This Was Actually The News: Roommate seeker discriminates against Trump supporters

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Old media is becoming increasingly difficult to parody, what with their willingness to put any inane or ridiculous thing out there as news. Because of this, I’ve decided to try a series titled “This Was Actually The News” (or TWAT News for short), where I look at what makes the news these days. I’m not going to limit my news selections to a specific criteria, mainly in the interest of allowing myself the freedom to mock or be pleasantly surprised at whatever news stories I wish.

And what better way to kick this series off than with an article by CNN that should not have made it past the classifieds page.

23-year-old Sahar Kian made the news after taking out a classifieds ad seeking a roommate with the condition that the roommate not be a Trump supporter.

And that’s it. That’s what made this story newsworthy. That someone doesn’t want to share some cheap apartment somewhere with someone that they don’t politically agree with. Of course, the vitriol is directed at Donald Trump, so it’s no surprise that old media is going to jump over this with all the eagerness of Jared Fogle at a daycare.

Yes, there are millions of ignoramuses out there that wouldn’t cohabit with someone with a different opinion. But what makes Sahar Kian different is that she came right out and said it. What makes this story interesting isn’t that she did, it’s that old media decided to make a news story out of a simple classifieds preference. So, it actually says a lot more about old media than it says about the umpteen millionth liberal fringe lunatic that thinks that animals are people.

She probably isn’t going to have a problem finding a roommate now, now that her classifieds ad has made nationwide news. The only question is how long her choice of roommate will be able to stand her. If what she seeks in a roommate is any indication, the answer is that it won’t likely be very long.

For one thing, she doesn’t allow pets into the house. This in itself isn’t unusual, as it is a rule enforced by certain landlords. However, she also bars alcohol and meat products. So she’s liberal, but not so liberal that she’d allow people to choose for themselves what they eat and drink.

Kian also has a victim complex, as indicated in the following statement issued by Kian herself:

“Look at me, I’m brown. I’m a woman. I am somebody who is heavily reliant on Obama’s pre-existing condition clause,”

She’s also not at all hesitant to bring her battle against imaginary racists and sexists into matters. Look, I know that Trump haters are sincere in their beliefs that Donald Trump and his supporters actually are racists and sexists, and in most cases, they believe it because they were presented with evidence that, however fallacious, was convincing enough for them. What I’m saying is, when you live with someone who is paranoid enough, you’re going to see days in which they misplace their stuff and then go around saying that their enemies are stealing from them and accusing their roommates of being in on some conspiracy to do so.

As for “Obama’s pre-existing condition clause”, she’d be referring to Obamacare and her fear that the unsustainable healthcare law will be repealed. As it turns out, the law to replace it retains a ban on discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, but that doesn’t prevent Kian from making assumptions, nor does it stop Kian from thinking that Trump and his supporters are out to get her.

Speaking of her ad, Kian says:

“It doesn’t say no conservatives in my ad, it doesn’t say no Republicans, it doesn’t say no Christians, it says no Trump supporters.”

Of course, it really doesn’t have to, because of her prohibition on tasty food and grown-up beverages. It’s obvious that she doesn’t want to talk politics unless it’s with someone who is in complete lock-step with the agenda of whatever left-wing fringe group that she’s a part of.

If it weren’t for the fact that this story made national news, Kian would stand almost no chance whatsoever of finding a roomie. The average person does have an ability to determine whether there’s something off about someone, even if on some small, subliminal level (it’s that so-called “creep vibe”). Kian embraces her inability to compromise with her fellow human being with an unsettling openness, which is just what makes her so unappealing. Her classifieds ad reads as a list of demands, including restrictions against food items, and it’s likely that she’d be leaving out quite a few demands that any potential roomie won’t find out about until after they’ve made the mistake of co-signing a lease with her.

So yeah… an anti-Trump classifieds ad was actually the news. Yep.

What your protests say about your values

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trump-dc-protests-thugs-pokemon-team-skull

People are ambassadors of whatever cause that they stand for. In particular, the actions that they carry out in the name of their cause is an indication of the virtues of the cause itself, as well as the values of the ones carrying them out.

This is particularly interesting to think about in light of the recent Trump inauguration protests. Pictured above is an image I found on CNN.com, and was obviously altered by myself to make a point. The attire of the persons pictured bear a striking resemblance to that of the antagonists of the latest Pokemon games. This is an odd choice for the protesters, as Team Skull from Pokemon were designed to be the worst amount-to-nothing low-life thugs a person could possibly imagine.

If a crappy fashion sense were all that were wrong with these people, I might not be commenting on them today (but maybe I would, considering my tendency to make fun of stupid fads). However, a person’s attire is not the only way that they represent their cause. Their cause is also represented by their actions.

What is their cause? Equal rights and opportunities for all races, either gender or perceived gender, and whatever strange sexuality happens to be touted by Buzzfeed this week. How do they represent their cause? By blocking roads, setting fires, and physically attacking people.

