The 500:

I caught up with all the CW superhero shows and finished Iron Fist.  Legends of Tomorrow finished pretty well.  The others weren't much to write home about.  I guess Arrow was okay.  But it's nice to finish what you've started, and I was well into all of these shows before dropping them, which left a bad taste.  I can always drop them again once the current season is actually over and all the loose plot threads are tied up.

Humorously all the shows were on a month long hiatus anyway, so it didn't take much effort to catch back up.

These superhero shows are in my tv rankings, so it would be pretty disrespectful to not even watch them, especially midseason.

Speaking of said rankings, if you combine all my hall of fames, and then subtract all the overlapping franchises -- like the x-men video games alongside the x-men movies -- you get around 500 independent franchises of artistic worth across all time and space.  That's a rather sizable number, so it's no wonder I've had something exciting to report about them almost daily.  Many of these 500 franchises are still alive and growing as we speak, so there's no shortage of news about them.  It's also newsworthy when an older work gets translated for the first time, or released on bluray for the first time, so even dead franchises can live on in a sort of pseudo spectral sense for many years after.

This is a very good thing.  Artistically speaking, we're in the most golden of golden ages the world has ever seen.  Great art is just bursting at the seams, in the field of video games (a field that only recently even came into existence), visual novels (ditto), movies and television (20th century inventions), books (light novels are super young, but even novels only date back to Robinson Crusoe), anime (only really started in 1982, and only really started being translated in 2000), and manga (ditto).

There's more art than any one person can shake a stick at, so I try to guide people down the right path and get them interested in the better stories that make people better people for watching, shows with the power to change the world in the right direction if people would only let themselves be affected by them.

One way to get people to take these works of art seriously is to lead by example, so I always want to point out what I've done to show my earnest interest in these series.  It's not pointless rambling about my daily life, it's a gesture of sincerity.  If people would only take these 500 franchises into their hearts like I have, they'd all come out the other side angels, overmen, like Nietzsche and so many others have dreamed of.  So the very first thing I have to do is do it all myself, to show that it really was worth doing.  Rather than 'soviet man', which Communism tried to create through force, 'hall of fame man' need only enjoy himself while empathizing with characters in stories.  It's a path anyone and everyone can take gainfully, a peaceful metamorphosis into reality's best shape.

If I had the power to change the world by force I'd use it in an instant, but I don't have that power.  So all I can do is beg people to come to understand good and evil by viewing it over and over through the prisms of all of these wonderful stories of good people doing good things.  Once they've passed through the doorway to enlightenment like I have, force would become obsolete.

Evil is the rejection of God.  Evil people are those who have rejected God.  And what is God?  Absolute Good.  That is everyone's definition and it is mine as well.  I wholly embrace that concept.  So what is absolutely good in this world?  What can we never have enough of?  What is always, universally, a good thing to have?  Truth, Love, and Beauty.  Therefore, that is God.  At the very least, that is the touching point where Adam's finger can reach out and touch God, whose finger is reaching out from the other side and holding out hope to us that we will at least do our part and try to interface with God in the one way our minds can.

That is the God we can know and feel and see is true, as mortal men, as humans, as sapients.  And therefore that is the God we have the duty to worship and serve.  Not the scribblings of ancient and ignorant men, but the God we know is true in our hearts because God is Good and these things are Good and therefore they are the closest approximation to God we can ever understand or embrace.

These 500 franchises do not have a monopoly on Love, Beauty or Truth.  I'm sure there are other sources and paths.  But they have enough to do the job, and I think I'm a better judge than others -- A) because I'm actually a good person, so I know good when I see it, and B) because I'm actually a good writer, so I know good stories when I see them.

Once you've already got enough Goodness energy to set off a fusion reaction, it really doesn't matter if there's a more efficient alternative.  There's enough Goodness energy in these 500 franchises, these halls of fame, to completely transform the human soul into a higher state of being.  I can guarantee it.  It's like the 10,000 hour method of practice, but instead of golf swings or swim times, you're training your soul.  You're training to be a good person.  Which is what everyone should be prioritizing in the first place, or how are we better than insects?

