1 Q.
- 12/29/24 2:36 pm
2 Q.
- 25mpnw
3 Q.
- i've only seen two musicals, the first one was mamma mia which was a guaranteed hit for me because i love abba. the second one was the book of mormon, which i saw on broadway with my friend/business partner/former minecraft archnemesis during our legendary december 2019 nyc trip, only the second time we'd ever met in person (there's a lot i could write about that trip). he was a fiend for musical theatre so of course we had to see something on broadway, despite our mutual precarious financies we both agreed it was worth it to shell out over a hundred bucks each to buy discounted last-minute tickets for the worst seats in the house to see the book of mormon (i still have my ticket, it's labelled "PARTIAL VIEW"). our seats were in the far left corner on the balcony, sequestered away in a private section with little visibility or legroom. then, during intermission my friend said “let me show you an old broadway trick”, and guided us downstairs to a pair of unclaimed seats in the third row he’d spotted during the first half, the kind of seats that usually went for $500 apiece. it was so close that you feel the spit from the singers' lips. anyways, the show was funny and the songs were catchy, i still remember lines like “and i BELIEVE” or “orLANdOOOOOO” or “Sal Tlay Ka Siti” (which i was sure to reprise many times when we were there ourselves). we had a good time listening to the soundtrack again when we were driving deep through the mountains with no cell connection, because it some of the only music downloaded on my friend’s phone.
4 Q.
- currently various cured meats, crackers, olive oil. if we’re talking sugary american slop, then always rice krispie treats. for salty, at this point i can only stand KETTLE brand chips, though if they’re available i’ll also go for ruffles all dressed, the most popular flavor in canada. unfortunately they don’t sell it down here so much anymore.
5 Q.
- not truly, i think
6 Q.
- victini
7 Q.
- iggy koopa
8 Q.
- demoman, specifically demoknight, though honestly i played most classes pretty equally besides heavy and pyro, which are sort of brainless to play.
9 Q.
- wow, that’s a throwback, it’s kind of the original “brainrot” content... if only we knew how bad things were gonna get...
10 Q.
- yes, ABBA, was inspired after answering that question earlier
11 Q.
- the circle is so mysterious...
12 Q.
- no but it has its uses
12½ Q.
i made some progress in the last year, here's quick rundown:
- - saw part of the outside of a space shuttle from a distance in LA
- - read maybe 50 additional pages of the recognitions, after spending an equivalent amount of time reading plot summaries to get caught up again
- - finally made it to gyukaku, as usual there were no shortage of opportunities but i more-or-less gave up trying to convince people to go. then, while visiting my dad, he brought it up again so for the first time ever somebody else actually suggested going, so we went. it met my expectations, though it was a little pricy for me to consider going regularly. i feel like yakiniku has got to be pretty easy to recreate at home, it's just different little cuts of meats with some marinades and dipping sauce, you'd probably spend more time shopping for ingredients than doing actual cooking, if there isn't already a yakiniku guide/cookback you could get inspiration from the menu easily, every japanese sauce/marinade is made from the same five ingredients (shouyu, sake, mirin, dashi, sugar)...
- - for maybe the fifth time i nearly made it to las vegas, i was going to crash in a friend's hotel room for the weekend while he was there for some gaming thing. then there was that massive national computer outage and my flight got cancelled 45 minutes before departure, luckily i hadn't even bothered to head towards the airport because i suspected that might happen. since i didn't have a hotel reservation or anything booked it was absolutely no trouble for me, they refunded my flight and then surprisingly paid an extra $200 compensation, so basically i got paid $200 for not going to vegas. i think some kind of cosmic power is trying to keep me away, i haven't so much as connected through their airport with the famous slot machines, the only question is whether the power is friendly or hostile... should i heed the warnings and stay away, or desperately try to make it to las vegas anyway?
