Jet Li: Rise to Honor (2004)

5/5

If you are a fan of Jet Li movies, you have to play Rise to Honor. This game plays marvelously and is as close as you can get to an interactive Jet Li movie. The plot is your typical martial arts movie plot, which unfortunately I don’t remember much, since I played this game in 2004, but I remember it has a lot of references to various Jet Li movies. There is a part where Jet Li climbs down a building, dropping from balcony to balcony, similar to what he did at the start of Cradle 2 the Grave.

Rise to Honor is a 3D action game that leans more towards a beat ‘em up. You fight a lot of Triad enemies in Hong Kong, and that’s about it. There is some shooting, too, the controls of which are not very well done, but it is fortunately minimal. The brilliance of the game, however, is in its unique combat system. Instead of pressing buttons to attack your enemies, you use your right analog stick to attack in the direction you want. This might seem counter-intuitive, but works very well, especially when facing multiple enemies at the same time. By simply wiggling the analog stick, Jet Li can do incredible combos and attack large groups of enemies coming from every direction. This cinematic 3D beat ‘em up, then, is at bottom a game of crowd control. The focus is not so much on executing complex combos, since the combos are practically automatic, but on controlling the crowds of enemies that swarm you. It’s an innovative mechanic that I have not seen elsewhere, and it feels amazing to use, because it flows perfectly. Jet Li also has an adrenaline bar that gives him super speed and strength when used. There are some bosses in the game, and predictably they are not as fun to fight as the Triad crowds, since as I said the combat system really shines against groups of enemies. If I remember correctly, there were also block and grab buttons, which were useful.

In sum, Rise to Honor is in my view a must-play for every beat ‘em up fan, not just Jet Li fans. It’s an immersive action game that resembles the best Jet Li movies and plays extremely well.

Okami (2006)

5/5

I think I played Okami for the first time in 2010. I had heard about it since its release, but I had just never found it on sale in my small town. I had also read for years people on the Phantom Babies forum saying the game was a masterpiece, so I had been meaning to play the game for a while. Luckily, I eventually found the game in a second-hand shop, in perfect condition. The next thing I know, I was playing the game 6 hours straight without a break. That’s how awesome Okami is. Firstly, you have to admire the game’s look. The whole game looks as though a Japanese painting came to life. With beautiful cel-shaded graphics, the first reaction I had when I started playing it was awe. As I controlled Amaterasu, a beautiful white wolf goddess, and ran through green fields and other detailed environments while leaving a trace of blooming flowers behind me, I could not help but notice the explosion of beauty around me. It was an impressive cocktail of colors. Simply wandering in the game’s beautiful environments is fun. But the game offers more than that. It has charming characters in a story that feels like an outright saga. You can interact with various characters throughout the game as you progress and hear what they have to say to you, as JRPGS typically do. Perhaps to cut costs, Clover Studio did not put any voice acting in the game. Instead, as the characters speak, we hear a sound effect that mimics the sounds of the human voice. It only adds to the ethereal atmosphere of the game, in my view.

But the game is not just about exploring beautiful surroundings. Because in our surroundings there are dangerous demons that want us dead. Combat, then, is another facet of the game. Being a Hideki Kamiya game, the combat system is good: you can attack, block and evade. You can learn new combos and new moves as you progress in the game, and you can unlock new weapons, too. Okami is an action-adventure game that leans more to the adventure side of the spectrum, so it’s understandable that the emphasis is not the combat system, and that other games sport more complex combat systems. That said, the combat system is still very unique because Amaterasu can use his celestial brush to attack his enemies. The celestial brush draws, for example, a line over the enemy, and the enemy is magically cut. It can summon the powers of wind, water and fire, too. You can also use the celestial brush to draw over the environment and interact with it. It’s an innovative and unique mechanic that I have never seen elsewhere (which I guess makes sense, since it’s so specific to the game’s art style). Basically, when you activate the celestial brush, the action stops, a brush appears on the screen, and you can draw on the screen with it, affecting whatever is there.

Finally, the music in Okami is spectacular. The tracks are inspired by traditional Japanese music and use traditional Japanese instruments, adding a lot to the atmosphere of the game, and making it even better.

I played Okami again years later, in 2021, and was still impressed with its beauty. The game plays amazingly and it’s a joy to control Amaterasu. It’s one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.