Apparently, they feel completely justified in their cause, otherwise, they wouldn’t do such things. It’s not like most people would get up in the morning, look themselves in the mirror, and say to themselves, “how can I be the most horribly despicable person I can be today?” If a person does something bad, it’s usually because they’ve justified to themselves whatever it is that they’re doing. In their case, that justification involves convincing themselves that the people that disagree with them are racists and sexists (though they aren’t), and convincing themselves that racism and sexism are the worst crimes that can be committed against humanity (they are far from it). Once they can do that, they can internally justify committing any crime against them, thinking that they are doing the world a favor in so doing, and thinking that they are the good guys in whatever cause it is that they are standing for.

Such thinking really isn’t new. It’s been employed throughout history to justify some of the worst crimes imaginable. The worst crimes in history have been committed by those who have felt justified in what they were doing. By way of example, Socialists and Communists believed that they were making the world a better place for poor people, and they used this as justification to kill tens of millions who opposed their movements. The National Socialist movement of Adolf Hitler actually believed that the Jewish people were plotting to take over the world, and they used this to justify attempting to wipe them out. During the initial expansion of Islam, Muslims believed that they were helping God by spreading their religion, which they used to justify attempting to take Europe by force, which they would have eventually accomplished if Europe didn’t respond with the Crusades.

Today, you see the Social Justice movement represented by groups such as Black Lives Matter doing things like blocking streets, setting fire to automobiles, attacking people, calling for the death of law enforcement, and threatening anyone that disagrees with their cause, just to name a few examples. While the movement itself sees such behavior as “activism”, the civilized world has another word that fits much better: “terrorism”. And it’s hard to argue with it, because their methods are intended to instill fear.

Terrorism – noun
the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims

Yet, they feel justified because they’ve convinced themselves that their actions, however criminal, are for the greater good. They’ve become the bad guys, yet they don’t see it, because to them it’s everyone else that are racist or sexist.

When they punch in a car’s windshield (unaware that the car might have belonged to someone who voted for Hillary), they are representing the values of their cause. When one of them uploads a YouTube video throwing a temper tantrum because someone presented an opinion that was not in lock-step with their own, they are representing the values of their cause.

trigglypuffAn overly-well-fed millennial throwing a fit about hearing an opinion that’s different from hers at an event she didn’t have to attend.

And people can see that something is wrong. To the rest of us, it’s obvious. A man indulges in vacuous inanities to defend an ideology that actively beheads people today; people see that something is wrong. A woman throws a trash can and acts like she has demon problems; people see that something is wrong. An educator calls for “muscle” to intimidate a student journalist; people can see that something is wrong.

When SJWs act like total nutcases, they are seen as nutcases. When they behave as such on a consistent basis, people are going to come to realize that there is something fundamentally wrong with their movement. When it goes on for years, people are going to get sick of it.

This is why we now have a Trump presidency. People saw Regressive Leftism acting out for years, representing their values by throwing temper tantrums and destroying things. So people put their collective feet down and said, “No.” It didn’t happen because the SJWs failed to represent themselves. It happened because they represented themselves well. When you say that you’re for peace and progressivism, and you go around breaking and burning things, people are going to think that you’re manic. And why shouldn’t they? You’ll have already proven it beyond a doubt.

When you see Leftists behaving badly, it’s easy to point out. But when they start dressing like thugs and carrying out terrorist acts, that saves the rest of us the trouble of having to point it out, because they are doing it to themselves. The core values of the Social Justice movement are apparent because they themselves have placed them on display for the public eye to behold.

Why don’t we put pumpkin spice in everything?

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I was at the grocery store the other day, and I saw that pumpkin spice was being put into so many things. I admit that I wasn’t very fond of pumpkin spice. But it is something that comes up during the harvest season in things like ice cream, coffee creamers, snack cakes, etc.

But then I had an idea: Why don’t we put pumpkin spice in everything?

Think about it. Don’t we have pumpkin spice Triscuits? If not, why don’t we? How hard can it be for food makers to sprinkle a little of that pumpkin spice that they clearly have way too much of into boxes of Triscuits so we can taste some of the pumpkin spice goodness in each bite of Triscuits?

In fact, why don’t we have pumpkin spice breakfast cereals? Like Cheerios. Is there already a pumpkin spice Cheerios? I didn’t look it up, so I don’t know. But it sounds like a great idea, so if they didn’t already do that to our Cheerios, why don’t they?

636059159307683888-pumpkin-spice-photo-2

Okay, so I looked it up, and they actually did do a pumpkin spice Cheerios. Okay, but why stop there? Why not put it in every breakfast cereal? Like Cinnamon Toast Crunch? They can just take the cinnamon out and put pumpkin spice in there instead.

Or why not add it to other foods that are missing out on the whole pumpkin spice fad? Like Tabasco. Tabasco sauce is great, so why not mess with it? Notice how they are starting to put Sriracha into everything? And dried cranberries, for that matter. It’s almost as though there was an overproduction of dried cranberries, because now it’s hard to buy health food while avoiding dried cranberries. Well, why not make pumpkin spice Sriracha sauce, combining the two fads to become one big super fad food item. Think about how unstoppable that would be. And they can somehow work dried cranberries into it. That would be brutal.