13 Q.
- not really, if you want a long explanation, read foucault's pendulum
14 Q.
- i've always considered vocals as another instrument so i never had any prejudice against it, there are plenty of good and bad vocaloid songs as in many "genres". it seemed like vocaloid fell off for a while there but now it's back in a big way, the most popular songs are better than ever it seems. i spent some time in the project diva mines as a baby rhythm gamer, it's really quite an unusual rhythm game in terms of exclusively sticking to one "genre" and visually, placing notes/targets all over the screen without the possibility of speed mods. sometimes i wonder, though, if vocaloid would have ever taken off if some random illustrator hadn't absolutely cooked with the character design on the "hatsune miku" voice package box art...
15 Q.
- nowadays it’s all about being a youtuber or streamer
16 Q.
- not really, i try to cultivate resilience and soldier through anything while maintaining a good sense of humor and/or bemusement throughout. i also think a lot of stress these days comes from people worrying over things that don’t even matter, new exotic neuroses spread to receptive hosts across the planet via social media faster than ever.
17 Q.
- honestly i didn’t take many memorable classes in high school, the only things i remember are largely times when i weaseled my way out of being in class. in middle school, though, there was this filmmaking elective that was the most coveted class in the entire school, which i somehow managed to finagle my way into taking twice over the course of my middle school career. the first time, we filmed a documentary trying to determine the best water fountain in school, and then a comedic series of skits called “[school’s] most outrageous security camera footage”. the second time i took it, it was with one of my friends who was really into film and we outdid ourselves by making a full episode of one of those paranormal investigation shows you might find on the history channel, complete with an anti-piracy warning at the start, a “reenactment” of the original paranormal incident, an ad break in the middle for merch related to the show, end credits, and a teaser for the next episode. there was even a coherent plot throughout, much more than any other group managed for their final project. we had to beg the teacher to let us go over the time limit so we could fit everything in, and somehow we were even able to get one of my other friends out of class several times so that he could play a part in it. if we're really drunk and nostalgic we watch it sometimes, a couple of the jokes definitely still hold up.
18 Q.
- steel
19 Q.
- obviously asuka, in fact in my evangelion review i offhandedly mentioned that liking rei is a red flag. in interviews anno said that when he created rei he was trying to create the perfect emotionless submissive girl that otaku desired in order to show how creepy it would actually be, unfortunately it seems to have backfired in a big way because instead of seeing the error of their ways, the otaku became obsessed and here we are still arguing over it a quarter century later. i also recall somebody asked why rei disappeared for a couple of episodes in the middle of the show, and anno’s response was “oh, i forgot about her”
20 Q.
- <dl> description list (it’s used on this page!)
21 Q.
it's complicated, i don't think i can properly call myself christian until i finish reading the bible and i'm shocked people who haven't are willing to do so, it's not like it's the apple terms and conditions you're agreeing to. even if i finally committed, i do not think i would go to any sort of organized church, i'm more about the personal relationship, i discussed this once with a vaguely-mystic hemophiliac carpenter i worked with for one day at an event who may have been an apparition of christ, and he agreed. some people definitely do need the structure, like those who can't learn unless they're in a classroom environment, but i do think there's also a danger of becoming a perfomative church attendee, going only to prove to others or yourself you're a good person, while sinning in secret (see matthew 6:5-6).
while i'm here, i should also say a word about
poperycatholicism. i'm predisposed against it, my family has deep protestant roots, and i've read too many (and seen too much anime now that i think about it) where the catholic church are the sinister bad guys (most often it's specifically those sneaky jesuits). recently, i gained some personal experience, though, venturing out to my cousin's extremely catholic wedding, and i saw exactly the kind of things church reformers were talking about. there was the decadence and the ritual, admittedly an extremely potent overall aesthetic, but at the end of the day none of it's actually in the bible, it's all something people made up later, a thick two-millenia gilded crust that's accumulated on top, so thick that sometimes origin gets lost completely.22 Q.
- first youtube poops and now nightcore, is it the teenies again? although i frequently listen to fast music i never really cared for nightcore, guess it kind of struck me as lazy that people were just speeding up normal songs. i even prefer the original slower version of caramelldansen, for example.
23 Q.
- gamer phase, lasted far too long and dealt irreparable damage. i will never recover.