Bayonetta (2009)

5/5

I missed Bayonetta back in 2009 because I didn’t like how the main character looked. Videogames are mostly visual artforms, and if you don’t like what you see in front of you, you probably won’t like interacting with it either. The game was directed by Hideki Kamiya, though, so it remained always in the back of my head throughout the years. Kamiya directed the original Devil May Cry, so he knows what he’s doing when it comes to action games, specifically 3D brawlers. In 2020, I finally decided to give the game a try. And I’m glad I did. It’s such a fast-paced game, with so much action and so many cool moves. The enemy design is amazing, and Bayonetta’s hair-powered special moves are incredible. She can summon huge monsters with her hair to finish off her enemies, in a fatality-style move. The action is crazy, too. Right at the start of the game we fight a bunch of enemies while falling from a skyscraper, enemies spawning non-stop. The whole style of the game is ridiculous, in a good way, and I wouldn’t expect anything else from a game made in Japan (we already know how weird their art can get). The story is uninteresting, and perhaps even silly but I hardly noticed it amidst all the wild action on display, so it didn’t bother me too much. I wasn’t exactly playing the game for the story anyway. I just wanted to kill beautiful monsters. The environments are cool, too, and some of the music is awesome. I also liked how she can slow down time after a perfectly timed dodge. It feels amazing to control Bayonetta and I felt that whenever I was hit by an enemy it was totally my lack of skill. The combos are done in a dial-up manner, like in Ninja Gaiden, as opposed to Devil May Cry’s more specific inputs, but in no way is that a bad thing, since you can string moves from your equipped weapons on the fly, and thus create insane combos. And you know, Bayonetta’s look even started to grow on me. Her walking animations, for example, were expertly done, and highlighted her sensuality perfectly. Unfortunately, for some reason, I stopped playing the game halfway through, having clocked in around 6 hours of play time. I should play this game again one day, from start to finish.

Randomness Fools by Definition

This article was originally published in Bitcoin Magazine, on December 2, 2022.

Nassim Taleb: “Earnings-free assets with no residual value are problematic. The implication is that, owing to the absence of any explicit yield benefitting the holder of bitcoin, if we expect that at any point in the future the value will be zero when miners are extinct, the technology becomes obsolete, or future generations get into other such “assets” and bitcoin loses its appeal for them, then the value must be zero now.”

Summary refutation of Taleb’s criticism: If bitcoin’s general adoption succeeds, it will be automating most of our financial structure with the aid of power plants, energy and computers. At the very least, it will create a system that is parallel to the current banking one and that would therefore be protected from the latter’s crashes (see 2007-2008 financial crisis). Of course, it is taking years for this new system to fully mature. Taleb says this mission is worth exactly zero because he lacks the vision.

Is it a good time to invest in bitcoin? I believe it is. Besides proper philosophers, who are thinking in terms of centuries, not many can build such a belief, with the exception of the best wealth managers, who think in terms of decades.

So, philosophers, who historically never cared about wealth, and wealth managers, who naturally enough only care about wealth, are uniting here in an interesting turn of events. Philosophers see that the inevitable fate of mankind is to evolve into a cybernetic organism, and they see that any technology that facilitates this process is bound to come to dominate. Wealth managers, on the other hand, realize that an alternative financial system that is thermodynamically closed can be useful to their activities.

That’s all there is to say about it. But I can say more.