And while we’re adding pumpkin spice to food, why don’t we genetically engineer all our foods so that they’d grow with pumpkin spice in them? We can make things like strawberries that grow with pumpkin spice already in them. And broccoli. And pears. Pumpkin spice everywhere!

Also, meat. We can breed some special cows that grow pre-seasoned with pumpkin spice. Then do that with the other livestock. Then dispose of all the other livestock that doesn’t have pumpkin spice in it. That way, all food would have pumpkin spice. Even steak. It would be impossible to avoid it. And if anyone would want to avoid it, they’d have to move to some island somewhere where they’d attempt to live pumpkin spice free lives. But rather than let them, we could fly jets over them and drop pumpkin spice bombs on them. BOOSH!!! Take that, you pumpkin spice haters. Then we’d have pumpkin spice everywhere.

Think about what that would be like. There’d be pumpkin spice in everything, and no one could avoid it. So, why don’t we put pumpkin spice in everything?

Because that’d be a stupid idea, that’s why.

NOTE: After typing this up, I looked it up, and it turns out that there really are pumpkin spice Triscuits.

1610w-pumpkin-spice-triscuits-box

The recipe on the box calls for (surprise) cranberries:

pumpkintriscuit-02

There probably actually is a pumpkin spice Tabasco sauce or Sriracha, but I’m afraid to look.

The thought of these 8 fads being over brings a smile to my face.

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This is a blog wherein I do complain about stuff, but I do like to generally keep things positive. While there are things going on today that I find irritating to think about and fads that make me think that so many people have been hit on the heads as children, there are some things to be positive about.

I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those people that sometimes breaks out into a smile. Because people don’t read my mind, they might assume that I’m just crazy, rather than savoring an especially positive thought (while I do enjoy my privacy, I know that there are some people who I’d welcome to read my mind because they’d learn a few things that could result in them becoming better people).

EDIT: In light of the fact that new, technologically-driven ways to violate privacy are continually being developed, I’m making it clear here that that last paragraph concluded with a joke. No human being has ever been granted my permission to read my mind, including through technologically-assisted methods. So don’t do that.

There are thoughts that bring a smile to my face, and I’m sharing a few of them right here. Mainly, they have to do with certain things that used to be really popular and irked me, but I managed to live to see the day in which they are things of the past. I think of the following fads being over, and it brings a smile to my face.

1. H.I.M. (His Infernal Majesty)
This was some trendy pseudo-rebellious garbage that pandered to black finger nail polish wearing high school kids who wanted a little bit of satanic symbolism to help them be passive-aggressive towards religion for image’s sake. Their associated symbol was a pentagram with two rounded points that made it look like there was a heart in there. What was the point of this? Who cares? The fad is over. I survived, the fad did not.

2. The Emo fad
Another stupid fad that pandered to children, this one encouraged them to act all depressed in spite of the fact that they’re children who have never experienced a real hardship in their lives outside of their mom and dad not letting them borrow the car.

I can think of the following challenges that kids face:

  1. Showing up for school. Apparently, they get credit just for that.
  2. Not stepping out of line. When everyone else is bigger than you, it’s easy for them to beat you up.
  3. Keeping your mouth shut. It’s a challenge for kids to realize that they don’t know better than the adults in their lives who have been at this “life” thing much longer than they have.

There are children out there with very little in the way of food, shelter, and clothing, and they were probably more irked by the emo movement than I was because the emo kids seemed so sad to be reaping the benefits of middle-class life in a first world nation. Not that they’d still be upset about it, because the fad is over.

3. Miscellaneous nineties music
The music was probably the most annoying thing about the nineties. While it may open some wounds to bring it up, it is comforting to know that the garbage that was popular back then is no longer annoying us today.

When was the last time you turned on the radio and heard The Mighty Mighty Boss Tones? Or Third Eye Blind? Or any of that other garbage that likely had some political undertones? Left-wing political undertones, of course. This is the entertainment industry we’re talking about here. It’s not like they trust you to think for yourselves.

For that matter, when was the last time you turned on the radio and allowed it to dictate to you what music you listen to? No thanks, radio. I prefer to listen to my own playlists, without the advertisements.

4. Tight/bangin’ as slang
There have been various iterations of the word “cool” over the ages that come and go. There were a couple in particular that I was really glad to see go: “tight” and “bangin'”. Both seemed to be popular at the same time, and both of them I was really happy to see go, because of the sexual connotation involved that made them cringe-worthy. Here are a couple examples of their use:

“That hamburger was tight, yo.”

That’s “tight” as in a property of a woman’s vagina, because apparently a Burger King hamburger can be compared to the grip supplied by a birth canal during coitus, right?

“Those chicken wings were bangin’!”