24 Q.
- ha no
25 Q.
- no, my fidgeting is more esoteric (and less likely to cause arthritis)
25½ Q.
- it's not really a huge deal, it's like being the largest amoeba in a cup of pond water
26 Q.
yes... it’s been a while but i might get back into it, i’m on a cycle where every two years i get super into reading japanese and it’s just about time again, it’s also the only period during which my japanese ability actually levels up rather than plateauing from never reading anything challenging. i’ve always had a soft spot for the distinct “visual novel” illustration style and lately i’ve been saving every vn recommendation i see, maybe this year i will only read things in japanese... i might even start doing anki again, i recently found out about a brilliant anki trick that lets you maintain a mining deck without the tedious card-creation process. what you do is find a huge premade deck that already has a card for almost every word, suspend all the cards, and then every time you encounter a word you want to “add” to your deck, search for it in the deck and unsuspend it.27 Q.
- no, i’ve been carefully saving all the buttons that fall off my button-up shirts until i find someone who can re-attach them...
28 Q.
oh yes, i’ve been keeping up with the cooking, earlier today i snapped my penultimate wooden spoon in half trying too hard to scrape the browned bits off the bottom of a pan (i lost another one a few months ago when i was away for a while and my brother left it incubating the whole time in the dishwasher, where it sprouted tiny mushrooms). my specialties are eggs benedict (can slam it out in about 30 minutes now) and stews, which are easy to make in huge batches that leave leftovers for days, sometimes they even age well in the fridge and taste better reheated. my biggest win this year was the hayashi rice recipe i accidentally developed (available on the notebook page), i’ve made it at least four times now. i also found out there's hayashi roux that comes in a box like japanese curry, turns out it was always there on the shelf in the yoshoku mystery zone i always avoided because they all had suspicious names like "TASTY WHITE STEW". i bought a box of hayashi roux recently and i’m curious to see how it measures up.
my biggest loss, on the other hand, was probably this experiment i ran trying to make a small portion of slow cooker kalua pork in this cute tiny crockpot my mom had for some reason. the original full-size slow cooker kalua pork recipe was one of my first big cooking wins from years ago, it’s literally just three ingredients (pork butt, hawaiian red salt, liquid smoke) in the slow cooker for 12 hours, but somehow it comes out incredible. the only downside is that it makes a massive amount, so i wondered if perhaps i could recreate it in the tiny slow cooker to make a reasonable dinner-sized portion. the idea was that i toss it in the morning when i wake up, and then it will cook all day and be fresh and ready for dinner. i even got the ingredients down to just two by getting smoked hawaiian salt. when i tried it out, though, it came out completely wrong, way too dry and salty. i think the main issue was that i didn’t use the right cut of pork, i don't think it was fatty enough, i didn’t use pork shoulder butt because at the store it only came in huge packages, instead i bought some kind of discounted mystery meat cut that sounded vaguely similar. i still had a bunch of it left over after the kalua experiment and had no idea what it even was for looking up recipes, so i braised it until it almost disintegrated and then tossed it into a curry, which sort of salvaged it. it completely came apart in the curry, though, giving it a kind of "japanese sloppy joe" appearance.
i also made a big stride in my culinary education during a snow day (well, more like snow week) early in the year while holed up at a friend’s house, where i thumbed through his mom’s copy of bestselling cooking book “salt, fat, acid, heat”. it probably could’ve just been named “salt” because it’s the first section and feels like it’s half the book, plus it’s the only memorable part (i saw a couple other reviewers with similar thoughts). that’s fine though because the salt section COOKED hard enough to justify the whole book, it was full of mindblowing revelations, turns out i didn’t understand salt AT ALL before. maybe i’m just an idiot but i was always under the impression that the function of salt was to make things saltier, like how you add hot sauce makes things spicy. there’s only a few situations where you actually want something to taste salty, it’s usually something to be avoided, so i didn’t pay much attention to salt. i could not have been wrong, salt is literally the most essential ingredient in cooking, a magic powder that if used right enhances flavor without leaving any trace of itself. rather than making dishes taste more salty, more often that not it makes other ingredients in a dish taste more like themselves!
