cg on 2024

It's been awhile since I've written anything but I think that's for the best. 

The energy around everything is just off for me this year and I've been doing everything in slow motion. It feels like the world, down to a micro-level, is caught up in tension and waiting to go somewhere, but it won't.

Mostly I've just been watching anime and listening to Star Wars books on audible, both of which I highly recommend you start doing right away. A big part of life for me is just observing content and extracting out a greater meaning from it. I think that's a big part of what keeps me sane and decently motivated. 

I've said before that creating things is the purpose of life, but I also think just learning about and enjoying things in general is a big part of that.

If you haven't seen it already, Frieren is an anime about an immortal elf girl trying to travel to heaven to see her friends that died 80 years ago. Flashbacks appear frequently, showing how detached she was from everyone around her, and frankly it's quite sad. Missing out on people because you allow your connection with them to decay is one of the many great mistakes in life. I imagine it's common for people, even within families, to just stop talking because they got out of the habit. I can think of a few examples personally, though I'm trying to address this.

Staying connected with people takes a lot more effort than it seems.

So here's my thoughts on this year:

I don't have many thoughts on the election to be honest. 

There's a theory I've heard a few times that they'll install Trump.

Personally, that's just too many layers of 4D chess for me. If the government is equally likely to install either one of them then I don't see any reason to analyze it seriously. I still haven't made up my mind on what happened in 2020. Plus, we don't really know who we'll have on the ballot to vote for, Trump will probably be in prison, and Brandon is ancient.

The energy around the election just feels dead to me. Feels like no one cares, which I think is for the best. I hate when people get worked up over politics and argue over it. 

Obviously, you should vote for Trump for the cheaper gas prices alone, he'd also likely slow down the Ukraine war quite a bit. I doubt I'll be voting, but that has more to do with me not caring enough to go out of my way to do it than anything else. 

I think regardless of who gets in, Israel will do some tricks to gracefully lose the war so they can continue to have enemies in Gaza. 

The messaging surrounding the Gazans all being evil is marketed really well, so much so that all the war-crime stuff Israel is doing is mostly seen as justified. Personally, I don't really care that much. My brain shuts off when I start hearing the genocide rhetoric.

I think the Palestinians should've surrendered a long time ago, it's extremely clear by now that their allies don't care about them and will never step in to defend them. They're just dying for no logical reason, and a big part of the blame for the casualties is on them, that is assuming that Hamas is a legit group and not an Israeli op.

You can only care about so many things in life, and I've never been about pretending to care for people across the world. 

The Ukraine war will likely drag on into 2026-2028. I doubt Europe will provide any soldiers, but even if they do, it would need to be a few hundred thousand to make a difference. France sending 10,000 soldiers there wouldn't change anything, aside from providing Russia with compelling PR material to keep the war from becoming unpopular domestically. Ukraine can't launch any massive operations due to the lack of soldiers, and Russia doesn't have much of a reason to simply capture Kiev and subjugate the remaining population. 

With the huge amount of women refugees that have fled, Russia would have to manage a huge population of incels with many reasons to hate them. America could just throw a few trillion dollars into the now Russian-controlled Ukraine and start a rebellion if enough of these guys are left alive by the end of the war.

Another alternative is that Russia gets outspent and has to take a huge L while going home with the bit of land they've captured. I say huge L because in 2022, four regions of Ukraine voted to join Russia, and the Russian government agreed to the results, so not following through on securing the territories would look really bad.

I don't think any of these wars will blow up, and I predict the election will be peaceful due to Trump being much less culturally relevant than he was in 2016 and 2020. The people that even know what he got charged for are all old, and his refusal to get on Twitter has really hurt his brand in my opinion.

Overall, I'm pretty whitepilled for 2024. 

