Becoming a Veggie Eater

2-3 days ago, I watched part of a documentary. Many documentaries are entertaining, but this one wasn't. It made it's point in two minutes and spent the next ten throwing statistics at you and the boring stories of which scientist thought up the idea to collect that info, as well as when, where, why, and how. Boring stuff, but the point was this: Humans do not need meat in their diets.

It never occurred to me that I could or would even think to become a vegetarian, but when I heard that piece of information something clicked for me. The other reason why vegetarianism makes sense to me is because several of our serious diseases are linked to our poor American diets and can be prevented or even reversed if you eat a healthy diet. The problem is not just meat though, which in and of itself isn't unhealthy, it's just the amount we get. The problem is it's all our crappy processed foods which contribute to early deaths and poor overall health. Note however that much of our animal products become such crappy processed food.

So, just for curiosity sake, I haven't eaten any animal products since then, and I've discovered that it doesn't bother me (so far). In fact, it feels pretty good, like atheism. I don't crave meat, but I do have for sugary caffeinated drinks. I think I could very easily go without meat for a very long time, but the sugary drinks are going to be hard to get over unless I can discipline myself or replace one vice with a slightly less bad one. I have a blender, maybe I can make really tasty fruit drinks?

Let me comment on the reasons for vegetarianism. The moral ones sound pretty good; I don't agree with mistreating thinking and feeling creatures. It's an environmentally friendly thing to do, and I'm in favor of that. Although, in my case, neither of those two arguments sell vegetarianism. Instead, the one that shouldn't, did. Rather than just figuring out how to eat healthy, maybe hiring a nutrition, the extreme idea to cut out piece of my diet - a very readily available food staple in my culture, did. Is my brain chemistry messed up?

As I write this, I have various doubts, but I think I'm going to try being a veggie eater for as long as I can.

King of America 2

New rule: Prison sentences are for violent criminals only.

Where do prisons come from? Does anyone know what a dungeon is? Once upon a time, if someone committed an infraction of the law, you threw them in the dungeon (if the stocks were too good for them). What else do you do with criminals? We should know better by now.

First off, prison ought to be for dangerous people only. If you are a real threat to the safety of innocent people, we need a place to put you. If you lie, cheat, steal, fraud, vandalize, or become a sex offender by mooning some VIPs, I'm not afraid of you.

Secondly, incarceration is expensive. In California, it's $50,000 of state budget to imprison someone for one year. If your system has laws against shoplifting and smoking grass, that kind of stupid is obscene. I'm not worried about keeping the kleptos in check if it's that expensive. My country is broke, dammit!

Third, prison conditions are abysmal. Prison is full of dangerous people and short on space. Everyone is familiar with the concepts of situational homosexuality, situational evil, prison shanks, and prison rape, right? I think modern prison counts as cruel and unusual punishment, and as King, I will not treat my citizens this way.

Finally, is prison an effectual option? Is prison the healthiest thing for an individual's physical and mental well being? Let's try some alternatives that might give a criminal time to reflect on their decisions while contributing, and without disrupting lives and families. I think a criminal's time would be better spent serving mandatory community service: Cleaning up trash, washing city property, planting trees, shoveling snow, collecting fall foliage, mowing grass, or even working with homeless or special needs people. We don't know what works unless we try.

I think prison as it is is archaic. Only violent people belong in prisons, just as only the criminally insane belong in asylums. There is a lot of room for improving society here. Bust a move, assholes.

Amendment 28: The Prison Shank Amendment

      The other night I had a dream where I was a member of Congress, but it was a slightly different vision of congress. I must have been on a committee. We were discussing my own idea for a Constitutional amendment that grants prisoners the right to a safe prison environment. Everyone seemed to love this idea except for 3 people. The first person who objected was oddly enough a guy I knew from High School named Shadi, and the reason he ultimately didn't care for the idea was because in my dream he was some kind of cliched rival who just wanted to stop this bill because it was my idea. He had corny cliched dialogue and everything. In fact, after we passed the Bill, he even stood up, clapped condescendingly, and mockingly congratulated me on my victory and then he promised me that I won't be so lucky next time. The other two people who didn't like the Bill were arrested and escorted out for being evil – more or less. Basically, they didn't like the bill because they were evil, and this was so apparent in their arguments of the bill that they were charged by authorities with being amoral congressmen. I laughed out loud at my dream.