29 Q.
- arcade cabinet
30 Q.
- all for it, in fact why is it consigned only to special occasions, why shouldn’t everyone dress in elaborate cosplayesque outfits all the time, we could use more beauty in the world, i’m sick of the modern athleisure trend where everyone goes out looking like a slob, i mean i even see people wearing straight-up pyjamas at the arcade sometimes, which is a kind of “night out” destination (though it is somewhat balanced out by the crowd that sees round 1 as a good opportunity to wear their wackiest j-fashion). why shouldn’t every employer create a costume-uniform for their staff members like disneyland does? i don’t have it in me to actually put together a cosplay though i’d gladly wear one somebody else made for me, as long as it actually looks good. people don't expect actors to put together their own costumes, after all...
31 Q.
- not a band/musician in particular, but i can’t stand rap music. do not take this as an invitation to send me your favorite rap song to try and convince me, it will not work.
31½ Q.
- my trick is that i have plenty of time to write because i don't watch youtube or play any video games (besides dance games, which have an effective time limiter called "stamina").
32 Q.
- really depends what is meant by “dramatic”
33 Q.
- i used to be big into 🤔, though recently it’s been all about 😳,🤨, and 😐 for me. i know those are technically emoji and not emoticons, but nobody uses emoticons anymore, though for a brief time i was trying to be super obnoxious by using kaomoji in texts when i discovered that the japanese phone keyboard autocorrect would frequently suggest appropriate kaomoji whenever you put in emotion words or onomatopoeia.
34 Q.
- is this a reference or something, idgi
35 Q.
- has to be the right one
36 Q.
- hatsune miku
37 Q.
- it's cool
38 Q.
- like everyone i read the “percy jackson” series, i got in pretty early, before it was cool, when i started only three of them were out. the first book was the first time i encountered “ADHD”, for a while i remained under the impression it was some kind of superpower, though rick may have been correct about ADHD being evolutionary adaptive in a more violent society, that is if you believe ADHD as a distinct mental condition with a specific etiology is even “real” in the first place and not merely pathologizing falling beneath a certain arbitrary line drawn on a hypothetical attentional capacity bell curve... but let’s not get started on that
39 Q.
- well, for starters, there’s everything i’ve written about on my website, and all the topics i haven’t gotten around to writing about yet or have been avoiding. turns out the trick to delivering eloquent “off the cuff” speeches/lectures is to just repeat a bunch of stuff out loud from memory that you already wrote about beforehand. then again, half of my writing originates as spontaneous rants i’ve delivered to people under the influence of caffeine/alcohol/endorphins/fresh air, which i try to record in some capacity before i forget them completely...
40 Q.
- generally, i get practice because autocorrect has been off on my phone for years, i turned it off when one day it randomly started autocorrecting everything to the same thing, but in ALL CAPS. there are a couple words i can never spell right on my first try, though, like tomorrow (i always try to put two m’s). also, i was unable to spell "onomatopoeia" on my first try back there.
41 Q.
- most
42 Q.
43 Q.
both these questions were probably cute and quirky back when they were written, but thanks to the recent AI advances a lot of very serious people are now worrying about them deeply and concocting all sorts of terrifying doomsday scenarios. they are writing things like “AGI will usher in a new epoch of technofeudalism and whether your grandchildren will be miserable technoserfs or wealthy immortal trillionaire technoaristocrats will be entirely determined by your current proximity to the AI industry. Do you REALLY want to condemn all your descendants to eternal penury by not grinding yourself to the bone to try and get a job at OpenAI?”. the optimists, on the other hand, propose a more realistic scenario in which the npcs are kept comfortably numb by endless streams of AI-generated short-form video slop while the ambitious solopreneur builders/players use AI coding tools to 1000x their productivity and keep themselves occupied by keeping society running in the background, finally not being held back and distracted by “society” or “public opinion”. it’s a little bit sad but if most people are genuinely content endlessly consuming AI slop, should they be stopped? “OMG Just Let People Enjoy Things”. come to think of it, it’s kind of like “brave new world”, a book i’ve never quite been able to call a dystopia...
