
-Confucius

The time has come to give this book it’s score. Men’s Society: a Guide gets a score of Don’t Be That Guy out of ten.

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Because the Don’t Be That Guy sections make up around 1% of this book, that comes to 0.1 out of 10.

Theft of the Wild

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Genshin Impact, recently announced as coming to the Playstation 4, is causing quite a stir due to certain creative decisions. To get right into it, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the Nintendo Switch title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

That’s not an understatement, as Genshin Impact looks almost identical to the hit Switch game. For example, the picture above is not a BotW mod with anime characters, that’s an actual screen of Genshin Impact.

Gamers have taken note of this, and they are not taking it well. At ChinaJoy, where a trailer was shown of Genshin Impact, gamers responded by taking a picture of the trailer, including in the frame their copy of Breath of the Wild and one of their own hands flipping Genshin Impact the bird.

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That seems like a careful expression of polite indignation compared to how much further another fan has taken it: by actually destroying his PS4.

kenshin impact PS4 impacted.pngSource: Daniel Ahmad on Twitter

While such brazen imitation can be interpreted as disrespectful to the source material, it need not be. Breath of the Wild was an award-winning game, and is therefore a natural choice for imitation. Having said that, there is a certain expectation that someone involved in creative media actually exercise this thing called creativity. While creative works are emulated in media all the time, it’s not usually so blatant.

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On the bright side, it was a feat that the atmosphere of Breath of the Wild could be so faithfully recreated short of copying the assets directly. Also, among the choices that game maker Mihoyo made for imitation, they made a pretty solid choice. It’s also a game starring cute anime women, and it’s hard to object to that.

What is it that they call the sincerest form of flattery?

The Pokedex Meltdown from My Perspective

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A few weeks ago, during E3, the staff of GameFreak has revealed that not every pokemon from previous Pokemon games will be making it into the upcoming Pokemon Sword and Shield. Considering how entitled that people are becoming, it’s not hard to imagine that some of them would throw a fit when faced with the prospect of not getting everything they want.

What I didn’t anticipate was just how important it is to certain fans to collect over 800 of something, most of which won’t have any meaning to them outside of the act of collecting them. The sheer unreasonability of these interesting persons is exemplified pretty well in a reply that I got to an observation that I’ve made on this matter:

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This self-professed overlord of lunatics is taking the news so poorly that he’s willing to destroy the game company that gave them the game that he enjoyed to begin with. If there are any geese out there that lay golden eggs, this news might just put them on edge.

Now that the temper tantrums are dying down and the mouths emitting them are finally tiring out, we can finally start hearing voices of reason on this matter.

When I heard that not every pokemon from previous games would be making it to Sword and Shield, it really didn’t bother me much at all. This has to do with my previous experience with Pokemon, and with similar games.

When I first got into Pokemon, it was when I watched the first episode of the anime in 1998, when it debuted in the States. Since then, I also played the video games and the trading card game.

The Pokemon Trading Card Game (Pokemon TCG) was and is similar to other trading card games in that a few new sets are released every year, and that it didn’t take long before the multitude of different available cards made it difficult for new players to emerge onto the competitive scene, and making it challenging for the game makers to maintain a balanced game that’s fun to play.

To cope with this, the game makers introduced the concept of a standard competitive format which saw older cards rotated out, usually on a yearly basis. Seasoned players had to adapt to a continually changing competitive game, but that wasn’t much of an issue for them, because they remained interested in the game enough to continue buying new cards, and new players had an easier time getting into the game without having to concern themselves with hundreds (possibly thousands) of old cards that were no longer competitively relevant.

It’s because of this concept of rotation that the idea of leaving some less-relevant or meta-breaking pokemon out of a new Pokemon game makes intuitive sense to me. I’ve been playing games long enough to see the same principle applied to numerous other games, including the Pokemon TCG.

What’s more, we saw a similar practice in the Pokemon anime. Ash and Pikachu have been recurring characters, but eventually Ash got in the habit of leaving his old pokemon with the professor and focusing on new pokemon as he traveled to different regions. Even human traveling companions such as Brock and Misty have long-since gone their separate ways, and Ash’s core circle of friends have changed with time.

1484032488-3214bb8e28a979d1e3e0fe9b6cab30f5Not pictured: Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle.

