One thing which has helped me from having a "wandering eye" when it comes to women is the realization that God has a model, which he wants for all of us: a husband, a wife, and children-- what one might call a family. He wants everyone to be a mother or a father or a brother or a sister, a son or a daughter-- to be a part of a family. Then, all of the families interconnect to form the larger body; imagine a honeycomb, with all of the different compartments joined together.

If I were to sin with another woman, not only am I corrupting my honeycomb cell, but I'm corrupting hers as well. I'm robbing both of us of our ability to have God's model. But it's worse than that: the dropped pebble has ripple effects outward, as the sin sets a bad example for others, causes children to be deprived of their proper parenting which will cause them issues, and myriad other problems.

I think this honeycomb metaphor can be applied to sin more broadly too. The Lord has a moral code He wants us to follow. Any time we deviate from that code-- i.e., we sin-- we are introducing corruption into the larger honeycomb lattice, weakening its walls and structural integrity.

So when I see a pretty lady these days, rather than experience desire I think to myself, "I hope she finds a wonderful man with which to raise children and create a family, if she doesn't have one already."

I can't get over how silly Naughty Dog's latest game looks. It features a black lesbian shaving her already shaved head, because why not belabor the message, along with other "girl boss" characters with as much charm as bags of rocks. To be clear, Naughty Dog haven't released a game I've been interested in since "Crash Team Racing" on the PSX-- but even by that low bar, what lessons have they and Sony learned from "Concord"? Apparently nothing.

On top of that you've got the latest example of a virtual sex swap with "The Witcher 4". As was the case above, I tried all three of the titles and couldn't get into any of them-- but for fans of the series, isn't playing with Geralt, or some equally-cool protagonist, the whole point? I mean, they are character action games, correct? How many white males, which probably make up ninety-plus percent of the game's audience, are going to want to play with this ugly boss woman character?

On the positive side, the 3DO is in the process of receiving an arcade perfect port of "Mortal Kombat II", out of nowhere! I was always more of a "Street Fighter" guy, but have been wanting to give Midway's famous series a shot over the past few years-- this port will be where I jump in I think. Or, maybe I'll start with the original on the Mega Drive? Haven't decided yet.

I've been playing quite a bit of the "Flight Simulator 2024" career mode. Unfortunately, I hit a point where I seemingly can't progress: I spent all of my money buying a helicopter, since I'm seriously interested in getting good at flying those-- only for the game to not have even a single mission I can perform with my new company. I even ground out some employee missions to get cash to relocate to one of the noted "hot spots" for winter, and still the map is empty. I think it's simply a bug.

Speaking of helicopters, I always wanted to go on a ride in one-- but not anymore now that I understand how they work. Airplanes are intrinsically stable-- in tune with the laws of physics. You set your aileron plus elevator trims, and away you go, plane practically flies itself. But helicopters need constant fussing: anti-torque pedal pushing to prevent the thing from spinning in circles, there is a huge delay between cyclic activity and the chopper gaining and losing altitude, the aircraft wants to constantly drift all over the place... they are extraordinarily dangerous!

Finally, I'm planning to write my "Killing Time: Resurrected" review today. I also ordered one of those "better-than-the-original" long box repros for Saturn, this time of "Saturn Bomberman", should be a blast once it comes in. And on a non-gaming note, Lotito made his long-awaited "Stadio Flaminio" presentation, it looks like it's going to move full steam ahead from here. I'm thrilled beyond belief at the extraordinary season Lazio is having, this is one of my favorite squads in the whole twenty years I've been following the club-- what a team!

One of my all-time most memorable 3DO games-- Video Game Esoterica's favorite game of all time in fact-- is Studio 3DO's Metroidvania-FPS hybrid, "Killing Time". Along with "The Need for Speed", I think it has the best graphics on the system-- I mean, just take a look at this picture I snapped several years ago:



I finally got around to buying the Nightdive Studios remaster on PlayStation 5. This new version of the game runs at native 4K, 120 fps, with HDR, and has completely re-worked visuals. In fact, they even went frame-by-frame through the FMV and touched all of that up!

In preparation though, I fired up the RetroArch Opera core on the Steam Deck OLED, and played through the game's opening few areas, capturing some screenshots as I did so. Let's start with the intro FMV-- here is the original game's:





And here is the remastered version:





Original title and name entry screens:





New title and name entry screens:





The original's opening forest area:





One thing I wasn't expecting is that the game uses the PC port levels, which are totally different than the 3DO's. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, since I like the 3DO rendition's areas. But here is the closest apples-to-apples shot from an opening area of the remastered edition:





The mansion foyer, original version:





The mansion foyer, new version:





And finally, screenshots of some of the enemies, original game:





And some screenshots of enemies, remastered game:





The Bob Vieira soundtrack and all of the sound effects made it over to the remastered version, which is fantastic! There are also improvements to the minimap, the player can now jump and crouch, which is kind of weird, and there is gyro aiming to boot. It's a typical A+ job from Nightdive Studios, expect a full review in the coming weeks.

This is very much a "well, yes and no" situation: if you had a genius-level programmer like a John Carmack sitting down, hammering out assembler and having all of the Saturn's various chips working simultaneously, there's no doubt the system can do some crazy things. By contrast, the PlayStation has a full-on triangle-based rasterizer built right into the SoC-- and it's fast! Take a look at even launch titles like "Warhawk" to see what it's capable of.

But while game developers were undoubtedly very talented back then-- much, much moreso than today-- not every development team had someone at a Carmack-like level. Further, games aren't developed in a bubble: they are created under strict budget and timeline constraints. So in real-world terms, the PlayStation's setup is significantly faster than the quad-based myriad chip design of the Saturn-- that's how things manifested in real-life when both platforms were under active commercial development.