To understand the full annoyance of the delivery, imagine a mildly-overweight middle-aged woman trying way too hard to sound hip tilting her head back and to the side on the word “were”, so she can push the word “bangin'” at you so you immediately feel like going home and scrubbing that association between the sexual connotation and her overly-mascaraed face from your brain with steel wool and butane.

When these two slangs were phased out as substitutions for the word “cool”, the collective did language a huge favor.

5. Michael Moore’s career
One thing that really annoyed me about the Bush presidency wasn’t Bush himself, it was the sheer smugness of the self-appointed intellectual superiors who complained about him nonstop, while a bunch of liberal arts majors carried water for them in spite of the fact that they had no idea what was going on. Considering that these people had near institutional control of the information media, it was difficult to escape all of the whining over everything he had ever done. But if I were to pick just one of them that I found more shrill and annoying than the rest, that would be Michael Moore.

While hating on Bush was the fad of the time, Michael Moore took it to an art form. To the point of making a movie to bust Bush’s chops. His arrogance was so astounding, that I actually wanted to see Bush win reelection out of spite. Which was just what happened.

Wonder what Michael Moore is up to now? When was the last time he said anything that you gave a care about?

Exactly.

It’s true that he still does speaking events, but it’s not as fun watching him descend into lunacy as it once was. Besides, right now, we have The Young Turks for that, and those guys are pure unintentional entertainment. If it’s a left-wing meltdown that you’re in the mood for, Cenk Uygur has you covered. Michael Moore is old news.

6. The DaVinci Code
If it weren’t bad enough that we had a fake documentary from Michael Moore, there were a bunch more inspired by The DaVinci Code. If you’ve already forgotten what The DaVinci Code was about, that’s enviable in it’s own sense. It was basically a work of fiction based on the premise that Jesus actually had children, which was then covered up by a mysterious order who somehow benefited by keeping this information to themselves. The order, being highly secretive and cunning, decided that the best way to keep their secret from the public was to have Leonardo DaVinci plant evidence of it throughout his work. The associated media flavored the material with mysterious, moody music and yellow, faded parchment, because you’re supposed to feel as though such a conspiracy actually happened.

Here’s the kicker: The author, Dan Brown, says that the cover up actually occurred. And suckers ate it up. Plenty of them.

So, what happened? One might like to think that the aforementioned suckers realized that they were being conned into buying garbage and doing a media machine’s marketing for them, but it’s far more likely that they got distracted by the next fad theology that came along. In any case, the DaVinci Code fad was over, and the History Channel moved on to marketing another stupid movie.

7. Loose Change
I could have merged this and the previous two into an entry called “Fakumentaries”, considering that all three of Fahrenheit 9/11, The DaVinci Code, and Loose Change came around at about the same time, indicating that there was this unusual demand at the time for being lied to by pseudo-intellectuals with obvious agendas. Our children will think that we were so stupid, but there’s no denying that there were many stupid people around at the time, as evidenced by these three fakumentaries.

What makes Loose Change so special is that it was produced by a film student by the name of Dylan Avery, who made it as an example of the kind of nonsense that 9/11 truthers believe. What Dylan didn’t count on was that, after having released his film to the internet, millions of people were stupid enough to take it at face value. So, did Dylan set the record straight?

No. He gave himself up.

He had something that most film students could only dream of having prior to graduation: a huge audience. If he set the record straight, he’d lose that audience and have to build it up again in the industry, which is something that many in the film industry spend their entire lives doing. So he issued a revised version of his film and gave the suckers what they wanted.

So, why don’t you hear about him today? For one thing, he made the mistake of releasing his video to the internet for free, so no one had to pay him for it. Not a very sustainable way to do business. Since then, he’s worked on several other films, but no one cares about them.

Of course, if more people had thought to ask why a mere film student would possess such insight into the inner-workings of a conspiracy to present a planned demolition as a terror attack, we wouldn’t have heard much about Loose Change to begin with.

8. Truck nuts
Truck nuts are one of those things that you’d see at a store somewhere and think to yourself, “Man, these things are stupid. Only a total dunce would put something like this on their car.” But then you see some people actually mount them on their cars, and you find yourself wishing that you had a rifle in your car so you can shoot them right off while you’re on the highway.

So, what are truck nuts? It’s a pair of plastic testicles that one can hang from their vehicle, right under the license plate. Putting them on your car sends a message, and that message is that you’d buy anything.

One thing I found weird about them is that I didn’t see anyone attempt to hang them on the front of their car, only on the back. Maybe it’s because they are being used to express a desire to [REDACTED].

So, there you have it. A list of fads that I’m glad are over. And sure, a few more annoying ones have popped up since. But at least we know that fads do come to an end, even the annoying ones.

An image to describe 2016

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Last year, I spent just a few minutes crafting an image to describe the year. After thinking about it, I’ve decided that the year 2016 is described pretty well by this one:

donald trump deal with it.png

For the cheap seats that think I’m a fan of the guy: not especially. It’s nice to see that after years of SJW insanity, America decided to put its foot down. I could have put in a blurb about blaming the Russians, but I got a little lazy. Besides, this says it just nicely.

