The web site of Vas

Hello, world. I am Vas, and this is my private playground on the web, courtesy of Neocities. There are no comments, but you can get in touch through email and xmpp. I can read English, Ελληνικά, and 日本語. If you like, you can find lewd things over at AO3

The Little Wokemaid

I am a vile, racist extremist, and I have not watched the Little Wokemaid. The discussion around this oversized turd is reason enough for going on a genocidal rampage. The amount of human rights you deserve cannot be understated, and your words are like sandpaper in my brain.
Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night: Surprisingly nice. It helps that SAO is gigantic enough of a franchise to warrant a great budget, but also it adapts arguably the best parts of the franchise, before its degeneration. Asuna has more dimensions to her than Kirito (well, at least for now), and the addition of Mito is good. Still, it isn't a stellar example of the Man vs. Nature trope, and some of the more nuanced characterisation is left to our imagination and unexplored. For example, Mito seeing Asuna as her only friend who can actually keep up with her. It being SAO, it revolves entirely around two, now three characters, producing a claustrophobic sensation that sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the film, and one would have expected that having few characters would have allowed their exploration in greater depth. Still, it was a very pleasant watch and as good a revitalisation of the franchise as one could have hoped; certainly SAO has given us significantly worse. 7/10
Ascendance of a Bookworm : The other great isekai of recent years, discounting Mushoku Tensei. Japan spreads the glory of the printing press and the Enlightenment to a high-fantasy medieval European setting, having strong Spice and Wolf vibes (and Dr. Stone too, if you think about it). It handles its themes and conflicts with surprising maturity and attention to detail, offering a degree of on-the-ground realism that has been missing in our hearts since Goblin Slayer stopped airing. Unfortunately, some recurring characters are a bit too bland, and sometimes forgotten, but overall the series impresses way more than it disappoints. A strong recommendation if you’re starving for more high-quality isekai. 8/10.
Overlord : It has some interesting ideas, but its overarching themes do them disservice. It’s one thing to have a villain protagonist, and another having an overpowered protagonist slowly descending into villainy because he’s socially pressured by his underlings. The lack of any strong primary conflict harms my ability to relate to any character, and the few that I do care about get treated like cannon fodder in the end. In light on things like Youjo Senki, which execute a similar idea much better, I can only be disappointed. 4/10.
Bofuri : I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense : Imagine Sword Art Online, but even more boring. It doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel, but it’s damn close, and it has almost nothing of value to offer aside from wasting your time watching moeblobs. But even taken as mindless slice-of-life, still it manages to underwhelm. 2/10.
So I’m a Spider, So What ? : More fun than it has any right to be, owning to its entertaining protagonist. Nevertheless, scenes not involving the protagonist feature the typical fare of isekai tropes that bore me to death. It’s at its best when Kumo is struggling to survive, and falls off elsewhere. 6/10.
Vivy : Fluorite Eye’s Song : Hatsune Miku prevents the second renaissance. This is the Matrix side story you never knew you needed. Well-directed and well-paced, though not without its failings, Vivy is a paragon of good, self-contained, original science fiction in the adaptation-loaded modern anime climate. I am not a fan of the time travel trope, as it opens itself up to plot holes and detracts from the story. Nevertheless, Vivy is an excellent allegory for the power of humanism and, more directly, the Vocaloid fandom. 8/10

NovelAI : I want to breed with a neural network

NovelAI is a subscription service that provides a nice user interface to a text prediction neural network. It allows you access to all the goodies without the hardware or time required to run and fine-tune a model. It can be a writing assistant, a collaborator, a dungeon master, a confidant, and, yes, even your prepubescent waifu, all for the low low price of $10/month. You have a myriad questions, I am sure : How ? Why ? Why hasn’t Vas been vanned yet ? Today, your questions shall be answered.

Paedosexual Reincarnation : I Will Seriously Pair Bond With A Child If I Go to Another World

Beloved by paedosexuals and despised by MyAnimeList reviewers lebensunwertes leben, Mushoku Tensei is the tale of a good-for-nothing perverted shut-in otaku who is murdered by a truck and reincarnates in a high fantasy world. I've seen the premise a billion times, and I've been bored to death by it a trillion more. My unending hatred for isekai has brought me to its progenitor-God, its iPhone 1, its epic of Gilgamesh, its Neon Genesis Evangelion. But how does the oft-imitated baby daddy fare in these metamodern times ? Does the original shine brighter than its carbon copies, or did time dilute its most mind-numbing sins ? And above all, are prepubescent children sexually attractive ?

Temporarily embarrassed noble

It doesn’t matter what you say you stand for. On the internet, anyone can and does say anything. What matters is what you actually stand for, with actions, not words. When rightoids claim to serve God and Country but proceed to rape and pillage their own land and people in the name of a fat paycheck, leftoids have no trouble identifying that what they actually stand for is big, fat paychecks. It’s time to face hard, sad facts about our metamodern left politics : they are no longer the politics for the poor, the disprivileged, and the dispossessed, but for spiteful tweeters who bemoan they aren’t oppressors. This has started being reflected in elections, and will cause irreparable harm unless there is a course correction. Hint : there won’t be. Buckle up.

Electron does what you won’t

I’m tired of listening to subhumans redditors complaining about electron and bloat, and not because I’m a bloat, electron, or web stack lover. I do think it’s ridiculous that every chat app, game, and even text editor ships with a full copy of google chrome and node.js to do its relatively trivial task. However, it is not enough to post angry comments in your degenerate SoCal subreddit ; you need to understand why people flock to electron (and web technologies more broadly) instead of your favourite GUI framework. By understanding the problem you can begin offering solutions instead of merely whining for upcummies. Desktop programmers are so spiteful that their holy cows are getting slaughtered that they are simply refusing to provide solutions.

How many decades do we need to wait for Wayland to be usable ?

I need 100% of the people evangelising about Wayland to shut the fuck up about muh protocol for a moment and make it accessible. I don’t mean making it noob-friendly. I mean making it friendly to anyone who isn’t a compositor author. I’m not an idiot, I’ve written my own X11 window manager, I can read documentation, I’ve been using Linux full time since Ubuntu 7.10, my day job is literally managing Linux servers, I’ve been following Wayland since 2010, I’ve seen all your fucking presentations on YouTube about why X11 sucks, and still I can’t figure out basic things about Wayland and its ecosystem, nor do I even know where to look to figure it out short of going through the source code. Since 2015, I’ve tried migrating to Wayland at least once a year, and while there are slight improvements, I stumble on the same fucking bullshit every single time and my patience is wearing thin.

Neocityle Guide

This is an alternative style guide for English. As with all style guides, it aims to improve readability and consistency in long form written English text. It deviates significantly from standard English typographic practice. The main influences are typographic conventions in American English and French, with minor influences by other European languages such as Finnish. Its primary focus is reflowable text on the web and web-based platforms.

The Right to Community

When it comes to preservation — and I’d like to focus specifically on digital preservation — we focus on the preservation of cultural items, like works of art or commentary. Of course, their preservation is essential. It doesn’t even make sense to preserve a culture without preserving the products of that culture’s participants’ labour. But no product of a culture has been created in a vacuum. Everyone in a culture necessarily interacts with the culture, influences the culture, and is influenced by the culture. This can be as simple as motivation. It can be the memeplex the individual tropes of their works occupy. The culture provides the context that is essential in the production of the work, and upon completion, the interpretation and the enjoyment of the work. The culture is the breeding grounds for new works.