Because there are indeed other opinions in the marketplace, which are however mostly inconsequential. There’s, for example, the confused Nassim Taleb, who writes 300-page books about trivial ideas that can be summarized in a single paragraph. He talks about “black swans” as if we didn’t already know that a scientific model is merely a rough sketch and not the freaking gospel. He literally wrote 300 pages about this. That you can’t accurately predict any event with 100% certainty and that accidents and disasters happen. Only instead of calling these events accidents or disasters, which is what they are, he called them “black swans”. In an utterly exasperating prose riddled with italics, moreover, literally italicizing at least a word in every single paragraph, if not sentence. And also gratuitously quoting and name-dropping intellectuals for absolutely no reason. So why did people pay attention to him again? Because he made a fortune trading options or something. Either way, Nassim Taleb says bitcoin is worth exactly zero and that bitcoin’s price drop in March 2020 “proves” that it can’t be used to hedge again risk (as if all risks were equal, and as if diversification wasn’t the best general hedge against risk to begin with), showing once and for all that not only did he not understand his own book, but also that he should go back to school asap and pay attention this time. For you cannot “prove” anything from a single data point, my dear Taleb. The March 2020 lockdown was a freak event⁠—an accident⁠—an exception⁠—a black swan, to adopt your terminology. If you had paid attention, you’d have also seen that the entire market also collapsed, and you’d have maybe realized that you cannot extrapolate anything worthwhile about bitcoin at this stage from this freak event. But Taleb says that bitcoin collapsed more than the stock market did, “therefore”, he thinks, “bitcoin is worthless”. We’re moving now, then, from childish terminology to childish logic. But what exactly is his mistake here? The problem is that he has failed to realize that bitcoin is still in development, it is still growing and evolving. The mistake he’s making is equivalent to watching a healthy cat kill a new-born lion, and then concluding from that freak observation that cats are stronger than lions. He seems to think that bitcoin’s future behaviour will mirror its current behaviour, but how could that be the case when we are this early? So early in fact that no regulation exists for it and most people are still trying to define what exactly bitcoin is. Meaning, practically nobody has a clue about what bitcoin is. Taleb, then, is not considering in his analysis the idea that bitcoin’s maximum utility hinges on a future widespread adoption. He’s analyzing bitcoin at this point in time, myopically, with a total disregard for the effect of future favorable conditions in his analysis, as if bitcoin’s behaviour today was already a finished process. But it isn’t⁠—because bitcoin is designed to bind itself cyber-symbiotically to mankind, and right now the portion of mankind to which it has bound itself is not significant enough, in terms of raw wealth and investment power. To Nassim Taleb, bitcoin seems to function like a Ponzi scheme, but I say it will resemble a Ponzi only if it fails to develop into maturity. Otherwise, it will be nothing like a Ponzi and very much like an extremely awesome asset with great utility. I could also say that most assets on planet Earth are a “Ponzi”, because a few billion years down the line the Sun will expand and destroy the entire planet, destroying with it, for example, all the real estate contained in it. At that time, the real estate bag-holders might perhaps say that real estate investment was always a Ponzi to begin with, especially after they see every bitcoin holder safely move their bitcoin out of the planet. In this scenario, what exactly is the Ponzi? So, we see that Taleb’s quote above is meaningless: in a sufficiently advanced future, everything is fated to go to zero, but of course that doesn’t mean there’s no value to anything in limited timespans. Right now, we are, then, entering bitcoin’s “development into maturity” phase (having already gone through ten years of its infancy) which is the final and protracted phase that will reduce price volatility and effectively bring to the table its store of value capabilities. Can this phase fail to be completed? Sure. In nature, lifeforms occasionally fail to develop into maturity. That doesn’t stop me or any other person from trying to imagine what a particular lifeform can look and behave like if favorable conditions emerge that guarantee its prosperous development. This is, of course, a basic idea from biology (from bio=“life” and logos=“study”: the study of life). In the technological realm, however, the same principles from biological and evolutionary thought can be applied because tools are created, they grow, they mutate, they clash with each other, and eventually evolve or become obsolete in a manner that resembles that of lifeforms in nature; only in the technological realm it is mankind which dictates the fate of the tool, while in the biological realm, it is nature. The point is that this “development into maturity” phase that I’m referring to is of course in the case of bitcoin the “widespread adoption of bitcoin” phase: the phase in which all worthwhile wealth managers agree that bitcoin’s rules are great and decide to play by them⁠—allocating a small portion of their capital to it, initially⁠—and gradually but steadily adding some more whenever they see fit. For it will be this phase that will put the cybernetic symbiosis between bitcoin and mankind in full swing. As of right now, bitcoin is useful for wealth transfers and that’s about it. However, bitcoin can potentially, i.e. in theory, under favorable conditions, be much more useful than it currently is. For we are envisioning, after all, a radical optimization of the entire financial structure with the aid of automation. It’s on this coming, higher utility that we are betting, dear Taleb⁠—and this is why we couldn’t care less now about volatility or fragility or your “convex curve responses to stressors”. I know you wrote an entire book about randomness, and even tried to create a theory on how to utilize randomness to our benefit. But at the end of the day this entire theoretical endeavor is pointless because the purpose of theory is to predict the future, while randomness is defined precisely as that which cannot be predicted. Sure, of course we want to minimize the harmful effects of randomness (=chance,=accidents, =disasters). It’s called risk management. But until the non-predictable accident (see the pleonasm?) actually happens nobody knows how fragile our process-activity-asset stands relative to said accident⁠—otherwise the event wouldn’t be by definition an accident and we’d have been able to factor it in our theories and models! But not only do you fail to see this triviality, you even give lectures about it, as if randomness could be in any way intelligible, as if we hadn’t already defined it as unintelligible! And as if the book’s message was something profound instead of obvious, as obvious as saying the sky is blue or that birds fly.

