#various thoughts

- Why can’t the CONCACAF write the names properly??! 75% percent of your members are native Spanish speakers, so don’t “dumb down” the names!

- Why are there people with the first name “Bismarck” in Nicaragua?

ratio and jing yuan soaps have arrived, and for some reason they sent 2 ratio hand creams when i only bought one so today is a great day

unfortunately i can't actually go pick these up yet as they're currently about 6000 miles away

sometime next year, january 2026, i will be complaining about mihoyo's prices while continuing to throw money at them

anyway that's what it feels like watching 喜夜 season 2

there's only so much funny you can give an audience before they start to get saturated with funny and now you have to find something even funnier to get those votes so you can progress to the next round and meanwhile the audience is all going this isn't as funny as it used to be

i liked all 4 of the sketches on the latest episode (10/10 pt 1 (that's a date not a rating)), and compared to last season at least it doesn't seem like the quality's significantly dropped or anything, i think the expectations are just getting higher

it feels a little like the two cakes metaphor for fanfiction; in a small fandom, having a cake is enough, who cares about the quality? complaining about the quality of the cake will just discourage the baker and now everyone's starving

whereas in a large fandom there is the option to choose, there's enough works to fill one page, there's like ten thousand cakes from ten thousand different bakeries and there's the freedom to be picky between cakes

the first time i try the homemade cake made by someone with no experience using a boxed cake mix and an oven as old as i am the only thing i'm thinking is wow a cake finally this is amazing

but when i try the cake i chose after going between twenty stores looking at their different flavor, size, type, anything options and it doesn't match 100% with my tastes, i'm still disappointed even if it might objectively be a better cake

this is not to say that i think 一喜 and 二喜 aren't funny or don't deserve their reputation, but i feel like it isn't fair to constantly compare products of different times against each other, they're all funny in their own ways and like anything with a large number of options some of the sketches will be less funny than the others

but all of them will still have appeal for the right audience

anyway don't go on weibo there's so much general negativity on there but i think that's common knowledge at this point

for a good while cmd? cotmad? crown? the 1.6 quest has stood in my mind as one of the best quests in honkai star rail, and even with the amphoreus quests i still think it's hard to knock crown from its spot

obviously i'm biased towards it because it has ratio but putting that aside it's genuinely so good because (and especially compared to amphoreus quests) it's a very dense quest

the whole thing is only 2 sections but it does an amazing job in those two parts of establishing and juxtaposing the geniuses with the rest of humanity, and further developing existing character (screwllum) alongside the two new characters it introduces

and it sets up what seems to be a future antagonistic force in penacony (even though we learn they're dead in 2.1) and wraps up cleanly with room to wonder but not gaping holes that leave you desperately hoping mihoyo comes back and answers them in some later update

with the whole 3.x update and its overarching questline going on i've missed these shorter trailblaze continuances that know exactly what point they want to make and do so well in the space they have

another thing that's happening a lot in 3.x is the tendency to layer on synonyms so that what could be said in one sentence is instead doubled or tripled, especially noticeable in the way lygus talks

whereas 1.6 just says what it needs to say and that's all there is to it

ratio might seem similar in that he also sometimes speaks with many word when few word do trick, but in his case it is not used as a tool to make his philosophy seem more complicated or deeper than it is

and in general the points made during 1.6 set us up very well for penacony which calls back to some of 1.6's themes throughout its own mainline quests

like they have phones and obviously there's magic of some kind but also do they still have a systematic way of theorizing about the world or are they still too focused on the titans for that yet

but even if you don't have a systematic way of doing science you can still make observations and predictions and devise experiments to test your hypotheses you don't need scientific rigor to the same extent that we have today to do that

if amphoreus is modelled as a spherical planet, its civilizations are certainly able to notice that

the closest match for 海阔舟无辑 i could find came from the tang dynasty poem 《望洞庭湖赠张丞相》 written by meng haoran for the titular zhang jiuling, in the third line 欲济无舟辑 端居耻圣明

the original poem was basically a letter from meng haoran telling zhang jiuling in a very roundabout and polite way to please let him be an official look at how much i want to contribute to our country

the line 欲济无舟辑 basically translates to "i want to cross the lake but i have no oar" (i want to get hired by the government but nobody is recommending me), and further emphasized by the second half of the line 端居耻圣明, "staying at home is a shame upon the emperor" (and you could fix this by recommending me, meng haoran, to become an official)

and so if you look at ratio's 5th eidolon 海阔舟无辑 literally translating to the sea is vast but the boat has no oar, it's easy to see the connection between it and meng haoran's poem

无辑 is also an interesting phrase because it's maintained its status as an allegory pretty steadily since the han dynasty, when it was first used to describe the same state of having dreams but no method or power to achieve them

and if you add the context then you could interpret that as ratio wanting someone to see him and promote him but i don't think it's very in character for him

or at least, not very in character for him now

the sea is vast but he has no oar, but that hasn't stopped him from paddling across anyway

it's a golden age and he doesn't want to just sit at home, so he gets out there and starts the practically impossible task of 普渡众生 (save all beings by helping them cross the sea of suffering or in his case ignorance (this is a buddhist term but i feel like it weirdly fits ratio))

i think 海阔舟无辑 is more fitting for a younger ratio, when he first set his eyes to the stars, and for the thought process that went into making the ratio that we see in the 1.6 and penacony quests

and also if you look at the english name sic itur ad astra/thus we journey to the stars it has literally no relation to wanting some higher being to write a rec letter, but rather a lot of relation to going higher and farther to whatever lies beyond the sky