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Thursday, May 10, 2018

Congrats to Naruto on its 500th Episode:

Naruto's 500th non-filler episode/movie mark was just reached today.  Only One Piece and Pretty Cure are longer, and no one else will ever match these three.  Dragon Ball, in 4th place in length, is still at a mere 350 episodes/movies.

True to form, a large portion of the latest episode was already covered by the Bolt movie and thus the whole thing was of only dubious worth.  That's much of how Naruto managed to get so long in the first place.

But quantity has a quality all its own, so Naruto isn't just 3rd place in length, it's also the 3rd best anime ever.  So long as it keeps pouring out mediocre additional fluff, its place in my rankings is secure.  It's not like some newbie 12 ep series could ever compete with a legacy like this one.

Naruto is popular worldwide, with 235 million manga volumes sold, so it's no wonder they keep extending the series.  I love Naruto as much as the next guy, but I always wonder what could have happened if the anime industry had spared some of those hundreds of episodes worth of work for other projects.  How much better off would we be?  A 400 episode Naruto would be nearly as good as the current 500 episode Naruto, but we'd also have 4 more 25 episode series to choose from.  We could shave off 300 episodes of One Piece without missing much and make 12 25 ep series. . .

Oh well, the consumers have spoken, so Naruto, One Piece and Pretty Cure is what we get.  Meanwhile, two new songs made my music hall of fame, the opening and ending themes to Steins;Gate 0.  One song was kicked out, 'the cradle will fall,' so the new total stands at 4841.

Kanako Itou is newly ensconced in my 200 eminent composers/performers list due to having sung the opening theme to both Steins;Gate series, with Aira Yuuki being kicked out to make room.

It's good to see Andrew Anglin join the 'men going their own way' movement.  I've long since despaired of making women prefer marriage and children over their careers and called for artificial wombs and AI girlfriends to make up the difference, but he has a lot more readers and has now endorsed the exact same policies.  When I look back on all the wonderful musical contributions made by career women in my music hall of fame I have to say they're more valuable to me than a wife and children could ever be, so it turns out I profit from the current state of affairs.

Women are particularly great at music, but it's not just in music.  They have contributed to a lot of great books, manga, visual novels, video games and anime as well.  Their voice acting is absolutely necessary and the keystone to what makes anime and visual novels great.  Their actors are crucial to all the great live action movies and tv shows.  Their gymnasts and figure skaters make the Olympics great.  They're even artists for Magic: The Gathering cards like Rebecca Guay.  Thousands, possibly tens of thousands of career women have all enriched all of my favorite things.  We couldn't have accomplished anything without them.

It's certainly possible to imagine a world where talented women continue to be allowed to work while normal women stay at home, and this would be better than the status quo, but there's no practical way to get there.  So if I have to choose between Islamic style body bags and all women pursuing their dreams, I'll go with the latter.

If men and women each go their own way the human race will die out.  But since there's no way for us to ever reconcile our mutually contradictory desires, and it's psychologically impossible for men to want to go back to the barbaric ages where we just threatened women with clubs to do what we said or else, the only path forward is technology replacing the former role of women in the world.  Women used to do chores before we invented the washing machine and the dishwasher.  They also used to give birth before we invented the artificial womb.  But the true value of women has always been in their brains, just like the true value of men was their brains, not their brawn, which has now been replaced by the internal combustion engine.  I want the products of women's brains more than the products of their bodies, so we need to invent replacement bodies for women, which is a hell of a lot easier than replacement brains -- the single most complicated objects in the universe.  If we free up women's brains to pursue their own goals and stop having to serve their lowly bodies, everyone will be happier.

A woman's purpose in life is not simply to reach puberty and then start giving birth.  Her mouth isn't there to just take in nutrition in order to grow and replicate, it's to say what's on her mind.  Any society which neglects the fact that women are sentient and in need of mental and spiritual nourishment will fail.  Any society which neglects the fact that women are sentient and capable of providing mental and spiritual nourishment to others will also fail.

In the past I feel like the church served the important role for women that careers serve now.  In fact, Mormons, who still have a serious church, are capable of being stay at home moms.  But now that we know religion and God is all baloney the church can no longer serve that role any longer.  It would just look like a farce and satisfy no one.  Careers are a place for women to stretch their wings and exercise their brains.  Giving birth to children and nursing them are not sufficiently intellectually demanding tasks to satisfy the curious and hungry mind.  God knows I wouldn't be satisfied with just that.  Careers offer greater variety of circumstances and a greater chance to make an impact on the wider world.  There's more meaning and purpose in a challenging career than in a daycare facility.  And most of all, there are other people of equal intellectual heft you can converse with.  Without church, there's no reason to go outside and talk to anyone except at work.  Women will get stir-crazy, they'll get lonely and bored, with no one to talk to except for sub-sentient kids.

Telling a woman to just stay at home and take care of kids all day may as well be a death sentence.  It completely denies them all of their mental faculties and turns them into some sort of lobotomized milk dispenser.  Who would choose to live like that?  We have to offer something better than that.

Outsource all the necessary work of reproduction to artificial wombs and nursing bots.  Neither men nor women want to waste their time on it.  It's less fun than picking strawberries all day.  Then men and women can get together as fellow sentient human beings, forming mental connections primarily instead of shallow physical ones.  Or they can not get together, and no big deal, because mental connections are androgynous.  Two boy friends and two girl friends is just as good as a boy and girl friend.  Once sex is removed from the equation, and the necessity of childbirth, everyone could go their own way without any pressure on anyone.  We're just a bunch of minds floating around, seeking self-actualization, and if we can help each other towards that goal, great, if not, oh well, move right along.  There are plenty of additional self-actualizing minds in the sea.

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