Snooze:Fest — Falling Asleep in Another World

A rerun and a global pandemic later, it is time for the much-awaited second season of Re:Zero. Lord knows I was not kind to the first season, and far be it from me to be inconsistent. The second season didn’t have the highs of the first one, nor did it have the lows ; alas, the lows were more than the highs. With Rem snoozing it out for all of the second season (and beyond), it is time for the question you all ask deep in your hearts : can Re:Zero exist without Rem, or will we sleep too ? Grab your pillows.
Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation board is great not just because he's amazing and deserves the position, but also because he has exposed the idiots don't care about free software, and in fact seek to actively undermine it to push their totalitarian, anti-human and genocidal agenda known as « social justice ». The real question is, what are you going to do about it ? Are you going to let woko haram continue their takeover of the projects you have built, or are you going to fight back ? Start today with a donation to the FSF and by boycotting postmodern neomarxist institutions such as Google, Mozilla, and the EFF. End by killing all blue checkmarks. Yes, all blue checkmarks.
Justice League (2021): Basically a different film. It's actually amazing that a turd as big as the original Justice League was able to be polished as much as this. Don't get it twisted: it still is no masterpiece. A lot of the failings of the original are still present here. Some dialogue is cringe, some CGI is bad, there is too much slow motion, and you don't get to see the superheroes do a lot of superhero shit. However, the bigger story is that a studio was able to admit that it did wrong and tried to fix it. It's evidence that fandoms can still exert influence on big productions and perhaps this is a sign that the half-century of great Hollywood cuckoldry is nearing an end. We can only hope. 5/10 meh.

About Vas Keys

Vas Keys is a keyboard layout that I based off Vu Keys by Vu Dang. The modifications are in order to improve the layout for Japanese text and mixed Japanese-English text, similar to TypeHack, although sometimes they are minor improvements for English text as well. Improvements are calculated through the Keyboard Layout Analyzer. For the most common words, for English, is scores slightly worse than Vu Keys but better than TypeHack. For Japanese, it scores worse than TypeHack but much better than Vu Keys. I developed it because I had become good at Vu Keys and didn’t want to switch my layout completely, especially the vowels. Vu Keys’ basic principle of using as many fingers as possible is preserved. My personal best in monkeytype is 185 WPM with this layout.
In QMK, try TAPPING_TERM of 0 (yes, zero), and activate RETRO_TAPPING. In my experience it is much smoother and it saves you a lot of firmware space.

Aldnoah.MinusOne

Picture a politically complex series touching on imperialism, classism and racism, featuring giant robots, big explosions, qt3.14 waifus of royal descent, love polytopes, and an overpowered protagonist. This is the Code Geass that Aldnoah.Zero tries to imitate, with varying success. Despite its big name production staff, visuals, and soundtrack, it is panned on MyAnimeList like it’s the second coming of Twilight : New Moon. Is it justified, or are anime reviewers subhumans ? Yes.

Why I don’t recommend writing in a word processor

In 2020 I decided to experiment with my tools, so I tried to stop doing everything in Emacs. I used LibreOffice Writer for writing. I must say the experience was more pleasant than I initially expected and I ended up liking some things. However, if you are serious about writing and your writing tools, as in you are willing to invest a few hours into optimising your workflow, here is why I recommend writing in a text editor instead of a word processor. This is basically my review of LibreOffice Writer.

Five years of blackpill: the 500k Neocities views special

In the summer of 2015, something new happened: I fantasised about killing myself over long stretches of time. I have always been apathetic regarding my death, but my thoughts never went further than apathy. As this continued for weeks, I decided this wasn’t healthy and that I needed help to overcome it and to avoid doing something stupid. This is how I began therapy and how I swallowed the black pill.

Learning to type on a custom keyboard layout

If you’ve ever hung around the typing community, competitive or otherwise, surely you must have come across memes about Qwerty and how inefficient it is and how it can all be improved by switching to Colemak or Dvorak. Are these legit, or are people falling into mass psychosis like an nVidia cultist eager to spend $1000 more for a 5% performance gain ? I learned how to type at 130 words per minute on a custom keyboard layout — that’s the 99.85th percentile by the way — so that you won’t have to. Behold my anecdote lived experience.

MeToo mechanical keyboard with super blacks (MemeToo)

The MeToo is a very cheap keyboard that you can buy on AliExpress. There is not much to be said about those keyboards, as they're usually marketed towards gamers and have very loud blue switches and gratuitous RGB. While they serve as good entry point into the mechanical keyboard market, they aren't very good and they tend to sound terrible, as if they use a special batch of blue switches that are even more intolerable than normal. As it so happens, one of the things I like the most is taking junk and improving it so that it's amazing, or at least significantly better. To that end, I bought the MeToo memeboard with the explicit purpose of spring swapping it and lubing it. I call it the MemeToo and it is here to #metoo your fingers.
Ordered some more meme Chinese hardware for review. Get hyped boyos. This website is going to be the official China master race review site on neocities at this rate and I love it.

Bad technology memes : save money, fuck hype

Technology is plagued by shitty, incomprehensible decisions by people who should know better. Accepting a shitty deal is something we all have done out of ignorance or hastiness and it is no grave sin. It is a different matter altogether if these decisions are backed by false ideas, because that way you will systematically keep accepting shitty deals. You aren’t even playing the lottery at that point. You’re playing a rigged lottery that’s always going to fuck you over. These shitty opinions are echoed by redditors and techtubers alike, but at least the techtubers get money out of it ; redditors only get ethereal internet points. In this article I will help save you big money that your « influencers » ignore because they don’t make for good clickbait.

JJ40 ortholinear keyboard build & review (Gateron Clears)

Recently I completed an ortholinear keyboard build using parts I got from AliExpress during their 10th year anniversary. As is well known, I approve of Chinese components and products for their value proposition and indie mindset. I got them for what I consider very low prices; a fully custom build like this will usually run you north of $100, and for the good stuff north of $200. However, for what I consider a medium-range build, I ended up paying under €50, which is great value and I suggest it to anyone who is willing to put in the time to assemble it by themselves. If you want to do it, you will need a soldering iron and solder, which you can order from AliExpress for cheap. Here’s my review of the components and some thoughts on the overall build.
I'll be learning how to use the workman keyboard layout and I'll report my findings so that you won't have to.

Microtypography in LibreOffice

This is a guide to making your PDF or print look better in LibreOffice. This is focused on paginated, non-reflowable media. Most can be automated or improved upon through TeX or groff or Scribus, but more people are familiar with LibreOffice than them, so they’re more likely to use them through LibreOffice than learn new software. You can mimic the output of InDesign given time and effort. It’ll never be identical but it can be good enough that a layperson won’t tell the difference, and a professional will have only minor problems with it.
Woke video games. Woke TV series. Woke visual novels. Woke manga. Woke ads. Woke historical revisionism. Everywhere you turn, seething hatred for men, for pale skin, for male interests and sexuality. Your films hate you, your television hates you, your journalists hate you, your advertisements hate you, your communities hate you, your leaders hate you, even your fellow people hate you; for if they self-hate enough, a rainbow-haired hamplanet might grace them with her wet hole. The woke train knows no stops. This is the future we asked for. Everything you once loved, everything you once cherished, everything that made waking up in the morning a deed worth doing, it’s all going to rot and degenerate. There will come a day, maybe tomorrow, when you will look upon the things you once admired and feel not nostalgia nor glee, but bottomless disgust, perhaps even shame that you ever liked anything to begin with. This is the future we deserve.

Joppiesaus asks anything

These are the answers to the “AMA” I announced the other day, which were all from Joppiesaus. Enjoy.
April 16 is the 4th year anniversary of this family-friendly website. Let's do an AMA. Submit your question on neocities, or through email/jabber.
First episode of Fate/kaleid liner prisma Illya but it fits in a discord attachment (8MB). 2-pass vp9, 24kb/s, 256×144, 10FPS, opus mono 16kb/s with low pass filter. Barely watchable, albeit not pleasant. At this compression, you can fit all One Piece episodes in a single dual layer DVD.

