Imouto Sae Ireba Ii volume 9 read:

Two of my favorite light novel series released at the same time yesterday.  So I bought A Sister's All you Need 9 and downloaded SAOAGGO 8, splitting the difference.  Since I was looking forward to Imouto more I read that first, and it was good as expected.

It's a story about the sort of people I appreciate, otaku writers, roleplayers, little-sister lovers, etc.  The only thing I don't have in common with the main characters is the alcohol and nudist tendencies.  Of course the content is right up my alley.  Like usual the humor is the best part of this series, but it is nice to see the plot progress a little, what with Chihiro announcing she really is an imouto.  Of course, just wait and see, she'll say she was 'joking' or something in the next volume and the issue will be put back on the backburner again.

But if that happens that means volume 10 sucks, not volume 9 which is totally innocent of its future namesake's misdoings.

We'll see how quickly I can clear SAOAGGO 8, probably not as fast as the more anticipated Imouto, but it's good to have lots of things to do.  I can't wait for that $1400 stimulus check to pay for all my gaming, reading, and food bills I've chocked up since the last stimulus check.  Go democrats and the ez life.

No but really if my choice is between democrats and Andrew Anglin, who's now thoroughly convinced that every event in life is fated by divine intervention and God picks winners and losers in real time based on some inscrutable agenda that's inscrutably for the best, I choose democrats.  There is nothing more repugnant than the idea that a) there is no free will so no real point in humanity, existence or anything you do in life b) God is responsible for everything evil in this world and is thus the sum of all evil.  This somehow simultaneously denigrates both mankind and God in a wholesale libel.  The only thing he could call worthless next is the animal kingdom.  

I think it's obvious this world was created, because it's far too unrealistic to have occurred by chance.  (In the entire wide cosmos, life emerged on only one planet after 14 billion years of every other planet in the universe having their chance operating under the exact same laws of physics?)  If you want to call that Creator God, that's fine.  If you want to call it an older civilization or aliens or a computer simulation or whatever that's fine too.  If you want to worship that God that's also fine.  But the moment you say God is divinely intervening into our lives, meddling here and there, enforcing karma or God's plan or answering prayers or doing miracles or whatever -- you've sinned horribly.  Because in that very moment you robbed creation of its glory and the Creator of their innocence.  Now every time any harm is done to anyone God wanted that and willed it, or God would have intervened and stopped it.  Now you're suddenly trying to justify the rape and torture of little girls as part of God's plan.  It's horrid and absurd.  You, in the stroke of a pen, just said that everything that happens and everything we do is moral because it is according to God's plan.  That the worst person on Earth is equal in value to the best, because we're both enacting God's agenda equally.

God created the world and left it to us to do with as we pleased.  God does not know what we will do with it, because we can freely choose what to do with it, and we are responsible for our choices and their results, nobody else.  God gave us a perfectly decent staging ground so no blame can be laid at her feet for anything.  We can make of it whatever we will.  And it's that very essence of infinite possibilities which probably motivated God's curiosity to make us and see what would come of it in the first place.  Take away our free will and there's no discernible reason for our having been created at all.  It does not logically compute.  We exist, therefore God must have had a reason to create us.  Can that reason really have been to stage a puppet play for her own amusement, to dance us around and arbitrarily punish us or reward us for decisions she chose for us to make in the first place?  Is she that pathetic a figure, playing with dolls, playing out a script in her head, sadistically causing real pain in billions of brains that have no choice but to follow her plan while awaiting her next tea time?

Someone with the power and knowledge to create a few laws of physics, knowing that they would eventually evolve into sentient life in a singular corner of an infinitely vast creation, cannot have motives lower than a 2 year old's.  A mind that can create a universe like this could only be interested in something equally vast.  The soul, so long as it possesses free will, suits that parameter.  Nothing else does.