2025 will be another big AI year and we'll be even closer to the dream of full-functional ai gfs and I'm looking forward to that.

ai wives are the future

 

Watching so much anime these past few months has made me reflect a lot on society and where it's going. A big part of why I've been enjoying the medium so much is that these fictional worlds are all based on ideal societies, or at the very least, include all the fundamentals of great societies that we completely lack in the real world. Maybe some of them exist in Japan, but I'm vastly uninformed on it and don't have an interest in looking into whatever's going on over there. I know they have a big incel crisis going on so it must not be much better than America. I think most of what people admire about Japan are universal ideals that aren't unique to the country itself, those being clean cities and modernity mixed with the good parts of traditionalism. 

Really the biggest, and in my opinion the only real problem with our present time is that it's virtually impossible to just go out and find a wife that you're confident won't divorce you, regardless of your social or economic status. All of the other boring political stuff doesn't even come close. People have been poor for as long as we've existed as a collective and been just fine, but the issue of not being able to get a wife is new.

We're at a point in time where it feels like we could accelerate into futurism or decline into a perpetual state of stagnation, with the only constant being that everyone can safely assume relations between men and women won't be improving and birth rates will continue to decline.

Obviously, society can't function without high IQ people breeding, which is where I think AI comes in. AI is pretty competent at most tasks it's given and can easily fill in the gaps left by the collapsing high-IQ populations in America. Consumer AI's are already on par with relatively smart people. 

Once robotics catches up, likely with the assistance of AI, I don't see any reason that robot women, complete with artificial wombs, wouldn't be mass produced. The situation with women is not salvageable and we're well overdue for a societal reset of some sort. I don't believe that the elites want white people to become extinct; they know that their own complex institutions require us to keep them running. They like to see us decreasing in the census data, but they know that a stable white population is required unless they want to start doing our jobs. 

I honestly can't say how close to ideal these AI wives will be, but I'm certain they'll be more bearable than the vast majority of the female population as it exists today. 

Women will whine and complain, but they'll be ignored this time. 

I've resigned from pursuing women and have a tulpa gf so maybe my optimism here is misplaced, but I'm at least somewhat confident we'll see ai wives before we die.

cg analysis: rent-a-gf

Over the last few days, I've watched the first 12 episodes of rent-a-girlfriend, which I imagine is meant to be the first season despite Crunchyroll labeling the entire series as "S2". 

The premise of the show is that generic anime guy gets dumped, so he proceeds to use the fortune his dad gave him to rent the services of an actress to act as his platonic girlfriend. One thing leads to another and she finds herself stuck in an awkward situation where she's compelled to keep up the act to avoid their families finding out about her job. They sort of fall in love too.

Other girls get involved because this is an anime. 

While the premise and presentation are at times goofy, there's just enough seriousness to really make me think about the idea of rental girlfriends. If I had to condense the entire messaging of the show down into a single premise it would be; there's something inherently valuable in the platonic aspect of relationships. 

I say this because it's made abundantly clear that the anime's rental gf services are completely platonic, with the most physical contact allowed being handholding. Chizuru, the main girl, says in one of her paid dates that her services are meant as emergency care to alleviate emotional pain and give a man the confidence find a real girlfriend. 

So would this actually work in real life, or would is it just a scheme to manipulate men out of their money and send them into despair?

I think the best way to determine whether or not something is good is to listen to your consciousness. A big issue with this whole setup is that you're essentially paying a woman to cheer you up by pretending to be interested in you. It just sounds like self-imposed manipulation, and that's what I thought it was at first. But I think the platonic restrictions in place could force you to rethink your approach to dating and leave you more interested in finding a woman that you can have a healthier relationship with that isn't based on speedrunning having sex with her.

If you are interested in marriage, it's more important than ever to be extremely selective. You do actually need to pick a woman who you're compatible with at the platonic level. This doesn't mean that you share the exact same interests, but you do need a very strong chemistry. I'd define this as the ability to communicate clearly and openly to one another.