If you think I am being too tough on Taleb, dear reader, I’ll just say that he was asking to get such a reply when he started gratuitously quoting philosophers for no reason, hundreds of pages in a row. He invoked the spirit of philosophy⁠—so here it is now biting him back⁠—a proper case of a wizard’s spell turning against the caster. Hope you like it, Taleb!

So that’s that. Philosophers, wealth managers and a few visionaries agree that bitcoin is awesome. Then, there’s the rest of humanity who simply doesn’t care about this stuff. Finally, there are thinkers like Nassim Taleb who aren’t thinking straight. In short: the potential gains far overshadow the, in my view, laughably low risk of bitcoin going to zero.

Some of Bitcoin’s Civilizational Roles

This article was originally published in Bitcoin Magazine, on December 20, 2022.

Charlie Munger: “Of course, I hate the bitcoin success, and I don’t welcome a currency that’s useful to kidnappers and extortionists, and so forth. Nor do I like just shoveling out a few extra billions and billions of dollars to somebody who just invented a new financial product out of thin air. So, I think I should say modestly that I think the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization. And I’ll leave the criticism to others.” (2021 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting.)

It’s time we condense into a couple of bullet points some of the ways in which bitcoin will likely contribute to civilization. For some of its contributions have by now become apparent. Afterwards, we’ll analyze Munger’s arguments. So, to start off, bitcoin:

  1. Reduces administrative bloat. By making the ledger public, much of the work needed to verify and audit wealth transfers is obliterated.
  2. Cheaply transfers large sums of wealth across the globe.
  3. Can potentially work like a treasury bond but delivering higher yield returns. This is because the real return on bonds is always lower than the nominal expectation, due to inflation.
  4. Will increasingly function as a secure store of wealth or even as a savings account, as its market capitalization grows and its volatility decreases. Both the colossal amount of computing power that already powers bitcoin, and the manner in which this computing power is distributed across several jurisdictions, ensure that bitcoin’s network and therefore ledger is incorruptible.

The contribution to civilization is expected to be so significant that gold and treasury bonds should gradually become obsolete, as bitcoin’s adoption rate increases. So bitcoin is indeed merely another financial product, or asset, at the moment, but assuming its adoption keeps growing, it will gradually replace older, less efficient, and ultimately more expensive financial products and assets. Bitcoin is real financial engineering that stores work-energy flows from energy production sites right into an incorruptible and irreproducible digital asset. As Michael Saylor elucidates, bitcoin is thermodynamically-sound monetary energy.

Let’s now dissect Munger’s arguments:

Munger: “Nor do I like just shoveling out a few extra billions and billions of dollars to somebody who just invented a new financial product out of thin air.”

It is an interesting point, at least psychologically, but if we consider that every worthwhile invention started “out of thin air”, as an idea inside someone’s brain, we realize that it holds no ground. To give an example, the Wright brothers had first to imagine an airplane on their minds, “out of thin air” as Munger says, before getting down to actually building it. Moreover, those billions and billions of dollars are not exactly going to the creator of bitcoin. Whoever buys bitcoin is in effect buying a piece of the bitcoin network, i.e. a piece of finite blockchain property, and that piece will belong to the buyer and only the buyer as soon as he acquires it. The earlier adopters become wealthier as a side-effect of a growing adoption of the asset, but the positive civilizational event here is the radical optimization of wealth flows, as summarized above.

