Imperial Garden Cut Down:

On the 83rd listen it occurred to me that Imperial Garden from Star Ocean 5 was no good.  I'm not sure how I didn't notice the previous 82 times, but I guess it grew tiresome in a drip by drip manner and this time was the straw that broke the camel's back.  Some songs grow on you over time, and others turn sour.  It's the way of life.  Back down to 5479.

I watched Red Dawn, but I can't recommend it.  The scenario is preposterous.  The Soviet Union didn't have the strength to invade and occupy America with conventional forces.  Our military was vastly superior to theirs.  Besides, if they had managed it somehow, we would have resorted to nuclear weapons, and they know we would have, which is why it's preposterous for any war to break out in the first place.  No one wants to die for nothing.  But even accepting the setting at face value, it's tiresome how all these boys-forced-to-be-warriors would cry at the drop of a hat.  Oh no, a parent died, cry cry.  Oh no, a comrade in arms died, cry cry.  Oh no, I had to execute a traitor, cry cry.  Stop crying you sissies.  This is fucking war.  Get over it like every other warrior on Earth and go kill some more bad guys.  You don't see people crying left and right in Midway or Enemy at the Gates.  You just see people getting to work and killing the opponent.  If you want to make a war movie, make your characters act like they're in a war, not a drama club.

Ready Player One had some cool references -- Gundam, Firefly, Akira, Back to the Future, etc.  But the actual plot was silly.  2045 isn't going to be a massive slum with virtual reality.  It's either going to be a perfectly nice place or a crater, based on our foreign policy with China and Russia.  And there still won't be any virtual reality, because virtual reality is way harder than movies pretend.

Rio Bravo is also a no go.  It had some pretty faces and the plot wasn't exactly bad, but it took way too long and was way too repetitive.  What that movie desperately needed was an editor.

At least I could sit through those movies, others were so bad I couldn't get past the first five minutes, like Rocky and Dunkirk.

The ending to the Shingeki no Kyojin manga was a bait and switch.  The entire time the manga debated how best to deal with the Eldians.  Eldians can turn into Titans and destroy the world, which makes them a net negative for non-Eldians.  (Even if most Eldians are well intentioned, it would only take one Eldian once to destroy the world, which is unacceptable.)  The options were quite simple -- Eldia could take out the outside world, the outside world could take out Eldia, or everyone could agree to live in harmony and somehow all future threats could be averted by the power of love.  Those were the only 3 options all manga long.  But in the very last chapter, the author, out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing and with no basis, invented a 4th solution, if Mikasa kills Eren then Ymir agrees to deactivate the Titan power and Eldians all go back to normal, happily ever after.  So the entire debate and the entire struggle of all the characters was rendered moot by this sudden new easy solution.  That's called a bait and switch.  The story posed an interesting moral dilemma -- what should people do in a case like this?  And ultimately the author flinched away from answering it, and instead magically solved the dilemma via divine intervention.  So we're still left with no answer to the central question that supposedly the entire manga existed for.  What should people have done?  What a cop out.  If you aren't willing to answer your own story's questions, if you don't have the moral courage to take a stance, then don't pose the question in the first place.  Once posed, the author has an onus to answer.  It's like a mystery with no solution or a riddle with no solution, you simply aren't allowed to make those moves.  It ruins the compact between writer and reader.

The same thing happened with To Love ru Darkness.  The author posed a question, what would make the characters happier, Rito starting a galactic harem, or Rito staying on Earth and living a normal monogamous life with Haruna?  The manga ended in a stalemate.  Rito tried to go with Haruna, but found himself too sad to actually go through with it.  So in the end what's the solution?  Neither?  The author must make a choice!  Either one would be fine if they have the moral courage to stick with it, but vacillating even on the very last panel?  Who does that benefit?  For what purpose was the story even written?  A story is about decisions and their consequences.  If you refuse to make a decision there is no story.  Likewise, if the consequences are completely separate from people's decisions, like with Shingeki no Kyojin, again there is no story.  I wish pro authors would at least reach the starting line of storytelling 101.

