Blog Archive

Sunday, September 7, 2025

More BanG Dream arriving in 2026:

Anime essentially took a year off in 2025, but it's going to roar back in 2026.  On top of the already promised Ave Mujica Season 2, BanG Dream plans on a new season for a new band, Mugendai Mewtype.

China's military parade was extremely impressive.  Not only did it showcase its ability to march vast numbers of men in lockstep, which America apparently can't do, but it showed off 46 brand new weapons systems.  And I mean brand new -- built in 2024 or 2025.  Some of them were sci-fi stuff like laser cannons and microwave emitters.  Others were 5th generation jets capable of beating our F-35's, ICBM's for their nuclear submarines, the most modern tanks in the world, and tons of new large unmanned helicopters/planes/submarines.  It feels like the military jumped out of a warp gate from the future.  There is zero chance America could beat China in a war.  Most of our equipment dates back to the 80's, and most of that we already shipped to Ukraine.  Our goose is cooked.

America needs a good drubbing, because a new study released by the prestigious Lancet journal states America (and its allies) is responsible for 29 million deaths due to our endless and indiscriminate sanctions.  Over half of those deaths are to children under the age of 5.  Like I pointed out with the LGBT+ indoctrination, America seems to be satanically fixated on hurting children beyond all else.

The world would breathe a sigh of relief if America were to suddenly explode tomorrow.  And China is the only nation strong enough to create that wondrous future.  I wish China would invade the Philippines or Taiwan or some other US ally and just get it on already.  With the military they just paraded, they could liberate the whole world from our tyrannous and mass murderous reign.  It would be the beginning of a new era of global equality, where everyone's rights and lives are respected, not just the 'golden billion's.'

Meanwhile, the NFL kicked off today, and the 32 starting qb's of this season are extremely talented.  The old hands like Aaron Rodgers and Russel Wilson and Joe Flacco, the proven greats like Joe Burrow, Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, Justin Herbert, and Josh Allen, and some promising young guns like C.J. Stroud, Trevor Lawrence, Kyler Murray and Brock Purdy.  It feels like the field is wide open and every team is competitive with every other.

Anime was a letdown in 2025, but so many other things, like the new football season, have come forward to pick up the slack.

SS Maria:

I spent another $75 to get another handful of SS Memoria recruits.  This time my luck wasn't so good.  I wouldn't say it was horrible, but not the lucky streak I'd been getting recently.  I got the first limit break for fallen angel Chie, Santa Misato, Tuxedo Tama, thunder Byakko, the second limit break for swimsuit Mari, and an all new SS Memoria, paladin Maria.

Until now I've never gotten an SS version of Maria.  I don't much like the Italian nun, so it wasn't a big deal that I never got her, but I'm so close to having a full SS Memoria collection of all the girls that now I actually do want seraphim like her.  I'm down to not having only Kanata and Satomi at this point, so 48/50 possible SS girls.  What a beautiful trophy case a full collection would make.  And paladin Maria is actually quite pretty, unlike her base form.

Santa Misato is in my ice squad, datenshi Chie is in my dark squad, and swimsuit Mari is in my anachrony backup squad, so getting limit breaks for them is genuinely useful.  All of my squads are now over 20k rating, which you'd think would be strong enough, but I still doubt I could beat Apophis.  After all, I couldn't even beat the secret event boss this time.  Someday I'll come back and hunt it down, when I'm stronger, but it's certainly frustrating how I've spent this much money and the game still tells me I'm too weak.  What more do they want from me? >.<.

One of the reasons I'm too weak is simple -- I haven't gained all the experience necessary to take advantage of the level cap rising by 10 for all my characters at the start of Chapter 5.  I think things will be a lot easier once I'm the level the game assumes I should be.  Also, I've been recruiting new SS Memoria at such a rapid pace, a large number of them haven't gained their Memoria levels.  So that's 20 extra levels I'm leaving on the table.  Obviously I can't beat special bosses like that.

