Depression is a Bitch

When I was a kid I used to play legos, video games, watch TV, and for no reason I would feel really really sad all the sudden and I would just go to sleep even in the middle of the day. I didn't want to do anything ever. It was scary. My mom told me it was going to be like that till I got married and that I was gonna need to learn to deal with it. I learned to force myself to do what I was supposed to do and to distract myself. My mom told me if I didn't the pain in my stomach would make a hole, an actual hole, and I was gonna need surgery. So I tried really hard to get my mind off reality. I learned that time makes things better and if I wait it out it gets better. That's been the best thing ever to help me.

There's Nothing Special About Psychic Powers

 How can you tell legitimate psychics apart from frauds? They have the same success rate and the same effects upon success. If any clever liar can replicate the effects of extraordinary or supernatural abilities, than there’s nothing special about psychics or their abilities. If you say you can levitate, I expect a loop-de-loop. 

What sort of god would create a world where psychics are relevant anyway? The pain of loss is universal and if it's intentionally imposed by someone then it's cruel. It's also cruel if a nature designed by any god would incorporate assured, permanent death and the ability to communicate with the dead is rare. At best it's wasteful that these people don't use their powers to gain a potentially near-infinite amount of wisdom from the departed; Martin Luther King Jr., Nicola Tesla, Einstein, etc. Instead, these people sell their powers at a high price, sometimes, to offer either comfort or the semblance of comfort to the grieving.

Once again I ask how you distinguish between a psychic and a liar. The reality is it's irrelevant because psychic powers, if real, are nothing special. They have as much relevance to society as graffiti, which is comparatively high brow next to the average psychic. Fine arts such as painting, music, and literature have a measurably more beneficial effect on the world by improving our culture. The sciences produce knowledge and technology that can give us longer lives and a higher quality of life. The dead can only tell us of the mundane. If you’re a psychic, I would argue that you’re not making any contribution to the world or your species.

Why You Should be a Gnostic Atheist

I was thinking the other day and it seems to me that throughout the entirety of humanity's stay on Earth, we've been grappling with the mysterious. At the very least we've been struggling with it for 10 thousand years and in that time, we have not objectively verified one damned thing about the supernatural! There isn't one single piece of tangible, verifiable, empirical evidence to speak of. This should a be an overwhelming reason for any grown, educated adult to outright reject any superstitious claim or belief. Period. The absence of evidence is itself evidence.

Euthinasia

I believe in assisted suicide. If you do not have the right to your own death, then your basic human rights have not been fully granted.

Free Will is Bullshit (and God is Evil)

Chris said it best, although I happened to simultaneously think of something similar. He said "I have free will because I have no choice."

Free Will is an abstract concept. It's vaguely defined. That makes it immeasurable. How then do you demonstrate it's real?

Here's my response to religion when it says God respects free will (besides mentioning the instances in the bible where God forcefully interferes with peoples free will):

"If free will causes us to do evil and if free will is sacred to god, than evil is sacred to god, therefore god is evil."

How to Beat Final Fantasy 5 EZ (The one with the Monks and Ninjas)!

     Final Fantasy 5 is the least intuitive RPG ever. It's a game built around fruitlessly and inconsequentially customizing the four most forgettable characters in Final Fantasy history by using a useless ass job system that magically becomes a very broken ass job system on the second to last screen. You have no defense stat, meaning your ability to take hits is completely dependent on your armor. This means that you will always take the amount of damage as carefully intended by the programmers even if you're properly equipped. No matter how much you excel at the game, your defensive capability is locked in. It's also frustrating and difficult for newbies. It's probably the least popular FF and that's why it was passed over for an international version the first time around. Wanna know how to beat it?

• First off, don't get carried away buying equipment until you unlock your first set of jobs
• Once you unlock the first set of jobs, make everyone a monk. Monks are dirt cheap and very effective fighters because the damage formulas for weapons are bullshit.
• Alternate some characters as white mages to improve their white magic skill as new white magic becomes available. This becomes insanely easy once you earn the barehanded fighting ability from the monk job. You want everyone to be able to double as a healer. Do this for the rest of the game until you earn the highest level of white magic.
• When the ninja job becomes available, make two characters ninjas. You will commit the other two to mastering the monk job. 
• When your monks master their jobs, make them ninjas. Then, change your other ninjas into monks until they master their monk job and then make them ninjas again. This should take you till the end of the game.
• Having 4 ninjas is overkill and super expensive. This way, we also get to take advantage of the monks for being dirt cheap to equip.
•  After mastering the ninja jobs and the monk jobs, make your characters their starter class. Equip all the best stuff and go into the last dungeon. clear it. In the second to last room, you can encounter enemies called movers who drop ~200ABP/battle. Earn all the other abilities and master all the other jobs you like. Return to the world map and complete the side-quests. Come back and finish the game.