It’s a simple fact of life that as time goes on, the resources available to a person changes, and these changes can result in a different life experience. If a person leaves one job and finds a different one, they’re no longer doing what they previously did for a living, and they might be making a much different amount of money. Their last job is no longer a factor in their living. If a person moves to a different area, they may have a different climate to become accustomed to, what’s convenient to them might change, and they’ll have a different set of neighbors.

One of the challenges of playing games like Pokemon is that they test a person to make better judgements over the course of the game, even as the amount of resources available to the player during gameplay changes, usually increasing, but in some cases decreasing.

Another matter relating to this to consider is that sometimes a game maker faces challenges while making games alongside Nintendo. This is due to a long-held practice Nintendo has had where, when they notice that a game is stalling in development, they’ll throw out all the assets and restart development from scratch, with only the ideas behind the game to go on. Game makers have come to refer to this practice as “flipping the table”, and it conjures an image of an abusive Japanese father getting upset and flipping a table over, allowing everything on it to fall onto the floor.

While this sounds extreme, Nintendo is usually justified in doing it. Sometimes, during the course of development, a game gets to be bogged down with features and other elements that weigh down the experience, or don’t significantly contribute to it. Development on a game can seriously slow as game makers struggle to decide which elements they can justify keeping, and a lot of time can be wasted on endeavors that turn out to be counter-productive. Sometimes, flipping the table is just what it takes to get development more focused, and the prospect of it happening may be daunting enough to get game developers focused on their projects to begin with!

With this in mind, let’s consider a few things we know about Pokemon Sword and Shield:

  • Mega evolutions aren’t going to be included in the game.
  • Neither are Z-moves.
  • Some character models, such as Wingull, aren’t animated very well.
  • There are poor textures on certain models, such as the trees.
  • Not every pokemon from previous games will be present.
  • All this in spite of the fact that a Pokemon game for Switch has been hyped for a long time.

When you consider all this, it becomes evident that Pokemon Sword and Shield have been stalling in development as the game makers have been struggling to incorporate gameplay elements from previous installments while at the same time trying to maintain a balanced game with a competitive element.

To those who don’t know Nintendo very well, the Sword and Shield gameplay demo, along with the news that certain pokemon and features won’t make it into the game, is considered evidence of GameFreak being lazy. But to those of us more familiar with Nintendo, it appears more likely that GameFreak has been struggling to include characters and features from previous games while still making a balanced and coherent gameplay experience that is to Nintendo’s liking.

While it’s easy to blame Nintendo for (possibly) obstructing progress on Sword and Shield, Nintendo usually only steps in to flip the table when progress stalls. When it comes to games that Nintendo licenses, their reputation is on the line, so there’s something in it for them to ensure that a quality product is released in a reasonable amount of time.

While there’s more that can be said, I think that perspective provides plenty to consider when it comes to the Pokedex Meltdown, or the National Dex Fiasco, or Dexit, or whatever you call it. Obviously, not everyone is taking the news well. If you happen to be in the Barboach fan club, it might be a tough time for you.

Why do people laugh at activists?

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It’s likely that, at some point, you’ve run into an activist. You know who I mean; it’s the kind of person who makes a point of identifying as a feminist, a desegregationist, or any of a variety of flavors of activism currently promoted by Tumblr.

Because they understand no setting as too inappropriate, they’ll work the conversation into activism, and drive themselves into a fit as they labor the points they’re trying to make about the issues that they perceive as being a matter of life-or-death. The people around them will try to keep their distance, and once they tire themselves out, they’ll retreat to their base of operations (their mother’s basement) where they’ll work out their next scheme to save the people of the world from themselves.

But you don’t actually have to meet an activist to see signs of cringe. In fact, it’s a snap to see those signs of cringe outside of people’s houses, usually in three different languages, because apparently inclusiveness means being poly-lingual just to read a platitude that does nothing more than express a feeling.

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Even on social media, it’s easy to find an activist meltdown, and it provides an opportunity to watch it happen from a safe distance. If you’re like most people, whenever you see activism, you laugh, cringe, watch in fascination, or at least keep a safe distance. But did you ever wonder why?

Why do people laugh at activists?