Friday, September 5, 2025

Miya's New Event let me play all day:

The latest event in Heaven Burns Red introduced a ton of new content.  First there was the actual event story, which was about the long-awaited Miya.  I upgraded her to a wonderful character before getting to see her story, on the basis that Japan loved her so they must know something.  But now she's fully earned that wonderful status.  Miya was separated from her sister by her parents' divorce, but got to meet her again in the midst of the Cancer war.  She gave her sister a new taste of hope before departing back to the battlefield.  She was very cool.  Also very funny in her interactions with Ruka.  She kept falling for Ruka when Ruka was around and then reminding herself she loved Yuina when Ruka wasn't around.  The process was an endless loop.

Then there were the new Clock Tower floors, which I climbed.

The new score challenge, which I aced with a 530k score.

New recruitment opportunities, which got me swimsuit Tsukasa's level 4 limit break, Spanish Yuki's level 1 limit break, and a new sci-fi Chie who immediately was useful against this weekend's score challenge.  I couldn't have gotten such a high score without her.  She's an improvement to my ice squad.  I also got base Yuina's level 2 limit break, which will help out my light squad.  Swimsuit Tsukasa is an ideal level 4 character to get -- she's beautiful, at the center of the plot, in a swimsuit, and strong.  I feel like I'm getting too lucky.

There was a power level campaign which gave good rewards for using life points which I completed all in one go.

I was able to consume all 100 necessary life points because of a new title badge mechanic they introduced.  The title badge gives various rewards to each of your 48 characters for every threshold they pass -- so for instance if they win a score challenge they get a badge, or if they get a limit break, or defeat lots of enemies, or delve lots of dungeons.  You get a reward for virtually anything you do.  Some of these rewards were lifestones, some were quartz, some were polish which helps you upgrade your items (this gave me a big boost to my earrings.  Now I can field a full squad of +6 wearing earrings.), some were up to experience items.  Anyway, the title badges tracked everything all my characters had ever done since the game came out and rewarded me for all of it (though strangely not for any of the anachronies I'd defeated) all at once.  I was swimming in hundreds of lifestones.

There was also an orb boss campaign that allowed you to get slightly more up to skill points when it came to the criticality orb skill, so I farmed that orb boss a lot.  Mainly I wanted experience from it, not the actual skill, though, so the characters who ended up getting the skill weren't that sensible as recipients.  At least I did get the skill for Hisame and Sumomo, my actual heavy hitters.

It's amazing how quickly 150 life points can evaporate when you put your mind to it.  Even with all the experience I got today it wasn't enough to give everyone the ten unit levels that Chapter 5 Part 1 opened up, much less all the memoria levels for the newly recruited SS'es.  Obviously they intend for me to level for many months to come.

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Power of Siberia 2 is a game-changer:

Russia and China just signed a deal that means Russia will have guaranteed funding and China will have guaranteed energy for the next 30 years.  All of the natural gas that used to be sold to Europe is now going to flow to China.  Russia and China will be totally secure against sanctions, because there's nothing they need that the two can't provide each other.  Europe, however, won't have enough energy to even heat their homes.  Suddenly it looks like Europe is the 3rd world while Russia and China are the 1st world.

Russia and China actually fulfill their promises, so an agreement on paper that this is going to happen is the same as if it had already happened.  Yes, there will be a few years of delay before this rock-solid security exists as the gigantic pipeline is constructed, but that delay won't change the reality of what just occurred.  In the meantime, China has agreed to buy an increased volume of natural gas from the currently existing Power of Siberia 1 pipeline.