While we're on the topic of modern-day game programmers, check out this video. Heck, while we're at it what about this one? I've said many times before, the PlayStation 5 GPU can solve ten trillion floating point math problems per second-- there is no reason why games should be having any kind of even remote performance problems, or have any sort of lack of ambition. Hand this hardware to developers from the 80s and 90s, and they'd made the Holodeck somehow!

I don't think the kids today are dumber, I've met a lot of extremely sharp people in their teens and twenties. But I don't think they are being taught the right things in university: everything today is higher-level languages, middleware, and off-the-shelf engines to the point where a lot of the "art of the hardcore" has faded from the industry. Outside of rare exceptions such as "Penny's Big Breakaway", I can't think of any developers doing "down to the metal"-style programming anymore.

Speaking of video games, I've been on a real resurgence with PC gaming lately. My latest kicks have been "World of Warcraft: Dragonflight", which looks like an up-res'd Dreamcast game and with ray-traced shadows bolted on, plus "Flight Simulator 2024". Specifically in the latter, I've been teaching myself how to fly helicopters. Here I am cruising around my old Twin Cities area, hovering over my old house, near my old city's water tower, checking out the Twins stadium, and weaving around the buildings in downtown Minneapolis.

Click on any of them to see the full-resolution versions:









The only struggle I'm having right now is, it seems like the cyclic-- at least in this particular model of helicopter, which is the only one I've tried so far-- is on a razor's edge: either the machine will hover, or it will drop like a rock; so when I try to land, I can't establish a nice clean two-foot hover, I instead slam down on the ground. I think I just need to continue to practice, it feels very fussy.

Wifey and I are taking this Christmas to do some PC updating a across-the-board.

My daughter is getting bumped from an ancient Ryzen 1600 to a 5700x, and is getting a mini-LED 1440p 180Hz panel, with HDR and VRR. The CPU upgrade will let me get that machine off of Windows 10, plus give her a major performance boost. She's only on an RTX 2060, so maybe next year a GPU upgrade will be in order too. Meanwhile, my son is getting the same monitor. He's already on a Ryzen 5800x3d and Windows 11, along with my old RTX 2080-- pretty decent shape. As for the wife, I just ordered a brand new B550 setup for her: she will get my 7700x, and I will take a brand new 9700x. In January I will order a myself an RTX 5000 series card, and she will get my mighty, 40 teraflops 4070 Ti.

Finally and changing topics, here is a complete list of all of the refereeing mistakes made against Lazio this season. The list is astonishing when you see them all lined up in one spot!

I have an aunt who lives North of San Francisco, and a first cousin-- her son-- who works at Activision Blizzard down in Santa Monica. He drove up to stay with her over Thanksgiving. I was thinking, "Oh, must be a short drive, I mean they both live in California after all." So I fired up Flight Simulator 2024, and... wow, what a trip-- and that was through the air! I talked to him on the phone, and it was an eight hour drive via car!

Here is Santa Monica in the air, followed by the Activision Blizzard headquarters, haha:





From there I flew up over and along the mountains, headed North. They become quite arid after a bit:



After what felt like forever I arrived in the San Francisco area. The airport is like half the size of the city, absolutely astonishing:





Continuing North I saw this weird antenna tower, followed by the actual downtown area:





I passed by the Bay Bridge and some weird landmass called "Treasure Island":





Finally, I came to her city, landed at the airport, and parked. California is a cool looking place from the air.

This is an excellent article about what resentment does to the body, and how to move past it. Every morning when I wake up, I point to Heaven with both hands and just say, "Thank you Lord for another day." It's amazing what a simple gesture of gratitude can do.

In other news, Trump isn't even in office yet, yet he got Mexico's president to agree to stop all caravans and other migrants from going to the US's Southern border-- he had a phone call with her and got the whole thing cleared up. And to be clear, this is the over two months before his inauguration. He's not even in the White House yet, and he's already running the country!

In totally unrelated news, this notion of determining men and women based on hormone levels is completely the wrong approach. For example, there is apparently a woman-- a legitimate, actual woman-- named Barbra Banda, who has extreme levels of Testosterone compared to the average female. This lady actually failed a what they are calling "gender eligibility test", deeming if someone is allowed to participate in a given sport.

I solved this whole John Money gender-bending question back in 2018. Sex and gender are identified in exactly the way I lay things out in that post: there is no "let's measure hormone levels" aspect of it, because hormones can fluctuate for people depending on which stage of life they are in, or even from moment-to-moment during a given day. If Barbra Banda has female genitalia, XX chromosomes, and a body which serves the function of female reproductivity, then Banda is a woman and should be allowed to participate in women's sports. If those factors are in the converse, then Banda is a man and should be competing with the men.

It's not really that complicated. A simple drop of the shorts during the next annual physical might be enough to clear up the question immediately.

Finally, I bought this but on the PlayStation 5 so I could get one hundred and twenty frames per second support. If I can ever finish "Infinite Wealth"-- save counter at almost one hundred and thirty hours, and counting-- I'll be happy to move on to "Killing Time" plus a couple of PSVR2 titles in my review backlog.

A little bit ago I installed "Super Mario 64 PC Builder 2" and used it to compile the path-traced version of the game, plus to install a high resolution texture pack. Within the game's settings, I set the motion blur to fifty, and capped the game at one hundred and twenty frames per second-- a frame rate which my PC can maintain in the game flawlessly, at native 4K.