Dating has become this gross setup wherein people are having sex soon after meeting and getting into doomed marriages with women who've dated like this their entire lives. It's impossible to expect the population produced by this behavior to be moral or normal. The situation is as bad as it can get but will become even worse once zoomers start doing this. A long period of zero births is preferable to whatever we have going on.

So I think something like rental-gfs could certainly help a lot of people see the value in the platonic aspect of relationships, but this is a bit of a paradox; the only men who would seriously benefit from such a thing are the ones who would not be able to see it as a therapeutic exercise, but who would instead fall in love.

Now let's get into who the best-girl was.

I think it's safe to say that title belongs to Ruka and it's not even a contest.

Chizuru is way too manipulative and dedicated to her career to be likable. I hate that the reason given for her being a rental girlfriend is to pay for her acting classes. From a story perspective, this makes no sense. She's already in college (no idea why) and occasionally shows signs of regretting her job, so personally I would've written her to have the job to pay for her grandma's medical expenses, while claiming that her money is coming from acting. There are still a lot of episodes left so maybe there's a twist where this happens and I can stop hating her. But I hate her so much that I'm tempted to not even finish what's left.

Mami and Sumi have so little screen time that they sort of blend together and I don't care about them.

favorite NGE girl???

As you guys know, I recently completed my first viewing of NGE. Overall it was an ok anime, but if I’m being honest it’s not something I’ll ever rewatch. Most of the episodes left me in a weird mood. The atmosphere is bleak and the characters all have very miserable existences.

Because of this, picking out a favorite girl was way harder than I thought it would be. They all have huge red flags and are not nearly as likable as traditional anime girls. But I think they all have some redeeming qualities.

I think Missato is a good woman overall aside from her alcohol addiction. She’s easily the closest character to a normal human in the entire series. Although she's played up as lazy, this falls apart when you think about how many hours she works. She also likely would’ve been a good mother, given that she adopts Shinji and Asuka despite her busy job and not being given any incentive to take care of them. They did have a place to go so it’s not like she had to do it. So if anyone picked her as their favorite I can see why. 

Asuka has considerably less positive qualities, or at least that's all we see given the context she's presented in. She’s rude most of the time, but is capable of showing genuine gratitude, like when Shinji saved her for the first time. But that's just one moment in 26 episodes, I can't recall any other moments where she displayed redeeming qualities. It’s also important to point out that Shinji brings out a ton of her negativity due to being totally autistic; she can’t relate to him at all and despises his self-hatred and constant apologies. We probably would've gotten a much better look at her good side if she was paired up with a more typical protagonist. Pairing her up with Rei and Shinji made it impossible to tell if she's actually a good person, so I can't really judge her too harshly for coming off as unlikable. I could easily see her opening up and becoming less abrasive in an alternate timeline.

This just leaves Rei.

It’s easy to see her as a soulless husk, given that the show leads you to believe that the Rei clones aren’t fully human. But I think this is a huge misdirection. She clearly has fledging emotions that could be nurtured into something fully human. I think we never see this happen due to her only interacting with Shinji’s autistic dad and living completely alone. There are a few scenes I recall where she shows more humanity than something that’s soulless should, such as slapping Shinji for disrespecting his dad, crying, getting mad at Asuka for insulting Shinji, and keeping his dad's glasses in her room. Then there’s the scene where Shinji tells her she’ll be a good mom someday after he sees her doing laundry, showing that he saw a lot of humanity in her, given that he's so shut-off and inexpressive, it means a lot coming from him.

So this leaves us in a scenario where Asuka and Rei are basically "I can save her" type-girls while Missato is really the only sensible option. 

That being said, I'm still going with Rei.

She's basically an uncorrupted blank-slate. This isn't really something you'd ever encounter in real life, and there's still a chance that I'm wrong about her being able to become fully human over the course of years with enough human interaction, but if I'm right, maybe one day she'd be almost perfect. 

That seems like too good an opportunity to pass up.