Russia and China are nuclear powers, any attempt at a direct attack upon them will signal the end of the world.  Now indirect attacks won't work against them, because they've become immune to economic pressure.  The West has lost their war on common sense and freedom.  Russia and China have banned LGBT+ bullshit.  They aren't actively funding and supporting a genocide of Palestinians like the West is shamefully doing.  They aren't violating international law by not allowing Palestinians to attend the upcoming UN General Summit, or allowing Israel to annex portions of Syria and Lebanon, or allowing Israel to randomly start bombing Iran for no reason.  They don't support Ukrainian Nazis who launched a coup against a freely and fairly elected government, then 'suspended' elections indefinitely, creating a Nazi dictatorship answerable to no one.  They don't support Ukrainian Nazis who burn peaceful protestors alive, brag about shelling kindergartners, or rape/torture/murder women in Kursk after roleplaying a redo of the Nazi attack on Kursk from World War II.

They don't, like Canada, give standing ovations to literal Nazi SS members in the seat of Parliament.

The West has been exposed.  They aren't an economic superpower -- everything they have is based off of debt, trade deficits and inflated asset prices (stocks with price/earning ratios of 60 or more, instead of the historical average of 13).  There is no real production in the American or European economy, their GDP figures are pure chimeras.  They aren't a military superpower -- the combined industrial production of all the USA, Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan can't produce as many artillery shells as little North Korea does per year.  Unlike Russia, which has shown it has enough patriotism to sustain massive casualties and keep signing up to fight without even being drafted year after year, the West can't meet recruiting goals even in peacetime.  Can you imagine if they were in a hot war and losing hundreds of thousands of men in battle?  Which nation's men would show up to fight?  Does anyone think anyone in Europe or Japan or Canada could do what Russia has done?

America has already shown that once casualties reach a certain level they tuck tail and run -- look at the Korean War or Vietnam.  Any conventional conflict with Russia, China, Iran or North Korea would quickly produce similar casualty figures, which means America can bluster but it can't actually fight any real opponent.

Most of all, the West is not a moral superpower.  By siding with Ukrainian war criminals and genocidal expansionist Israelis they have completely exposed their hollow inner cores.  At no time was the west ever fighting on principles of good vs. evil.  All along it was self-interest.  The West is fine with any atrocity against civilians no matter how horrid so long as it suits their view of geopolitical chessboard maneuvers -- and in fact they've always been fine with it, it's just that now we can actually see that's the case in an indisputable manner.  The idea that the west was fighting a moral crusade against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was all a myth -- the British Empire and America just wanted to promote their geopolitical interests by weakening possible competitors that were doing a bit too well for comfort, and all that crap about stopping civilians from being killed was just propaganda for the masses.  The British were fine with their own concentration camps leading to mass deaths in the Boer War.  They were fine with their own Holodomor by creating a famine in India that killed 3 million people, and of course the Irish Potato Famine was wholly artificial and caused by extractive British policy.  America famously vaporized two cities full of civilians just to show off the power of their new toys -- when Japan had already sued for peace and was ready to surrender.  The firebombings of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo showed the equivalent disregard for innocents across the entire World War.

The grotesquerie of convincing a full 40% of your nation's youth that they are something other than their God-intended straight men or straight women, but instead some degenerate freak that requires surgery to 'get right,' is something out of a nightmare horror film.  Has any nation ever done more to violate the mental health and spiritual innocence of their own children than America and Europe has done over the past decade?  Is there any worse sin than destroying a nation's youth, its future, and casting them into lives of hopeless depression for the remainder of their lives?

Let's assume the Holocaust occurred exactly as described and half the world's Jews were killed in diabolical manners -- is that anything remotely as bad as this LGBT+ shit?  After the war the Jewish population rebounded like nothing had even happened.  The survivors became rich and famous and even got their own new country.  But after being brainwashed into mutilating and sterilizing your own body -- what is that person's future?  What is a nation's future composed solely of kids like that?  The Nazis did less harm to Jews than America has done to itself.

And remember the question of scale here.  No matter how evil the Nazis may have been, all it adds up to is 6 million dead Jews.  How many LGBT+'s are there in America and its Western allies?  Perplexity estimates over 100 million.  All of them just as essentially doomed as those 6 million much lamented Jews.  The scale of moral atrocity the 'Allies' of World War II are engaged in is beyond anything the world has ever seen.