Along with a fully maxed-out "Cyberpunk 2077", "Minecraft RTX", "Quake 2 RTX", and the path-traced versions of "Doom" and "Doom II", this is in that top-tier of video game graphics that I've ever seen. Click on any of the below screenshots to see the full-sized versions. Look at the bounce lighting, the reflections, and the shadows in particular.

And screenshots don't even do it justice; seeing it in motion on my OLED TV is astonishing!

Haven't really had much to write about lately! Just working as usual, picking up my daughter from her job, participating in church stuff. On a really weird whim I started craving an MMORPG of all things, so I installed World of Warcraft and have been having a lot of fun with it-- it's like an up-res'd Dreamcast title or something, kind of cool at native 2160p with Auto HDR, 120 fps, and ray-traced shadows. I also bought Super Mario Bros. Wonder, but haven't been feeling compelled to play it much. Finally, I installed Flight Simulator 2024, but it has some major issues-- more to come on that one later.

A fellow named Daniel DiSilva, the founder of what's called the "Divine Mercy Institute", gave a sensational talk at my church last week, going into extreme depth regarding the origins and history of the original painting, as well as background on where all of the cheap-- to my eyes, frankly-- clones came from.

For those who haven't ever seen the painting, here it is. My church bought a beautifully framed, 1:1 scale, full-size print of this, at 8000 dpi!



This was painted originally by a guy who was taking instructions straight from a sister, who was herself taking instruction straight from Jesus. She had this artist re-do just the right arm something like seventeen times-- every little detail had to be perfect. She had the artist spend immense time on the face in particular, as restorers had later discovered while doing repairs.

Many years ago I wrote about the "Shroud of Turin". I'm struggling to find the post now, but the gist of it is that I spent hours and hours researching it, categorizing all of the various pieces of evidence on all sides of the question. In the end, I concluded that the shroud is actually real-- the only way scientists were able to reproduce the image was by using many millions of dollars of high-tech equipment to bombard a fabric with insane amounts of ultraviolet radiation.

Here is the face in the shroud, corrected for contrast:



It stands to reason then that if the shroud really does show us Jesus's face, and the sister was taking direction straight from Jesus, the two faces should be pretty similar, right? Let's compare:



I zoomed way the heck in within The Gimp, and started drawing some measurement lines, counting pixels:



The gist of it is that the two faces are extremely similar: notice the shape of the eyebrows, the shape and proportions of the nose especially the thin bridge and the bulb, the way the nostrils flare upwards diagonally, the shape and composition of the facial hair, the shape and width of the mouth, and even the relative ratios of all the constituent parts.

The picture in the painting is slightly wider ratio-wise, and the nose is just a smidgen shorter, along with some other minute differences. But overall, it's not a stretch to say that it's the same face. The face on the shroud might simply appear thinner because of gauntness from the ordeal Jesus went through-- whereas perhaps he had the sister and painter convey His physical form from healthier days?

Lazio and Vikings almost always run in parallel, right down to alternating good-and-bad seasons-- but this year has been especially uncanny. The most recent example came today: Lazio went on the road to a lousy Monza side, played an almost unwatchably bad game, yet squeaked out with a win anyway; meanwhile, Vikings went on the road to a lousy Jacksonville side, played an almost unwatchably bad game, yet squeezed out with a win as well.

In other news my PlayStation 5 Pro is due to arrive tomorrow, I'll have fun playing with that. It'll be a nice upgrade which will bring things closer to what my PC can deliver. At the same time, it'll undoubtedly make me miss the old days when getting a new video game system meant moving from the Atari 2600 to a Sega Genesis, or having a shiny new Sega Saturn under the TV, or something similarly Earth-shattering.

I think that's part of why I like old consoles so much: I sit in front of my Japanese PC Engine Duo-R, and imagine the excitement the person who bought it originally must have felt, sitting there playing games like "Gate of Thunder" and "Castlevania: Rondo of Blood" when they were brand new.

Absolutely thrilled at Trump's victory, what a relief! Time to clean up the mess of the past four years, and get things back on track. Here is a nice summary of many aspects of his platform; all great stuff:

• Deport illegal aliens starting with criminals; continue building on prior four hundred miles of border wall; use tariffs to pressure Mexico to stop sending "asylum seekers" to the US border, which is a violation of international law as these people are supposed to go to the nearest country first-- not travel from Venezuela, or take a ship from freaking Africa.


• Greatly cut Federal regulations and red tape; extend his 2017 tax cuts; lower corporate rate to fifteen percent for domestically-made goods, which is very competitive by OECD standards.


• Attempt to eliminate the trade deficit by introducing tariffs of at least ten percent, to increase domestic manufacturing.


• Greatly increase drilling for oil and natural gas, try to get back towards the energy independence he established during his first term.


• Prohibit Federally-funded colleges and universities from teaching Cultural Marxism, plus prohibit public schools from their current anti-white racial discrimination; let parents use tax dollars for private or religious schools!

He also has recently floated getting rid of the income tax and replacing it with consumption taxes, which would be mind-bogglingly cool.

Even better, he now "gets it" and won't be surrounding himself with cabinet members actively trying to destroy him. Considering how amazing his accomplishments were in his first term when that was the reality, I can't even imagine what he can get done this time around.

I have a couple of montages all ready to go!

• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (Here)
• Madden NFL 25 (Here)

Regarding Madden specifically, I did my usual sports game franchise mode deal of taking one of the worst teams in the game, wheeling and dealing with the CPU teams to increase player quality, hoard draft picks, and simultaneously improve finances, then play through a season or three, continuing to build as I go.