When one hears their stated causes, they seem just. They want equality between the races. They want sex discrimination to be illegal. They oppose religious discrimination in the workplace. Their causes are like this, and most people wouldn’t argue against any of these things.

But here’s the deal: These kinds of discrimination are already illegal. If your employer discriminates against you because of your biological sex, for example, you could take them to court. If you could demonstrate that it happened, it would be an open-and-shut case.

Also, if there were any people out there that were sincere about their racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory views, they are afraid to be up front about it. This is because they know that their views would make them an outlier, and they’d quickly become a pariah if they were to come forward with them.

When you consider all these things, do you know what they collectively mean? If you need to be brought to the finish line, I’ll tell you:

We’ve won.

Equality of virtually any kind exists throughout the civilized world, and is actively enforced by the strength of the law. The major civil rights battles have already long-since come to their conclusion.

Yet, the activists of today still continue to complain. They continue to fight against their own imaginary enemies in an obvious effort to look good in doing so. Even though all the major civil rights battles have already been won, they continue to live in the past, as though they’ve never been properly informed of the reality that the civilized world has been living in for decades. Because of this, people have a hard time taking activists seriously.

In the sixties, people took to the streets in protest of various injustices. They also spent a lot of time getting high. But eventually, they won.

In the seventies, people continued to protest injustices and they got high. But they won.

In the eighties, people took it easy, listened to cassettes, and got high. Because they won.

In the nineties, people listened to CDs and got high. Because we’ve long-since won.

In the 2000s, people listened to music on their iPods, and a few of them listened to music on Zunes. Needless to say, they also got high. People accepted that the major social justice battles concluded decades ago, and things were generally nice. Those victories would probably have come much sooner if people spent less time getting high. We still don’t have the cure to cancer, by the way. I’m just sayin’.

In the 2010s, things stopped being nice when a bunch of Social Justice Warriors appeared on the scene, bent on chasing down the boogeymen that they themselves imagined. People laugh at their stupidity and also get high.

While the rest of us laugh, play, work, and enjoy life, activists work themselves into temper tantrums. They’re missing out on the good things of life so they can savor the cynical sense of satisfaction that comes with fighting a battle that doesn’t even need to be fought. That is both hilarious and sad.

While the rest of us work for college educations, meaningful jobs, and take home paychecks that allow us to afford decent-size homes, cars, families, beer and many other good things that we appreciate, activists are on a mission to achieve a greater level of cynicism and misery. Eventually, they’ll have to look back on what they’ve accomplished over the course of what would come to be the most regrettable years of their lives, and come to the realization that they haven’t really accomplished anything, except maybe pick up a criminal record. Maybe they’ll also realize that everyone else has been laughing at them, cringing at them, or even egging them on as one would an ignorant source of amusement.

One could make the case that humans are well-conditioned to having enemies. In light of this, it’s understandable how, in a lack of a major long-term conflict, a person can still regress into a form of tribalism. We see this all the time in how many people identify themselves with what media they consume, the cell phone they own, their brand of automobile, their fashion choices, and so on. Ironically, the many fad activists that we see today exercise the same in-group thinking of the kind that they accuse other people of practicing. Psychological projection provides a tidy explanation for this behavior.

You know what’s better than activism? Here’s a list:

  • Having sex
  • Watching anime
  • Being great at your job
  • Being great at someone else’s job
  • Driving a car that doesn’t need restarted each time it comes to a stop
  • Performing a benchmark of reps in a workout in one go
  • Playing video games
  • Whiskey

The list could be amended, but the idea is that anything that’s either fun or meaningful belongs on it. Activism does not, not just because the list was constructed specifically to exclude it, but because the trendy form of fad activism that accomplishes nothing really isn’t about having fun, and a pretense of meaningfulness doesn’t satisfy the condition of being actually meaningful.

I know it seems like I’m laboring the point that there are better, more awesome things to do than make yourself miserable for the non-existent returns of activism, but that’s what it really comes down to. Suppose you were given the choice between a pack of beef jerky and a bowl of celery. If you’re like most people, you’d go for the beef jerky. It’s tasty, while the celery is not. It’s one of the obvious choices in life. However, there are people out there that would choose the celery, thinking themselves better than the plebs that go for the tasty beef. As they munch away at the green, bitter limpness, they stew in resentment towards those that are happier because they chose the beef jerky.