* NOTE: Some boss battles require alternate strategies. For instance, the fire boss you fight at the end of the steam ship is weak against Ice 2 and nothing else so make everyone a black mage for one battle only and spam it.

     That's it. Monks and Ninjas. Forget everything you know about RPGs, fantasy games, adventures, etc. This is actually the ideal way to get through this RPG. You can only make it easier if you grind a few other abilities on the side if you know what abilities you'll need in advanced. Every other job in the game is useless garbage.

God's Love is Bullshit; A Final Definition of Love

Once, I thought about the feeling of love an realized it is a vaguely defined, abstract concept. Da Fuq is it! Srsly! So I gots to the innernets. I wasn't looking for a philosophical answer, which would be something ridiculous. I was looking for a scientific answer. It's all brain chemistry. Turns out it's a small mixture of chemicals in the brain that 1. make you sexually attracted to someone, 2. think they're awesome and have no flaws, and 3. think that the relationship itself is awesome and better than any other relationship ever - by a lot. Found me a scientific article to boot! *The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings. According to this, you can fall in love with anyone in 45 minutes. It's just chemicals, guys! I always did say "you could fall in love with anyone, even Hitler, if you were isolated in an intimate space with him long enough."

So basically, love is a chemical reaction! It takes place in the brain and makes you want to bone someone who your brain has tricked you into thinking is awesome. The ultimate "fuck you, brain!" joke can be found here somewhere.

So now that we've established that love is a not-special word we invented to describe what can really only be called a trick of our brain which ultimately compels us to reproduced sexually (as opposed to miraculously) and care for our offspring, surely your illusion of the over-romanticized, over-hyped, bogus money-making concept is dispelled, correct? There's no such thing as Hollywood love, Hallmark love or romantic love. Love is not a force or a power. Gravity is a force. Math is power. It's all nonsense. I had a cat for 15 years. When she died, I got a new one. Guess what, the feelings I had for that cat? I'd call that love.

So what of God's love, if I may impudent (that's right, impudent is a verb now. Get over it.)? God must have the real love right, and we have the fake love. Is that it? Our love is just some bullshit brain juice. It's the fake stuff, no matter how powerful it's effect. If you feel fit to disagree, you must be rocking the extra strength brain juice. Brain juice on steroids (new energy drink - combine with sriracha sauce for maximum effect! Only at wal-mart! Save more, live better.) So is God's love real or is God's love some fakey-ass illusion too? If your response is "no, all love is real," you're a science denier. Science denial is dangerous, fuck you. If your response is "God does have the real love and we do in fact have the fake love," then still fuck you. God is retarded.

We should accept that love is not something special. You are all free! I release you from the matrix. Embrace this truth fully and contently. You now have the knowledge to understand your illusion and stop yourself from any destructive love-driven (brain juice-induced negative) behavior. You can also find comfort and joy in knowing how simple love actually is. I think it's a much more genuine, sensible, and practical way of seeing it. I hope you all use this knowledge to make the world a better place.

*After reading the article I learned that the experiments did not show positive results.

Game Arts in Bullshit

Game Arts is a video game studio in Japan. I wonder if anyone knows anything they've made? Grandia and Lunar. That's basically it. While I've barely seen Grandia because it didn't amuse me, I used to be a big fan of the Lunar series. Lunar is now one of the saddest series of all time. There is literally 3 remakes of the first game, Lunar the Silver Star, for a total of 4 different versions of the same game. That's all they do with it! I have not been anticipating a Lunar 3, but I've heard that it is something they've written down on a yellow sticky note somewhere.

Lunar is perhaps the best case against re-makes. You eventually just keep remaking the same shit over and over with the intention to appeal to some assumed expectations of a presumed, locked-in-till-death fan-base without doing anything of substance or merit. Eventually, they'll remake everything to a point where you're so bored of the last ones that you are already bored of the new one your first time. I call this the Lunar Threshold. To sum up, the 4 versions of Lunar 1 are as follows.

Lunar the Silver Star for the Sega CD
     For it's time, a hell of a game. It had voice acted and animated cut scenes when that sort of thing was impossible. The gameplay was unique, and the story was memorable. It had good music and it was fun. It had a cult following.

