After the End of History

I’m learning that Southeast Asia has a large number of subways and railways currently under construction (I suggest zooming into the maps linked as some of the projects don’t show up properly). Here’s a roundup of the state of railway construction projects in Southeast Asia as of October 2022.

I guess the region is booming and they’re building stuff that’s been sorely needed for decades. The railways are especially impressive considering how mountainous and jungled most of the region is. And yes, they do have high-speed rail, or will shortly in a couple of months (the Jakarta to Bandung HSR is opening later this year).

Honestly, it’s startling to read about someplace that actually gives building public transit the priority it deserves. And there’s a ton of infrastructure being built: bridges, airports, hospitals, and so on and so on.

It’s strange to live in the End of History – also known as the developed world – and peek at someplace where history still happens. Here in dear old declining Canada, the political establishment seems to think that we’ve reached the final perfect society and all that remains is to keep things at a steady state. It’s of course a bullshit mindset that delays the very necessary and radical reforms that we need to get out of our downward spiral (try googling “Canada housing crisis” sometime, or “Canada cost of living”, or maybe “Canada healthcare crisis”).

But in Southeast Asia, the leaders and the people are very much aware that they need massive structural changes and are frantically doing everything that they can to push those through. And maybe they might. The region’s GDP growth rates have been ridiculously high for the past 20-30 years, ranging between 3-8 percent when 2 percent is considered booming in the Global North.

Line graph showing Annual GDP growth rate of the countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations from 2016 to 2023 with the individual country rates ranging from 3-8% minus the negative growth rates of 2020-2021
Click to enlarge

I’ll be honest, I’ve spent the last while watching Youtube videos projecting country GDPs like the one below about the Top 20 Largest World Economies. I like to keep my eye out for members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Watch for Indonesia getting on the board in 2005 then being joined by Vietnam in 2044 and the Philippines in 2048. It’s oddly relaxing to see the masters of the world like the Netherlands and Switzerland drop out of sight and get supplanted by the likes of Bangladesh and Iran.

Obviously the projections are hogwash. They’re merely current GDP growth rates taken to their mathematical endpoint. Any number of things could throw a spanner into the works: a war, another pandemic, a revolutionary new technology, a terrible climate breakdown. The projection is most believable the closer it is to the present day.

But just look at that chart in 2100. China and India are struggling for dominance, the US is at #3, then come Indonesia and the Philippines while Vietnam, Nigeria, Brazil, Pakistan, and Bangladesh fill out the top 10. Has any near-future science fiction story ever imagined this kind of world? I wish I could live long enough to see if this ever comes to pass.

Ah, what a thing it is to still be optimistic about the future. It’s a strange thing to glimpse from the other side of history.

After the war

I saw that Force Awakens movie a while ago.  I don’t know if anyone has made this observation yet, but I thought Kylo Ren was basically the personification of the whole movie: he’s a reiteration of an original product that’s neurotically obsessed with whether he’s as good as the example he’s copied from.

He’s good enough, which is kind of my feeling on the movie as a whole. I thought it was decently entertaining, though it’s kind of interesting to see the Marvel blockbuster formula being used for something other than superheroes.

Karma chameleon

I logged on to the Dragon’s Dogma website for the first time since August. Apparently one of my characters essentially won a beauty contest and was featured on the game newsletter by Capcom. On the one hand, yay me. On the other hand, that particular look is being copied by other players, judging from the screenshots being submitted.

What the hell, people? Get your own look. It took me hours to coordinate that outfit, not to mention the time I spent picking the hairstyle and fine tuning the bone structure and body type for that character. And I don’t want to think of how many goblins and bandits I had to kill for that cape.

Anyway, I’m thinking of playing this game for a third time and getting all the trophies. There are only three left and they don’t look that hard. One quick run should do it.

Morituri te salutant

I bought Dark Souls 2 over the weekend, and I’ve been playing it every day since. It’s quite fun.

Among many in the video game community, the Souls games are held up as the pinnacle of difficulty, with a typical playthrough resulting in at least hundreds of deaths for the player. I don’t really see it, though. My failures are the result of my miscalculations and are essentially just part of the learning process for a new player.

