Renai Boukun

I was skimming through the upcoming anime season, looking for anime of interest that I was never going to watch. I mean, I read Danmachi back in November of 2015? 2016? And it apparently turned into an anime without me knowing. Suddenly all of my friends are talking about Breastia Hestia and I’m just sitting there like “I read it before y’all even knew about it. Goddamn newfags”.

Anyway, so I came across Renai Boukun’s image. (I do this on MyAnimeList btw)

Cute girl, check. You have my attention. Then I start reading the synopsis.

A Kiss Note is a powerful notebook that makes anyone who has their name written together will instantly fall in love if they kiss each other regardless of any circumstances…

Wait, what’s that? A Kiss Note is a powerful notebook… A KISS NOTE? SOLD I AM FUCKING SOLD. You see, terminology like that indicates that this will probably be some trashy manga with references to other anime and manga that I enjoy. So I decided that I had to read it.

And I read it. All of it. In two days. It’s beautiful. I like to imagine that I am some sorta monocle wearing, mustachioed critic of high society. But I love my trashy romance novels just like anyone else. The synopsis really sells the series short. Here’s your spoiler warning.

The manga focuses on the life of Seiji Aino (English). He’s just minding his own business one day when Guri crashes into his life and says he needs to kiss someone or he’ll die. Guri is a cute cupid, a cutepid if you will, that acts as a catalyst for the story (as noted literally last sentence). Guri is actually lying, and she is the one who will ‘die’ if Seiji doesn’t kiss someone, but Seiji would be cursed with being a virgin forever. Not exactly desirable so he kisses Guri. Whoops, Guri forgot to mention that she just wanted him to give her the name of someone so she could complete the couple pairing in her… sigh… Kiss Note. So he still has to kiss someone anyway. He points out the super attractive girl with giant tits (of course) and she turns out to be TOTALLY FUCKING CRAZY.

I mean, it’s not like I don’t enjoy a nice girl with giant tits, but I kinda knew she’d have giant tits because of the harem anime formula. There’s always a girl with giant tits. And if has to be one of the first girls. And Guri looks pretty petite, so it had to be one of the next two girls.

Upon discovering Seiji kissed the Guri the Cutepid. So she tries to kill him but Guri has paired Seiji with Tits and with Guri herself so they’re share fates. Guri is immortal so they’re all immortal (but Seiji can still feel pain). Guri is your stereotypical yaoi-loving fangirl so she spends all of her time making boys fall in love. She thinks it’s fun, it’s a game, so she looks for more (male) members to add to the Seiji Harem. The rest of the manga are the hilarious hijinks that result from mixing yandere bait with looking for more harem partners.

The manga has a lot of references and with its fourth wall breaking moments and delightful atmosphere, it reminds me of that Cthulhu girl anime I watched a couple of years ago. (Google search) Apparently it’s called Nyaruko: Crawling with Love. I’m legitimately surprised by how little fanservice the manga has.

My personal opinion, the manga is pure pleasure… for someone like me that likes these trashy pandering manga. It’s a harem manga for people that are culturally invested in manga overall, rather than the harem itself. Contrasting this with a harem giant like To Love-Ru. To Love-Ru is about the harem .This manga is probably more accurately described as being about the industry. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I can readily recommend it to other people. I think it’s a very niche manga, but if you think your interests are similar to mine, give it a whirl. That’ll be it from me though, thanks for reading.

Artemis Hunt

JumpJet Rex

Steam Page

I regret to inform you that I write this review without having finished the game. Not for lack effort, but because it’s just not feasible. I’ll go into why later in the review.

JumpJet Rex is a colourful speedrun game about a dinosaur that collects stars to save the universe. Something like that anyway. There are some 30+ delightful little worlds with each type of world (ice, desolate space base, etc.) seeming to have their own little chiptune to go with it. And these are some damn good chiptunes. I bought the game through Chrono GG so it came with the soundtrack and my god was it worth it. Definitely got some workout tunes out of it (should I ever be finish my selection of podcasts). Really, have a listen to some of them. You can also customize the appearance of your dinosaur, 4 elements. Head, skin tone, shoes, jumpjet particles. But that’s dress-up and I don’t find it particularly enjoyable.