We chose right, my friends. We chose the beef jerky. Not only that, we chose the prettier women, went for the jobs that paid better, and live in homes that aren’t parked outside Walmart. When it comes down to it, living happier begins with choosing to live happier.

You know what else can make someone happy? Schadenfreude. And for a steady supply of that, we have activists. So, if activism is your thing, you’re giving the rest of us something to laugh about.

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Not that it would be to your own benefit, of course.

LOLWAT: Star Wars is about Nazis, now.

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It looks like everything is still about Nazis, even today, the greater part of a century after the ideology was wiped out, and the memory of it so distorted by the mists of history that almost nobody today has any idea what Adolf Hitler actually stood for.

According to J.J. Abrams, the director of the upcoming Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars will still be about Nazism. The use of the word “still” carries the implication that Star Wars was ever about Nazism. Maybe it counts that Armitage Hux Hitlered it up before firing up Starkiller Base, because how many heads of state in the history of mankind ever gave an impassioned speech before firing weapons on an enemy that they’ve declared war on?

While we’re discussing Nazis, I think the time is ripe for a confession. Are you ready? Here it is:

I’ve never taken Nazism seriously, and have never viewed them as a serious ideological threat.

Yes, I’m being serious. At their most significant, Nazism lost the only war they had ever fought, within years of having started it. In fact, Nazism was defeated so quickly that the bulk of World War II became about staving off Japanese imperialism. Hitler became viewed so unfavorably that his name became an insult, and any idea that he put into practice became grossly unpopular. People today hate eugenics, and relate the idea to Hitler, even though he didn’t come up with it. He pretty much took the idea from the United States, because he saw that it was popular there. Which it was, especially with the super-wealthy family of Rockefellers feeding into it, and the then-popular idea that criminals and the poor were genetically inferior. It took Hitler taking eugenics to its conclusion for people to realize how disgusting it was. He was the leader where everything he touched turned to crap.

Hitler was slow-witted to the point that he believed that military victories would be inevitable due to the virtues he perceived in the ideology his soldiers were fighting for, and his own generals feared he would derail any strategy they could come up with with his sheer, naive idealism. What’s more, he believed that we lived on the inside of a hollow earth, and could therefore spy on the British by aiming telescopes upward at an angle.

See what I mean? Nazism is way too stupid for anyone to take seriously. Today, most people who claim to be a Nazi do so as a joke for shock value. Not my cup of tea, and a rancid cup of tea at that, but I understand the humor of it.

Nazis are viewed so poorly, that when someone wants to tear someone down in as few words as possible, “Nazi” is usually the go-to insult. It’s gotten to the point where a rule for debate was made called “Godwin’s Law”, which states that the longer an argument continues, the likelihood of one side comparing the other to Hitler approaches one. The implication is that in an exchange that wasn’t originally about Nazism, the side that calls the other a Nazi is considered to have lost the argument, because that will be considered the point where they have exhausted any reasonable argument that they could have alternatively made.

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I’ve made the point before that it’s super-easy for anyone to read into a fictional narrative a political movement that’s not intended, such as the Separatist movement from the Star Wars prequels as a close equivalent to the SJWs of today. But it’s hard to argue that a point is not there when the director of the film himself states that a comparison was intentional.

One point that I found interesting in the Newsweek article that I’m referencing is that George Lucas had intended for Star Wars to make comparisons with the Vietnam War, which is a comparison that I had not noticed when I had previously seen the original trilogy. While one can get carried away and call it “subtle”, I think it can be credited to a failure to properly articulate the social commentary that was intended. Having said that, that’s not as bad a crime against creativity as being so on-the-nose about one’s point that the director takes it upon himself to point it out months before the film is even released, expressing no faith in the viewer’s ability to interpret the film for themselves.

Personally, I think the case can be made from the first ever Star Wars film, A New Hope, that it’s intended as a commentary on how religion will always play a role in human affairs, even if it were to come to the point that humans were to dwell primarily in space, which would be a time that secular types seem to like to imagine as a time where humanity would have long since given up on religion.