If Munger perhaps meant that one bitcoin can be easily created, or replicated, then that’s not true either. It costs, by design, a significant amount of energy to mine (i.e. to create) a single bitcoin. The side effect of this mining mechanic is that it incentivizes us to put to use lots of waste energy and also to repurpose power infrastructure. This is of course another excellent contribution to civilization.

Munger: “I hate the bitcoin success, and I don’t welcome a currency that’s useful to kidnappers and extortionists.”

The thing with this line of reasoning is that it is equivalent to saying, “I hate the success of knives and I don’t welcome a tool that’s useful to criminals”. But what if I told you that you can cut food, skin animals, and help build an entire civilization with knives? Or like saying: “I hate fire because there are pyromaniacs”. But what if I told you that the “invention” of fire was practically the point at which human beings diverged from mere animals?

Not to mention that the moment regulation is tightened, criminals using bitcoin won’t be very bright: the ledger is public, and all transactions are tracked. As regulation and AML/KYC rules start being enforced (on exchanges, and perhaps even on wallets), criminality driven by blockchain tech should gradually vanish. Good old plain cash, i.e. physical cash, is way more difficult to track. Why would a drug dealer, for example, accept bitcoin on his regulated, IRS-tracked wallet? Under such a regulatory scenario, in which the anonymity of bitcoin holders is non-existent to authorities, criminal activity driven by bitcoin transactions would hardly survive.

Sure, the criminals might create their own black-market of wallets and marketplaces, but as soon as a criminal wallet connected with a regulated, IRS-tracked wallet, it would sound an alarm. The “digital asset black-market” would consequently short-circuit itself from the economy–the criminal wouldn’t be able to use the wealth on his criminal wallet on anything other than untracked, criminal goods and services. Whereas now, the money, i.e. the physical cash, the criminal makes on the black market can flow back into supermarkets, bars, restaurants, etc. and the criminal can effectively make a living out of crime.

In fact, the smartest anarchists are against bitcoin’s wide adoption, too, because they recognize it can lead to a society where your every move is tracked. So it follows that criminals, too, should be against it. If bitcoin works at the moment for them, this is because we are still early in its adoption and there is practically no regulation. After all, we are talking about replacing your physical, untracked wallet, with a digital, tracked wallet. How could crime prosper under these circumstances? Only through extremely organized crime and/or with government help.

When the first airplane the Wright brothers built crashed, there were guys laughing at the brothers. When the first monkeys burned themselves with fire, there were other monkeys laughing at them. They probably remained monkeys back then. As for you… Will you remain one now?

Charlie Munger: “This is a good lesson for anyone: the ability to take criticism constructively and learn from it.”

The Double-Slit Experiment’s Mystery Explained

In my Thoughts, in section 23, I explained why Feynman called the double-slit experiment the only mystery of quantum mechanics. The idea is that Feynman called the wave-particle duality a mystery because he was confused by language. Language believes in “things”, but strictly speaking there are no “things”, and therefore there are no particles. There is only flux, and language falsifies the reality of flux. So, when he observed that a so-called particle could behave like a wave under certain conditions, he called it a mystery. But he was just confused by the inadequacy of language to properly describe reality. There’s really no mystery, then, that’s just how stuff works at the minuscule level of quantum mechanics, and language makes it look paradoxical because it believes in “things” and therefore particles.

Why God Did Not Create the Universe

This text was written in January 2014. I’ve recovered it today and thought it was good enough to post here. I expanded my opinion about this topic a year later, in February 2015, when I had an epiphany, and I will make another post next explaining my current position.

Before we even attempt to solve the problem of the creation of the universe, we must first take a closer look into the concept of creation. What does it mean to create? Is it possible to create something out of nothing? What do we exactly mean when we use this word? Strictly speaking, we never create anything; we only ever transform some things into other things. Physics has taught us that in this world nothing ever is truly created, but merely transformed. When we “create” a knife, for example, we are in fact simply transforming iron into the blade and wood into the handle, combining both materials to “create” the knife. In this so-called process of “creation”, nothing magically appeared out of nowhere: iron and wood were merely extracted from our environment and subsequently transformed according to our wishes into a “knife”. The same thing happens with all the stuff of the universe: rocks, trees, human beings, clouds, planets, molecules, etc. are always the result of transformation, not creation. What this means to us, then, is that the concept of creation at a higher level is strictly speaking meaningless. It’s an empty concept that corresponds to nothing real. We merely use it for the sake of convenience in our day-to-day conversations, as we do with so many other words. Plus, this word is no doubt a memento from our stupid ancestors who did not know better.