5+1 ways to increase your productivity by 69,420%

It’s 5AM. Your eyes are sore staring at your screen. You’ve been power farming in World of Warcraft since… you don’t even remember when you started. You look down to your phone every so often so that you can take breaks by farming in Fate/Grand Order and stroking your peen a little to Shuten’s gloriously prepubescent thighs. In the back of your mind, you’re thinking: “man, wouldn’t it be nice if I were more productive?” I got you bruh. Hello and welcome to my self-help guide. I am Chad Thundercock, notorious self-made billionaire, CEO of my Silicon Valley company that I started with my own bare hands and a small loan of a million dollars from my dad. The only thing separating you and me are our habits, and if you became as productive as I am, you would be a billionaire yourself. That’s because the world is fair and exclusively rewards good habits, nothing else, and if you disagree you deserve homelessness. Join me on my wild ride and gradually we’ll lift the bottom 99.9% to the top 0.1% with me so that we can all be the top 0.1% together, just so long as you remember that I’m above you.

Custom keyboard layout with xkb and ibus (the poor man’s QMK)

This guide will help you create a custom keyboard layout in xkb and configure ibus to play along nicely. Effectively you can configure any key on your keyboard to do anything you want, for example output curly quotes, em dashes, and mathematical symbols or to use something besides QWERTY. After forcing ibus to cooperate, you can retain your layout even in your input method editor, for example to write Chinese or Japanese using Dvorak. This is also for my personal reference because documentation on this subject is scarce at best. It works for X11 (GTK, Qt, xterm, whatever). I don’t know about Wayland.

Ajazz AK33 mechanical keyboard mod log

Late 2018 I bought a very cheap mechanical keyboard from Aliexpress. Since then, I’ve performed various modifications on it to improve its feel and sound, and basically make it less craptastic overall. I was a beginner when I did these and I appreciated beginners’ guides, so this is me giving back to the community.
Blogging software test. If you're reading this and nothing exploded, the update worked. Vote Biden for Paedo Pride 2020; no taxation without representation.
If Democrats steal the 2020 nomination too, do not abstain, and do not vote third party; vote Republican. I'm not saying "Bernie or bust", I'm saying "democracy or death". You want "blue unity"? Then stop raping your allies. The victor must win fair and square, as the result of a democratic process, without election fraud and rigging, and only then should they get your support. If the Iowa debacle keeps repeating itself, or the person with the plurality of votes somehow loses, or there is debate rigging as with 2016, then my support goes whole-heartedly to Trump, and may he do his worst in his second term, up to and including nuclear war. There is only system of governance deserving respect: democracy. If you undermine it, you deserve dystopia. And when the poor starve for idpol, let them eat Trump.

Sell your NAS: Store all your anime in your pocket

I keep reading about these extremely complicated schemes you people set up in order to store all your Chinese child pornography cartoons, with ZFS arrays spanning terabytes in the double digits, and of course running on AMD© Ryzen™ Threadripper® CPUs℠. Let’s not talk about the hoops you jump through to ensure uptime by securing your power delivery, network, and of course security from random Chinese ssh hacker bots. Today, I have good news for you. I have solved the anime storage problem for good, and by “good” I mean “for the next decade”. Forget 100% of the bullshit tedious file system and networking tasks that have given you lots of anxiety and very little anime. Actually forget about partitions; you should just mkfs.bcachefs /dev/sda raw without even a partition table. Sell 👏🏻 your 👏🏻 NAS 👏🏻
Ford v Ferrari: The film that proved to Fast & Furious: Grrrl Power edition that a driving film should have cars and driving in it. The only thing to dislike about it is Ken Miles' interactions with his wife felt forced and pointless, like some producer demanded there be a romance subplot for the normie's girlfriend who hates cars. It fools no one. It's a film about lots of driving and lots of cars. Great direction and great performances that deliver its message properly. 8/10.
Aldnoah.Zero (Season 1): Good, when it plays to its strengths, but has a weaksauce cliffhanger ending that brings few if any character conflicts into meaningful conclusion. Excessively padded out for an anime series: by trimming event recaps and drawn-out scenes, one could easily fit 2 to 3 episode's material in the time gained, which should have been used to explore the world and other characters. There's stuff to like here, but unfortunately a lot of it is things you're forced to imagine because they're glossed over rather than shown. 6/10. Lose some weight.
To All the Boys I've Loved Before (Cancerflix): A movie about a psychotic, psychopathic, borderline, self-hating, white-worshipping wannabe turboslut and her misadventures with a frat boy gigachad (and also all the other white gigachads she wants to fuck). There's little to say about it, it's yet another American "romantic" "comedy" that is neither romantic nor comedic, and in fact celebrates the degeneracy and pretentiousness that plagues the Asian-American female population. The fact that this got 97% on Rotten Tomatoes (compare: The Matrix at 88%) should tell you all you need to know about Rotten Tomatoes and the film "review" (promotion) industry. This movie deserves gas gulags. 1/10.
KonoSuba (season 1): Something actually watchable for a change. Starts out a bit weaksauce, but the memes get more hardcore the longer it goes on for. The isekai genre is a good match, because it's meant to be subversive and deconstructive. Impressive character development given the genre and tone. Goes experimental with a few of its later episodes, which works well for it and I hope to see more. An enjoyable and light-hearted watch. 6/10.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): I'm not joking when I say I almost fell asleep during this. The first film was crap, but the sequel takes the crap to a whole notha level. You shouldn't watch this. I can't describe how mindlessly boring it is. I honestly can't remember most of what happened because it was so boring and I had trouble paying attention. I'll go out on a limb and say this was the most sleep-inducing film I've watched in my life. Perhaps it'll be more fun for you if you get some hard liquor inside you. Another piece of crap I was forced to watch. 1/10.
6 Underground (Cancerflix): Cancerflix, the most cancerous production company, combines forces with Michael Bay, the most vapid director, in order to produce an uninteresting snoozefest. The most interesting part of this film is a minor character has a cool beard, and that should tell you everything you need to know. The action scenes are without weight, the characters are uninteresting, Ryan Reynolds plays Deadpool again, the morality is degenerate and the script is derivative. Again, I was forced to watch this. Any Brazzers porn video is more interesting than this. 2/10.
The Witcher (Cancerflix Adaptation): Unsurprisingly, mediocre as fuck. In almost every episode and in almost every respect, it insults your intelligence as a viewer with its blatant impracticality and inconsistency. Padded out, poorly executed, poorly paced, and lacking in anything that makes a fantasy franchise interesting, it nonetheless has the gall to sequel bait. The visual FX teams and the actors do their best to carry it, and admittedly there is one (1) funny meme in it. There is no salvation. I was forced to watch this, because otherwise I avoid Netflix productions. 3/10. Play the game.
Dr. Stone: The Chaddest, most masculine anime you'll see in a while. Literally Neil DeGrasse Tyson: The Anime. From the very first second until its last, it overflows unadulterated testosterone. Transmen watch this series to save up on androgens. It has only one goal, to prove that science rocks, and it delivers. A little weaksauce on the plot, without much in the way of epic conflict, but nevertheless very enjoyable. 8/10.
Mr. Robot: A realistic and enjoyable dive into hacker culture, ruined by American writers' obsession with multiple personality disorder (which doesn't exist FYI). Initially, the technical and sociological focus of the series makes it stand out above and beyond its brethren in Hollywood and cop dramas, but gradually the petty interpersonal and psychological issues of the characters eat away at the series until all that remains is yet another soap opera, but this time with more computers. Its weaknesses rear their head from the very first season and only grow worse. Waste of hype and acting skills. Stick to the first season and pretend it's over. 8/10 if you pretend. 5/10 if you don't.