So far I've played a single season, here were the stats of some of my star players. Expect my full review of the game soon.

I pray for their sakes that people on the Left will be able to calm down if Trump does win the election. During my final years in Murderapolis, I was barred by them from going to the doctor, going to the dentist, being able to buy groceries or going inside of any building if I wouldn't demean myself by ridiculously taping a paper towel to my mouth.

For months I felt unsafe walking out of my house due to George Floyd rioters throwing bricks through windows and setting fire to buildings near me, among the generally skyrocketing crime. People on the Left told me repeatedly that they wanted me to lose my career, have my kids taken away from me, throw me into an internment camp, or even force a morality pill on me, because I refused to let them inject me and my children with the clot shots.

They routinely brag about how they want to stack the Supreme Court, which is in essence getting rid of it. They want to get rid of the electoral college. They brag about how they want to replace one racial group, white people, with other racial groups so that the Left can perpetually have a one-party state. They want the legal system to have racial bias in it, so that outcomes such as sentences depend on the color of your skin.

I bring all of this up to remind my Leftist friends: it's their side which are the Fascists. The evidence indicates that they are in a lot more danger if the Left gets and obtains power-- they should be rooting for a Donald Trump victory, not dreading it.

I have a resting pulse of about 60. In fact during sleep, my pulse can drop as low as 28 or 29. The below is what often happens when I lector at Mass. One of these actually happened when I was only sacristan, I think because I was nervous about having prepared enough hosts:



There is an awesome guy at my church who is recruiting me to become a deacon in the Catholic church. I'm interested in learning more, but I don't know if my body would hold up under the stress of having constant Mass involvement!

Yesterday before Mass, I had one of my friends approach me in the Sacristy, and express her disappointment at how I had handled the setting up of a recent Liturgy Committee meeting: "How did I get invited, and why? I had no idea what we were supposed to be talking about; I kept waiting, 'are more people going to show up?' I'm sad and disappointed that I wasn't given more of a heads-up."

The reality was that I also had no idea what the agenda should have been, and also went into it blind! All the same, it was my fault for not explaining in greater detail what I had known. I explained all of this to her, and told her I was very sorry she was uncomfortable. "So am I", she replied with a smile.

And that was the end of the conversation-- we shifted to other, more happy subjects, and that was that. As I was driving home, it dawned on me: "So this is how healthy people express their feelings!"

Even though she was uncomfortable, sad, and disappointed, there was zero hint of anger, or malice, or a desire for retribution. Practically every single time in my life I encounter what she was feeling, it has carried along with it chains, where the person shouts and yells, expecting some kind of emotional or monetary restitution-- sometimes they even have ulterior motives, taking advantage of their emotional position to gain an edge over me and others.

But in the conversation with my friend, there were no strings attached. She wasn't looking for sympathy; she wasn't trying to make herself the center of attention. She wasn't trying to gain an upper hand, she wasn't trying to manipulate me. She felt a certain way, and simply wanted to share how she felt! It was constructive and positive and brought us closer together, versus shoving us further apart.

It was also a good lesson for me in practical terms: I've spent the past twenty-six years in my career in agenda-less meetings, leaning into uncertainty, thrown right into the fire-- it was a lack of empathy on my part that not everyone is cut out for or wants that kind of situation! From now on when I set up these church meetings, I will do a mental assessment of each person individually, and check in where it's warranted to make sure they feel good going in.

I spent six months as part of a planning sub-committee, having a famous Catholic YouTuber do an event at one of the churches in my Area Catholic Community-- and we finally had the event this past Sunday! We had around a thousand people packed into the church. I wish I could say the guy's name or show pictures, but I don't want to "dox" my location. As a volunteer I got front-row seats, and he was literally leaning over me at one point.

I've been watching his YouTube content for a long time now, so it was very strange shaking his hand and talking to him in person. I asked him how much preparation work he does before an interview, and he said he'll literally read every book they've ever written.

In other religious life news, this article about "near death experiences", or "NDEs" was super interesting. The descriptions from these people exactly matches the Christian explanations for God and Heaven, exactly what Jesus Himself told us. Heck, I was just reading the petitions for a Mass recently, and the words for the "recently departed" were "may they rest in God's perpetual light", which is straight from these "NDEs".

In football news, I've been super critical of VAR since day one, writing stuff like this since 2017 and 2018. As is often the case, it took the mainstream many years but they've finally caught up with what I was saying from the very beginning. From the article, translated:



Like I've been saying since 2017, VAR doesn't lead to better outcomes: in the end decisions still come down to the discretion of the same individuals. The only thing VAR does is delay the game, and turn the bad decisions into three-ring circuses. As the article says, all VAR does is change the means, not the interpretations.

It especially hurts because the current body of refereeing in Italy hates Lazio as a team. Almost every major controversial decision goes against us, and it's all well documented, to the point where the referees will do reviews and routinely "apologize" to us after the fact and admit the mistakes-- but then go on to have another horrible game the next time too.

I think we're the best team in Serie A this year. I saw statistics recently where we run the second-least, and have the second-best ball distribution. That's a clear formula for dominance-- and we are dominating. So why are we in fifth? Well, we've lost three games, and all three were wildly influenced by blindingly major refereeing mistakes.

And by the way, Lazio and Vikings always follow the same cadence. This season it's been especially pronounced. For example, two games ago both teams won on last-minute plays by wily old veterans Pedro and Stephon Gilmore, respectively. Then this past game they both lost super tight matches to powerhouse members of their respective leagues in Juventus and Detroit, albeit the Lazio result was highly controversial due to the aforementioned refereeing mistakes.