Returning to our initial question, we now realize how absurd it is to claim the universe was “created”. Was it perhaps transformed then? But transformed from what? The universe is everything, there is nothing besides it! Nothing could have “created” the universe, then, not even God! For even God is inside the universe. There is then only one final logical answer after recognizing this: the universe has always existed and will always exist.

Why does it exist? We cannot possibly grasp this. The best we can do is grasp how it works and nothing more.

Truth Is a Falsification

This text was written in January 2014. I’ve recovered it yesterday and thought it was good enough to post here.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What does it mean to be right? And what about being wrong? Something is right when it is true, and something is wrong when it is false.

But from the point of view of truth, the plot thickens, because everything man says is in fact wrong, since it is necessarily a falsification of the flux. This is what Nietzsche shows us in his On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense. Everything man grasps through his senses is already a falsification of the truth, so everything we build upon this small yet already false structure must necessarily be also false. There is no doubt about this last proposition. So, to make a long story short, let me give you an example: in math we say 1+1=2 is true. But the numbers “1” and “2” themselves are already falsifications of the truth, since the concepts from which we derived them were arrived at through our “unreliable” senses: We saw “two” oranges and created the concept of number afterwards. But in reality there is no such thing as number. Consider also that there are no two equal things in this universe, yet it was by assuming that the oranges were equal that we arrived at the number “2” (i.e. we created a concept by taking for granted that something false was actually true).

So, what does this all mean to us? If, then, 1+1=2 is false, why do we nonetheless say it is “true” or “right”? We say 1+1=2 is “right” because we have defined it as “true”, because we have made it “true”. It’s the same when I say Donald Trump is American, instead of Brazilian. We have agreed that people born on the country we agreed to name the United States of America are American, but of course these designations were all invented, i.e. made up, by us. The massive false structure of concepts we have managed to build inside our heads throughout our history, although built upon a false base, has managed to stay consistent and coherent throughout whole millennia. This massive structure is what we have called “knowledge” and it’s with this knowledge that man became the most powerful being on Earth. Who cares if it is all, ultimately, false? Aren’t we flying in airplanes, using cellphones and, in short, shaping our immediate surroundings according to our wishes? Haven’t we gotten more powerful exactly because of this fantastical structure called “knowledge”?

We did, and it’s for this reason that, in order to further complexify and build upon our massive structure “knowledge” (i.e. in our quest for more power), we need the designations “right” and “wrong”. “Right” is then, to conclude this reasoning, whatever is consistent with all the stuff that our structure “knowledge” is made of (the stuff being relations of false data that we’ve defined as true, as we’ve seen); “wrong” whatever is not consistent with this structure. The words “right” and “wrong” are then extremely useful, since they allow me to negate stupidities being spouted at me with just a couple of symbols slapped together, thereby saving me the trouble of writing entire essays just to communicate to someone that what he is saying is stupid.

Devil May Cry 5 (2019)

4/5

I finally played DMC5 last year. It was fun, but I was expecting a better game. It was cool to play as Nero and Dante, but V was an awful character to play with. Playing with V was just a mindless mashing of buttons while trying to keep some distance from the enemies, it was really boring and even annoying. That I was forced to play with him for 3 or 4 missions was a real pain. As for Nero, he was fun to play with, but I thought the devil bringers scattered around the levels were a little silly. How much sense does it make to have several devil bringers sitting in random locations on the stages? But I guess DMC5 wasn’t supposed to make sense, and that’s where the telephone booths and the stupid plot enter. On the other hand, playing with Dante felt overwhelming. This is because he has a million different moves and is extremely complex. I could only properly play him with 3 melee weapons equipped, which is what we’ve previously seen with DMC4 Dante. When it got to 4 different melee weapons that you could switch on the fly, it became too difficult to play with him smoothly. If I was willing to practice with him for several hours, this complexity might have been a good thing, but for a first playthrough it felt overwhelming. Fortunately, you can choose at the start of the mission how many weapons you want to equip, so there’s that. I did, however, try to equip all weapons to see if I could handle it, but it was just too much for me in the end. As for the environment, it was underwhelming. For most of the missions, it was ugly and bland. Climbing a blood-filled red tree for half the game was a letdown. Long gone are the days of the first DMC, in which we explored a beautiful castle. Still, the game has style. I enjoyed the soundtrack and thought there were some real bangers there. The best thing about DMC5, though, was the ending. The fight against Vergil was very exciting and by the time I completed the game I was filled with an enthusiasm I hadn’t felt with videogames in a long time (but to be fair, I haven’t been playing a lot these past years). All in all, I’d say DMC5 is a good game. The only reason I don’t give it a rating of 5 is because the game forces you to play with V for a few missions and he sucks. I will probably replay DMC5 with Vergil soon. I’ve already tried Vergil for a few minutes, and he seemed to be more fun than all the other characters. Complex enough without being overwhelming like Dante. Looking forward to it.