Buy Ryzen

Computer hardware, and in particular consumer PC hardware is plagued with a particular brand of parasite: corporate shills. Whether it is because they enjoy Intel’s fat paychecks, or to rationalise spending hundreds on Core i5s, on silly 4 thread 14nm+++++++++++++++++ nodes, they will argue against reason that you should not buy Ryzen, because fuck you. This is sheer quackery and it deserves to be mocked— nay, it deserves to be gas gulagged. In 2019, AMD CPUs are the objectively superior purchase at every desktop price point, from dirt poor to filthy rich, from normie to enthusiast, for productivity and for gaming. Intel apologias work by: a) undervaluing multi-core performance, b) blowing single-thread gains out of proportions, and c) not considering externalities. This leads to comical results such as a 4 core 4 thread Core i3 8350K “outperforming” an 8 core 16 thread Ryzen 2700X, even though the Ryzen is significantly better and also cheaper.

11/11 China Master Race Deals

This is a time-sensitive post about the best deals you can find on Aliexpress by exploiting discounts and Dear Leader’s transportation network, assuming you don’t care about shipping time and warranties. Neocities saves you hosting costs and now regular spending costs too!
Unnatural Selection: Often, it loses itself in the minute personal drama of the people involved, and honestly at four hour-long episodes, it does feel a bit too padded out for the views, but nevertheless it delivers on what every good documentary aspires to: blowing your mind. More than a few times, it felt like I was watching a science fiction film, or reading a Peter Watts book, rather than a documentation of reality. If you watch Unnatural Selection and aren't hyped for what's to come, there's probably nothing out there that will convince you, unless you see it happening before your very eyes.
Yōjo Senki: More interesting than it initially appears given its Wikipedia summary. One of the few isekai franchises that actually uses the trope for something meaningful, in this case the protagonist’s awareness of the real Great War that happened in our timeline. That said, some decisions remain unintelligible, like some poorly composed 3DCG shots, or why countries don’t share their real-life names. Presumably this is so as not to cause offence, but I doubt anyone sensitive would be spared from that detail alone. Nevertheless it isn’t fascist apologia as it may initially seem, with the series regularly reminding you that what is happening is bad, but without patronising you by spelling it out for you. It has a very distinct style, both in visuals and in sound, unless 3DCG messes it up; air fights in particular, especially in the movie, are very enjoyable and well-choreographed. Its high pace makes it very easy to marathon, and keeping up is an intellectual exercise for a discerning audience, which is appreciated, and starkly contrasting the infantilising perspective of Hollywood capeshit propaganda films. It is laser-focused on its niche, Modern Era military strategy, often to the detriment of its other qualities, like character building and drama; characters are often flanderised for the sake of brevity and in order to fit in its frantic pace. If you pay attention, there are many interesting character arcs, but I would prefer for them to be shown more; they felt a bit glossed over. The sociopathic protagonist can be interesting, but her lack of connection to other characters removes the emotional impact of scenes where they are in danger; character development in that regard isn’t so much shown as it is implied, maybe, if you look real close. 7/10

Communism won’t fix incels

Communism, and more broadly egalitarianism, is based on the principle of eradicating the distinctions of class between people, in particular focusing on wealth, but also including gender and race and so on. Incels are people—mostly men—who want to get laid but can’t. In particular, blackpilled incels have an ideology vaguely similar to MGTOW, that in addition to incelibacy includes critique of women’s behaviour, often harshly spoken. There is a belief in left-wing circles that incels will be fixed by left-wing policies, but I think this is divorced from the truth, and in fact they will exacerbate the problem.

Emacs for writing, 2019 edition

I used to have some tips and tricks for writing in Emacs, but that article no longer exists. I spent the first 6 months of this year giving Atom and VS Code a serious try for coding and writing, and after that I took a short break and returned to vim/neovim. Now I’m back to Emacs, with an entirely new configuration, and these are hacks I use every day to make writing easier. This isn’t an Emacs tutorial. init.el here

Heatmap in LibreOffice Calc

Heatmaps are a data visualisation technique where values are arranged in a grid and then shaded according to their values. If you’ve seen the GitHub commit heatmap, you know what I’m talking about. You can replicate it in LibreOffice Calc, so that you can see whatever data you want in a heatmap; how many hours you’ve spent being productive, how many words you’ve written, and how often you’ve told someone to kill themselves.
Kanata no Astra: A survival series, but in space!. There's plenty of its kind out there, but the characters keep it much more interesting than it had a right to be. As the story progresses, more and more focus is shifted away from the survival and towards drama, world-building, and politics. Good balance between serious parts and comedic relief, maintaining a generally upbeat tone without damaging its other qualities. Is helped by the fact that it has a very specific story to tell, and executes it as well as anyone could hope to, without sequel-baiting or filler; it is compact and to the point. Making the first and last episodes double length was a great idea, because the foreword and afterword are both lengthy and necessary, but they would have ruined the pacing if they were their own episodes. Visuals are nice and the 3DCG doesn't get in your face too much, and characters are distinguishable through more than just their hair colours, although they can be a bit too tropey at times. Nevertheless, it plays its tropes straight and unironically as a love song to sci-fi fans, so don't expect a ton of realism. Unfortunately, there was nothing in it that truly wowed me, so while it is a great and enjoyable watch, it isn't a timeless work of art or something. 7/10
Cop Craft: The most enjoyable series of this season. A buddy cop series with fantasy elements, it consistently delivers the best writing anime had to offer in Summer 2019; it is no surprise that it was the work of an experienced author, as in not his first work. Alas, due to budget and time constraints, the animation quality suffers, especially in action scenes, but even gimped it remains a blast to watch. I cannot offer enough praise for the world-building: it is clearly made by people who understand American culture and how they specifically apply to this genre, and of course the fantasy world elements are similarly nuanced, from the constructed language to news headlines and or even the websites people use and how. The characterisation is always spot on, with even minor characters having more vivid colours than other series’ main cast, and the interactions between them are intoxicating. In more than one case I couldn’t believe these lines were written for an anime series; so starved was I for good writing. It doesn’t waste your time. The pacing is rapid and everything from details to major plot twists are preferably shown rather than told to the benefit of the perceptive and loyal viewer. The cinematography is filled with 200 IQ takes up there with the best of them in Hollywood. The character design is from lolicon legend Range Murata and it shows in how (((intellectual))) Exedelica’s sublime flatness is. Does not shy away from more complicated issues, such as human trafficking, war crimes, or racism. If you are to watch anything from Summer 2019, watch this. Series like this are why I’m proud to be in this fandom, or, indeed, alive. 9/10

LG 25UM58-P 25″ ultrawide monitor review

I recently upgraded from my crap-tastic and ageing Samsung Syncmaster T220HD monitor, which after years of use and abuse was really beginning to show its problems. I was fine when my previous and even current smartphone had better colour accuracy, but what started grinding my gears was the crap-tastic Chinese tablet (review coming soon™) that I snagged for free €100 having a better display. It was so old it wasn’t even Full HD; that should tell you something. So when the backlight finally started flickering and it looked like it was on its last legs, I bit the bullet and got myself a proper ultrawide Chad monitor to get into the productivity meme. This isn’t my first encounter with this display, as I have suggested it for a friend and he liked it, but I found it at the unbeatable price of €139 and couldn’t resist any longer. If you can find it at a similar price, I strongly suggest it; ultrawide isn’t a meme.