currently, though, with regards to AI we’ve somehow ended up in one of the funniest/most ironic situations: everyone thought we’d use AI to automate all the boring menial jobs so that people would be free to pursue all their high-minded artistic dreams, instead, whoops! AI automated all the art but can’t flip a burger or mop the floor to save its life. but it's kind of a wash because i'm positive 99% of those people who say they would devote themselves to art if they didn't have to work would actually spend all day smoking weed and playing video games, like most unemployed people. the true artists come home every day from their miserable job and immediately get to work on their art anyway, if they weren't already doing so while on the clock, scribbling little notes atop socal's most scenic rooftops.
i’m not sure AI can get much better within the current paradigm, we have almost existed every source of training data (someone commented that a modern and more realistic version of the matrix would have AI farming training data from people rather than using them as batteries) and tossing more computational power at them is having diminishing returns, but the point it’s at right now is already enough of a gamechanger. where progress is really lacking is from the hardware side, as in robotics and other mechanical interfaces that AI could use to interact directly with the physical world, a problem which it looks like a lot of very smart people are going to be tackling very soon.
44 Q.
- uhhhhh i dunno... what about both, some good old-fashioned ambiguity... something that got my noggin joggin lately was this vocaloid i played in the last version of iidx, it had one of those music videos where they stretch a single illustration into a whole video by moving around a bunch and animating the lyrics around it, the illustration they used was interesting because it had what appears to be a devil miku with a white outfit/color scheme together with a dark color scheme angel miku... which is which? really makes you ponder... the devil often approaches in the guise of an angel...
45 Q.
- tangent
45½ Q.
- i originally copied the floating background symbols from a certain anime opening, however this week thanks to a mcdonalds japan ad on x formerly twitter, i learned that it's called woshite script, a type of jindai moji. jindai moji are forged ancient japanese precursor writing, quite a few varieties have been "discovered" by japanese scholars going back centuries, presumably it's such a popular hoax because japanese exceptionalists are in denial that their writing system was originally lifted from the chinese.
46 Q.
- meh
47 Q.
- DOGS, they have this frightening power that reduces even the most stoic hardened men i know into babytalking fools around them, but i seem completely immune, i feel absolutely nothing around dogs, though if people are around i force myself to pretend so they don’t think i’m some kind of freak. maybe i’m just defective, missing some kind of “dog area” of the brain. now cats, on the other hand...
48 Q.
- i was a voracious reader in elementary school, after i got home from school i would spend all day reading, to the extent that teachers constantly doubted hours i submitted on reading logs for homework, even though they were usually underestimates. unfortunately, almost all of what i read and re-read was an endless procession of YA slop, so it might as well have all been for nothing. i went through many of them while tidying up lately and only saved a select handful for the next generation: lemony snicket, chronicles of narnia, roald dahl, the bartimaeus trilogy. in a cultured society i might have grown up with adults encouraging me to read all the classics, mastering the western canon by my teens like nabokov so i could dismiss revered masterpieces as “A boyhood favorite, but no longer. Essentially a book for the very young”, instead i’m going to be playing catch-up for life and will likely always be a philistine. this would be a great place to spiral into a bernhardian rant about how the public education system is designed to crush spirits and nurture mediocrity, but i’ll spare you. my dad does get a shout-out for giving me “1984”, “brave new world”, “slaughterhouse five” and “catcher in the rye” when i was in middle school, though.
49 Q.
- no but i can play pop’n music decently
50 Q.
- BanYa - CANON-D Full Mix from Pump it Up Exceed 2. alternatively, this trance version of canon that was in groove coaster. love the mysterious unrelated video thumbnail that seems to be some kind of vintage CGI giant salamander.
51 Q.
- may have happened once
52 Q.
- will leave a legacy that critics and pundits deem “[...] complex” and “...grappled with...”