Lunar the Silver Star Story: Complete
     It was a bright, more refined version of the original. The gameplay was amped,  the animated and voiced cut scenes were impressive, and the story was expanded on. It was real fun too, and brought in more fans.

Lunar Legend for the Gameboy Advanced
     Obnoxious shonen bullshit for the fans and a sad attempt at cashing in on Lunar via a handheld. RPGs are not for handhelds. Fuck you. The gameplay was slow and boring. This one was probably meant to be cool because it had limit breaks like in Final Fantasy. It was probably a smaller game than the previous version.

Lunar: Silver Star Harmony for the PSP
     I wanted to give this one a fair chance until I saw what kind of bullshit they pulled. Typical anime shonen bullshit: Contrived and fan serviced until it was primed to burst. It's an older game redesigned to have some appeal to a new generation, which is alienating to the original generation who took an interest at the start. I can't say I saw any real effort put into this. It had nothing new that was worth seeing or hearing.

Another problem they  probably didn't foresee is due to the massive number of remakes, the replay value goes down exponentially for every new game! That's kinda funny. I am so tired of replaying Lunar 1 that you're not going to make it playable ever again; Not unless you do something really different like cross another genre.

Another problem is when you have new creators working on something old: do they get it enough to be able to be faithful to the spirit of the original? Star Trek fans might agree.

Facebook is Bullshit, Part 3

Sometimes there's stuff on facebook that just sounds really annoying to me. Like people who post about all body sizes and shapes even though it's condescending if you're not fucking them.

Here's a list of something that's pretty annoying. It's annoying because it's obvious. If you don't like your body, I can walk any busy city street and find you 10 decent people who WOULD FUCK YOU, IMMEDIATELY. This is the kind of stuff that you learn and understand as you mature but maybe you can't appreciate before.

This list was laughably pitiful, so I took the liberty of creating a similar list for men, who also have list needs that are sated by lists of things. The point is to reflect how your inane list comes across to me.

10 FACTS EVERY MAN SHOULD KNOW:

1. Your balls are huge!

2. No one has abs. Enjoy eating junk!

3. There are definitely people out there who think the size of your penis in not important. If you meet someone who thinks it is, they're probably not right for you. Don't worry about it.

4. It's called manscaping and it's universal. If that doesn't work for you, find someone with a body hair fetish.

5. Bald or baling? That's OK for men! Own that shit! Own that shit hardcore!

6. Don't look for a woman to save you. From danger? Call a fire fighter. They're nicer than the police. From the IRS? Call an accountant? Wha?

7. It's OK to masturbate 3 times a day. It's also natural. It's also natural to be inappropriately attracted to body parts.

8. No one is perfect. If you meet someone who you think comes close, you might need a dictionary. The concept of perfection is abstract and unattainable. There, now you know something. You're welcome.

9. If someone needs to be told that they should be a priority as opposed to a option, last resort, or backup plan, that's pretty sad. You should do something for them. I would defifnitely do something for them.

10. You're a man. That makes you fuckin' awesome! And since all men are fuckin' awesome, that makes the whole concept of being fuckin' awesome completely redundant. Calm down.

Sometimes, we all need to take off our captain obvious hats, which I presume looks like a giant, conspicuous boner trapped in spandex.

Facebook is Bullshit, Part 2

You learn lots of aggravating stuff about your society through facebook. Here's a post that made me angry thinking about it having any relevance to the world. It's an image I found on some guy's facebook page about how presumably stupid people view marriage.

They're serious about that underboob.

The following are my thoughts which I wanted to leave as a comment, but I thought it might be rude of me and make me a buzz kill. I don't think social media sites like Facebook should be your soapbox. So I left a link for this article in the comments. I'm sure it'll get lost in no time and no one will be able to click it. Most people wouldn't anyway, it's a link to a site called wet junk. Who would visit?

