The Crusades

February 28, 2026

-New Tinder match.

-THERES A NEW POKEYMANS

-Wrestling: I really liked Dani Luna vs Lei Ying Lee on TNA.

-Thinking a lot about the packing and moving process. It’s daunting, but also not really as bad as I might have feared.

-I was listening to the YouTube video by Ahoy, “When Video Games were Brown.” I do certainly appreciate to an extant any thoughtful effort to challenge consensus. But, I mean, come on. There absolutely were quite a few big budget, widely marketed AAA games right at that exact 2005-2009 point that all pushed the brown and bloom thing extremely hard. They wanted to show off all the new lighting technology that the newest hardware was now capable of, and made their games a tremendous eyesore in the process by doing it. I know for a fact that this era in particular makes my eyes just sting when I look at many of the games. And it’s such a wild contrast to the colorful beach trend that so many other games were doing just a handful of years earlier, and the typical video game trend all the way up until the early 2000s of video games wanting to show off the diverse color schemes that only the newest hardwares were capable of. But, hey, maybe people will just look at things differently…

-Let’s make a more comprehensive list. Twilight Princess, Shadow of the Colossus, Grand Theft Auto IV, Call of Duty 2/3/4, Fallout 3 (and New Vegas,) Metal Gear Solid 4, Gears of War 1+2, Killzone 1+2, Resistance 1+2, Assassin’s Creed, Resonance of Fate, Bayonetta, Demon’s Souls, Resident Evil 5. Many of these games were highly advertised, many were proclaimed by big AAA publishers as what absolutely defines gaming at this point, and quite a few clash wildly color-wise with their series predecessors. The phenomenon was real. It’s undeniable.

-Twilight Princess clashes heavily with Wind Waker, and even the N64 Zeldas. Grand Theft Auto IV clearly embodies this in a way that Grand Theft Auto III does not, even though they are supposed to be taking place in the same city. Metal Gear Solid 4 clearly clashes with the first two Metal Gear Solid games. The earlier Resident Evils perhaps were never described as colorful, but Resident Evil 5 truly does go all out in meeting that brown, bloom, urban warfare stereotype of the time.

-I’ve been reading through The Book of Mormon, with my theory in mind that much of this is simply a folk telling of European Protestant history with the names changed. Right now, I read the chapter Mosiah 11. Remember, my theory has it that King Noah is a broad stand-in for all of the corrupt Catholic kings and popes, in a folk Protestant telling of the history of the Catholic Dark Ages, while Abinadi is a stand-in for someone like Jan Hus, a failed and martyred reformer at that time. Here’s some interesting things I saw in the chapter. It talks about how King Noah built many great buildings, which matches how someone like Joseph Smith might have understood the great architecture of medieval Europe, but as he had never seen it personally, he describes it using Old Testament Temple-like language instead. There’s a part here that I think matches the Crusades, when it describes Lamanites capturing Nephite territory but King Noah waging a war effort to take it all back afterwards (“for a time.”) There’s an interesting verse here, verse 19, which in code basically declares that Catholic Dark Age leaders got arrogant and blood hungry after the initial success of the Crusades and began to wage many wars within Christendom, which I suppose lines up nicely with what happened in Europe at that point (The “Guelph Age.”)

-To ChatGPT: “Here’s the thing: If it was the case that King Noah was invented by Joseph Smith as an otherwise simple villain in the story, why even compliment him by including this victory for “Christendom” at all? The best explanation, I feel, is that the storytelling fits what may well have been a good folk Protestant moralizing about what the Crusades meant within the context of the Catholic Dark Ages.”

-There you go. Islam’s in The Book of Mormon. I win.

-To ChatGPT: “No, dude, I keep needing to explain this to you. 3 Nephi? It’s not 1688. It’s not 1776. It’s not the past. It’s the immediate future! Just after 1829! Joseph Smith was saying that Jesus Christ’s return was JUST ABOUT TO HAPPEN, in his own time!”

-It’s really weird that they just never released a version of Final Fantasy VII (1997) with a proper English translation.

-You have to wonder why it is that America is so much more slow in hiring than Korea is. Remember that on time in America, with (cut), where I had three separate interviews for a job, all a week apart from each other, and still failed to get it?

-(cut) won’t be back at her apartment until tomorrow morning, but she is allowing me to stay overnight there and leave some of my items, and I am tremendously grateful for this.

-(cut) on Tinder stood me up, alas.

-Wrestling: Jordynne Grace vs Candice LeRae on SmackDown.

-Wrestling: Rhea Ripley’s on an incredible roll right now. I hope her losing the championship doesn’t change that equilibrium.

-(Oh, they absolutely took it off her so that she could win the Elimination Chamber match unencumbered, right? That’s unfortunate…)

-I finally applied for the job that (cut) shared with me. It took way less time than I initially expected.

-2 PM: It took me a half hour of waiting outside for me to realize that buses just aren’t coming today. Really would have appreciated if they would.

-Uber didn’t work for a moment, because there were declined payments in the past due to previous card drama. To set things right, I needed to introduce a new card, which required that I put in my PIN number. However, I have three separate PIN numbers associated with the card, and I don’t know which one they are looking for. I could just guess between the three, but means that two of the given PINs would be incorrect, and too many errors would lock the system and prohibit me from trying again until midnight. Thankfully, I guessed the correct one early, so Uber now works again.

-Never mind. The bus finally came.

-(cut) apologized, and still wants to meet.

-Read to Page 300 in What’s Our Problem? by Tim Urban.

-The middle-aged woman who picked my coat tails off of the floor on the restaurant chair and set it more neatly. Yeah, I never want to leave this country.

-BREAKING NEWS: Israel just attacked Iran.

-Ey, fuck Donald Trump.

-The journey to (cut) is over. I can finally put down this incredibly heavy bookbag.

-I walked in on (cut) having a long phone conversation with her pastor. The first thing I hear him say is that she should only be in a relationship with a man who can prove that he has a love for scripture. They were talking for a long time. I decided to go out for the evening instead of waiting there.

-I was given the advice to apply for work at (cut). I was told that they are always hiring.

-A new conversation with the Mormon missionaries. I’m really happy that I had the chance to pour my heart out about Jesus, and the Bible, and God, and what it all means to me. I actually spoke about Calvinism, and about perseverance of the saints, and about the biblical gospel. There was a sharp divergence between the two missionaries: One was disinterested and he gave off the sense that he really didn’t care about all of this and may have been forced on a mission, while the other was extremely enthusiastic and listened carefully to everything I said. He actually told me that he was really interested in Calvinism and that he wanted to look up more about it once his mission was over. He actually was kind of nervous at the end of saying that, accidentally revealing how the LDS church restricts their information flow while they are on a mission.

-I could get kicked out of the country tomorrow and the whole thing would have been worth it just to have heard those words.

-It’s God who brought me this far, bringing me to South Korea. It is God who is the one who will keep me here.