In video game news, I'm playing "Super Mario Bros. Wonder" on Switch, "Arcade Paradise VR" on PSVR2, and "Madden NFL 25" on PS5. I'm not sure when I'll get time to play them enough to do reviews, but you can expect them at some point.

I was just telling my mom the other day, that I suspect we're going to continue to see this weird descent in the country into a third-world nation. Here I'm reading that American corporations, the Federal government, and human traffickers are all cooperating to provide cheap labor for factories. With the untold millions of illegal aliens who have poured over the border, how long until entire sections of towns have been taken over by violent gang wars, with gun-platform helicopters flying overhead raining bullets, like I've seen in videos from Mexico?

I'm in the Twin Cities visiting family, and I wound up having a three hour conversation with a couple of guys at GameStop. It's fun discussing the hobby with other passionate people. I exchanged contact info with one of them. I'd been assuming that GameStop was about four hours away from shuttering completely-- but the store manager was telling us that they actually turned a small profit this past quarter, that they are basically a debt-free company, and that the current CEO seems like he's trying to help the company survive long-term, and that he's not just using it as a quick cash grab.

I've always rooted for them, back to the Funcoland era. I really like having a brick and mortar option for the hobby. The one in the town near me closed a few years ago, so it's now an over hour-long drive to the closest GameStop-- but when I visit the Twin Cities I like to stop in.

It's been tough to break away, even for a couple of days. Yesterday I got a call asking if I could sub in as Sacristan on Sunday-- then got another call asking if I could cover a funeral today at 13:00. I would have said "yes" to both things if I were even in the area! I like the fact that I'm getting so intertwined in things there, it's been such a blessing to be involved in something other than my career, from which I've never felt any sense of fulfillment. My absolute dream would be if they hired for a "Director of IT"-style position at my "ACC"-- I would be willing to have a significant pay cut even, to accept a job like that.

In any event, today is a "down" day for me to work on my game music a little. I've also gotten back into Smash Bros. on Switch a bit, and I had a copy of "Super Mario Bros. Wonder" show up, so I'll probably start that today as well.

Once in awhile I'll read "The Video Game Critic" reviews such as this one. He's one of the only other people I know on the entire web who runs a review site like mine. His forum is often pretty cringey-- they are Gen X'ers like myself, but are deeply out of touch with both gaming news and the broader culture-at-large: "Did you hear they made dis here new video game?", like four years after it came out.

The good news is that the Critic himself is finally-- seven or eight years later, but better late than never-- caught up to Cultural Marxism, and in fact he calls it out in the aforelinked review. Several members of his forum were butthurt about it, but I say good for him! Of course, those butthurt forum members can only come back with: "Hurr, Critic doesn't like black people in games!"

As a refresher:

• "There are two groups of people who generalize son: those who do, and those who don't." Like the joke, Karl Marx broke all of humanity down into the "proletariat" and the "bourgeoisie". You're one or the other. The latter oppresses the former.


• He predicted that the "capitalist"-- as he called them-- countries would collapse, and the Communist ones would thrive. Why? Because in the former, the downtrodden workers would overthrow the hideous property owners.


• Instead, the complete opposite happened: the Communist countries were such destitute shitholes that they had to put walls around them to keep people in-- whereas the average worker in the "capitalist" countries became wildly rich by almost any historical standard.


• Some Jewish eggheads at the Frankfurt School researched this in the 1920s. Their conclusion wasn't that Marx's over-generalized model was too simple to be useful: rather, they doubled down! You see, men oppress; Christians oppress; heteroxexuals oppress; white people oppress; and so forth. Hence the birth of "intersectionality".


• Hitler caught on to what these nefarious eggheads were up to, and wisely ejected them from Germany in the 30's. They wound up in America, in New York City-- lucky us.


• According to their model, your worth as a human being is calculated by how many "victimhood" points you have. Forget your specific life experiences, that doesn't matter: what matters is how many boxes you tick. Just like with Marx, an entire human being can be distilled down into a tiny handful superficial attributes, which then drive the legal code, hiring practices, access to health care, and so forth.


• If you're a black Muslim lesbian in a wheelchair, you should have more "representation", more legal rights, have more financial freebies given to you, have access to the better schools, get first dibs on the best jobs and promotions, at the literal expense of a, let's say, straight white dude. Meritocracy is thus replaced, as is the hard-fought "Martin Luther King Jr." Civil Rights progress which is tossed out the window-- they were actively trying to repeal all of that in California.


• This is why black people dominate commercials, video games, and so forth despite being less than thirteen percent of the population. Watching TV in America is like watching TV in Zimbabwe at this point. It's why the "independent boss womyn" characters dominate gaming now.


• The reason the female characters are being uglified is because Cultural Marxists want to subvert what they call the "male gaze": "heteronormativity", as they call normal pro-creative human sexuality, is "oppressive" therefore anything which a straight man might like should be removed, including attractive female characters.


• If you object to this hateful and utterly illiberal ideology and its racism and sexism, you are told "you just don't like black people", or "you just don't like women". "Gee, too many black people for you, eh Critic?!?! It's dat right-wing garbage, eh Critic?!"


• The people who say "you don't like black people": actively support this bizarre cult-like dogma; OR, are clueless zombies who literally don't "get it"; OR are weak-knee'd and pretend to support it so they can fit in with their social groups.

Lazio just steam rolled yet another team, this time in the form of a very good Nice squad, worth over two hundred million Euro, and who clearly had come to play football. Lazio are playing at such an elite level right now, a good team playing an "A" game isn't enough to get a result against them. It's been so much fun to watch, I'm a huge fan of our new players and coach!