      But anyway, the idea that prisoners should have the right to a safe prison environment is something I came up with a little while ago. If you are incarcerated, then whoever incarcerates you is responsible for your humane treatment and if humane treatment cannot be provided, than you should not be incarcerated. I'm sure most believe that every human, except for an extreme few, deserve to be treated humanely, not with cruelty. Why should a person's humanity be disregarded just because they've made a mistake?

      I like the idea that you can get in trouble for doing your job as a congressman wrong. Not by taking bribes or other forms of illegal, unethical activity, but rather by simply doing your job in such a way that can be construed as non-constructive. A filibuster for instance is a strategy to kill a bill by wasting time talking. Does that sound ethical to you? Many politicians are lawyers who know how to talk and argue creatively. They can avoid areas of discussion that are not beneficial to them. They can make arguments that can mislead. They can be really tricky bastards and I think there's good reason to prohibit people with law degrees from becoming politicians.

I Want to Be A Super Villain

     I think I would like to be a super villain - in super hero comics. I think many people who work in the super hero genre who create super heroes and super villains approach it in a similar way. Heroes are based off of them personally and people they personally know/know of, and/or they incorporate the traits of people they admire, traits they think are interesting, noble, or ideal. Villains are based off of people they know or know of who the creator feels is faulty or deserving of hatred. Super villains might also be created out convenience or in trying to invent the best opponent for a specific character. But maybe I'm wrong.
    I'm not sure anyone has ever fantasized about being the villain, as I have. I would like to be a intelligent, versitile, and strong, OWN AND RUN MY OWN CITY in an exotic place such as the north pole, the middle of an ocean, or outer space, and I would like to be known for being extremely dangerous. I would do creative (emphasis on creative!) and radical thing and my M/O would maximize efficiency and minimize risk. I would like to be known for personally carrying out my plans from the front and acting and commanding on a whim. I would like to be unpredictable and I would occasionally taunt world governments and the like. I would also be known for my flair.
    I would like to have my own army. It would be highly sophisticated - full of intelligent, skilled and loyal men and/or women; Loyal because they believe in my vision. They would receive training in Ninjutsu, the art of guerrilla warfare, espionage, assassination, and exploiting the weaknesses of the human body. I would also have an elite group of specialized badasses for carrying out jobs that required finesse. My elite group would be very selective and have a reputation for being extremely ruthless, with a cool name like the Godslayers.
    I want to be the villain that makes even the most powerful superheroes gulp at the sound of my name because they know I will never permit any interference with my plans go without mass casualties. I play to win and the heroes know their best chances will always be win-lose. While I apprecate sudden and random catastrophe, my actions all have the ultimate goal of conquering the world - yes, "of course" I would want to conquer the world. I'm not a petty villain who just wants to get rich or have fun. My reasoning is simple: I think I can run Earth better than anyone else, and though I am the deadliest villain, I would make a genuinely good world leader who wants to create a self-sustainng world of peace, love, understanding, harmony, and equality. 
    If I had a symbol it would be something nice that is widely recognizable, like a Heart Shape or a Star Shape. If  made use of color, such as in uniforms, weapons, tools, vehicles, etc, I think I would use black and grey. If I had a gimic or any recognizable, aesthetic themes, I would incorporate black formal attire and swords. My personal guards would be dressed in black cloaks with veiled hoods too resemble the Ghost of Christmas Future and they would carry broad swords. They would walk and stop in step with me wherever I go, and there would always be 8-12 of them, but mostly they serve to intimidate. I'd call them my Deathlords.
    What makes a good villain is a whole dissertation on its own, but at the very least, the villain needs to pose the right conflict.