A few obvious points can be made for this from the original film, such as:

  • The prolific use of Biblical names such as Luke, Ben, Leah, and even Anakin, which sounds like Anakim, the race of people that Goliath originated from.
  • Speaking of Goliath, Luke’s attack on the Death Star seems like a type of David vs. Goliath. When Luke points out that hitting the target was like hitting a target he was familiar with, one can easily think of how David pointed out that he had slain a lion and a bear when making the case to Saul that he could take on Goliath. Then there’s the obvious point that a single, well-placed shot took down something big.
  • Imperial officers seemed to make a point of referring to Darth Vader’s ideology as his “religion”, even after he had demonstrated his capacity to strangle someone from across the room.

Even considering this, it’s still possible that no such point was intended, which goes to show (again) how simple it is to read into something a message that wasn’t intended.

Now, one can imagine that a Newsweek article about Star Wars would have gotten a lot of attention. However…

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Hours into its publication, and no comments. It’s almost as though no one cares what Newsweek has to write about Star Wars, Nazism, or Social Justice, even when the topics are rolled into the same article. But when some guy with a blog trashposts about Digimon, something far different happens.

But the question that remains is, what is the relevance of Nazis today that they’re still used in films to make a point? What political ideology can be accurately compared to Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party?

Nintendo Stands Up to SJW Bullying

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While SJWs claim victimhood all the time, it’s obvious at a glance that they’re the real bullies. They’re so boisterous that it’s difficult to stand up to them, and when they come in numbers, most people would prefer to look the other way and just let them wear themselves out to the point that they dismiss themselves to their mother’s basements.

Because of this, it’s refreshing to see a large media company decide to put their foot down and decide that they’re not going to put up with their horse-puckey. Today, the company that we have to thank for being brave is Nintendo.

I’ve always admired Nintendo. They’re one of my favorite companies, because they’re about the games and the entertainment, while other video game companies become obsessed with stuff like multimedia. Nintendo is one company that sticks to its guns, and that’s allowed it to stick around for a very long time.

Recently, someone decided that they’d use Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s Stage Builder to make a political statement, which would then be disseminated through Nintendo’s network services. The stage in question contained an LGBT flag. Nintendo saw it, and was like “Nope, we’re not going to have that.” They then put the kibosh on the stage, and not only that, they banned the stage’s creator from the game’s network features for nine hours.

Bravo, bravo. Now, it would be great if they could do more about the user-contributed content of Splatoon 2, since many of its users think little of using a game primarily aimed at children to peddle a sexual deviancy.

Many of us are well-aware that SJWs don’t see their causes as being about politics, but about basic human rights and decency. I have views that I see as a matter of basic human rights and decency, but some people view those as political opinions. For example, I view it as an outrageous offense against decency that children as young as three have experimental treatments performed on them that are designed to stunt puberty. Some people have an opinion different from my own.

Unlike SJWs, most of us are aware that there are venues that are entirely inappropriate for spreading certain viewpoints. This is because we possess the capability to comprehend why those venues are inappropriate for spreading those views, and how wrongly exploiting those venues in such a fashion can result in the general population becoming less sympathetic to a cause. When SJWs use a video game primarily targeting children to promote a sexual deviancy, they’re going to think that SJWs are predators.

Media companies, Nintendo has set an example for you to live up to. What is intended as escapism should remain escapism and not another tone-deaf reminder of the problems that we watch movies and play video games for temporary relief from. If we wanted Star Wars to remind us of our problems, there’d be more demand for games about Poe Dameron paying his bills, or Han Solo doing the dishes. We don’t like doing the dishes, and we don’t want Splatoon to remind us that perverts are bullying themselves into control over the establishment.

WordAds is garbage.

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I decided to check out how this site looks from a device other than my computer, seeing how my site would look for my visitors. What I was treated to was a bunch of super-gross advertisements. The content that I typed away to deliver to you guys was being undermined by drawings of cross sections of intestines that looked like they were exploding with worms, and I wasn’t even aware of it. When I finally learned that it was going on, I wasn’t happy.

A little while ago, I decided that a little ad revenue wouldn’t be a bad thing for supplementing my income. I wasn’t really planning on going professional by blogging as so many people out there attempt to do, but it would have been nice to have been making a little money on the side to subsidize how disappointingly little I was making with a STEM degree. What I didn’t anticipate was just how little my income would be supplemented:

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That’s right, eighteen cents. Thousands of ads have been served, some of which making the site a nauseating experiencing for an unknown number of visitors, and I didn’t even get enough money out of it to buy a gumball.