Review: Pentel Twist-Erase Click

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pentel-twist-erase-click

When it comes to office supplies, people tend to think “work”. That’s understandable, but just because you’re working with something on the job doesn’t mean that you can’t work with the good stuff.

I’m not writing this review because I’ve been sponsored by Pentel, because I wasn’t. I see it as my way of standing for quality in writing utensils. I know that I’m not the only one who went years writing with those cheap BIC pens that are a couple dollars for a dozen, then later discovered how much more joyful writing can be with a quality rollerball and not want to go back to the cheap BICs.

There is a high-quality mechanical pencil that is affordable, and that’s the Pentel Twist-Erase Click (PTEC, for brevity). I’ve liked mechanical pencils for a long time, and favored them over old-fashioned wood pencils due to the wood pencil’s many unpleasant features:

  • They get dull, necessitating sharpening after just quick bursts of writing,
  • You can get thin wood shavings all over your desk or other writing surface after sharpening,
  • Also, sharpening them is seriously inconvenient.

While those with wood pencils are taking trips to the pencil sharpener, those of us with mechanical pencils can keep writing like champs, keeping the momentum going with pencils that don’t get shorter. That’s even better for the PTEC, because the clicker is on the side of the pen, rather than on the top and housing the eraser, so there’s no need to perform hand gymnastics to keep pumping the graphite and writing efficiently. You can keep the flow of graphite going in the same position as you would be holding the pencil.

Oh yeah, speaking of the eraser, that’s the PTEC’s stand out feature. You know how most mechanical pencils have stubby little erasers that wear down quickly and are difficult to pull out and replace, provided that the pencils even come with replacement erasers? The PTEC comes with long erasers that can be mechanically drawn by the pencil itself. Meaning you can have a mechanical pencil with a convenient eraser that lasts longer than just a few assignments.

And better yet, the eraser isn’t one of those cheap erasers that have dyes that change the color of your paper when you try to erase something. Does anyone actually like those pink erasers? While the eraser that came with my PTEC was already pretty good, Pentel makes a quality high polymer eraser that erases very well that I would have preferred was in the PTEC. So I went and performed a modification to my own PTEC by trimming one of those erasers to shape using a box cutter, so I made some long cylinders that would fit in the PTEC and enjoyed the benefits of having a great mechanical pencil with a great eraser.

Not only is the PTEC a blast to write with, it’s made of some rugged stuff. I purchased it as I was beginning a 2-year college course, and it didn’t break until I was taking the final exam of one of my courses towards the end of the second year, so I finished the test with an inferior pencil. Noticeable difference. I still passed, though. There is more to getting a great grade than having an excellent mechanical pencil, though it doesn’t hurt. I liked my PTEC so much, that I fixed it with Gorilla Glue and kept using it.

There is one minor complaint I can think of, and that’s that the thin button protrudes noticeably towards the bottom. This can make the pencil appear as though it has a mechanical flaw, even though it’s just fine. However, even this turns out to be an advantage, as it allows for an easy tactile indication of the button’s presence when it’s time to draw out more graphite.

If you think that I made a good case that the Pentel Twist Erase Click is a great mechanical pencil, perhaps this will help you out: a link to an online store where you can buy it. Or you can choose another retailer, if you prefer. As of this posting, the listing contains the message “not sold in stores”. It’s upsetting that such a great product is not getting restocked, perhaps because it wasn’t being supported by purchases or because people are simply ignorant of just how good this mechanical pencil is. I know that there are some out there who just go with what’s supplied to them at the office, and resign themselves to either writing with cheapo stationery and whatever pens that their ultimate-cheap company managed to pilfer from a nearby bank. If their company isn’t going to get better office supplies for them, why shouldn’t they at least invest for themselves in making their time in the office at least slightly less miserable?

Score: 9/10

There might be better mechanical pencils on the market, but I think that the Pentel Twist Erase Click is among the best that are still affordable. It may not be perfect. As far as I know, there is no mechanical pencil out there that has a feature that summons a team of scantily-clad ninja women to make you a sandwich. But this mechanical pencil is great for getting the job done, and because it gets so many things right.

Pokemon Sun first impressions… Disappointment!?

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Imagine a game with deep, engaging gameplay mechanics, crisp, colorful graphics (for the system it’s playing on), catchy music, but is marred by what is possibly the most cumbersome story in the history of gaming.

If you’ve played Pokemon Sun or Moon, you don’t have to imagine. You’ve already played it.

I’ve played a bit of Pokemon Sun version. Enough to write up a post about my first impressions of the game. I haven’t read or watched any reviews on the game, so my impressions of the game are not influenced by them at all. After this, I might find it interesting to look at a few of them to see whether I’m the only one who had the kind of experience with this game that I have.