I Wonder If...

*I wonder if a shark and rhino have ever fought?
*I wonder if food service employees get to eat the food the customers send back?
*I wonder if T.V. studio executives know that all the television shows they green-light suck ass?
*I wonder if any of my classmates from high school are doing porn now?
*I wonder if those two teachers were doing it?
*I wonder if the people who park in the street instead of their half-empty driveways know they're assholes?
*I wonder if my cat can take a dog?
*I wonder if people who talk over movies are alright?
*I wonder if any of todays rock and rap musicians can read music?
*I wonder if Square Enix knows they haven't released a decent RPG game once?
*I wonder if Steve Jobs was actually killed?
*I wonder if Theism will ever die?
*I wonder if Jesus was really both crazy and lucky?
*I also wonder if Jesus was also a ninja?
*I wonder if Stan Lee will ever get a decent movie cameo?
*I wonder if they'll ever make condoms that don't smell like rubber, balloons, or surgical gloves?
*I wonder if George Carlin is coming back?
*I wonder if my congressman is secretly an evil, Saturday morning cartoon villain?
*I wonder if the Vice President of the U.S.A. ever has to get out of bed?
*I wonder if there's a Parallel, Alternate Universe Joshua out there writing a "I wonder when..." series?
*I wonder if Jim Davis will ever get to the joke?
*I wonder if other universes in the multiverse have to deal with tangles in cords and wires and strings and such?
*I wonder if their is life out there, but we're in the lead?
*I wonder if Jack in the Box commercials will ever be funny again?
*I wonder if humanity will ever get their shit together?

King of America 1

      Have you ever watched a movie super villain say he/she wanted to rule the world and thought, "Why?" Seriously, why on Tod's green earth would anyone actually want to rule the world? Why would anyone want to badly enough to actually go for it? Well I was on the john one day pondering this question when an epiphany struck: To prove that I can run this crap hole better than anyone else!

      Dead serious, that is why I would like to become a super villain and conquer the world. I figure I'd rename it for that is the privilege of all conquerors, but for now let's just keep the name. After crushing all who would oppose me including everyone who works on capital hill and in the Vatican, I'd declare myself King of America and impose/implement my vision.

      In my fantasies, my vision satisfies the needs of the people so that they love me and support my overthrow of all the world powers and I run the whole damn thing with ease with thanks to e-mail for making the world a manageable size. Take a moment to picture your contacts list if you were King of America.

      My first order of business is to declare world peace. Booya. More “King of America” ideas to come.

Objectionable Affect and Smoking

     Ever wonder why smoking is illegal as an indoor activity these days? I believe that if a person wants to smoke, they should be allowed to smoke unless they happen to be in a building owned by someone who doesn't want anyone smoking inside their building. Why does the government have the right to make that decision for anyone? Or rather, why don't people believe in liberty and freedom enough to allow others to make these decisions themselves?
    But anyway, smoking is illegal indoors and that's that. My personal explanation for this phenomenon is that smoking is just plain rude. Think about it, you know it's true. I compare lighting up to farting. You know that most people think it's just plain disgusting to do either, so why do people think it's ok to light up without clearing it with everyone 50 feet up wind? When you fart or when you light up, what you're actually doing is subjecting everyone around you to an affect that is subjectively objectionable. I like to call this sort of thing an "Objectionable Affect," which is anything one can perceive with any of their five senses that is objectionable.
    Along with farting and smoking, other objectionable affects include burping, picking your nose, digging in your ears, cleaning your finger nails, hacking and spitting, audible chewing of any kind, occasional singing out loud, talking too loud, wearing your baseball cap crooked or backwards, talking with your mouth full, glaring, staring, any Axe scent, crying (children only), slurping, announcing what your business is at the bathroom, licking anything, and talking about politics, religion, or what illness(es) you think your coming down with or just got over, especially at the dinner table.