And that 100 million number isn't the end figure, it's just the starting point, as the number of indoctrinated kids continues to bloom indefinitely.  The schools are still operating full tilt to increase that number to a billion.

The future of the world, if it has any future, rests in Russia and China.  Nations that are not currently engaging in genocide, or sterilizing their entire nation's youth, or building economic pyramid schemes in the sky entirely out of debt.  Nations that are seeking normal, everyday happiness on Earth built around safety, prosperity, and family formation.  China is ahead of the USA when it comes to groundbreaking technological innovation.  They are building a prosperous future for their people, the type we imagined in our old science fiction novels.  While we're funding transgender puppet shows in Peru.

This is why any sane individual must support China and Russia in any war with the West that is happening or might happen in the future.  Even if you assume China or Russia is in the wrong, it doesn't matter, because the world needs China and Russia to prevail so that they can be the world's future.  If we prevail we know what the future will be, total black despair.  If China and Russia are aggressive warmongers who make all their newly-conquered subject people unhappy or dead, that's immaterial compared to leaving the future in the hands of the West.  One event is a misfortune for a small portion of the world, the other is a decisive calamity that overtakes the entire world.

I think China and Russia have a solid moral basis for conquering Taiwan and Ukraine, but even if they didn't, I would still support China and Russia.  Because we need China and Russia for there to still be a 'mankind' in 2100.  What we don't need is even one more decade of American hegemony. 

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Lady Luck is Kind:

The monthly refresh in Heaven Burns Red got me a lot of loot, which quickly transitioned into 6 new SS Memoria.  None of them were actually new, though, so instead I got 5.5 limit breaks of powerful old SS Memoria instead.  Swimsuit Karen got her level 1 limit break, base Yotsuha her level 2, ninja Mari her level 3, swimsuit Tama her level 1, and base Tama her level 1.  Base Chie got halfway to her level 4 limit break.

What's most impressive about this haul is all of these SS Memoria are already heavy hitters in predesigned squads.  It's like the game knew what would help me out most and gave me exactly what I wanted.  I mean, I guess if I was being picky I'd rather the game had given me all-new SS Memoria, or a level 4 upgrade, but the ones I got are way better than what you'd expect from pure randomness.

Of course, until I actually level these characters up it doesn't much matter that they got their limit breaks, so my newfound strength won't show up immediately.  But what a haul considering I didn't have to pay a dime for it.

I am a little distraught that I can't purchase any more miracle bells through the crystal exchange.  I was counting on them to get me more reversions.  But now I see that reversions are a precious resource that can't actually be divvied out willy-nilly.  There's no reliable way to get my hands on more bells, as far as I know there's just the 3 bells you can get during events -- and there's a finite number of events in the game.  A pretty small number too. . .

I got Ichiko, Isuzu, Yuina, Sumomo, Hisame, Karen and Megumi their 'skillful means' skill.  I should probably move on to farming a new skill orb boss already, though it's hard to argue any skill is as useful as skillful means.

I defeated Flat Hand for the first time without having to resort to a stat boost, making Apophis the last anachrony that can stymie me in any way.

I maxed out my elemental rings, now I have 6 +4 rings of all types.  It's a shame because I like the caverns of cultivation for their speedy encounter rate that is great for increasing skill levels, but the main loot of the dungeon, the rings, is now useless to me. . .

Meanwhile, I promoted Long Long Spell to 5-star, demoting Ami from FF8 to 4-star to make room.  It's another case of a vocal upstaging an instrumental, part of a long-term trend dedicated to making the top tier more emotional.  This also promoted Jun Maeda into the position of the 6th best composer by points, 944 vs. Yasunori Nishiki's 938 points at 7th place.  What a well deserved victory for Jun Maeda, who can never receive enough praise for what he's done.

According to the latest statistics, people in the USA have a 1 in 87 chance to die by suicide, a 1 in 57 chance to die by drug overdose (which is also suicide), a 1 in 238 chance to die by gun assault (which every other civilized country has an obvious solution for but we don't.), and a 25% chance for girls to be sexually abused by the age of 18. (a much higher rate than the global average).  As usual the USA fertility rate hit an all-time low this year.  The obesity rate is 40%.

