Ask Questions (UPDATED AS OF MAY, WOAH, 5 HOT QUESTIONS TO SEE)

I’m not huge into conspiracies, so I don’t have one that really fits this question. The barrier separating myself now and myself the conspiracy lover is a refusal to draw conclusions from loose correlations.

For instance, ‘You ever notice how police are just sitting and waiting around for cars to speed? You’d think in a city as big as New York, no cop would have the time to do anything but answer calls. Really makes you think, are they letting crime happen to justify their own jobs? Pretending to be doing traffic duty?"

I’d get hung up on that first correlation. How many calls does new york city get on an average day, and how many cops are on patrol at any given time.

Why bother thinking about a conclusion to your own correlation before you even know if the correlation holds true? (It’s fun obviously!)

This is probably the basis for most conspiracy theories. “Yeah, huh, that makes sense. And if they’re worried about their jobs, they must be doing something wrong. If we get the message out, we could up end the entire NYCPD!”

It sure does, lots of things make sense. Words can make anything make sense.

All that said: China spying on its citizens. I have worked as a dude in the big data space managing big data systems. At more than one of these companies, I have been instructed to directly send the personal, private communications of all Chinese citizens using the product to the CCP.

So. Dunno if that’s exactly a conspiracy, but it’s absolutely true. If a USA company operates in China in any official capacity, even Chinese citizens living abroad have their data sent directly to the CCP.

If a company doesn’t comply with this order, they are not permitted to do business within China. Though for US based companies, it’s only Chinese citizens data that gets sent. A company operating in China, not itself a Chinese company, would only send Chinese citizens data there. This is often solely determined by setting your country in your account settings, or language, to China or Chinese. So uh, don’t do that.

Therefore, I’d wager with the odds in my favor that the CCP has direct access to all data from any app run a Chinese company.

Pigeons? Birds? There’s a dating sim called Hatoful Boyfriend, which features a lot of hatoful boyfriends. It’s an otome game.

For those unware of what an otome game is, there’s a genre of video games in Japan called bishojo games, sometimes harem games in the west.

Think of choose your own adventure books, but in game form, where you, the male protagonist, are presented with a swarm of delicious fictional women dying to date you.

Otome games are the reverse, where you, the female protagonist, are presented with a swarm of tasty imagined men who are dying to date you.

In Hatoful boyfriend, nearly everyone on earth is bird. Not like a furry, but just a bird. But birds fully capable of all human speech and action.

You play as a primitive cave dwelling woman who gets invited to a birds only PigeoNation school. Where you will meet the bird of your dreams.

In this exact game and setting, pigeons are cool and hold my interest. Outside of this exact game and setting, I don’t think a lot about pigeons. Sorry pigeon heads.

Listen, I’ve never read art of the deal. I have no idea what’s in that book. All I know is it’s called art of the deal, a ghost writer wrote it, while trying to sound like Trump, but not exactly like trump, because Trump would be pretty shitty at writing a book. Maybe he’d be great at writing fanfiction though.

“Cloud thought that Sephiroth was the greatest swordsman alive, the absolutely smartest most intelligent and cool guy. He felt immediately that he had to marry him. Folks? People? They were in love. Absolutely in love. You can’t hide how much Cloud wanted to ram his p-”

Yeah. Yeah he could probably pull that off.

As for this art of the deal book, like I wrote thirty seconds ago, I ain’t read it. So here goes what I imagine Art of the bird might be like

“RULE TWENTY ONE: Each Bird has a place. And every place has a purpose.

Birds don’t pick their places out of habit, habit is the enemy of the bird. Would a worm show it’s head from the same spot in the dirt each morning? No. No, worms are smarter than that, wormy as they might be.

If a bird were to wait at the same spot, out of habit, eventually the worms would catch on.

Consider the genius Crow. Crows are notorious for their sophisticated dialects, able to communicate ideas through signals in their caws. You may notice a crow in the same spot for a few days.

That crow isn’t there out of habit, that crow is there purposefully, each member of his flock assigned a specific position. They’re collectively, through their caws, building a picture of what goes on in this area. What’s normal. What’s out of the ordinary. What’s safe. What’s dangerous.

It’s through this mechanism that they can learn the days in which garbage gets taken out, which they can pilfer. The days in which tiny animals are hunted by cats, leaving scrap for them to peck at.

If nothing happens, they move on. With purpose. Collectively.