Imbibing this much art isn't easy and it isn't fun all the time, but it's worth it for what awaits you on the other side.  A cleanliness of spirit that no amount of work for money, status, power or biological descendants can ever reach.  And without that spirit, everyone's just wasting the time they've been allotted on this Earth.  There's no afterlife, so this is it.  It's laughable for people to look back on their lives and pride themselves on living no differently from plants or animals at the end of the road.  "I gathered resources!  I reproduced!"  Whoopdeedoo!  So did everything and everyone else.  But were you good?  Were you good?  That's the only question that matters in the end.  Were you good?

Did you ever see the face of God and see your name written in fire among the pages of the blessed?  Did he ever smile upon you?  Did you ever affirm Him?  Did you ever smile upon Him?

When you die, do you want to say, "I go now to my Father, in whose mighty company I will no longer be ashamed?"

Or do you want to say, "I put together metal in order to afford a shelter made of put together wood, and repeated until I got sick and died?"

Or do you want to say, "I blew my brains out with drugs and alcohol until my body finally crumbled underneath me?"

Or do you want to say, "I replicated my genes, none of whom share my values, because we never had any values to begin with?"

Or do you want to say, "I used force and fraud to make the whole world nothing but a collection of suckers, subjects of malice I delighted in torturing to my own ego-inducing gain?"

I mean, really.  What are your options here?  God has given us the ability to appreciate divine, sacred, perfect things.  It is the greatest gift God can possibly give.  It's impossible to love us more than He already has.  But He also gave us the free will to ignore His gift, and continue on like pigs or scorpions or worse, because part of being Good is realizing and recognizing why Good is superior to Evil.  That's part of the joyous discovery process.  That's part of what this is all about.

Do you know how incredibly easy all other aspects of life would be once we've become good people?  Do you know how fruitful and prosperous good people's lives can be?  How incredibly dynamic, inspired, and creative spirits not weighed down by vice and malice, entire societies not weighed down by vice and malice, could be?

Everyone is putting the cart before the horse.  If we are not good, then everything we touch rots and dies, twists into malformed worthless mud and dross, because we are mud and dross, twisted and rotten, diseased and filthy, and therefore what hope was there in our hands producing anything better?

Relationships rot and die if we are not first good.  Businesses become about monopolies and marketing instead of products people need.  Governments become more concerned with maintaining and expanding their own power than the public good they were instituted to ensure.  Money that could have been spent well, is instead endlessly wasted on fripperies.  There is nothing you can pursue in this world that evil will not first destroy, long before you ever reach it.  It takes five seconds for evil to destroy what good can only produce after a lifetime of earnest effort.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to not concern themselves with first becoming good.

Do not lay up your hopes in material things, for they are not structured to outshine the souls of their users.  There is not a corporeal or material thing in this world which cannot be used for evil in the hands of an evildoer.  Therefore to produce anything of worth, anything at all, children, science, money, a utopia, whatever you want, you must first produce a good soul that can properly treasure and protect these things.

Just as there is nothing we can do so long as we are evil, or held down and held back by the seemingly limitless evil of the others around us, there is nothing good people cannot do when they join their hands together and create a society exclusively composed of, and dedicated to, each other.  A community of the soul is the next stage of evolution.

First, we appreciate these 500 artistic masterpieces, and in so doing, become good people.  Then, we have a natural sympathy for those who love the same things we do, form bonds of trust and understanding between ourselves, and establish a community on the shared values found in those 500 works, passing them down to our progeny so that the golden chain is never broken again.

That community is Heaven.  That is paradise.  It could deliver up any Good imaginable to man, including man's own replacement with something better.  It would be so easy, so effortless, to form a loving family in that community.  To raise good children.  Happy, healthy, beautiful children of good will and good cheer.  It would be easy and effortless to make a living, because all the money made would be put to good use, and we would find ourselves drowning in excess with all the money saved via our own good behavior.  It would be easy and effortless to live free and with honor, because no one would punish you for it.  It would be easy and effortless to make new technological breakthroughs, because everyone would have the time to think together, study together, rather than fighting each other for bread crumbs of wealth, status and power in an eternal war of all against all.  It would be easy and effortless to get along, because we are all one in the spirit of our Lord.  All one.

For this reason, I'm happy to report I'm now 3/4 of the way through the Final Fantasy XV listening project.  I also finished Aiyess's route in Majikoi A-2.  Just Monshirou's to go, and one more item can be checked off the list.  I am refining myself every day, sharpening the sword inside my heart every day.  Are you?