I’m likely to catch some flak for it, but this post is my honest opinion. It’s not as positive or upbeat about the game as the opinions of other players might be, but it’s an honest opinion that addresses what I see as problems with the game. You can look at my other posts tagged Pokemon, so you’ll know that I’m sincere and not someone who is just trolling, here.

For a while, I’ve viewed stories as largely unnecessary in video games, but viewed RPGs as the exception. However, I think it is possible for RPGs to go too far with their stories, and Pokemon Sun demonstrated this to me. RPGs typically start out very story heavy in an effort to establish the premise and provide a pretext for the action that’s to take place for much of the game. That’s normal. However, Pokemon Sun went too far with this.

How do most Pokemon RPGs start? With a young character meeting a professor, receiving his first pokemon, and after a short fetch-quest, he can buy pokeballs and strike out on his own, and the player can play the game at their own pace. In Pokemon Sun, the story is heavier. Much heavier.

The point of Pokemon is the pokemon themselves: catching, battling, and raising them. I started Pokemon Sun eager to do just that, but had my experiences frustrated by loads of lengthy exposition. By the time I finally obtained my first pokemon and experienced the first battle, it felt like it was over too quick. But then it was on to more exposition.

In RPGs, there is an illusion of open-endedness. There’s usually a story that doesn’t advance until you’ve brought your characters to a certain location. I’m okay with this, as long as it doesn’t get too linear. Pokemon Sun is linear. It felt as though I was carting the main character from one location to another just to have the plot advance some more. It got to the point that I was dreading the appearance of Lillie, a character that does a lot to advance the plot early on. To put that in perspective, I didn’t find Navi from Ocarina of Time to be annoying.

One of my personal objectives getting into this game was to get a Raichu in my team, because I liked the new Alolan Raichu’s design. So I was looking for a place to catch a Pichu or Pikachu early on. So I was happy to have battled a guy with a Pichu, because I could use the fact that it was registered in my Pokedex to find its location. Getting Pichu required me to backtrack to a route that I had visited earlier, but Lillie wouldn’t let me wander off. I had piles more exposition to go through before I could finally go back and catch the thing.

My experience with Pokemon Sun was that of carting the main character from one short distance to another with piles of exposition in between. That kind of thing typically wanes off early on in most RPGs, particularly in story-light RPGs like Pokemon. But at four-and-a-half hours in, it doesn’t seem likely that that’s going to change much.

Another point to bring up is that there seems to be a bit of a spiritual theme going on in Pokemon Sun. That comes off as strange, considering that the main themes of Pokemon have been nature, science, technology, exploration, and, of course, friendship. I understand that it’s not the intention of video games to try to determine what everyone believes in. But spiritual themes are more serious than they are often given credit for. I’d have preferred if Pokemon avoided taking on certain themes that may be of religious significance. I don’t say this as an atheist, because I’m not an atheist. There are people who take religion very seriously, and some may see the appearance of spiritual themes in Pokemon as reason to not allow their children to play them. Not long ago, I defended Pokemon from false accusations of witchcraft. When Pokemon goes near spiritual themes, it makes it harder to defend it against such a charge. It might be that many people out there won’t consider this a determining factor for whether to purchase this product, but there is a potential for controversy.

While I haven’t played very far into the game, there is one feature that I might have a problem with. That would be the one where you take pictures, and they are subsequently rated in a manner reminiscent of social media. Yeah, we actually have Pokemon teaching people how to post photos on pages like Facebook. Personally, I don’t see the feature as one that’s necessary to the experience, and I’d prefer for it to not be obligatory to complete the game. However, that the demo could not be completed without taking some pictures might mean that it would be necessary to do the same in the main game to complete the story. Not to be overly negative, but the feature struck me as tacked-on and unnecessary, and was probably put in after spending a while as someone’s pet project.

The main point of Pokemon is the pokemon. The battles, the catching, and otherwise interacting with pokemon. That’s the kind of thing that a person would buy a game called “Pokemon” to do. The piles and piles of exposition isn’t necessary to such experiences, and largely serve as obstacles to the gameplay mechanics that players bought the game for. At this point, it’s looking like a chore to complete Pokemon Sun, and I don’t feel strongly inclined to play the Moon version and repeat the experience.

So, I’m actually disappointed with what I’m seeing from the Sun version so far. Maybe next year, they’ll make remakes of some earlier games that take it far easier on the story. That would be better, considering that I know how to play Pokemon, and I don’t need hours to get reacquainted with the game mechanics or get escorted around some city that was already in the demo. In fact, allowing players to explore a game on their own and find out things about it isn’t a bad thing. It was what made nearly all the rest of the Pokemon games so rewarding.

One more thing. The rewards for playing the demo include a bunch of items that can be sold for piles of cash. The opportunity to start the game with a silver spoon is theoretically a neat incentive to return to the demo. Except you begin the game with more money than in most Pokemon games anyway, and receive a much bigger lump of money from your mom shortly after starting the game, making those items not much of a big, screaming deal.

That’s how I feel about the game so far. I did say that I was going to be honest. I’m getting pretty tired of stories in video games, and this one turned out to be a particularly egregious offender, so I went and unloaded on it. Disagree with me? Comments section.