As is often the case, Vikings are on the same cadence and are also an elite force right now. So every time I tune in to, I'm getting to watch my side dismantle opponents. These moments don't happen too often overall, so I enjoy them when they do.

I thought that this was interesting, and is a sneak preview for November: the Left can't even stop manipulating numbers for a video game vote, for Pete's sake.

This one is also interesting: a "Sweet Baby" employee explicitly saying they want to burn the video game industry to the ground. Really, the reason for the square-jawed lesbian characters is to subvert the "male gaze"-- it's an intentional thumb in the eye. Their customer base is something like 90% white, male, and straight-- meanwhile, their Cultural Marxist cult's ideology tells them to hate whites, straights, and men.

The same thing is happening in other industries, such as in car punditry where half the "journalists" actively hate cars and the culture around them.

The other thing I was thinking about the other idea is the Left's notion of "debunking". A friend sent me this body of theorizing that the flooding of African aliens into Europe was to intentionally replace white people with a more amenable voting bloc-- a theory which is probably correct, incidentally. I looked up the name of this, and every single hit in Bing's index-- via "DuckDuckGo"-- was "It's a deboooonked far-right radical conspiracy theory!"

If I say to you, "Gravity repels things from Earth", you could "debunk" my specific scientific claim by showing me the mathematical equation, proving the physics otherwise. Similarly, if I were to say "Susan has brown eyes" when she in fact has blue eyes, you could "debunk" my claim by introducing me to the person. "Debunking" applies to specific claims which can be proven or disproven via the scientific method.

Conversely, let's say there is a guy named Fred, and he's constantly berating people and tearing them down. I could issue conjecture: "I think Fred is kind of an asshole." It's my opinion, my interpretation of Fred's behavior. You can't then reply to me and say, "Aaaaactually, that's been deboonked!" Logically, you can't "debunk" a subjective interpretation of someone's behavior. You can offer alternative conjecture: "I think Fred is playing 4D chess and is a jackass, manipulating people into the best forms of themselves." But only God can see into a man's heart: so any interpretation we put forth is not a factual, hard, scientific matter. The realm of "debunking" doesn't apply here.

Back to the illegal aliens situation then: the politicians are letting in millions upon millions of totally unvetted illegal aliens, unabated. They have celebrated numerous times in the past that one day whites will be a minority. We also know that they know that whites are much less likely to vote for them than African or South American aliens. Ergo, it's reasonable to assume that these policies are being instituted intentionally.

Now, maybe my theory is off the mark-- ok, fine. And you can have a different opinion, that's also fine-- but you can't "debunk" hypothetical conjecture: the whole concept doesn't make any sense. None of us knows what's truly in Kamala Harris's heart, or Keir Starmer's heart-- the best we can do is guess. And anyone who says that an opinion has been "debunked" is almost certainly just trying to shut down the conversation, and is not acting in good faith.

I've been seeing a lot of headlines lately that Microsoft is partnering with Blackrock and is also trying to re-open the nuclear plant which once had a partial meltdown, so that they can have enough electricity to run the AI which takes screenshots of your desktop every few seconds. Also, on the one hand it's "no A/C and eat bugs to lower your energy footprint" while on the other hand their AI data centers and electric cars require the energy of a small sun to function.

In Sony-related news, mama mia just look at these designs! I am planning to get a PlayStation 5 Pro, but I've already bought the optical drive and stand for the white unit-- and besides that, I plan to use GameStop trade-in credits to fund the purchase of the system itself. Otherwise, trying to land a pre-order for one of these designs would be tempting.

Also in Sony-related news, apparently Concord cost them four hundred million dollars to make-- and their internal culture is so absurd that any criticism was immediately shut down due to it being labeled as "toxic". Speaking of "toxic", I chuckle at the author of this article, "Sammy Barker": the day Concord came out he published a piece taking a shot at critics of the game-- now his articles say he's "not trying to rub it in" that the game was a historic failure.

In other news, I saw that Dim Tim thinks "misinformation" and "hate speech" should be criminalized. So too does Hitlery. Meanwhile, a majority of Democratic voters-- your neighbors, your coworkers, your family members-- either actively want Donald Trump to be murdered, or are on the fence about it. It is indeed the party of love, acceptance, and empathy.

Here is that modded Game Boy Advance I mentioned in a previous blog post! If you hold "Select" then tap "L" and "R" simultaneously, it opens up a menu where you can select different screen modes and color filters. The first alternative mode is the best I think, as it looks closest to the original GBA screen-- just backlit, super bright, and one hundred percent uniform!





Here is the ebay seller. There are tons of people selling these, so I'm sure there are lots of other great people out there doing this work as well.

As for the second picture, I bought those from this seller on Etsy. They look even better in person than in the photos-- the print quality is phenomenal, and they look so good sitting on my shelf!

These numbers are no surprise to me: within US companies, native-born people from the US have lost employment, while foreign-born workers have gained employment. The article focuses on the non-college-educated, but even among college-educated people I see this trend. My own employer has been stealth-outsourcing the entire IT department to India, for instance, to the point where I was recently looking at job openings for a friend and counted ~150 out of ~150 opportunities being in Mumbai, with 0 in the United States.

What's weird is how few people complain about this overall nation-wide trend! It used to be that there was justifiable outrage about this kind of thing-- now it's normalized and no one even seems to notice it.

In other news, I really want to get a PlayStation 5 Pro. I think if I trade in my old PlayStation 4 Pro plus my existing PlayStation 5, the system itself will only cost me a couple of hundred dollars. Of course, I'd also need to pop for the disc drive and stand beyond that. To be honest I was shocked that Sony wasn't more aggressive with pricing-- they are clearly selling this thing for profit. But maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, given that with Microsoft's Xbox hardware tanking, Sony is the only game in town.