At first, I applied for Google Adsense. I figured I’d try. It took a long time to hear back from them, but after they reviewed the content of my site, to my surprise, they gave the OK. This in spite of the rants I’ve made about Google. It would seem that they are actually some pretty cool guys.

But it took so long to hear back from them that I decided to sign up for Amazon affiliate links. That was much faster, but there was a problem: the links required the use of script tags that weren’t permitted when editing this site. I had a WordPress Premium account, so adding my own adsense code should not have been an issue.

I checked various tutorials that came up in search results, but the methods that they described no longer worked. For some reason, it seemed impossible to implement one’s own ad code into their own WordPress site. That’s suspicious.

Shortly afterwards, I learned why it was so hard to add Amazon affiliate links and Google adsense codes: WordPress had developed their own advertising program called WordAds, and they’re pulling some shady tactics in an attempt to eliminate the competition.

WordPress worked to ensure that people would primarily use their own ad network, which requires a hundred dollar investment to participate in. After spending that to start to monetize this blog, and getting just pennies back as the return on my investment, it seems like the way to make the most of the money spent would be to eliminate ads from this site, so that readers can enjoy my content without it being interspersed with unintended gross-out pictures. If WordPress has a problem with my benefiting financially from my writings, then I can reduce their ability to benefit financially from my writings, as well.

At the moment this post is made, I’ve disabled advertisements on Magnetricity, as a service to you, my readers. Any ads that are running on this site would be doing so without my permission.

Currently, I receive marketing messages from WordPress to use their email system. Apparently, if they think I’m gullible for spending a hundo to activate ads on this site, I must be gullible enough to spend money to have an email inbox.

Wordads is garbage, don’t bother with it.

My Opinion of the Sonic the Hedgehog Movie Trailer

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Paramount Pictures just released a trailer that has been precision-engineered to demolish your childhood in a thermonuclear detonation of suck:

 

I don’t usually do this, but it’s reaction time:

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If this trailer did as most trailers do and showed us the most exciting parts of a movie, this one is a pretty safe skip. It didn’t do a single thing right.

Did they really just make Sonic a hairy monstrosity? Did they really just have Jim Carrey do Dr. Eggman? Did they really just unfuse Sonic’s stylized eyes and made his arms blue? Did they really just labor a child abduction joke? Did they really just use a song over two decades too old to use for movie trailers?

What I really want to know is what the film industry has against anime style. It’s not like hand-drawn animation would kill the budget, especially if millions can be spent on overly-hairly CG models. Detective Pikachu could have been hand-drawn, but instead they made the pokemon have ugly scales and fur. Dragonball Evolution could have been hand-drawn, but instead they brought in actors to proceed to disgrace the source material.

adumanga daioh.pngHey film industry, we actually watch this.

Here’s the thing: we really do want anime movie adaptations to be done in the anime style. When characters are done in the anime style to begin with, that’s how to do them justice. But it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, because when movies like Pokemon and Spirited Away aren’t watched in theaters, the film industry takes this to mean that people aren’t interested in traditional animation. Not only that, the film industry is really proud of its ability to throw tons of money at CG models.

At any point during this movie’s production, a person familiar with Sonic the Hedgehog could have piped up and said, “Look, this isn’t what Sonic the Hedgehog is supposed to be. I know this because I actually played the games, and watched some of the cartoons.” The reason I doubt this happened is because the film industry is packed with directors and producers who think they’re right about everything, and they’re surrounded by inefficacious suck-ups who are afraid to question them.

 

If they would have made the movie look like this:

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Viewers would have loved it. Instead, someone threw up, decided to sprinkle dog hair on it, colored it blue, and called it Sonic the Hedgehog:

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As you could imagine, this film’s creative direction was made without Sonic producer Yuji Naka’s knowledge or permission. When he was introduced to Sonic’s new style from a leak earlier this year, his reaction was “This is a Sonic the Hedgehog movie?”

Well said, man. Very well said.

EDIT (5 May 2019): The director of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie has since come forward saying that he’s taking fan input and will change Sonic’s design. What he comes up with remains to be seen. It’s refreshing to see someone in the film industry listening to feedback.