Vote by text? Is that even a thing?

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Can a person really vote by text? If it’s about voting in the upcoming presidential election, then the answer is no.

But that’s not stopping ads such as the one in the photo above from making rounds on social media outlets such as Twitter. The fake ads were apparently made by conservative Twitter users, who proceeded to share them as legitimate, perhaps so left-wing bloggers can take it at face value and re-tweet it.

Traditional media outlets have discovered that this is going on, and they went ballistic. One example would be this article on The Washington Post.

Twitter typically doesn’t intervene unless what is posted is illegal, and lying about the process of voting is not illegal. However, Twitter eventually intervened anyway, which I think just about anyone could have seen coming. You know, what with leftists making up a huge chunk of their Safety Council.

It’s easy to see why the left-leaning media didn’t like this very much. It’s not just the fact that it’s right-wing shenanigans, which they’d jump all over to try to convince you to change your vote to Democrat. Generally, politicians and the politically-involved tend to see the majority of the population as morons. So when they saw this hoax pop up, they suspected that people could fall for it. Personally, in the case of liberals, I see these concerns as much more well-founded.

I know that the image of the typical left-leaner as presented in the media is as some coastal technocrats that are connected and abreast of the trends of the digital age, while those on the right are portrayed as southern yokels who are too heavily invested in traditional values to come to the present age. However, when you spend some time on the ground, you see that this isn’t really the case. From my own experience, the typical left-leaners are low-income city-dwellers who believe that they are actively being suppressed, and that the odds are against them. They typically vote Democrat because they receive government assistance of some kind, and are convinced that if Republicans got their way, their benefits would be taken away from them, and they would be left to starve. This is in contrast to the typical conservative, who are usually skilled workers who see the world as unfair, but love the free market because it still offers a positive correlation between the effort that one puts forward, and the reward they get for it.

Fake ads like the one shown above, which has also been produced in Spanish, are perfect for pulling one over on the left-leaning. Many of them would see something like voting by text as something that could reasonably be implemented in the year 2016. They might even see the use of material such as the official logo for the Clinton campaign, as well as the disclaimer, and think it’s legit. So they’d fire their text messages off on their cheap pay-as-you-go Obamaphones while thinking that they’re bringing about change (by voting for the establishment candidate, go figure), and Election Day can come and go and they’d be none the wiser.

The fact that a similar ad was produced in Spanish is especially insidious. We know that the reason why immigrants (legal or otherwise) vote Democrat is because Democrats are generally weaker on immigration. We know that the reason why Democrats want illegal immigrants to vote is that illegal immigrants would mostly vote Democrat, and these days, when elections are usually tight, even a slight shift in one party’s favor can win that party the election. That Democrats desire to secure the votes of immigrants doesn’t have to do with sharing their values (because they don’t), they see them as a resource to exploit for political advantage.

The problem is, illegal immigrants don’t understand the American election process very well. This isn’t surprising, considering that Americans don’t understand the election process very well. So when someone new to America sees an official-looking ad say (in their own language) that they can vote for a candidate by text, they are likely to take it at face value, and not bother to register or vote or even show up on election day, and they’d be likely to pass this false information on to their friends and family.

The internet has proven to be a double-edged sword. While it’s true that it can be used to send information instantaneously around the world, the same could happen with false information, and that false information can get quite a bit of traction. It’s tempting to save time by taking someone else’s word for it so one can get back to wasting it with some vapid Facebook game. However, if a person doesn’t do their research, they’re going to be much easier for someone else to take advantage of.

I liked it better when Trump said it.

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When Donald Trump stated his belief that the US presidential election was rigged, it was treated by media outlets and the Democratic party as an unprecedented challenge to democracy itself.

But was Donald Trump the first person to ever challenge the results of a presidential election?

How quickly people forget. The results of the US presidential election has been challenged, and it was actually very recent. In the year 2004, George Bush won reelection. By a landslide. That did not sit well with left-leaners. While John Kerry himself shortly afterwards conceded the election, there were diehards who would not accept an extension of the Bush presidency, including Larry Chin of FromTheWilderness.com and Bob Fitrakis of the ironically-named FreePress.org. If Donald Trump can be called unpatriotic for challenging an election system he believes is rigged, certainly the same could be said of bloggers who were leftists back when leftism was fashionable.

But, the challenge wasn’t issued by John Kerry himself, so it’s not like he was being a poor sport. So then, was there a previous presidential candidate who directly challenged the results of the presidential election?

Yes there was. Does the name “Al Gore” ring a bell?

Yeah, that guy. Not only did he challenge the results of the election in the state of Florida, he brought the issue to the Supreme Court, which then gave the election to Bush. Gore made a spectacle of the American electoral process, which resulted in America being mocked abroad for our difficulties in selecting a leader. At that time, Floridians who claimed that the ballots were confusing sided with Kerry. I’ll let you consider whether you want to count the votes of those who don’t understand how to cast them.