In each level you collect rings to unlock the gate. Pass the finish line and you’ve completed it, you earn a star. You can earn up to three stars per level. One for completion, one for not dying, and one for speedrunning. You need to collect some number of stars to unlock the next few levels. Simple enough. I usually settled for completing without dying to grind stars because I only needed to be careful to progress. But some levels are easy to speedrun if you take advantage of checkpoints (and dying). So I took those too. You can also download ghosts within the game of the top players in the world or people near your skill level to see how they do things. So it provides a good improvement tool within the game, well done.

As the game goes on, and certain elements get added to the levels, I saw some SIGNIFICANT frame drops. Like, we’re talking 2 fps frame drops. The culprits seem to be certain environmental objects. Patches of thorns that disburse leaves and these globules that travel up and down. And it became a real pain on a particular boss fight called ‘Seedmour’ in which the level is full of these thorn patches so after maybe a minute of fighting the boss you’d be unable to do anything for several minutes due to the fps drop. Alt-tabbing seemed to help, but I don’t know for sure. That boss fight was a particularly annoying because after dropping the boss’s health to zero you also had to ground-pound it before it got back up and if you happened to be stuck in 2 fps time when that window presented itself… prepare yourself to have to hit it again because there’s no way you’re going to do it in time. And this is why I haven’t finished the game. Because in the later levels this becomes a constant issue and you kinda need the frames in a speedrunning game if you want it to be fun. (I suspect the issue is some kind of garbage collection or object recycling code).

Other than that though, the game is brilliant. Definitely recommend giving it a go. Thanks for reading.

Artemis Hunt

A National Strike?

I’ve always known that The Guardian is a left-leaning publication but now I think that it’s really going too far.

Francine Prose wrote this article in The Guardian published on January 30th, 2017. And yes, that is the proper way to write the day you goddamn euros. So let’s just go through it bit by bit and see what’s going on and why it’s absolutely absurd.

“On the morning after Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim ban went into effect”

Yeah, so-called is a pretty good way to describe it, since it wasn’t really a muslim ban as much as it was an immigration ban. Syria is 10% Christian but those Christians are barred entry as well. And I’ll stop a moment here to say that I disagree with the ban, as green card holders were barred entry as well. Just so people don’t start frothing at the mouth calling me an islamophobe or anything.

But why was muslim ban in the title of the article? As Francine points out:

“halting refugee admissions for 120 days”

Quite simply, a refugee can feasibly come from any country. If war were to break out in South Korea tomorrow and people began applying for entry as refugees, they too would be prevented from entry despite South Korea being a mostly Buddhist country with a Christian minority. Is this ban now a Buddhist ban? Well, yes, but not by design. It’s an indiscriminate ban, so stop calling it a muslim ban unless you also want to call it a Christian ban. Whatever. Moving on.

Since Trump’s election, we’ve seen dozens of demonstrations – most notably, the Women’s March on Washington – that have reinforced our sense of solidarity and provided encouraging evidence of how many Americans oppose our government’s fundamentally anti-American agenda.

The Women’s March (as I’ve noted in another post) is inherently contradictory. But yeah, it was a pretty big march. I think it had 300k members in the US which is about 0.1% of our population. Not bad. But I think it’s a far cry from a show of solidarity. Might be a show of solidarity with people across the world, 3 million protestors… but then again, that’s 0.04% of the population… so we may need to find another metric by which to judge the “strength” of these protests.

I’m going to sidestep the issues with implementation here because I do believe that it isn’t necessarily a bad idea and focus on the intent. The intent of the immigration ban (again, not a muslim ban) was to prevent people from countries in which the Obama administration marked as dangerous from traveling to the United States. Never mind that in European countries such as Sweden that have accepted the refugees are now telling their women to not go out alone at night. Officially advising women like that. That’s a hair’s breadth away from victim blaming. This is a map of every confirmed migrant crime that has been coded based on the type of crime. Doesn’t look that bad, does it? That’s just 2017. This is the map for 2016. You can’t even see Germany’s borders anymore. And these are crimes exclusively committed by migrants. Zoom in, it’s probably worse than you think it is. The crime rates themselves are a debated topic right now so I won’t draw any conclusions on those just yet. Those crimes are mostly difference of culture crimes. Add that to the two trucks of peace we saw this year and maybe you get a picture of how vulnerable the United States could be. Again, do I agree with the ban? No. But do I recognize that it has legitimate cause? Yes.