Jesus, Champion of Forgiveness

    I don't believe in Jesus, but when I think of him I choose to think of him as a great literary hero. He was a wise man with a message: Forgiveness. Teaching forgiveness to the world was so important to Jesus that he was willing to endure horrible torture and death. The noble death of Jesus illustrates just how important forginveness was to him: He died in order to atone for the sins of all human kind. Sometimes, forgiving others is hard. Maybe even as hard as dying. But Jesus believed forgiveness was so important that we must go those extraordinary lengths just to do so.
    Why is forgiveness so important? Because in order to have true peace, we must be able to love and understand each other, which comes after forgiveness.
    To forgive, you must put the world into perspective. All people are fallable and subject to dark urges natural to us because of our biological imperative and (sometimes?) our psychological conditioning. Sometimes we are susceptible to situational evil. People aren't evil, but they have the capacity for evil. Such evil is truely a result of one or more of three things: folly, mental sickness, and/or the human condition. A wise, healthy mind doesn't actively try to hurt others. Try to understand the perspective of others and withhold your judgment or be damned.

Science Proves Racism is Stupid!

     I don't understand how any half-intelligent person can be racist. Look at it from the perspective of the humble biologist and see that we all have something called DNA. Guess what? The DNA of human beings is very much the same across ethnicity except for some very few superficial differences, but genetically, we're all essentially identical. Racism is the practice of looking at those slightly different bits of our common DNA, and then choosing to hate based on those slightly different bits. Why? What's the point? Remember The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss? Racism as stupid as hating people for buttering their toast differently.

Predicting the Future: Socialized Prostitution, Meat-Bots, and Transporters

After I'm dead, I want to be remembered for predicting future trends of human civilization because I like to be right. The first thing I'm predicting is that in 200 years, maybe even 300 years,  but at most, 500 years, human kind will have socialized prostitution. That's right, someday, your descendants will be able to call a tax paid, government agency and request that prostitutes be sent to your house. It's hard for us to imagine what that will be like since we're such prudes here in the year 2011, but our descendants will be much more sexually liberal.

Pornography will become obsolete, as the real thing will probably be a click away because by then we'll probably have very realist humanoid robots and teleportation. Actually, let me elaborate on the sci-fi tech here. I think we will have computers encased in meat instead of metal and plastic. Robots will actually be human clones without a brain and central nervous system. Those things will be replaced by a computer and miles of wires respectively. Well, maybe you can keep the nervous tissue. But yeah, anyway, prostitutes will be human clones with computers instead of brains, and they'll be teleported to your house. Actually, it won't be teleportation per se, it'll be more like the tranporters in Star Trek. The science of Star Trek explains that the transporters deconstructs you atom by atom, saves the blueprint of you digitally, then reconstructs you somewhere else. Logically, you can't do this to people because it's technically a murder and then cloning, but you could definitely do it to a lifeless meat-bot. So in summary, you surf the net for a meat-bot prostitute and click. Then the meat-bot is transported to your house. Who could go back to porn after having access to meat-bots?

Well, maybe we won't have meat-bots beamed to our houses, but there will definitely be socialized prostitution one day. Count on it.

A Review of FFIX

I want to level with you, there are aspects of ffix that are really positive, but there are also aspects of the game which are not, such as the main villains' pants, but I feel the pluses grossly outweigh the negatives and this is a game worth trying.

I think everyone's primary concern with this one is the art style. Most gamers are immediately deterred by the art, but I think you'll find that it won't be an issue for long. While the box art looks pretty unattractive, the game itself looks pretty sweet. There's a subtle cartoon-y aesthetic to the whole game; the settings, the characters, the monsters, and I think you'll find that it makes the fact that this game is a fantasy really stand out. The settings themselves are detailed and creative, and they're very beautiful from an artists' perspective.

The music in this game is also great. It complements the look and feel of this game. I can't say it's stellar, but your definitely getting good music. There are many times when you just become aware of the music's role, even while dungeon crawling.