In more productive news, I made two edits to chapter 41 of '100 Waifus'.  I'll highlight the new text in bold and show off the changes in context:

　　"Okay, my next wish is pretty silly. But could you give all my children the option to look like the characters in the stories they were named after? And could you give me a sort of augmented reality where they all look like that to me whether they like it or not? It would also be nice if their voices were changed to sound like their original voice actor source.  I can always turn it off if needs be but just when I see them around town it would be nice to meet the characters I always envisioned them to be."

"What about when their source characters could transform?"  Cute-sama asked.

"So like Gohan could be seen as Super Saiyan 2 or Kanade could be seen as Cure Rhythm?  That would be so awesome!  Let's make that a third option I can switch between when looking at them."

Because it's obviously better to see characters' transformations than not!

　　"I guess. . .it would be nice if entropy didn't ultimately devour and destroy everything we've ever produced, rendering it all pointless." I said.

　　"The laws of physics are necessary for life so I can't adjust them. But I can promise you nothing of value from this universe will be lost. I can spin out new universes for your culture to continue in if there's still more to see from it. And if there's nothing left to see but lots to gaze fondly back upon, rest assured that I exist in a plane beyond entropy and I will remember all of you, everything you ever felt or thought or did, every sight there was to see. Everything that's ever been continues to live through me." Cute-sama promised.

　　"I want to impregnate my wives naturally but it would still be nice to be able to sex select the children that come from them." I entrusted the fate of the universe to Cute, who seemed to have things well in hand, and went back to my specialty of petty selfish desires.

For this change, I wanted Christopher to show the audience that he had heard Cute-sama's words of wisdom and heeded them, but also to move the wishlist along.  All my previous attempts at this dual goal fell short, but I think I nailed it this time.  What a difficult line this was!  It took 27 editions to find a solution.

I've been stewing over how to edit things for the better all this time after I finished reading the book for the 26th time and it suddenly clicked only now.  It's amazing how much you can improve a book past its first draft if you just keep plugging.  And for the best book ever written it's worth improving as much as possible.  It's my life's work so I may as well spend as much of my life as necessary on it.

I subscribed to HBO Max for a month so I could watch the new Mortal Kombat movie, but the Hobbit Trilogy, New Mutants, Birds of Prey, Zack Snyder's Justice League and all these other random films have made it a real bargain.  YouTube charges over $5 a film so I've already saved massively.

Once Wheel of Time and Silmarillion starts airing on Amazon Prime I'll subscribe to it for a month and snatch those, and once Disney+ finishes all its MCU tv shows I'll subscribe to it for a month and watch all those.  So long as I have the patience to wait for lots of stuff to be out at once it will always be a good deal.

With all this other stuff to do I've made no progress on Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but I'm not subscribing to that game, I own it, so I can always get back to it later.  I'll finish it someday when the calendar opens up.

The CIA World Factbook has updated its economic data.  It now says the average American per capita GDP was $62,530 in 2019 (the latest year we have knowledge of), in 2010 dollars no less, so no one can argue this is only due to inflation.

To make this a little clearer, that means a normal family of four is making $250,120 a year.  What do Americans do with this ridiculous amount of money, buy a new mansion every year so they can own a home in all 50 states by the end of their lives?

No, the answer is, most people struggle to pay their electricity, rent, food, and car insurance while a few trillionaires make out like bandits with all of that money.  America is absurd not because it makes so much money we can swim in it, but that we make all that money and are still living no better than Nigerians.

We could take merely 1/5 of that money and give everyone in America a guaranteed income of $12,000 a year.  That could buy everyone a place to stay, a car, food, clothing, entertainment, health care, education, whatever they need.  We could give everyone in America a guarantee of happiness.  For the low, low price of 20% taxation.  The federal government already taxes that much and wastes it on various crap right now (and they're planning to raise taxes even higher.)  So why can't we have a basic income?  What is stopping us?  We can obviously afford it.  There's $62,530 per person floating around.  Scoop it up and build a utopia already.  There are no more excuses.