Abbreviation mode: write smarter, not faster

Since the invention of the typewriter, people have had only one method to input text faster: actually typing faster. Think about how dumb this is. Your average mechanical keyboard has more transistors than supercomputers used to have, and all that we’ve managed to do with this power is making it more comfortable to press the same dumb QWERTY keys that our grandparents did. Software advancements like speech recognition are only sidestepping the problem that if you have a lot of text to type and want to do it on a keyboard, there’s very few things to help you besides your physical ability as a typist. If you’re into transcription, you’ve probably heard of stenotypes, which, with practice, will allow you to write in excess of 200 words per minute. However, stenotypes, and their software emulators, are mostly aimed at professionals in courtrooms and such, and are effectively entirely new keyboard layouts, with everything that means for computer accessibility. We’ve all heard what’s happened with the supposedly superior Colemak and Dvorak layouts; nobody actually uses them. Luckily, there is salvation: abbreviations.

Fix the internet in one fell swoop

It is no secret that the web is plagued by bloat, malware and cancer. Despite numerous attempts and conferences, the problem remains and is worsening by the day. The web design community, instead of solving the problem the proper way, is instead doubling down on its pathological behaviour with more frameworks, boilerplate generators and compilers. All of us, including web developers, are aware that faster, lighter websites are superior both for the maintainer and for the user, and yet the industry refuses to adapt. Hell, it is adapting in the opposite direction. We have seen these issues in the past with leaded gasoline and tobacco, and of course presently with net neutrality and climate change. It is a market failure, and considering how much electricity is spent powering the internet, it is of paramount importance that we fix it for the ecological impact alone. As with all market failures, there is but one solution: brutal government intervention. Although I would love to throw every webshit into an unironic, nonmetaphorical and literal gas gulag, today we shall explore a less genocidal, peaceful alternative: money.

Javascript isn’t slow. Webshits are slow.

Javascript made the web slow and bloated. Javascript is a disaster. I could go on and on about the shitty opinions of proggitors, whose collective IQ is less than my shoe size, but really there is nothing to expect from a community which mindlessly flames everything that isn’t Java or C#. I have long maintained it isn’t Javascript that’s slow, it’s your dumb arse, and today I will back up my claim with a case study: the twist.moe front page, and specifically the search bar. Go ahead, try it out; you’ll notice it’s pretty slow. You have a quad core, 3+ GHz beast, and it can’t even do autocomplete decently: what is the problem? Overengineering.
Rest in peace, exhentai. Even in the darkest days, you were a friend.
All things end
We can pretend that it doesn't hurt
Anonymous space lacks grace
And it would rather see you burn



I respect women

I respect women. I respect them in the morning, and I respect before I sleep. I respect them in my dreams. I respect them when I’m eating breakfast, I respect them in the toilet, I respect them with each breath, I respect them with every thought. Not a moment goes by that I don’t respect women. I live to respect women. I’d die to respect women, but if I was dead, I wouldn’t be able to respect women, so I don’t die. Every day, I wonder what I could do to respect women more. I respect women. All women, I respect.
Mutafukaz: Visually impressive but otherwise all over the place. It's more fan service than a film in its own right, which is disappointing considering the great design and animation that went in it. It feels like talent was wasted in an incoherent film. 5/10.

The Redpilling of the Shield Hero

Fresh off last season’s “controversy” with Goblin Slayer comes another ”controversy” with a fantasy series, and it’s about rape again! There’s edge, there’s waifus, and of course, my favourite genre: isekai! Oh joy! I’m not even going to pretend I had any interest in watching this were it not for the drama and I won’t repeat ad nauseam why I hate this trope. What you’re really interested in is whether it’s worth the watch even discounting the drama, and the answer is yeah, pretty much.
It's time to write to your MEPs again because Article 13 is back with a vengeance. Use saveyourinternet.eu for your MEPs' contact information and voting record. Article 13 enshrines the censorship machines of Tumblr, Facebook, Google, and other technofascist American companies into law. Many centrist parties have conspired in favour of it, because they like billionaire money. Your neoliberal elites think that given a choice between voting Nazis and destroying free speech forever, you will never vote Nazis. I don't know about you, but they're wrong about me. Don't take this lying down and indifferent; don't be a cuck.
Devilman Crybaby: A faithful adaptation of a classic comic book, it doubles down on the surrealism, the sex, the drugs, and the violence, but lest assured that despite the Netflix label it remains distinctly Japanese. Like for example the female characters have agency and virtues and aren't mouthpieces for the author's degenerate gender politics. Its artstyle can be divisive, and there are times its scope outgrows its production values, though its greatest weakness are the wild tonal shifts between dark comedy and basically Evangelion (which it influenced). It sags in the middle, though it does a lot of work to make itself more cohesive than the original. It has some very well executed horror and drama near the end, though. Still, it's clearly a work of love, unrestrained by marketability and Hollystasi focus groups, and probably the most genuinely artistic Netflix production we'll see in a long time, if not forever. 7/10.

The first 1000 words

While you incels have been spending your time browsing Neocities cause you’re bored, whining about nostalgiamining, and recreating the premium reading experience of Cuckernoon, true Chads like myself have been taking the Neocities experience to the logical endgame: buttsex learning Japanese. That’s right boyos. If you thought static websites were only useful for edgelords to fuck around and post their hot takes, it’s time to have your minds blown and your eggplants inflated. This is the guide to the first 6-9 months. Strap yourselves in.
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald: I don't understand why this movie received so much hate. Although the direction isn't as genius as the previous one's, it retains most of the good characteristics and drops the last film's weakest point, i.e. the comic relief meme scenes with the titular Fantastic Beasts, which clashed tonally with the rest of the film. Its central plot could be stronger by devoting more time to its characters rather than chase sequences, and it should rely less on conflict by misunderstanding. Nevertherless it achieves what it sets out to do, and it impressed me more than it disappointed me. 7/10.

Spoiler Hearts III

Well over a decade in the making, the conclusion to the Kingdom Hearts story has arrived. The game, the movement, the voice of a generation, it speaks straight to your soul like a bowl of spaghetti served with rice and a loaf of bread—and absolutely nothing else. Sora will journey through many worlds to awaken all the hearts that are using his body like a Trump hotel and leave you with more questions than you arrived with.
Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance: Demotivating Dogshit Distillery. You're better off watching the cutscenes on YouTube if you want to catch up. Actually never mind, you're better off skipping it altogether because 95% of it is filler bullshit and some of the worst this franchise has to offer. It feels like Kingdom Hearts maybe at the very start and the very end, where all the difficulty and plot are crammed. Even then, the gameplay devolves from Kingdom Hearts II's dynamism to a mindless series of flowmotion attacks, blocking, and command deck management; you'll spend a lot of time fighting the controls, most enemies are intentionally annoying, and the game punishes you for trying to melee anything. Your keyblade is utterly pointless as is any sort of interesting combat. As for the plot, well, let's just say your Meow Wow pet is the most memorable character, even if it is a lame Pokémon clone. DDD spends far too much time explaining a drab and straightforward plot, the pacing is shit tier because there is nothing to pace, and its climax would be better off as a Kingdom Hearts III subplot because the way it is executed here carries no emotional value whatsoever. If there's anything that can convince you time travel is a shit tier trope, this is it. A waste of 40 hours of your life but Meow Wow is good laughs, God bless. 3/10.
Mortal Engines (2018): Another garbage film but this time with dieselpunk. It's gotta be anti-porn for mechanics because everything is overengineered but only to add more points of failure—ideally extremely fragile ones. As usual, nothing makes any sense and every character is utterly retarded, up to and including breaking its own subpar world-building within the same film. Usually there's at least one guy to root for, but I think the writers wanted to make a feminist statement, so everybody is equally retarded regardless of background. It's not nauseating to look at, though, so I guess you should shut down your brain and focus on the pretty colours? 2/10 dead on arrival.