The second problem for most people who play this game is the main character, Zidane. I don't remember how, but I got over his immature personality real early and without even realizing it. I think this is because the story puts a lot of obstacles in his way right at the beginning, giving his chivalrous nature real showcase. Also remember that characters change over time, especially on a hero's journey, so that initial immaturity of his is short-lived, and by disc three I begin wondering when he got so cool.

FFIX has a really good story based on a basic fantasy premises that takes you back to the roots of the FF series. There's a great kingdom called Alexandria, and recently the queen has become inexplicably cruel and wicked, so her brother arranges for his niece, princess Garnet, to be spirited away by some meretricious thieves in a spectacular fashion. The kidnapping gets complicated, and the escape is messy. Their fabulous mobile-theater/airship crashes in an Evil Forest where the princess is stolen from the wreckage by monsters. Out of responsibility and young idealism, mostly, Zidane chooses to rescue the helpless princess over staying by his family, and he protects her on a long dangerous journey with a dysfunctional party where they must brave the wilderness while being pursued by assassins.

Later on, a mysterious, otherworldly puppeteer with a god complex manipulates the world powers into a short and very one-sided war that leaves all sides miserably torn apart, and our heroes must hunt him down and stop him from completely perverting the planet. Unlike later games in the FF series, FFIX brings back something that was lost somewhere – it's that feeling you used to get when you played a good rpg that you were watching a play. These characters are alive on screen. They emote well and each of them have personalities that come from real human experience. They all grow and overcome their problems over the course of their adventure. I can't remember the last game I played where I knew that the characters had a bond of friendship.

Gameplay is good. Some recent RPG innovations are gone and some more traditional RPG elements are back. The characters have built in classes with specialized equipment and skills. I'm very fond of the way you build up your characters. Your characters learn abilities and magic from armor and weapons. Each piece of equipment in the game has at least one, but usually more, abilities, which your characters will slowly master as you fight. Many of these abilities don't matter in the long run; If you just hold on to your old equipment you can utilized specific abilities when you need them, and there's little need for any monotonous grinding.

Something else about the gameplay I'm really excited by is the stealing. Because your main character is a thief, Square developed an RPG full of monsters with loads of goodies to steal. There's a problem though, this being that you can be overwhelmed by the amount of things there are to steal. In my case, this problem is actually an hindrance. Stealing from bosses can require a lot of patience. Some of them have such attractive goodies that I'll have my party tolerate rounds and rounds of sometimes hardcore punishment because some steal items have such a low success rate. I think its a really neat idea, but it's execution actually takes away from the game.

Don't get upset, but FFIX has two mini-games. One of them is a bullshit card game you can almost completely get away with overlooking, but the other one is actually pretty fun and very rewarding: It's called “Choco-Hot'n'Cold” I think. It's basically a scavenger hunt riding a chocobo, but on a global scale. Cool, right? Who can say no to a scavenger hunt, especially one that rewards you with a full set of ancient samurai armor and the lance they used to kill jesus? The choco-Hot'n'Cold mini-game is actually the only side quest in FFIX, and there isn't much content in this game to distract you from the main story.

There's also an item creation system, and it's very simple. There are special shops in the world called Synthesis Shops, run by craftsman who can take your old, junky equipment and forge it into unique and powerful swords and armor. Finally, some use for my old crap. I found that this is actually a fun way to shop.

The only real problem I have with the gameplay is the ATB. I can't help but feel that the monsters are getting in more turns than me. This is especially obvious if you use the spell Haste to make your characters faster. Haste is definitely redundant. You'll find that all it does is make it so your characters turns come up sooner, and doesn't increase the number of turns they get over time.

Like I said earlier, this game is worth trying. If you nit-pick, you'll miss out. You can nit-pick anything. Being overly critical and approaching everything with a negative slant is real trendy these days. You should always remember that a video game is a piece of art, and also to try to look at art with an open mind. Start with the positives. Try to find something you can appreciate about the art first. It's natural that sometimes, we just hate particular art. Just accept FFIX for all that it is and see if you enjoy the ride.