53 Q.
- yes, just recently too, i haven’t mentioned it at all here but only a few months ago i was in e*rope, though it wasn’t much to write home about because i was horribly sick almost the entire time, as if the continent was trying to expel me. at one point i even went to the emergency room, where i waited for three hours watching with increasingly blurry vision on mute a public tv channel airing a documentary about joe biden that seemed to consist solely of panning over black and white “it’s joever” still images of him looking distressed. impressively, a few months later they managed to send to me in the US a bill for 46 euro. i was determined not to let being sick hold me back though and kept trying to do inadvisable things like play pump it up or row to the middle of a lake while drinking a beer, which may have hampered my recovery.
54 Q.
- the one constant in my life for the past decade has been “30 minutes of Phone as soon as i wake up”, interrupted only when i’m beyond the range of signal (camping, usually) or my phone is out of commission. i could probably break this habit if i really tried but it’s not a huge priority because i’m basically useless during that time anyway, i’m really not a morning person and do NOT wake up well, i’ve tried reading books before and i absorb absolutely nothing from them, i might as well be reading them blackout drunk. i suppose the only solution would be to fix my wakeups, which might be possible taking the right supplement or equipping my bedside with a coffee machine that automatically dispenses a pot into an IV drip immediately upon awaking...
55 Q.
- carrot. wait, is potato a vegetable?
56 Q.
- i acquired a lot of brief random fears from watching certain movies, none of which were even horror movies
57 Q.
- i like reading random neocities diaries, i suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising because literature is fundamentally voyeurism. that’s right, i read your posts, even that embarrassing one you had second thoughts about and deleted an hour after posting, i’ve absorbed it, it’s indelibly embedded somewhere in my neurons, when i die and the nsa uploads my brain data in their database it will go into the permanent record.
58 Q.
- vampire, i mean think about it, there haven’t been thousands of books written about being seduced by a ghost...
59 Q.
- stagnation, probably, hopefully i don’t get so scared of it that i become paralyzed...
60 Q.
- frankly i own an embarrassing quantity of plushies for someone of my stature
61 Q.
- fucking ROCK CLIMBING, and the worst part is that you’re basically a pariah in this damn town if you’re not into it. now i am fairly notorious for hating on things without even trying them but i actually have tried rock climbing and it was painful and terrifying and rock climbing class was the only class i ever came close to failing in high school (by that i mean i almost got a B).
62 Q.
- no, nobody does. cocktails are basically a culinary challenge to see if you're a good enough chef to overcome the overwhelming taste of what is essentially poison. i've had both cheap liquor and expensive liquor, and the main difference between them is that expensive liquor tastes much less like alcohol, distilling liquor is another challenge where the goal is to get alcohol to taste the least like alcohol. in my experience, the current winner is MINTTU , which represents an optimum of alcohol percentage and taste, it’s 50% ABV but goes down unbelievably smooth because the other 50% is packed entirely with sugar and peppermint flavor. opened bottles eventually gain a white sugary crust around the rim, it comes out with a slightly unsettling viscosity, and if you spill it anywhere it will get extremely sticky.
63 Q.
- i’m more of a pragmatic romantic
64 Q.
- envy. highly underrated these days, tbh...
65 Q.
- although they can't see that well, my eyes do look pretty good
66 Q.
- nope and don’t plan on it. honestly at this point piercings/tattoos are so common that it’s more of a statement if you don't get them.
67 Q.
- yes, one time when we got drunk my best friend and i fought on a nearby lawn just to see who would win. although technically he won by slamming me to the ground so hard my head was throbbing all night, i argue that i won in the long run because i somehow dealt him some kind of bruised rib injury that ached for weeks afterward, to the point where he went in to get an xray.
68 Q.
- costco, MUJI, and i picked up all my athletic apparel deeply discounted at a surplus sale years ago for this big event in town
69 Q.
- there’s many places i’d like to try living for a couple of months or so... i guess nothing is really stopping me besides laziness and cowardice.
70 Q.
- despite the fact that it is a trick, magic is indeed real
70½ Q.