People are criticizing it as human rights violation but that’s absurd. Nations have borders. To say that denying you entry to a specific country is a human rights violation is to say that you have the right to travel to this specific country just because you are human. Why does that country even have a border at that point. Why does the United States even check passports when you enter it if you have the right to enter the United States just for being human. Why is there an immigration process? Rah.

“Taxi drivers went on strike in solidarity with the detainees, and arriving passengers were forced to find alternate ways on getting home. Many used Uber, a company whose CEO, Travis Kalanick, serves on Trump’s economic advisory board, and which thoughtfully suspended “surge pricing” to make it easier and cheaper to subvert the taxi strike.”

Free market at work ladies. Look, if you’re going to go on strike and you provide a service that is easily replaced, be prepared to be replaced. If manufacturers went on strike it would be far more effective because it’s not like I can make toilet seats in my house or something. But taxis? I replace you with public transportation or a phone call to a friend. Symbolic gesture that serves only to put money in the pockets of other people.

Francine recognizes this, so she says we have to go bigger. We need to work as a nation. We need…

“I believe that what we need is a nonviolent national general strike of the kind that has been more common in Europe than here. Let’s designate a day on which no one (that is, anyone who can do so without being fired) goes to work, a day when no one shops or spends money, a day on which we truly make our economic and political power felt, a day when we make it clear: how many of us there are, how strong and committed we are, how much we can accomplish.”

We need a national strike. We need to not spend money or produce money for a day? That’s your solution? I like to think of myself as a typical American, so let me explain to you the train of thought that’s going through my head when I think of ‘strike for a day’.

I make $13 an hour, if I strike for a day then I’m losing $100 from my paycheck at the end of the month. Sure I could go a day without purchasing something, but what’s the point? If I was planning on going to the store that day, I’m just going to go on the next day and the store would still get my money at the end of the day. On top of that, I make things inconvenient for myself as now the stores will be more crowded because everyone is buying what they would have bought yesterday. 

When she adds the caveat, “anyone who can do so without being fired” it just falls apart. Why should my employer tolerate my political activism? My employer pays me to do a job. I should do my job per my contract which both my employer and I agreed to. One is tempted to argue “With this national strike we could make great change”. Let’s suppose that is true. You then run into the prisoner’s dilemma which you and I both know results in at least one snitch. I need to be assured of the participation of enough people (whatever that number may be) to convince myself to participate. But I imagine that sort of trust is hard to come by, so I’ll always have some niggling doubt, leading to my defection.

On top of that, what does a one day strike accomplish? It sends a message, okay, but sooner or later you’re going to have to work. You’re going to have to buy food. Shoot, you’re going to have to pay rent, which you might find difficult if you’re not going to work. And I realize this may sound pessimistic, in which you are owned by the world around you, but you can’t escape the reality that the world runs on money. Your life is dictated by money. And if you give up money because you disagree with a president, be prepared to lose future endeavors because without money you have no power.

And it’s incredibly ironic that this is coming from the left because the social programs that they champion come out of taxes. And if no one is spending money or making money, where do the dollars for these programs come from? It only gets worse. Imagine we did organize a national strike. What’s going to happen to the sick people? Cancer doesn’t take a day off (or more) just because you do. Someone breaks into your house or burns down a building, what happens next? Well if the police and fire department are really devoted to their protest, it’ll really suck for the victims.

If you want to send a message, that’s fine. Send messages. Send all of the emails, boycott all of the products, make all of the phone calls that you want. But when you try to drag the entire country down because you disagree with a particular president, expect to meet particular resistance.

And maybe a little bit of ridicule.

Thanks for reading.

Artemis Hunt

Abortions? No Men Allowed

So after Trump’s reinstatement of the Mexico City policy, a lot of women are up in arms about it because women have the right to abortion or so they believe. I’ve already made like one and a half posts about the issue so I’m not going to comment on abortions. I’ve pretty much said about all I want to say about the issue. I’m happy to tell you about compromises I would make on that front (and why) but really, that’s not the issue at hand today. Today we’re going to talk about the future and how exciting it is.