Leftists, I get it. You don’t like admitting that your favorite guys lost to Bush, the guy who’s portrayed as a chimp in political comics and has no apparent knack for public speaking. That’s embarrassing. This might have something to do with the fact that neither one of them became the frontrunners for their party again.

However, when Donald Trump accuses Hillary Clinton and the DNC of cheating, leftists trip over themselves to make him out to be a threat to democracy, not remembering what they themselves once said back when Bush campaigned and won.

Personally, I liked it better when Donald Trump said it. Not that he’s providing much in the way of evidence to back up his claim, nor do I know for sure what kind of information he has access to.

However, Trump did bring something against Clinton that I wouldn’t put past her. She was the one who staged an event where she hugged a child after collapsing at a 9/11 memorial event as though she were okay, then claimed to have been diagnosed with pneumonia just days prior (This is irresponsible, because pneumonia is the single highest infectious cause of death in children worldwide. Saying that she lied wouldn’t be much of a defense.). Hillary Clinton is the one who hired a child actor to feed a scripted anti-Trump question to her at an event.

And, worst of all, after Hillary Clinton was asked to turn over emails as part of an investigation, she then deleted them and proceeded to have her old Blackberrys smashed with hammers. It was bad enough that she used a private email server when she should have known that that was illegal. She couldn’t have claimed ignorance when she deleted the emails that she was ordered to turn over. Isn’t tampering with evidence in an investigation called “obstruction of justice”? At the very least, she knowingly defied a court order. How did she avoid getting arrested?

And, in any case, how was conspiring against Bernie Sanders to deny him the Democratic nomination any less detrimental to the electoral process?

Is there a fast, easy way to tell when someone is lying about a sex assault allegation?

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Sex assault allegations seem to be coming up with increasing frequency in politics. It’s a trend that arguably became more mainstream with allegations against Bill Clinton, it has more recently derailed the campaign of Herman Cain, and Donald Trump currently faces allegations of sexual misconduct.

Even outside of politics, an allegation of sexual misconduct can be what it takes to derail the accused’s life, whether or not the claims are baseless. In a sense, it’s become a kind of go-to cheap shot for someone who wants to bring another person down, and this approach is attractive due to how much damage it does for very little effort.

Due to what’s at stake, it’s important that we know of a solid, consistent method for telling whether a person is lying to the public about allegations of sexual misconduct.

There is a method that is strongly consistent, and the reasoning behind it is solid. It goes as follows:

If an alleged victim of sexual misconduct takes their allegation to information media before taking it to police, there is a very strong chance that they are lying.

The reasoning behind this is as simple as it is compelling. If it were the interest of the accuser to hold a sexual predator accountable for their misconduct, their most practical course of action would be to report the incident to the police, as soon after the incident as possible. The police can then launch an investigation to collect evidence and, in so doing, increase the likelihood of a conviction, which would greatly decrease the likelihood of subsequent sexual assaults.

If it were the interest of the accuser to cause an extraordinary amount of harm to a person’s reputation, their most practical way of going about it would be to bring such allegations to the media, who, in the interest in providing the public with compelling stories, would do most of the work of attacking the reputation of the accused, especially public figures.

If a person were lying about a sex assault claim, it would not be in their interest to report it to the police. Because the police would launch an investigation, claims made would be scrutinized in the interest in reducing the likelihood of a false conviction, the investigation process would search for evidence of a crime that never occurred, and the judicial process would provide ample opportunity for the accused to make a defense. False claims generally don’t hold up under ordinary scrutiny, and would be far worse off under the kind afforded by the criminal justice system. What’s more, the police don’t like being lied to, so the person making a false claim may be prosecuted for falsely reporting a felony.

There are those who would point out that victims of sexual assaults have a difficult time coming forward due to the scrutiny that they would face. The scrutiny of law enforcement is trivial compared to the public attention that they would face, whether or not their claims were sincere. However, by design, a person who lies by taking their claims to social networks or the mainstream media can do the damage they please while avoiding accountability. Due to the “deep pockets” principle, a person is more likely to sue a media outlet for committing libel per se, because the media outlet would have more potential for compensating for damages than some woman who works at JC Penneys, even though the media outlet merely took the woman’s word for it.

On the other hand, when the matter is reported to the police, there is little potential for public attention, and such a claim, if true, could be verified, and the offender can be held accountable. The likelihood for this occurring decreases with time as the victim sits on the incident without reporting it. In fact, the statute of limitations exists to protect citizens from baseless and frivolous claims that allegedly occurred a long time ago, especially considering the tendency of the human mind to recall events with increased inaccuracy as time goes on. Considering this, the sooner a sex assault victim reports the incident to the police, the better.

Based on the simple criteria above, consider on a case-by-case basis where alleged victims of sexual assault are taking their claims, whether their claims are directed against Bill Clinton, Herman Cain, Donald Trump, or anyone else, for that matter. Are they really seeking justice, or are they motivated by something else?