Kill all programmers

I am paranoid. It’s not to the level of psychosis, but it’s definitely to an abnormal degree. If you’ve any interest whatsoever in computer security, privacy settings, cryptography and the like, you almost definitely are paranoid as well. I can’t offer you any data, but if you don’t believe me, spend any time whatsoever in computer security-related communities; you will find no shortage of people so paranoid they can’t even socialise like normal human beings. I can relate, and I can even see myself becoming as dysfunctional as they are. I loathe spyware with a burning intensity. I wish death on the people who write it, for they enable abject oppression; they are the enemies of humanity, and I don’t sympathise at all with rationalisations about their profit motive—my human rights are more important than your income. After a decade of learning how to protect myself from all those out to get me, I realised I’d lost before the fight had begun.
Magic Mike XXL: I honestly thought this was going to be hot garbage, but it ended up being fairly good. It grabbed my attention and held it firmly for most of its length; the characterisation was very good and relatable, and though it sags in the middle, it's decently paced. The dancing scenes are very impressive, aided by excellent direction that Hollywood acshit films should have adopted decades ago. It also drops lots of red pills, at least if you know what to look for. 7/10.

Soyboy Slayer

While everyone’s busy fighting the darned Russians or North Koreans or Iranians, our society is facing a graver, invisible menace. An army of nu-males, facial hair sparse and testicles receded, gurgling soylent and threatening our way of life from within. They roam the lands in hordes, chanting strange rites as they wave the Nintendo Switch controller: “sweaty”, “yikes”, “maybe, just maybe”, “let’s unpack this”, “doggo”, “wifey”, and of course “I’m fine with my girlfriend cheating on me with that guy from Tinder because she needs to have her needs met and loyalty is but a construct of the cisheteropatriarchy.” Only one man stands against them, armed with nothing but the memes in his mind and the black pill in his heart: St. BlackOps2Cel Goblin Slayer.

Transcode all your animu for your shitty phone, TV

You finally got yourself a new phone and you think it would be a good idea to watch some weeb shit on the go. Likewise for your new Smart TV. However, woe is you, because there is format incompatibility: though your OS supports MKV, H.264, ASS, and FLAC or AAC, the file doesn’t seem to be playable. Luckily you’re reading the blog so you won’t kill yourself in desperation.

State of Tech 2018

AngularJS on the blockchain. 5 gigahertz, 1 cooling scam. Screen notch. Double screen notch. RTX off: We’re sorry for ruining your 10-hour HEVC encode; here’s Soy Cuck Saga reinstalled for the 24th time, oh and BTW we deleted all your personal files. RTX on: What’s a computer? When your whole life flashes before your eyes, how much of it do you want to not have a firing squad executing you and your entire family because you’re the incompetent cancer that’s destroying human civilisation through sheer force of JavaScript? State of Tech. 2018. Go fuck yourself.
Venom (2018): Not as garbage as I'd expected it to be. Weak opening and too many weak characters. The antagonist and Venom himself are pretty fun to have around, though. Crappy shoehorned romance like a good ol' (bad ol') Marvel film. Not too many jump cuts during the action scenes. I guess it's fine if you just want to kill some time. 3/10.

Decentralisation will fail

Modernity claims another victim: Google Hangouts. Google is on the deathmarch towards outdoing even Yahoo for the company that’s killed off the most services, not that Yahoo is doing bad for itself: tumblr is in the process of purging much of its content as we speak. I’mma give it to you straight: the longer this goes on for, the more of your “beloved” services you’ll see censored or shut down for profit. That’s because most of these services are directly tied to the company’s stock price, or even worse, rely on ads and venture capital (itself relying on ads) to be financially solvent. Since the ad industry is a bubble matched only by bitcoin, the situation is bound to get worse, and decentralisation will not be the solution.
It's the International Men's Day, so remember: It's amazing being male, having male sexuality, male interests, and male characteristics. Most of the things around you, from the desk in your room to the minerals in your water distribution system's pipes are the result of male labour. Tonight I'll fap one out for all our fallen brothers in the war against the soycucks and the femistasi.

Ajazz AK33 mechanical keyboard review

In the past couple of years, I’ve had to move a fair bit of furniture, more than the rest of my life combined. I already wasn’t a big fan of furniture, but god damn it, I absolutely loathe it now. I don’t like stuff. I don’t know when I first started hating stuff so much, but I guess after moving and redecorating a few times, I came to realise how annoying owning too much crap can truly be. I’ve become a minimalist. I want to compactify my life, and the best way to start is with the stuff you already use. The first one on my list was my keyboard.

House of Cucks

It is done. It’s finally the very last season. After much drama and figuring out that Kevin Spacey is one of us, we have arrived to the conclusion of this tale, one last arc to the most notorious political thriller of this decade, the sixth season of House of Cards, the one where this shoddy construction will come tumbling down, where all the Xanatos gambits will— YO IMMA LET YOU FINISH, BUT WOMEN ARE STUNNING AND BRAVE, CAN YOU SPARE A MOMENT OF YOUR TIME TO DISCUSS HOW WE MUST RESPECT WHAMEN?

How Some Geopolitics Carried the Novel (vol. 2)

I’m back at it again with the franchise that nobody wished to have more of. That’s right, my dudes and dudettes, it’s the second volume of Realist Hero, the light novel that made me reconsider life with its literary brillia— Ah, who the fuck am I kidding; it was terrible and I wish I had never read it. Deeper we now go into this isekai madness, the worst genre of them all, the turd that keeps on smelling, even as the industry descends ever deeper into the bowels of creative constipation. Perhaps having finished a novel will give the author sufficient retrospective to make the second one less bland. Spoiler: that happens.

WebAssembly isn’t the Messiah

I’ll keep this as short as I can so subhuman vermin redditors can comprehend it. WebAssembly doesn’t solve the problems you think it solves. WebAssembly won’t magically improve the web. WebAssembly won’t eliminate the pathologies of modern web design, and in fact it’s likely to exacerbate them.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution: A Wattsian tale through and through, but repetitive if you've read the rest of them; very much a discount Island. Doesn't explore enough interesting new facets of the Sunflower Cycle series to warrant existing. More readable than the rest of his works if you're a brainlet normie, or maybe I'm getting better at it. Honestly feels like a bit of a cash grab. The most interesting developments are in the very beginning and in the bonus Hitchhiker short story. Most of the middle is stale. Watts' aversion to visually describing things persists, resulting in faceless characters floating around faceless spaces, and since the plot twists and science don't make up for it, it's less tolerable than usual. Ironically Hitchhiker is a departure from this style, thus more enjoyable. 5/10, you can do better, Peter.
Deadpool 2: Snoozefest from beginning to end. It would have been much better if it was 30-45 minutes shorter. Its jokes get stale very fast to the detriment of the "serious" things it attempts to address, so all that's left is cringeworthy faux-edgy comedy. I felt really sleepy watching this. Rewatching One Punch Man is a far more fulfilling experience than wasting your time with this abomination. 3/10.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: Another meh tier film from a meh tier industry. Does pretty much what its predecessor trilogy did, but less fresh and exciting. The dinosaurs are cool, I guess, but the whole monster flick vibe hasn't aged well, plus none of the villains made any sense. Selling billions of biotech for a few millions? WTF? The casting is less annoying than the first film and there's a couple cool scenes, but it really is a bore. Only worth your time if you really, really like dinosaurs. 4/10.

I know fuck all about about design but I need my page to look good: the style guide

Are you new and ignorant to this web/design/web design thing? Don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to waste on college, seminars, and conferences? Do you have better things to do with your time than browsing inspiring mockup UIs on dribbble that you can leach off of? This guide is for you.
Batman Ninja: Good direction can't save a garbage movie. I can't believe IGN rated this trash 9.7/10. The less said about it the better. It's the Transformers of Batman movies. Avoid like the plague. I hated myself after seeing this. It's 80 minutes of my life I'm never getting back. DO NOT WATCH. It's bad. It's hella bad. We're talking bottom of the barrel bad. 1/10.