Each Bird has a place. And every place has a purpose. Don’t let habit become the enemy of purpose. "

Wow. Best seller material right here.

One time, as an angsty teenager, while at the beach on vacation, I was so moved by my hatred for the beach that I threatened bodily injury to my parent at the mere suggestion of making me go down to the beach instead of play video games at the beach house.

A baseless threat, meant entirely to impart the over whelming despair of being at the beach instead of playing World of Warcraft at home.

I don’t recommend this for any aspiring angst addled teens who stumble across this question.

Which brings me to my next point: What the fuck is up with all these personal websites saying ’ NO MINORS. THIS CONTENT IS 18 PLUS!! CURSE WORDS, SEXUAL THEMES!!

Haha, were you ever a teenager? That shit is like a beacon to the teenage mind. “Oh FUCK, I just found the GOOD SHIT.”

If you want to scare a teen away from your silly website full of mundane life events, you’re better off saying this is where you keep all your tax records and stable slow growth financial advice.

I don’t know a lot about feminism, so most of my thoughts about it have to do with the people I know who claim to be feminist.

Which is to say, there’s a lot of beautiful people, who care deeply about the shared experiences of people just like them.

And there’s a lot of ugly people, who care deeply about the shared experiences of people just like them.

Both adopt the same label. Both think it means very different things, and their actions are opposed to each others goals.

The label isn’t very useful anymore though. And that’s what I think about feminism.

I love the graphics[of Wind Waker], I think they’re absolutely timeless. Simple cel shaped models, animated with cartoon swagger, in a world where even the wind itself is visual melody in time with the harmony of the music.

Plus the idea of exploring a whole vast ocean where you don’t know what could be on the other end was an insanely cool thing to do for the era.

No other game had the feeling of openness that Wind Waker had, it was so genius to do an ocean thing.

You could basically slap a shader on a static piece of geometry and make the world infinitely large.

That being said - my favorite zelda game is actually Oracle of Ages on the Gameboy color.

Those sega zelda games were something else!

You had the developers of resident evil 2, dino Crisis 2, and Onimusha warlords, be given the go-ahead to make a mobile zelda game.

I think what those games showed most is how much nintendo didn’t understand their own design languages and themes at the time.

I truly believe it took them until BOTW to understand what made zelda feel like zelda.

They carved out so much of that design language back on the SNES with a link to the past, then abandon so much of what made that game and world great on OOT.

A huge component of Ocarina of time was the story. That game is littered with story and dialogue, in a way that a lot of people forget as a major component of the game.

Because what they usually take away is how vast the world felt, and how it opened up as you acquired new items.

Or how suddenly you went from kid link, to adult link and literally the entier world change.

The huge awesome thing people loved about OOT of how endlessly vast the world was.

And so in the next iteration of zelda, nintendo perhaps feeling that the fans felt this, built Wind Waker.

Trying to make a world that seems even VASTER. With the story element dialed back a bit in favor of a more subtle world building and narrative.

However, in the original Wind Waker, there were some major design flaws.

The way the wind worked meant that you were literally just having to waste time waiting for the wind to change to get to where you needed to go. And it had these huge grinds that alienated players for no good reason.

It also abandoned the dark over tones of OOT for something Painterly and Cartoon inspired. At this point, most zelda fans were approaching their late teens.

It may have been an attempt for nintendo to re-capture kids, but at the same time, the game was not kid friendly. It had some hard, obtuse puzzles.

So in Twlight Princess, seeing the feedback from Wind Waker: Too Kiddy. Too much travel.

They mighta thought “Oh what people loved was actually the darkness and story from OOT, not the vastness”

Scaling the exploring way down, made twilight princess much more linear, and dialed up the darkness

Perhaps it was a misread on the problem with wind waker being that it was “too vast” and not that the barriers to travel, and barriers to grind maps/rubies were the real problem holding it back.

This was later proven in Wind Waker HD where they re-worked mechanics and the game became way better and universally loved as a result.

The coolest thing about zelda is there is no other game franchise that has tried so many different things within the same basic formula.

Final Fantasy hasn’t even started to do this until the last few entries.

I’m not a flower head. I enjoy bright and vibrant flowers in an equal passive way.

With blue and purple flowers edging out amongst the rest.

Sunflowers though. My goodness. They are living aliens! HUGE, brown bee like fuzziness, extremely symmetrical yellowness. The way they topple themselves over as they grow, their flowery flowers too big for their stalky stalks.

