The kids and I just wrapped up "Death Note" last night, what a series! So far this is every anime series I've seen and how I rank them. The quality is so high that even the ones at the bottom of the list were enjoyable, with the exception of the last one which was ruined by the kind of obnoxious, abrasive feminist characters I've become accustomed to in Western media:

1. Neon Genesis Evangelion
2. My Hero Academia
3. The Promised Neverland (Season One)
4. Hunter x Hunter
5. Death Note
6. Cowboy Bebop
7. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba
8. The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.
9. Samurai Champloo
10. Spy x Family
11. The Promised Neverland (Season Two)
12. Jujutsu Kaisen

I thought "Death Note" was phenomenal-- the fact that it could only fit in at fifth in my list is a testament to how good some of these shows have been.


Starfield Captures

As is my wont, I made one of my traditional montages for "Starfield", which you can watch here. It was a difficult game to capture good footage for, what with the washed out broken HDR appearance, plus the fact that the Xbox Game Bar was capturing the whole buffer, not just the part with the 75% FSR2-scaled portion with the actual game in it, meaning I had to manually crop each clip in "iMovie" as I went.

All the same, I tried to demonstrate some of the game's myriad gameplay elements. The below screenshots are likewise washed out and with bizarre contrast issues, but they hopefully at least show off how detailed the environments are. Click on any of them for the original Xbox Game Bar PNG version.























Expect a full review sometime this week. It's like a "lite" version of many games, jammed into one package.


Hard to Believe

I read earlier this week that a bit more than fifty percent of the population has essentially no ability to have an inner monologue. I believe it even though it's difficult to believe such an astonishing thing! How is it even possible? How do they arrive at any conclusions? How do they formulate ideas? How do they make sense of the world, and others? What is it even like in their minds then, on a moment-to-moment basis?

I sought an answer to that lattermost question in particular, and found it described thusly: some stimulus happens, then they do something. Then some other stimulus occurs, and they do some other action. This explains so much to me of how the world works, and how little self-awareness the average person has!

For me, my brain constantly-- without even a moment's interruption-- has at least one "conversation" going on within it, involving my mind "discussing" some idea with one or more fictitious entity or entities. Sometimes there are two and even three such "conversations" happening all at once. On top of that, I always-- one hundred percent of the time-- can "hear" a song playing on loop in my head.

This is why I often appear distracted, or absent-minded: there is a noisy party going on in my brain all of the time! My mind is a happy place-- but it's also a hopping place.

But back to the subject at hand: these "conversations" produce results in the form of final analysis on some topic or issue, which create my entire way of understanding the world around me. I very often "speak" some of these conversations out loud under my breath, which helps me follow their threads. A few times in my life I've been caught "talking to myself" while out on walks by the surprise appearance of random strangers, such as from around a corner, or kneeling in their lawn inconspicuously trimming a shrub. Instances like those are embarrassing, but I wouldn't give up the way my mind works for anything.

I'm so self-aware, that my life takes place in quasi-third person. I obviously don't see myself in the third-person, but in my "mind's eye": it's like playing "Resident Evil" or something along those lines, where I can see the room, where I am in it with relation to others, and the impression I'm making via the interactions I'm having with the other people there. It's like I'm not just in reality, but I'm having the whole thing simultaneously reflected back to me as well.

In total contrast, my father-in-law came up to me two evenings ago, sternly: "Don't step on the mower deck." Having zero clue what he was even babbling about, I replied smilingly, "I didn't, but maybe you did while it was in the garage?" Anyone with an ounce of self-reflection would have immediately grasped, "Touché, good point-- I guess I did baselessly accuse him." But because my father-in-law is-- and I'm absolutely certain of it-- one of the people with no inner monologue, he could only receive the stimulus of my statement literally. He replied angrily, "I didn't! Not the way it's positioned in the garage especially!" After which, he stormed off as he always does.

Of course, I realize perhaps half of my audience here also has this particular issue. But don't take offense: I recognize that it's probably "on a spectrum", as they like to say: it depends on how much connective tissue between the different relevant parts of the brain are operating, which undoubtedly controls to what extent people have a "mind's eye" and inner monologues.


Tim Cain Stories

I thought this video from Tim Cain was interesting, it's well worth a listen. Of course, he's absolutely right-- young people today are absurdly risk averse, which is part-- along with a simple lack of talent-- of why modern games are soulless, and need to lean on the crutch of cheap, hipsterish, easy-to-write, tiresome self-congratulatory ironic self-awareness.

Not wanting to offend, Tim Cain immediately then transitions into the oh-so-common "But look at how creative the 'indie space' is, that's the good news!" Anyone who has browsed through the sixty thousand pixelshit "It's like Super Metroid and Soulsborne!" games on Steam and elsewhere will know that indie games are just as creatively bankrupt as the triple-A titles are. And just as woke, on top of it.

Slightly off topic, I would love to ask Tim how all of the woke garbage wound up in "The Outer Worlds". You'd think an older white guy like himself would have fought against it. Then again, he is evidently a homosexual, so maybe he's "all in" with John Money's "theories"-- who knows.