- i feel like i need to do something dramatic. maybe i’ll stop writing entirely and start doing some kind visual art instead. maybe i’ll keep writing but only in japanese. writing is dead, played out, maybe i need to transition to a medium with virgin ground left to explore and do Youtube or a Podcast. maybe i'll show up to the library with a typewriter and work on my magnum opus. maybe i'll conduct an elaborate scheme to once and for all get free of my brother. maybe i'll shotgun apply for a bunch of insane longshot jobs. maybe i'll go work at some local businesses doing paperpushing/IT work, automate everything using excel and AI, jobstack and work at several simultaneously. maybe i'll do some tutoring. maybe i’ll get that job at chick-fil-a. maybe i'll go for costco instead. alaska airlines now flies direct from seattle to tokyo. maybe i’ll make an account on X formerly Twitter and meme my way to enough followers that i’ll have people to host me in all sorts of exotic places on an insane world tour, in the same way that the Greatest Poet of Our Generation (don’t ask, you haven’t heard of him and wouldn't like his work) has managed to do for the past year (he also worked at chick-fil-a beforehand). maybe i'll get serious, study ai hard, brush up on coding, move to san francisco and try to be part of the zeitgeist. i've been in a funk because i'm getting to that age where people younger than me are visibly more accomplished, for several days i've been looking at their personal sites (not on neocities, obviously) and all of them seem to be students at exciting schools like MIT or berkeley, have already published 5 papers and founded 2 startups while building neat hardware projects on the side and publishing substack essays and getting thousands of subs, all while hanging out with people all the time doing cool stuff. i guess the comparisons feel bad because i consider myself within their reference class, we're all apples, they're shiny expensive organic ones at whole foods or erewhon and i'm a bruised microplastic and pesticide-infused discount golden delicious at walmart. i’ve done a few of the same things they have, just poorly and on a way smaller scale. i did cofound one startup in college which is still operating and profitable, but in absolute terms the profit is beer money and we always squander it on hare-brained schemes we should've known wouldn't pan out from the start. we’ve even gotten two acquisition offers, though each in the high 4-figure range. then again, i did find those sites i was snooping on a list titled “50 people who will change the world” so perhaps i’ve set the bar a little high...
71 Q.
- no but it’s on the list
72 Q.
- dishes, spending any time at all in the kitchen seems to spawn new dirty dishes at an incomprehensible rate, even when i’m explicitly trying to minimize my usage. sometimes i idly fantasize about getting really into a cuisine with minimal or even edible plates/utensils, like mexican or ethiopian, or just buying an enormous package of paper plates and tossing them into a furnace immediately after using them.
73 Q.
- what they SHOULD have named me, currently the only thing stopping me from fixing their mistake is that even a minor name change would require an onerous amount of bureaucracy and paperwork right away and endless explanations of my situation to various officials down the line too.
74 Q.
- i would not want to choose it myself
75 Q.
- who knows, probably something uninspiring because my parents don't have any cute story to tell about it
76 Q.
- “my treasure... is buried... at-" *ACK* dies
77 Q.
- minecraft
78 Q.
- i don’t know if i necessarily miss it the most however if i could go back in time to the 2021 zero-interest rate tech job market i would do many things differently and probably be a billionaire by now (not from working but from buying deep OTM call options on NVIDIA stock)
79 Q.
- i'm not sure this counts but if i set an alarm, i'm always able to wake up at least five minutes before it, no matter how long i've slept. the thing is, this only works when i set an alarm, if i want to get up at a certain time and don't set an alarm, i'll inevitably oversleep
80 Q.
- no that would be Gay
81 Q.
- youtube, windows media player, car cd player, sports walkman fm/am stereo cassette player
81½ Q.
-
- - the unfortunate proliferation of easily-marketable genreslop in all domains. i've always believed truly great works must be sui generis
- - the internet may be too effective as a tool for connections and it's bringing together people who should definitely not be brought together
- - there seems to be an epidemic of unhealthy relationships with fiction
- - make writing cool again
- - the shift in art away from skill/craft in favor of concept, context, artist identity, etc.
