I was on vacation and I got the opportunity to finish a few movies. Instead of creating separate entries for each one, I thought I’d just put it into one.

1. Xiao Wu/Pickpocket

This is a movie about a bit of a younger man whose friends have kind of left him behind. He tries to chase after this karaoke girl, but she ended up disappearing with somebody else. Lots of scenes of him smoking and being moody. He’s eventually arrested and then paraded through the streets to shame him. It was a decent movie.

I hate women. I don’t know how many times something like this has to happen before public figures start to realize they should just limit contact with women. Like, they’re not on your side. You’re just an idiot. I’ve always hated when people try to defend women portraying them as weak or people worth defending. You should never underestimate wamen, they are truly capable of destructive behavior. If you don’t think that’s the case then again, you’re an idiot. How many times do women need to be leveraged against men before men either get sick of it or limit contact?

First route of Tenshi Souzou completed. It’s funny to think, but after this it’ll be the last full length Yuzusoft game to complete until I’ve read them all. I don’t intend to read all the routes. I think this game is pretty mediocre. I think really the best thing about Noa is that she’s drawn well. Other than that, don’t really think I have much positive to say. Her personality is kinda flat. The drama is typical moege nonsense. Never really was explained what exactly being an angel means. Never had much sympathy for the demons. I’m human, I don’t know why I’d be cheering on demons. The ero scenes really aren’t that great. There’s something criminal in the act of drawing a tenshi with 貧乳. Big meh.

I mean, I thought it was okay. Once you’ve seen some ideal Chinese girl in movies then you’ve seen them all. Okay, maybe an exaggeration, but the personality is usually very similar. Smart, aggressive, provocative, playful, etc., not like I’m blaming, those are good traits. Mi Lan was a good character. Monkey was interesting enough. I just thought it was okay. It’s a decent movie. Actually I watched half of this movie, stopped, then decided to come back to it a couple months later. Shows I was really dying to know how this one ends. Now that I think about it, teenage rascals seem to be a common theme in Asian movies.

So, I saw this video and it got me thinking about this subject a little.

Yeah, honestly it’s brutal. Not even considering the global financial state, America (or the West) is facing two great threats that will probably mean a decrease in living standards of many in this country. The first is China, America has little manufacturing. American companies just can’t compete with China in terms of cost and efficiency. In the beginning American companies greatly profited off the Chinese market because they were the ones who possessed the technology. Gradually, China began to learn, and now they have an increasing number of companies which compete with American ones and at less cost. At first it was mostly cheap goods, but now it’s growing in the complexity of the goods. You also don’t hear much about bad Chinese construction or low-quality Chinese goods anymore—because they’re just better now. Two things in addition to that don’t help. The first is that China isn’t a free-market. A lot of the money which flows into China stays in China. The second is that China artificially keeps its currency down because then they can export more.

I’ve long wanted to learn more about both. Actually, I’m already moderately familiar with emacs. I’ve actually typed all the blog entries here on emacs. I created and edited the website with emacs. But, I’m not really a programmer. I’ve learned a lot about linux from using it, but I really don’t know that much about programming. I want to learn more about it and create little projects. I’ve always loved working with computers, so I think I’ll be good at it. Specifically, I wanted to learn Common Lisp. I don’t know why exactly, but it always seemed like a beautiful language to me. Emacs is also probably the best editor if you’re going to be doing anything with lisp. I don’t use the regular distribution of emacs, but I just install spacemacs. Out of the box it mostly does everything I want it to. Maybe I could take the time to configure default emacs myself, but I’m satisfied with this right now. There aren’t really any good youtube tutorials, so I went with a book. It’s called “Common LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation”. Many books about common lisp are directed towards those familiar with programming, but this one builds from the ground up. Perfect for me. Let’s see how far I get. I also wanted to learn more about doing things like email, music player, rss, and better terminal use inside of emacs. These things might take a bit to learn about. Too many things, not enough time.

The book The Limits of Power: The End to American Exceptionalism was penned by a man named Andrew Bacevich. Mr. Bacevich graduated from West Point in 1969 and went on to serve numerous years in the army. He fought in the Vietnam war, was deployed to posts in Germany, as well as serving in the Persian Gulf. Mr. Bacevich has a PhD in American diplomatic History and has taught at numerous universities. He has authored numerous book, this book in question is one of them. This book paints an awful bleak picture of American foreign policy and government. It is important to keep in mind, this book was written during Bush’s second presidency. Ultimately, his conclusion is that the United States should search for problems within its own borders instead of trying to fix issues outside of it. Three problems Mr. Bacevich seems to think are of particular importance are nuclear weapons, the national debt, and climate change.

The American Civil War was a conflict between the Northern and the Southern United States. The states broke off individually at first, but quickly came together to form the Confederate States of America. The reasons for exactly why it occurred are debated, course the textbook gives a very one-dimensional answer—slavery. I think why the narrative shifted like that is two-fold, one it serves as a cudgel for the South and whites in general that they should constantly apologize and feed bad for slavery, the second is economic because unified country is better business. Probably more realistically it was a large number of things that came together, economic interests were at stake, cultural interests were at stake, and political interests were at stake. Economic was slavery and tariffs. Cultural was the the mostly agrarian culture the South had. Political was the decreasing political influence the South had as more states were being added to the Union and population growth not as fast as the North. Many of the Southern states also didn’t see the Union as something which they were obligated to be a part of, so it wasn’t thought of an act of treason and treachery, therefore the Northern invasion of the South was unprovoked. Also, I think it’s important to recognize, most Northern soldiers didn’t see themselves as fighting to free the slaves. Wasn’t out of some moral reason the North didn’t own slaves, it was just they didn’t have a suitable climate. I think it’s also telling how willing Lincoln was to reintroduce the rebellious states back into the Union. The North launches an invasion of the South, the war ends up going on for five years and brings ruin to the South for decades to come. South had better soldiers and officers, but the North leveraged its industry. Grant marched to Richmond not through some brilliant tactics, but by making use of the North’s superior logistics. The Confederacy only really had one effective army. Their pride and Richmond’s proximity to Washington D.C. came back to bite them. 

Lol. This is great.

I’ll laugh so hard if Trump is elected again. With Gaza, prices of things in general, Biden’s mental condition, decline of fake news media, decline of idiotic celebrities, considering he’s the incumbent, and the poll numbers, it looks like the odds of Trump being reelected is increasing. I think at this point the leftist thugs of thrown everything they can at him short of arresting and assassinating him. If they cross that line, it’d be tough to return. Some of us aren’t as stupid as they take us to be.

Bocchi:

This is a great anime. Animation is nice. Girls are cute. Songs are catchy. No leftist bullshit. Story is engaging enough. Only complaint is that giving bocchi just a jersey to wear throughout most of it is such a shame. Can’t believe her name is Hitori too.

Kiniro Mosaic:

It’s fun enough, but I don’t think it’s nearly as well written or engaging as others that came before it. Think you can safely skip. Karen literally redeemed this show for me though. She’s a hilarious character. I want more loud, blonde foreigners in anime. She should’ve been an American too. The art is also very mediocre. It would’ve been good enough if the writing was better.