I’ve seen two fields of sunflowers in person. Might as well have visited two other worlds. No other common flower approaches the insanity of the sunflower.

That’s about all I got to say about flowers. I haven’t spent much time thinking or learning about them. And I can’t find any new thoughts about ’em!

Should, is entirely up to you. Keep that in mind. This should is mine, yours is yours.

Shoes in cosplay are a ridiculous thing. The vast majority of Specifically American Con Goes will walk more during an anime convention than they will any other day of the year.

And yet, people insist on wearing feet destroying machines for the sake of Cosplay Authenticity.

For some not insignificant amount of people, the rest of their cosplay is cheap hobbled together garbage. Bought directly from ali express, that is already so much unlike the authentic character they’re supposed to portray.

It is beyond me why someone would go to such lengths to physically suffer during their weekend of con fun for perceptual gain.

Yet not go to the same lengths in the lead up to it, to either purchase a superior cosplay, or for the brave, make one.

One should wear shoes that you can walk in. You will be walking more than you usually do. Way more. Suffering here gains you nothing, I promise you this.

Be gone shoe hobblers. Your shoe hobbling and slow gait have kept us from truly thriving for too long. Wear less insane shoes.

Now to the topic of underwear: A lot of cosplay these days is underwear. In these cases, yeah. The cosplay should match the underwear.

Cosplay often features skirts. A person has to ask themselves every once in a while to maintain a sense of self , in the likely event that a strange someone gets a glimpse, wanted or otherwise, what do you want that someone seeing?

How you answer that question should then inform your choice of underwear.

Personally, I will happily sport normal ass boxers under a skirt should my cosplay require one. Shorts if its cold.

Break free from the prison of cosplay exactness, embrace boxers.

My computer was setup in the basement, atop a bar height counter. My parents hadn’t allowed me to put it in my room, as they feared I may never leave it were it to be there. So I set it up there instead. Never left the basement much. I had a 21 inch LCD monitor, a logitech G15, and a microsoft sidewinder. Plopped onto the counter top.

There, peripherals my companion, in a bar height stool poorly supporting my back, I played thousands of games of Starcraft 2.

At some point, following the first few hundred games, I started timing my build orders to a song.

Starcraft 2 is a real time strategy game. Meaning, the game does not pause once it starts, and your goal is to build, then control an army composed of, at first a few, then as each 5-25 minute game progresses, dozens or hundreds of units.

All the while, someone else does the same thing, opposite you, and in direct conflict with you. Your goal is to destroy their army and base, their goal is to destroy yours.

In order to build a unit, you must construct a building. In order to build a building, you must gather resources. Resources are gathered at a fixed rate depending on how many “workers” you have gathering one of two resources.

Therefore, if you the player build the same buildings and units, at the same time across games, there is an optimal order and sequencing that will produce the maximal amount of units at the appropriate time. Appropriate being loaded with context.

To keep things summarized: there is a large tree of decisions every game you play.

At each moment in the game, there is information you can gather that may fork the decision in the tree. There are many styles and approaches to the game, but the “best” build orders tend to be those which are flexibly able to adapt to the gamut of tactics your opponent may employ.

So, all of this to say: Timing is extremely important in Starcraft. While you’re building units, you’re simultaneously struggling to issue commands to units already built.

Therefore, the less you have to think about the timing of things, the more time you can spend controlling units and thinking about how to get marginal advantages over your opponent.

I cannot recall why, who, how, or what, lead to the decision. But at some point, a few hundred games into playing, I made a Pretty Smart Decision.

As soon as the game started, I would start the same song. Then like a dance, all of my timings would be tuned to the rhythm of the song.

This song was “My Dearest” by Supercell. I enjoyed the song at the time, though not in any particular way.

I listened to it literally thousands of times, because I played literally thousands of games of Starcraft 2. And it impacted my skill rating in a hugely positive way.

If I listen to it now my brain is flooded with flashes of 1 gate fes, nexus first, 4 gates, 1 gate robo fe, two sentry fe, and so on and so forth.

It’s in Japanese. I have no idea what any of the Japanese lyrics mean. I don’t even want to know. I’d rather let it fester there as a useless information mountain carved into my head that I never use anymore.

So uh, there’s other songs that have had massive emotional impact on me. Even changed how I think about music, the world, and people in general.

But no other song is as retina burned into my minds eye “My Dearest”. Though, they’re mostly memories of my heart burning holes through my chest as I struggle to maintain 180 APM and blink my stalkers right into siege tanks.