Dear E, (I'm sorry, but I'm about to be a big ass to you)
What douchbag thinks they're doing someone a favor by marrying them? Sounds like someone who doesn't understand marriage. What else is wrong with this fallacious statement? Changing your name is traditional, not mandatory. I don't know about you, but I plan on changing my name to Batman when I get married. Don't take my name unless you really think it's pretty. "Leaves her family..." Let's put it this way, when you marry me, you do not marry my friends and family, you're marrying me! I will never obligate you to like my family. Hate them if that suits you; especially if they're assholes to you. I won't ask you to pick between me and your family, but if you aim to keep them in your life and I don't like them, I'm going to find someone else, this is fair to both of us, especially if you are idle if your family treats me worse than how I treat them. Why don't you just find someone who won't expect or need you to leave your family? Lotta fish in the sea. Find someone who is compatible with your needs, duh. "Changes her home" is kinda redundant if she's leaving her family. I don't understand why you would want to live with your family anyway. Three's a crowd for me. If you don't want to leave your family and you've found someone who wants you to, find someone else to marry. If by home, keep it if you own, right. "Moves in with you." That sounds like a funny, and by funny I mean twisted way of saying "the two of you move in together." "Builds a home with you." Well, you're not going to build a home with the neighbors, are you? Or, better yet, you're not gonna build your own home with hookers and blackjack, are you? Who else are you gonna build a home with? The teenage mutant ninja turtles! "Bears children for you." That's insulting. "Sorry kids, I didn't have kids because I wanted kids, I had kids because your father said he wanted them. I wanted to abort you, lolz." Ha! If you don't want kids, don't marry some who does. That's not fair to them to compromise and never have kids, and it wouldn't be fair for you to compromise and have kids when you don't. I would not be happy with this sort of marriage: a marriage of compromising one party's happiness for the other. It is literally asking someone to sacrifice some of their happiness for you. It would never sit well with me. There are obviously some compromises I would be OK with, but not others. "Even the kids get his name." Awesome! Batkids! No, seriously, fuck you that's stupid. Keep your name and pass it on to your kids if it's important to you. Come to an arrangement. Names don't matter to the rest of society. To anyone who argues, poke'em in the eye! "Till the day she dies, everything she does benefits you..." Everything? Literally? You know the rule about absolutes, right? This is very debatable. In fact, I wouldn't respect a man who would ask or expect his wife to only/mostly/etc. do what is beneficial for him and to, as implied by this statement, never(?) do anything that is beneficial for her or at least prioritize his needs above hers, nor would I respect a woman who would think or do just that. "...so who is doing who the favor?" Are you being ironic or hypocritical? I can't tell. "Dear men, appreciate your woman." I think you speak from your own perspective, and it sounds like you know a lot of shitty people who, like children, the spiritually inept, and the emotionally impotent, actually need to be reminded to appreciate their own loved ones. This society makes me angry.

This is basically what came to mind immediately, and I typed it out with mad typing speeds of up to 28 wpm. Let me repeat, all of it came to mind immediately.

Facebook is Bullshit (part 1?)

I'm getting tired of Facebook. You'd never guess how many people you call friend would have the most asinine interests including Spirit Science. Someone shared an article from Spirit Science which you can read here, but I wouldn't recommend it: http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/why-steve-jobs-didnt-let-his-kids-use-ipads-and-why-you-shouldnt-either/. The Article is about how you shouldn't let your kids use a smart phone or ipad or whatever because it'll harm their psychological growth and hurt their creativity without explaining how they know this.

First off, Spirit Science guy is a hippie, so I can't say whether or not he's biased towards nature and has some kind of aversion to kids not learning to respect mother nature by massaging her feet and asking about her cats.

Second, his assertion that you can have too much tech/that tech is unhealthy is made without any scientific substantiation.* I don't care if Steve Jobs thought it was dangerous or not, Steve Jobs is not an expert in child developmental psychology or neuroscience. This is called an appeal to authority fallacy. They're very easy to make, watch. The CEO of McDonalds doesn't eat rare hamburg. He says it's bad for you. See what I mean? I just made that up.
*Obviously, use a little moderation.

Third, he claims that technology "has been known to cause" and lists some bad things. I take issue with the way he says that. "Technology has been known to cause..." That's an odd way to say "technology causes..." Is he actually making the claim that laptops cause your writing skills to deteriorate and makes you an impatient person with a short fuse, a.k.a. a stupid asshole? That's a hell of a claim. I'm glad he included all those citations to credible sources so we know he's not making stuff up.

He also says technology is linked to obesity, ADHD, and brain tumors. How are they "linked?" With a metal chain? What does that even mean? You're just raising the stakes now. There's plenty of obese people who didn't get that way playing Runescape for 6 hours a day. My brother and I were diagnosed with ADHD before we got our first computer, and **brain tumors from cell phones is an irrelevant concern because now everyone just texts.
**Note the sarcasm.