- - the tyranny of the bottom quintile
- - everything is becoming gambling
- - global imposter syndrome
82 Q.
- tokyo, by some metrics also the world’s biggest city
83 Q.
- slugs. i recently got this wonderful banana slug plush, feels like the exact kind of slightly-offbeat plush majime might have
84 Q.
- most of them, which means my precious browsing data is split into multiple parts. perhaps one day the browser companies will bring together their fragments of my browsing data like parts of a treasure map so that they can finally send me a perfectly targeted ad that i'll find irresistible, like for a doremi-themed container that dispenses exactly 1 tablespoon of liquid or powder at a time.
85 Q.
- i don't think so but i definitely do have a handful of unidentified allergies, when i was in socal there was a week where i started sneezing and sniffling all the time out of nowhere, must’ve been some kind of plant i’m allergic to that’s in bloom only that week.
86 Q.
- no, they taste like drinking a firework or a pollack painting and i swear the caffeine in them hits differently than natural caffeine, giving me weird jitters and tunnel vision
87 Q.
- never, in fact i believe even playing gacha as a free-to-play is unethical. i think it’s fairly well-known by now that the entire gacha business model only works because it exploits a small number of hyperconsuming outliers known as “whales” who spend so much that they essentially subsidize the game for every other player, not just the free-to-plays but even the ones that throw a couple bucks into pulls every month "as a treat". although there are certainly plenty of whales like minor saudi prince weebs (they exist!) who can afford to singlehandedly support a whole shitty gacha game, others are driven to financial ruin, their neural circuitry preyed on by game mechanics precisely tuned to extract money far beyond what they can afford. so, in a sense, every gacha game is “Powered by a Foresaken Child”, and as free-to-play player you’re benefiting from that or even complicit, because an active playerbase is needed as bait for the whales...
88 Q.
- i'm physically incapable of getting to sleep before midnight unless i’m jetlagged, sick, or if i’ve eaten a large portion of ice cream after a long work day (replicated experimentally on multiple occasions).
89 Q.
- not enough according to certain people, though what they don’t know is that they’re unwilling victims of a conspiracy perpetrated by Big ‘Poo. they've trapped many in a vicious cycle: washing all the natural oils out of your hair makes your body work harder to produce them, which means that you have to wash them out more frequently, and so on...
90 Q.
- i’ve done it before, for a game development class i had to put together a project proposal presentation and i discovered for some reason that you could import 3D models into powerpoint, so i just made all the mockups of the game right there in powerpoint. i had more or less free reign because i was the “ideas guy” for the group, my other group members were competent coders but completely uninspired, when we met up to brainstorm they were totally silent, so i just rambled out loud in front of them for 20 minutes straight until i cooked up a concept that was more or less a rip-off of an old mobile game i remembered playing during band class in middle school. it involved driving a car, so to represent the car i thought it would be funny to make it a cybertruck, which had recently been unveiled. i put together 3 example level mockups in powerpoint in about an hour with a bunch of random ideas off the top of my head just to get the presentation out of the way quickly, it wasn’t meant to be definitive or anything. but, when i checked back in on my group member’s development progress a week later, i found that they had already faithfully implemented all three levels from the slides, including all my random details.
91 Q.
- LOST
92 Q.
the tippy hat. when i went to look up the picture above, i discovered that there's now an even better one, which i really shouldn't buy...
93 Q.
- i don’t really listen to music based on my mood and i also think it’s kind of cheating when movies play hamfisted “emotional” music to try and get you to feel things during “moving” scenes. a true filmmaker can make an emotional movie while playing “california dreamin’” on repeat for half the runtime.
94 Q.
- very rarely, and honestly they’re more like heteronyms...
94½ Q.
i'm not saying it's a conspiracy but i keep seeing this round hotel towers everywhere, someone should investigate...95 Q.
- you’re reading it right now
96 Q.
- yes – veterans, babies, and animals can suck it up for a couple days per year (or every day if you live by disneyland) so people can have some fun for once in their lives
97 Q.
- does tkmiz count? otherwise, el greco
98 Q.
- 98
99 Q.
- rhythm games, specifically arcade ones. i refuse to play o*u (and never have).
100 Q.
- 1/4/25 5:35 pm
101 Q.
- SURELY you don't think people actually sent in a hundred questions