America is still a nightmare hellscape, nothing has changed under Trump.  Nothing can change, because various judges have overruled every single act Trump attempts to take.  Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the House and the Senate has the filibuster rule so Congress can't do anything either.  No matter how bad things get Americans aren't ready to vote for serious change.  Obama was able to win a filibuster-proof Senate majority, but Republicans haven't had something like that since the 1920's.  So I sit here on my video-game playing throne watching the country burn.

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Hikari, Haruka and Lynne:

I've replaced three underachievers in my Wonderful Fictional Characters Hall of Fame with three new girls.  Lymle, Virginia and Umerus are out -- and Hikari, Haruka and Lynne are in.

My complaint with Lymle is she's a little too stupid to take seriously.  As for Virginia she's too reckless.  And as for Umerus she's a bit too treacherous for my taste.  Hikari is very much not treacherous, the coolest thing about her is she decides not to betray Hideo by dumping him in favor of Hiro like everyone suggests she should.  She's also a beautiful and inspiring girl who brings out the best in those around her.  Haruka is also inspirational, in that she gets people to try hard and not give up, but mainly because they're worried about what would happen if they left Haruka alone.  Sort of like how an infant inspires a parent.  Haruka is pretty and good-natured and eventually loving and that's good enough for me.  They're both from H2, the two main heroines.

Lynne is the third loli from Koujo Denka, the one dressed in red.  As opposed to Tina who dresses in blue, or Ellie who dresses in green.  It's hard to include blue and green loli and exclude red loli, since they're so similar aside from their favorite color.  Basically I'll never deny any loli anything, so in Lynne goes.

When Lymle dropped out I no longer needed her 4-star Star Ocean song in my Wonderful playlist, since the new characters had nothing to do with Star Ocean.  So I replaced Brilliant Future with 'Fight!' from Xenoblade 1, a much better song.  Now I feel like my Wonderful playlist really does have its strongest possible lineup of music.  I wouldn't want to change a single song even if I could.  I also flipped the rating of Mercphobia to 4-star and Mystic Mysidia to 3-star, though both remain in my Wonderful playlist regardless.

Meanwhile, a trans spree shooter attacked a Catholic School out of pure hatred, despite the kids having done nothing to him (pretending to be a her).  This tragedy wouldn't have happened if my law banning all lgbt+ from existence had passed, or my law banning firearms for the general public had passed.  But none of my recommendations are ever passed so here we are.  Everyone who doesn't listen to me -- this blood is on your hands, not mine.

Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Index GT 13 read:

The book wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either.  A powerful demon appears and various heroes get together to fight it.  The demon defeats hero after hero until the book ends in a cliffhanger where new heroes are setting up to fight the demon.  Though realistically, the demon already defeated all the strongest heroes so the new heroes shouldn't stand a chance. . .

There's also this random fight between two villains that's a complete sideshow and has no reason to have ever existed, except I guess to get the book to book length.

The point is the book is just nonstop action with zero psychological depth or emotional intensity.  If that's all you want in a book I guess it's fine.

Meanwhile, I got Sumomo and Hisame to master the 'skillful means' skill.  My progress towards defeating Apophosis is about as glacial as Russia's defeat of Ukraine.

Russia did take an important village north of Siversk called Serebrianka.  They also took Sherbinivka, which secures their possession of Toretsk.  No more counterattacks can disrupt their valuable conquest now.  But at this rate the war will last another decade.

Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, has published an article with videos and pictures and eyewitness testimony of doctors that the famine in Gaza Strip is real, not a 'blood libel' dreamed up by rabid antisemites.  This should end all debate on the issue.  Starving children to death en masse is a war crime and a violation of the Geneva Accords that Israel has signed.  All further support, financial, rhetorical, or military, to Israel is the equivalent to supporting the Holocaust.