Finally, let me say this: don't get all your parenting advice from one source and be careful who you listen to. I did not play outside when I was a kid. I lamented it. I played with legos and drew all day when I wasn't watching TV. My writing skills only improved when I began reading for fun in high school, not from writing. I would like to beg you parents: Do not ever bank on your kids "thanking you for it later." Spirit Science Guy says that thay'll "absolutely" thank you for it later. Watch out for people using absolutes unless they're psychic. Especially if they're claiming to be psychic. OK, if they're from the future, it's always safe to believe them.

Also, you'll most likely impede your child's ability to socialize by keeping them from experiencing the same things that the rest of their peers are experiencing. How else will your child be able to make friends with people if they can't relate to them because they don't get to watch the same shows or movies, listen to the same music, play the same games, etc. I had a lonely 5th grade year because I didn't have a Gameboy to play Pokemon.

The Guy from Spirit Science has Some Balls

The guy who makes the spirit science videos is kind of a moron. Amazing batshit stunt here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSh4omTySq4. After that, he shows you his materia collection.

Parenting is Bullshit

Parenting: What the fuck do I know about that, I have no kids. If I criticize someone's parenting, they'll surely point out just that. So, here's the thing: if no one knows jack crap about parenting, at least until they become parents and magically attain some esoteric knowledge unique to people who have successfully spawned their own hell raiser, how come everyone gets to be an unsupervised parent to their own kids? You know you've heard a practice child joke or two about first borns.

Here's another question: Do we all assume everyone knows what's best for their baby and if so do they really? I just know it's their responsibility, not mine. I would have said problem in lieu of responsibility, but then I realized it is my problem if their child grows up and becomes a lousy human being. How do we measure the lousiness of a human being and how do we account for what contributes to a person ultimately becoming lousy or not? I think these are things we should have down on a list by now. Parenthood seems to be an institution that is much more intuitive than intellectual. Does that bother anyone?

I think there must be some parenting methods that are superior to others, and it's probably relative to the kid and/or the parent. Doesn't that sound like something very important to figure out as a society? I think teaching parenting in schools is also wise. The textbook for that course could be called "How to Care for a Baby: Ensuring Optimum Psychological Development in Infants" or something like that. Any topic about raising kids could probably divide people into two or more camps. Corporal punishment vs time outs for instance; Are one of these camps wrong, neither, or both? Someone's fucking up!

Atheist A

Anita Sarkeesian: Dipshit

I have for you, Anita, a genuine "women in video games" thing for you to review. Every gamer knows about Final Fantasy 7. It's a very famous game. It's got three female characters. Aeris, Yuffie, and Tifa. Aeris dies, but it's not a case of women in refrigerators. It's still the most profound death in video games to date. She was built up as incredibly special: Her romance with the hero, her heritage, her powers, her personality. She was marvelous. Yuffie is some kind of black sheep who rebels against her patriarchy and eventually wins them over to her side. Then there's Tifa. Poor Tifa. Insert screen shot of Tifa's boobs here.

Tifa defaults to the heroes romantic interest after his first choice is famously murdered. She also dresses about as poorly as a Hooters girl. I've seen early concept art where she was given really cool leather asskicking pants, but some twat decided to dress her in a skirt - a completely inappropriate article of clothing for someone who does a lot of flips and kicks. Despite how competent a martial artist she is, she gets into a silly slap fight with another woman for being to pretty. She also has to be saved by the other heroes at least twice. When the hero falls into a "coma," (it's basically a coma) she immediately gives up her role as the new group leader and her responsibility of saving the world so she can be by his side. When every other character in the game has their own personal back story and motivation, she kind of has more or less the same basic back story and motivation as the hero, i.e. lazy. At least she did join the eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE on her own - wait. We don't actually know how that happened. We more or less are told that she sort of fell in with them because she identifies with their goals. Again, laziness. In her past, we see that she is fairly ordinary. Then her mom died and she got depressed or something. She does some crazy shit like climbing a dangerous mountain and sword fight a guy. Still kind of fuzzy about why. She spends quite a bit of time thinking about the hero, though; She might have completely romanticized most her memories of him. Unlike Aeris, she's also not confident or assertive enough to confess her feelings on the date scene, which I thought was kinda lame. Also, insert another screen shot of her boobs here for emphasis. Thanks for the porn, Square.

Finally, don't give Anita any power by insulting, threatening or intimidating her. She's clearly half-assed her hundred-thousand dollar vanity project, and the internets has called her on her shit. The best thing we can do is ignore her and let her fade away into obscurity.

Then again, I don't think that Tifa is the product of sexism or misogyny. 

Pages 1-3

I need to find a webcomic host. I'd be happy to consider something unconventional.