Turd Emblem: Fated for Flushing

The Fire Emblem franchise has arguably been in hot water since the SNES era, and definitely since the GBA era. What used to be a rich, complicated tactical RPG regressed with Fire Emblem 6’s back to roots philosophy, and it’s been trying to claw its way back ever since. Though some improvements were made, the regressions didn’t stop, instead growing like a malignant tumour, soon to encompass story and characterisation as well. The 14th instalment of the series, coming off the success of Awakening, was supposed to fix all that was wrong with that game, by bringing back complexity to the game, and also a professional author to give us a compelling story. What a nice world that would have been if it were true.

Westworld: the western world can’t write women

Westworld, the TV series, spawned October of 2016 and outdid the original in every respect. It was the Game of Thrones of robots. It sported strong, independent gynoid protagonists who don’t need no clients, timeline fuckery, face-heel turns, heel-face turns, and a surprising lack of underage sex bo— I mean, youthful maidens. Two years later, can the second season deliver something as fresh and exciting? Can it take the series in new directions? Can it give fapping fodder to lolicons? But above all, can it write women? Trigger warning: yes / yes / no / no.
Avengers: Infinity War: It doesn't have plot holes. It's a hole that occasionally has a plot. A well-written villain isn't enough to salvage it, surrounded by characters we don't care about, an empty world, and idiotic inconsistencies. For an action film, it had disappointing, directionless fights, and worst of all an inability to strike a tonal balance; its poorly-executed humour comes across as insulting in a plot about genocide. But at least it looks okay. 5/10.

Why do people like Rem?

If you ask around the retardosphere, people explain that Rem is adored by the fandom because she’s a cute maid with lots of screen time, a stereotype of a demure waifu, a trophy wife for a protagonist imprisoned by heteronormative masculinity, and a power fantasy for incel misogynerds escaping the friend zone. This is, as they say, not even wrong, to the point where I doubt I watched the same series as those “critics” and “analysts”. If you buy into that logic, you should kill yourself, and here’s why.
Ready Player One: An insult to its core audience. Builds two different worlds: an empty, dystopian mess filled with contradictions and plot holes, and an even emptier game world, full of characters nobody gives a shit about and no relationship chemistry whatsoever. At no point did I care for any character, nor did they for me: it shits in the mouths of gamers by having a bunch of privileged, able-bodied Chads and Stacies who’ve never experienced true social isolation in their lives preach to us about how we should get off the internet and focus on real life more, as if it’s as easy for an ugly wheelchair-bound incel as it is for a 9/10 Aryan God. Comes across as having been written by a retard with no experience with gaming and gaming culture, speaking down to us from their ivory Hollywood tower. I didn’t think I’d see a film with a more enraging core message than Black Panther this year. 2/10.

Lame Geass: Lelouch of the Disappointment

Code Geass is my favourite franchise in all of media. I’ve watched it almost a dozen times over the years, and it never fails to disappoint. If you think about it, it’s the perfect series for me. It’s insanely edgy, explicitly political, utilitarian propaganda, full of incest, and it romanticises paedophi— I mean, it empowers flat-chested maidens to feel comfortable and attractive in their own bodies. Some people say the Bible is the ultimate work of art; others say it’s Atlas Shrugged. For me, it’s this weeb garbage. Over a decade later, I still look back to it for its insights in ethics, politics, the human condition, and art itself; perhaps the most pivotal work of fiction for me. So when I heard of the new theatrical releases, I had insufficient scepticism as to whether film is an appropriate format for Code Geass’ narrative.
Psycho-Pass: The Movie: Retains little of the series' brilliance. Though it expands on the world outside of Japan, it offers few compelling insights, and hints at instead of displaying interesting developments. Ditches the crime investigation and interpersonal formulae for run of the mill geopolitics that are neither disappointing nor impressive, introduces many characters that it doesn't expand on, and thus leans heavily on its returning protagonists from the series; alas, two characters and a mediocre plot don't make for complicated drama. Also, both Tsunemori and Sybil seem to be holding idiot balls. The animation was also good but I didn't watch it for the eye candy. 6/10.

Bi:POLAR ✨Getting Diagnosed in a Different World with Bipolar Disorder✨

Why, would you look at the time! It's weeb o'clock! Have you noticed that every anime series as of late is an adaptation of some sort? Re:ZERO is another one of those, and it's our favourite trope as well: getting transported in a 〜different world〜. Wait, I mean, 〜getting a harem〜. I'm starting to get things mixed up, but don't worry, it's no biggie, because Re:ZERO has all of our favourite tropes and the kitchen sink. Getting war flashbacks yet? OD on your meds and strap yourselves in for a joy ride through the Vas theme park, where up is down and down is even more down, in our quest to answer but one question: should we KILL ALL JOURN— is Re:ZERO a waste of time? <insert-polarisation-pun-here>
My Hero Academia: Entertaining enough, but ruined by its terrible pacing decisions. A good 1/3 of each episode is wasted through editing tropes that belong in soap operas, if that. There are glaring mistakes and inconsistencies in the world-building, the plot is lacking in a strong antagonist, characters (especially the protagonist) make utterly idiotic decisions. Not enough time time is spent expanding on characterisation that would be interesting, and in some cases, the most glaring being Uraraka, followed by Bakugō, character development flatlines, resulting in stale interactions. Nevertheless it builds up hype and executes it well, fighting scenes have good animation, and the voice acting is stellar. 6/10.
Black Panther: An alt-right power fantasy, but with black people. A regressive, patriarchal, tribal autocracy with non-existent personal freedoms, a self-inflicted embargo, intense nationalistic bigotry, in complete isolation from the rest of the world, Wakanda is more interested in maintaining its Big Beautiful Wall and (later) going full Hitler™ with expansionist genocide against the "colonisers" rather than fight against the crushing poverty and STDs plaguing the race it hypocritically claims to celebrate. Its only saving graces are its magical vibrating metal and the cool visual effects of a film that's otherwise political cancer. Propagandistic Hollywood opium for the lowest common denominator of wehraboo aficionados and their dark-skinned ilk, you can be forgiven for idly passing your time with it, but it's impossible to look past the glorification of an ideology and policies that have cost almost a billion lives throughout human history—mostly nonwhites and minorities—repackaged in neoliberal, progressive faux-leftism (fascism). By far the single most disgusting Marvel film to date, rivalling The Birth of a Nation in intended affect and exceeding it in pure, unadulterated, psychopathic capitalist greed, cashing in on racial tensions and the lasting trauma left in the black American psyche ever since some opposing African tribe enslaved their ancestors to be ultimately sold to whitey, all so that some rich Disney stockholder can fill up an extra pool full of Benjamins as they sip on their artisanal green apple martinis off the Miami coast. If you're celebrating this film, especially if you're left-wing, kill yourself immediately and livestream it so that the world can celebrate one less subhuman racist scum wasting our planet's precious oxygen. Holy fucking shit I fucking hate this fucking movie and everything it stands for. I haven't been more sympathetic towards gulags in my life. 4/10, pirate it.
Your Name: The sister heartstring-tugger of A Silent Voice, it has a more interesting premise and plot twist, but a less tight execution. Oh, it also tugs on your heartstrings with less passion. Shinkai teases with a 5cm/s ending, but doesn't pull through, lest you ragequit laifu in the face of no waifu. The background porn is at its zenith, though. The true victim of blue-balling is Itomori. 8/10.
Titan: Promises Interstellar, delivers cheap monster flick. As usual, nothing makes any sense. The science is worse than if you'd only read the first Wikipedia paragraph of everything. Plot has so many holes it could double as a cheese grater. The main villain is cartoonish, and no character is relatable. The protagonist is Blandy McBland, and his wife is a spoiled preteen in the body of an adult. Action is hard to follow and often is shot in such a way as to obfuscate what's going on. 1/10 kill yourself.
No Game No Life: Zero: A mediocre prequel, much like its source material. Great animation wasted on a throwaway setting and flat caricatures of characters. If anything the genocidal events of the film make the happy-go-lucky main series come across as even more tone deaf than it already is. It's at its worst when any characters interact, or when strong emphasis is placed on dialogue. The writing is stuck way too far up its own arse; please stop smelling your farts and have a breath of fresh air. It's cool to look at, I guess, and has lots of prepubescent girls. 4/10.
The Dark Tower: A milquetoast version of the Stephen King series, retaining only hints of the source's glory. The few rays of light aren't worth the price of admission. 3/10.
Justice League: Mindless DC garbage. If you thought the Marvel superhero films were bad, prepare yourselves for new lows. Whereas their competitors are at least somewhat enjoyable, this one's boring. I was unable to sympathise with any of the characters, so nothing that happened here bore any significance. But to be fair, at least the action sequences weren't filled with jump cuts, and the contrast wasn't cranked up to infinity, so you were able to figure out what's going on. 2/10. If you want to watch something about the formation of the Justice League, may I suggest Secret Origins?
A Silent Voice: It doesn't tug at your heart strings. From the very first second, until the very end, it perforates them with a thousand harpoons and pulls with the force of a neutron star. The pacing, the animation, the voice acting, and the writing are all on point. If I have one critique, it's that there's too much crying, which ultimately detracts from the emotional impact said crying is supposed to have. Nevertheless, this is hands down one of the best animated films I've ever seen, rivalling the fabled Disney films of yore. There's very few things that I would approve of more. Drop whatever the fuck it is you're doing and watch this. 9/10.
Blade Runner 2049: nothing will ever be as good as the original, but at least this fanfic wasn't a complete abortion. Alas, the villain is extremely weak, the plot has gaping holes, and most of the characters aren't what they ought to be. The original was a very visual experience, and admittedly 2049 retains this characteristic, though it's far less claustrophobic. Nevertheless it definitely has style. I also appreciate the nod to Vangelis in the soundtrack. 7/10.
Thor: Ragnarok: same Marvel superhero film, different title. I've enjoyed it the most out of those I've seen; it felt like a legitimate adventure, reminiscent of comic books and video games. A big part of the reason is we're dealing with things that matter, rather than Earth citizen nobodies and their stupid interpersonal romantic comedy issues. It seems Marvel has finally realised people watch superhero flicks for the superheroes and not for the chicks. Its best asset were the visuals; the world felt more alive than usual, and the locations felt like places people actually lived in, rather than hollow sets to eat up our time. 6/10.