So what prompts today’s post? This tweet which flew all over my Facebook feed not too long ago (at the time of writing).

https://twitter.com/MartinBelam/status/823637000783798272

I’m just going to leave out that it’s highly probable (mathematically) that over the lifespan of our species (assuming another few billion years) that we will actually see a photograph of some number of women signing legislation about what men can do with their bodies.

So what do I find so terribly interesting about this? Quite simply, the introduction of transgendered individuals being accepted as members of the sex that they identify with. A man that identifies as a woman is accepted as a woman. With the current political climate, we’re at the point where you don’t even need to make the effort to transition through operation to be accepted as whatever sex you want to be. Hell, you don’t even need the op, you can just say that you’re some other gender and badda-bing. You’re ste. See Lauren Southern’s video just to see how easy it is (in Canada, anyway).

This pressure is coming from the American left, not the right. I only bring up the distinction because it’s relevant to the photo above. When it comes to abortion rights, the left tends to support the woman’s right to choose. (As a side note, what is the woman choosing?) So when we combine the above, (sexual identification) and abortion rights, what we get is the possibility that several of those men actually identifying as women (inwardly) and for all you know it could be 4 men and 4 women signing legislation about what women can do with their bodies. So there’s your first strike, you assumed the genders of the people signing the documents, you bigot.

Let’s ride this train a little further. A person may be born as a woman but identify as a man. We also see from Lauren Southern’s case that there’s no necessity for transgender operation (or chemical castration as Vee likes to call it) for this transformation to be accepted. By that logic, it is conceivable that Lauren Southern could have sex with a man (is it gay?) and get pregnant. Lauren Southern is legally a man now, so would abortion rights still apply to him? It should. Which means that abortion rights are no longer women’s rights, they are human rights. But maybe you want to come at it from the biological women’s rights angle. Sure, that’s cool. So the right to abortion is afforded to only people that are born as women?

But the future is a strange and wonderful place. About two and a half years ago, The Lancet (a reputable medical journal) published an article about a successful birth after a uterine transplant. This is big news. In the case of the article it’s biological woman to biological woman, but let’s imagine the future for a little bit. Suppose the transplant was put into a gay man that identifies as a man because he wants to have a child with his partner. Abortion is no longer a women’s rights issue. You can’t come at it from the biological women’s rights issue anymore because now we have a case of someone born as a man that is pregnant.

So what do we have at the end of the day? We have to call abortion rights human rights, and the left needs to get off their high horse because now they can’t frame it as a women’s rights issue. Anyone that finds fault with anything I’ve said can come at me bro. Thanks for reading.

Artemis Hunt

Words for Evil

Steam Page

I write this review without having finished the game, but since I find no indication that there is a ‘finish’, I think it’s fair.

You play as a party of adventurers completing “quests”(let’s call them that)… for some reason. In fact the quests are scarcely explained so I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing except typing random letters and seeing if LJCQUES is a word that the game will accept. As you travel from scene to scene, occasionally people will request to join your party to which you have only two responses. “Absolutely” and “No”. Quite a jarring contrast of responses.

RPG elements are introduced in the form of character classes and upgrades. Every class gets three types of attacks and each can be upgraded three times (max level of 10 for each character). You can upgrade stats at blacksmiths through purchasing equipment and equipping them to your characters. There’s no equipment screen and there doesn’t seem to be a limit to how many things you can equip to a character so I like to imagine my archer had like a sword (not even a bow, a sword) for every finger and was wearing 4 types of chest armor. Lord knows how he did it, but he did it.

You type words at the screen for like an hour and then you get to the end of your map. Along the way you’ll find treasure or evade traps. Then you will be presented with some text “Book Found” or something like that and you’ll be told to move to next zone or to stay in your current zone. Very immersive.

I don’t really have any complaints about execution. Everything is done quite well. The artwork is nice, and consistent. It has that old 16-bit feel. The fights are… well, typing. If you manage to screw up so much that your heroes drop to 0 HP (maybe you were alt-tabbed) you are offered a chance to keep them alive by typing a 6 or 7-letter word.

Did I phone this one in? I know it’s short but it’s really not a complex game. You type words. Kinda missing where the ‘Evil’ is. I don’t think there’s enough in this game to really extend beyond “type words until done”. I’m going to say no on this one. Thanks for reading.

Artemis Hunt