I do want to share my favourite story so far, which is about the first time my game got invaded. Other players may enter your game to help or hinder you, as they wish, and one such person did so to me. I was just minding my own business when someone glowing red showed up in my game. I bowed to him, since it seemed the polite thing to do, then he bowed back, then I stepped forward to get a closer look at him and he shot me in the chest with a crossbow. I didn’t know we were supposed to be fighting. He was classy about it and messaged me saying "Valar morghulis", so of course I replied back "Valar dohaeris" since no one is outdorking me.

Anyway, I also discovered this list of player names banned from Dark Souls 2. Players may choose the names of their characters, and if you’re familiar with certain parts of the Internet then you’ve already guessed that most of the banned names involve sex acts or are various synonyms for genitals. It’s kind of awe-inspiring that so much human creativity is expended on slipping obscenities into a video game.

Elevator pitch

Okay, here’s an idea for a movie: You know how aliens came to Earth and gave us the tools and the science to build like pyramids and Stonehenges and shit? Where did all that high tech space hooey go?

Well, maybe a greedy alien developer was going to demolish their community skate park, so the Atlanteans bet everything on a breakdancing contest that was going to be broadcast live across the galaxy. Unfortunately the alien champion was too fly and – according to the ancient rules of breakdancing – all of Earth had to give up its advanced technology. All this and more in Breakin’ 3: Intergalactic Boogaloo.

Hollywood, I’ll take that cheque now.

Tittle at titles

What the hell is up with anime lately, anyway? The titles are basically a descriptive sentence containing a plot synopsis. I realize this isn’t really a trend from within anime, but because a lot of anime are light novel adaptations. The trend is therefore merely carried over from light novels themselves. Sample titles:

  • There’s no way my little sister is this cute
  • My youth romantic comedy is wrong as I expected
  • I couldn’t become a hero, so I reluctantly decided to get a job
  • My girlfriend and my childhood friend fight too much

Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. What if Star Wars had used the same naming convention? “I went into space and kissed my long-lost sister”?

It also seems that the crappier series are the ones that try to squeeze the entire premise into the title. The ones that pander to a ready-made audience of otaku, I mean (implied incest, flat female characters, harems, etcetera). In fact, this article states that the inherent crappiness and ephemerality of light novels – which are, quite frankly, a dime a dozen in Japan – necessitates squeezing the premise into the title to catch the eyes of bookstore customers who are confronted by shelves of stories so unoriginal that the customers can barely summon the energy to read the plot synopsis on the back of the book.

Fortunately, an insider states in the article that he believes that the trend will burn out soon. New light novels will need another way to distinguish themselves from the pack. Yay for cyclical trends in fashion?

Da Durarara

Damn you, Mass Effect trilogy, why were you on sale on the PSN store? I’m doing nothing but playing Mass Effect 2 as soon as I get home and up to when I fall asleep with the controller in my hands. I finished the first game years ago and I quite liked it, but not enough to deal again with some of the wonky aspects that set my teeth on edge the first time around (i.e., driving the MAKO, dealing with the inventory system, the endless elevator rides, and so forth).

So to refresh my memory on the plot, I read the fanfic Of Sheep and Battle Chicken. I would have been pleased if it were the official novelization of the game, instead of the rather bad spin-off novels that were actually published. It explores and expands upon stuff from the game, and where necessary it invents things wholesale. The story also isn’t shy about changing things drastically from the game’s plot to make the narrative flow better, which I quite liked. It’s by no means perfect, since small but persistent annoyances such as mixing up “its” and “it’s” and slipping between past and present tense happen quite a bit, but they weren’t enough to stop me. The fic’s writer really poured a lot of creative juice into this endeavour, as evidenced by the reams of text about this fictional world’s setting, akin to Tolkien’s volumes full of hobbit apocrypha.

Anyway, that’s what’s been up with me lately.

Also, guess what? Hello Kitty is promoting Durarara. Ain’t that adorable?

Stop the presses!

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU is getting a second season.

MY TEEN ROMANTIC COMEDY SNAFU IS GETTING A SECOND SEASON.

In other anime news, apparently Russia invaded the Ukraine. Did anyone else hear about this? Do you know what anime this is from? I’m guessing Axis Powers Hetalia but I’m not a hundred percent on that.