In a way it's similar to Nvidia on the PC side, with their exorbitantly-priced video cards. The real kick in the pants is that Sony can't even bother to include the plastic stand with the unit. That's shocking, really.

A second attempt at a modded Game Boy Advance should arrive tomorrow. The seller wound up apologizing: the d-pad wasn't working because a tiny piece of paper had wound up on the membrane. The rest of his work was immaculate, so if I'm happy with this new one I will post a link to him on eBay. I also bought these incredible GBA game cases from an Etsy seller. I will do a full blog post, with pictures, hopefully over this weekend showing off the whole thing, with links. It will be a really fun collection to assemble.

Finally, I was Sacristan last weekend at what's called a "First Saturday Mass". The priest asked me: "Ummm, can you serve after Mass for the Adoration?"

Before I knew it I found myself in full server's robes, manning incense, ringing bells, and all the rest! I did ok considering I had less than five minutes of instruction beforehand, although I did fumble trying to place the humeral veil around the priest's shoulders: as I started to unfold it, it became like a parachute it was so huge, and I couldn't find the right-side clasp! The priest just calmly looked over his shoulder and whispered, "I've got it", haha.

For the Lefties online who are saying you "can't criticize the 'Minecraft' movie if you aren't a kid", my daughter tells me that kids hate the preview as well, and are "meme'ing" it to hell and back!

I've been playing quite a bit of "Doom 64" recently, on real hardware, on a CRT television. The game plays great with the N64 controller, provided you map the left and right "C-Buttons" to strafe left and right, respectively-- then I move the map over to "L", ala "Turok". It also looks great on the TV. My biggest problem with it is that the gameplay is a little too puzzle based for me-- you spend almost all of your time playing wandering around trying to figure out what random wall switches have triggered.

Finally, I ordered a modded Game Boy Advance from a seller on eBay-- but when it arrived, the left direction on the d-pad didn't work. The seller implied that I'd broken it somehow, which was frustrating. But he did agree to a return and refund-- I'll just turn around and order one back from him, my guess is the d-pad membrane moved during shipping, as the quality of the other work he did on it seemed excellent. I'll post pictures once all of that settles.

The neat thing is that outside of the "build your own PC" sphere, the GBA is probably the next closest thing: there is an entire cottage industry around selling modern screens, battery mods, speaker mods, custom "shells", custom buttons and anything else you can imagine. It's almost like the platform has gone "open source hardware", so-to-speak-- it's pretty cool! I'm not the handiest with a soldering iron so it was easier for me to outsource that work to someone else-- but I could have "built my own" GBA, for sure, just like how I assemble my own gaming PCs.

Two nights ago I didn't sleep at all-- I had a mix-up with the psychiatrist regarding a renewal for my Lunesta prescription. Last night, then, I slept very oddly and had the rare occurrence of actually remembering one of my dreams.

Huge volcanic calderas had opened up all over Earth, creating massive molten rivers, and giant sinkholes were consuming entire neighborhoods. Weirdly, I was living in a home in the upscale area where my mother currently resides, and where I lived during high school over two decades ago. The sky was yellow, the air was very warm. Lava had completely encircled the area, and we were trapped. There was no electricity, and the internet access was gone. I looked at my wife and said, "That's the end of the internet, for good-- and maybe everything else too."

Weirdly, instead of mass looting the tragedy brought out the best in everyone. The UN was flying helicopters in to rescue those of us who were stranded in the zone. Each person was allowed to bring one medium-sized box of belongings. They were using the parking lot of the Target near us as a make-shift loading area and helipad. I had my GR86 in the dream, and it had some gas left in the tank. My wife drove us to the aforementioned parking lot so we could fill out some paperwork prior to the helicopters arriving.

On the ride there everyone was outside of their homes, packing up boxes, possessions strewn over lawns and driveways. Tree branches were down everywhere, leaves scattered all over the road. There was a sense of calm as the neighbors prepared. The yellow sky and the still in the air was remarkable. Like a lot of suburbs, the road was curvy, and my wife deftly wove the car through the area-- driving a bit fast. The neighborhood looked like one giant refugee camp, as people prepared to leave everything behind, forever, to eventually be swallowed up by sinkholes.

We arrived at the parking lot. Some makeshift buildings had been erected. There was a line around one of those metal, hastily put-up structures. Everyone was calm, parents were holding children. We'd left our kids behind at the house for the moment, it was strongly implied to me that someone-- my mom?-- was back there with them. We'd make a separate trip in the very imminent future with everyone, to actually board one of the helicopters.

Again, the tragedy brought the best out of everyone. People in the line were orderly, and the UN workers were calm and efficient. Everyone could sense that this was probably the end of everything on Earth, and had made peace with the idea. And that's about when I woke up. The dream was real End Times kind of stuff: super vivid, right down to minute details.

Today is a day of fasting for me: I've been trying to watch my eating, but on Saturday I was fed at a large party hosted at their farm by some good friends of ours nearby, then last night my father-in-law made one of everyone's-- myself included-- favorite meals, and I overate on that too.

Three masses for me this week: one at a church a half hour drive away tomorrow in the most beautiful area of Minnesota that I've seen, to get our home school group blessed; then on Saturday I am Sacristan and Lector for our adoration-oriented First Saturday Mass; and then on Sunday I am once again Sacristan for the ordinary Mass.