A Night in Lahti

It was my first time traveling alone to a different country, and I was finally going to watch Alek Száhala play live for the first time, after years of listening to his music on my PC at home. I was beyond excited. After arriving in Helsinki, I took the train to Lahti. I had the location of the party noted down on a piece of paper, in case I needed to ask someone for directions. While on the train, I noticed a group of Finns that looked cool sitting a few meters away. I thought to myself I’d ask them for directions if they stopped in Lahti, too. As the train arrived in Lahti, I got up, the group of cool guys got up, and I walked outside and approached them. They told me they knew where the party was and that they were going to a bar next to it. They told me to join them. I walked with them to the Pitka Pub, which was right next to the Senssi club, where Száhala was playing later that night. They welcomed me into their friend group and I started drinking beer with them. The bar was crowded, and I ended up drinking and chatting for hours. Eventually I met a guy that was also going to the party, and he told me he knew the organizers and that I could get in without paying. Cool. I told him I had come all the way from Portugal to watch Száhala live and couldn’t miss it, and he agreed.

After a few more hours of this, he finally told me I had to enter the club because it was getting full. So, I joined the line. That’s when suddenly the man himself Alek Száhala showed up from inside the club and came to me with the dude I had met at the bar. “Holy shit!”, I said enthusiastically. I must have said the word “fuck” at least seven times. After years of obsessing about his music, I finally got to see him live, and not only that, but I also even got to talk to him. We chatted a bit and then he gave me a signed CD with one of his sets recorded in it. Probably the best gift I’ve ever got. I was very excited at this point, but I learned he had already played at midnight, and that I had missed his set while I was drinking at the bar. Too bad, but at least I got to meet him! I met and chatted with a few more FINRG crew members, and then went in.

While inside I was enjoying the music of the DJs and drinking some more. But then something happened which I can’t exactly recall. Basically, I tripped somewhere, hit my head, and lost consciousness. At least that’s what I was told when I regained consciousness. Moreover, there were two police officers grabbing me and taking me with them. “You are too drunk”, “You are bleeding”, I was told by someone. I was taken to the police van, and before I knew it, I was in jail.

In my cell there was only a very thin, yellow mattress, a small window on the wall which I couldn’t get up to, and a toilet. I pissed in the toilet and laid down on the mattress to sleep. After a few hours, I woke up sober, but I had no clue why I was in jail. I knocked on the metal door several times and yelled “Hello” to see if someone would come. But nobody came. There was no clock in the cell, so I had no idea what time it was. I fell asleep again. A bit later I woke up and there was another man in my cell, in another mattress. He told me he had been driving while drunk. We chatted a bit, and he told me he thought I’d only stay one night. Apparently, I had a big scar on my forehead.

Eventually, I got out. I went back to the Pitka pub because I had nothing else to do. The next day I’d be in Helsinki and then back to Portugal, and the main reason I had come was over, so I’d just pass the time now. While at the pub I coincidentally met Száhala again and chatted a bit more with him. I think I asked him how many languages he spoke lol. Someone then told me I had a big scar on my forehead again, which made me check on the bathroom mirror, and indeed there was. I told them I woke up in jail, and they said that in Finland when someone is too drunk on the streets at night and they have no place to go, the police take them to jail so they don’t freeze to death. That made sense. I didn’t have any hotel room booked for that night, anyway, so I guess it was for the better.