Reddit Circlejerk Comments

These are my best comments on reddit until I deleted my account. Almost all of them are from technology-related circlejerks, so they're meant to be read as parodies. Enjoy.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: Garbage. No pacing. Cringeworthy writing. Empty characters. Nothing makes any sense or stays consistent. It's so bad it made me want to kill myself. 1/10, ban this suck filth.

How a Bland Hero Bored the Kingdom (vol.1)

A while back, Anpan on the anime conference suggested I read Realist Hero, as part of my curiosity about Japanese young adult genre fiction (light novels). Of course I am aware of Spice and Wolf and such, but I figured it would be a better idea starting off with something less insanely well-known. Realist Hero is part of the "warped in an another world" trope, which is the sensation that's taken over Japan for the past five years or so. Works in this genre are a dime a dozen; Sword Art Online is perhaps the most well known of these. The trope has become so insanely stale and uninspiring, the best way to describe it is taking a look at the Hollywood horror genre, which has produced nothing but utter, irredeemable garbage for the past 30 years, with exceptions you can count with one partially amputated hand. It's so bad some publishers straight up ban this trope. Predictably, Realist Hero is bad.
Harmony: Slow and depressing. You'll be watching this mostly for the writing, which is unrealistic in important aspects, but it actually wraps itself up very well. I get what the author's trying to do, but everyone acting retarded breaks suspension of disbelief. The weakest link are the visuals; many environments look sterile and uninspiring despite the sense of grandeur that's intended, in particular during nature shots and high-tech cities. The streets of Baghdad are an ironic exception. There's a lot of 3D animation, which is sometimes okay, but very often isn't; as usual, 2D animators seem to forget everything they know about direction when they try doing 3D, and the result is awkward at best. I probably enjoyed this more than I should have. Peter Watts' Echopraxia goes well with the film's themes (also Blindsight, but less directly). 6/10.
Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo: Eye candy as far as the eye can see. An archetypal adventure film, it delivers god tier colour, atmosphere, writing, and some moral teachings. I disagree with its message, but that doesn't mean I can't love it. 9/10 gave me feels.
Transformers: The Last Knight: Somehow manages to be a little bit better than the previous iteration by actually having a semblance of a plot. Don't get the wrong idea though, I still wanted to kill myself. Nothing makes sense, poorly edited, poorly directed, action is boring and uninspiring, and the characters are written by five-year-olds. 1/10 pure cancer.
Spider-Man: Homecoming: Another mediocre Marvel superhero film. At least we don't get to see Spider-man's origin story yet again. Visuals are nice, but the usual faire for Hollywood. 4/10.
Yuri!!! on Ice: A tale of two series. For the first four or five episodes, well-paced and inspiring genuine interest. Afterwards, a rapid-fire mismatch of fujoshi fanservice. If you think harem anime is especially egregious, watch this and drop your sexist double standards. Though the choreography is nice, it does get repetitive after seeing it like 20 times. 5/10.
One-Punch Man: Imagine Deadpool, but actually good. The de facto superhero parody series of this decade. Brilliant, impressive, and hilarious in every respect. For a series all about an overpowered protagonist, it got my heart pumping and emotionally invested. Also, Tatsumaki is a loli goddess and if you don't desire her lower body limbs then you're gay as fuck. 8/10.
Rapid fire review time. I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. I haven't seen something with so much gratuitous filler since the last time I watched Dragon Ball Z. The visuals, the music, the atmosphere, and the sense of mystery were good, but god damn did almost every single scene drag on for far too long. You could easily cut 30-45 minutes with no impact on its merits. 5/10, hire a better editor.

Zuk Z2 Review

In June, I was looking for a phone for my sister, when I stumbled upon the Zuk Z2. At this point, my own phone had been falling apart. Pieces of the body were falling off because they were adhered to it instead of being part of it; a terrible idea, by the way, and shame on Sony for going with it. Performance was questionable at best and always had been, especially in web browsing, which in retrospect should be expected from the shitty SoC. Most importantly, the antenna was problematic, so that any momentary loss of signal (which could happen anytime) was misinterpreted as a SIM card failure, and the software would raise its hands in surrender until the device was rebooted and it could try again, a process that took 2+ minutes. The ageing Lollipop software didn't help. It was time for an upgrade. Or, well, two months later, I guess.
I think it's safe to say at this point that the 7th season of Game of Thrones is high fantasy cliché central. It's a little sad seeing a series that's supposed to be intricate and complex reduced to generic "hurr durr, good guys team up to fight the big bad". All the scheming, backstabbing, and machinations that defined it from the very beginning have been replaced with "see problem, smite it with righteousness". The main characters have an almost superhuman capacity to cooperate, and flaws which would have been lethal before are now under the domain of plot armour. Moreover, they carry gigantic idiot balls when the plot needs them to; fighting without armour or helmets, not paying attention to their surroundings, I could go on forever. We can only hope this cancer doesn't metastasise to the novels; good luck with that.
Watched the fifth season of House of Cards. Strong beginning and middle, last third not so much. Way too much time spent on Frank "playing dumb" and self-sabotaging, and it was transparent enough that it would have probably been better if we were officially in on the thing. Distinct lack of closure in the finale. I'd still strongly suggest watching it.