Switching gears to gaming, here is the most recent Steam Deck most-played list. For my part I've gotten back into "No Man's Sky", it runs extremely well on the Deck-- 800p, all "High" settings, frame rate capped at thirty-four frames per second, FSR set to "Balanced", and is totally stable. You need to make a lot of image quality sacrifices with the Deck, but not nearly as many as on the Switch, that's for sure.

Here is a video of RFK Jr. discussing the Ukraine War and Blackrock. No wonder his father and uncle were assassinated, it takes real guts to say this stuff out loud. Finally, here is Eric Peters talking about inflation, and how to gauge the drop in our standard of living. It reminds me of this recent blog post I wrote.

I didn't like the days when Igli Tare "knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy, who had a used Honda Civic"-- "Hey bro, pick up the phone, boy do I have the deal for you! He's Albanian, you'll love him!" Having an actual scouting room, with an actual methodology, analytically picking apart players and how they'd fit our aspirational team culture and style of play is much more up my alley.

The trouble is that every approach has its trade-offs. Taken to its logical end, we've wound up with a team full of young players who could all flop: the obvious candidates for "who will fill the top-line technical qualities gulf" is not present.

Best case scenario: one or more of these young players has a light bulb go on, and we've got a Kvaratskhelia or Rafael Leão on our hands. Then we'll be fine-- as in, Europa League qualification, top-six fine. There are lots of possible names from which to choose: Rovella; Dele-Bashiru; Guendouzi; Noslin; Tchaouna. Maybe Castrovilli goes back to his very best football? Maybe Castellanos or Dia-- or both in tandem, ala Rocchi and Pandev-- start pounding in goals? Maybe Isaksen winds up being a genius and takes over? Maybe Tavares becomes a monster and takes over the entire left flank?

Worst case scenario: we look like how we did against Udinese. Teams physically press us, we turn the ball over stupidly, the team isn't ticking over, it gets demoralized, and we wind up in a relegation scrap ala the Ballardini 2009 year. It could happen too: we bought players from relegation-bound teams, then hired a relegation-zone manager to coach them. What will you wind up with from that approach?

Really though, the biggest problem the club faces is that Lotito can't be a senator and run the team at the same time. He really just needs to sell, or hand it off to his son. For example, what's the point of buying young players for future capital gains, then giving away fourteen-million Euro rated Casale for seven million, when in today's inflated world he's realistically a twenty million-plus player? How about not being able to place people like Akpa Akpro, Hysaj, and Basic?

Apparently Baroni thinks Milan is a "wounded animal" and is going to field an all-out-attack formation today. Sounds like something which could backfire horribly, but maybe I'll be surprised.

My father-in-law had a big temper tantrum today because he had to drive my mother-in-law's Subaru Forester back to the bugout house from his Murderapolis home. "Grrrr, it's not a truck! I hate this thing!" Meanwhile, trucks are the worst-driving vehicles on the road, and it isn't even close:

• Only twenty percent of their weight is over the driving axle, so they have no grip or balance.


• They have super light spring setups, so they wobble all over the place, further diminishing what little grip they have.


• They have an ultra high center-of-gravity, so they constantly feel like they are going to fly off the road.

The only thing they are good for is if you own a business where you need to haul stuff-- and even then, they are best driven only when the need absolutely presents itself; I couldn't imagine using one as a daily driver. I'd rather drive a school bus than a pickup truck.

That's not to say my mother-in-law's Forester is a great driving vehicle either: it too is tall, and has a horrible spring setup. Plus it has every nanny nag system in existence. But that's beside the point, since those weren't the issues being taken up.

And setting all of that aside, would it absolutely kill him to just do someone a favor for once? Favors from narcissists are like holy water to vampires.

Here is an image the Trump campaign put together. Any one of these bullets is damning, let alone all of them-- and this is only a partial list, to be sure:



Add to the list the official Democrat platform-- then juxtapose it with all of Trump's first-term accomplishments. More than at any other time in my life, this upcoming "Selection" illustrates how people on the Right utilize facts, logic, and evidence, while people on the Left lean almost exclusively on emotion. Unfortunately, their emotion is going to drag us all into oblivion.

I thought that this was an interesting video: a discussion of narcissism, but from a Catholic perspective. It can be summed up with this quote: "They [narcissists] terribly need the saving power of love, but are also absolutely certain that if they opened up to it, they would be destroyed." I deal day-to-day with my textbook narcissist father-in-law, and I'd previously reached this conclusion regarding him on my own: he has super low self-esteem so he rebuffs any attempt at attachment by being an asshole, because he doesn't feel worthy of that attachment.

Of course that's all happening at a one hundred percent subconscious level. In addition to being a narcissist he is also one of those people with essentially zero inner monologue or capacity for self-reflection. My mother-in-law often asks him how he's feeling, and not once has he been able to plainly answer that question. His existence is simply riding the current to-do item, then the next, then the next, and sentences simply pop out of his mouth ad-hoc whether they are mean, cruel, blatantly hypocritical, or don't even make any logical sense.

Changing gears and on the gaming front, my son had one of his best friends over this past weekend, and I fired up "Streets of Rage 2". His friend is twelve, and it was fun watching someone that age attempt such an all-time classic-- best brawler ever made-- for the very first time. I also sat him in front of "Gate of Thunder" on PC Engine so he could see what a "shmup" is, and handed him the Game Gear for a little "Sonic Chaos". He's developing a love for old video games-- as he put it to me: "I know I wasn't even alive then, but even for me the old games have a nostalgia with them, an 'it' factor that modern games totally lack." I told him he should pick up one of the cheaper old systems, and ask for a flash cart for Christmas.