#like the average person doesn't play 60 hour games my guy

[jjinpang]

the "failure" of new final fantasy is hilarious to me.

squeni: we captured the interest of people who like our particular brand of story and world building. They were small fry. Time for the big fish... time to capture THE MASSES

some guy: what about the people who liked your stuff before?

squeni: SCREW THEM they are niche and SMALL and TINY. WE WANT THE BIG BUCKS! gotta make a gritty grimdark

*masses still play only the gritty grimdark created by people who have been making gritty grimdark for years and ignores the 3 kids in a trenchcoat grimdark squeni thought was a good idea.

squeni: ... at least I have my loyal fanbase! guys? where'd you go guy?

that single poor soul who has already tightly associated the name final fantasy to a more joyful time in their life and can't leave this situationship even with their eyes wide open: screw you man.

[spraxinoscope]

Sumo is the best and worst sport there is

Champion Sumo Wrestler Hokutoumi by Kinoshita Daimon, 1985

I've been playing Street Fighter 6 and maining E. Honda, which is a gateway drug to learning about sumo, which is a gateway drug to watching hours of sumo wrestling on this 24 hour sumo rebroadcast twitch stream.

It's a fun spectator sport but it turns out that sumo is like American football but worse, because in addition to getting their skulls smashed together constantly, they also get all kinds of health problems from the stress, injuries, and diet. The average sumo wrestler lives to be 65 and is likely to get diabetes. It's inhumane. And it's backed by hundreds of years of tradition so they can get away with it.

...but, unfortunately, sumo is cool as shit. Here's why:

You lose a match by being forced out of the ring or getting knocked down. You win by being immovable. How do you become immovable?

By having more mass than your opponent, of course.

Every match starts with both wrestlers rushing together and colliding. All else being equal, the heavier wrestler has an inherent advantage at the start. Strength alone is insufficient; if he doesn't have the mass he'll just bounce off the other guy. If the match isn't decided in the first second, then it becomes a hellish grappling game, as they both try to figure out how to tip over a person who's built like the dog that cannot be tipped over.

So there's this arms race happening behind the scenes as coaches use the power of Dark Nutrition Science to try and make their guys heavier.

Every wrestler is trying to be heavier than average, so the average weight keeps going up. It's been going up since the 60s. Building and sustaining mass, along with doing the accompanying strength training to stay agile, is the challenge that defines a sumo wrestler's career.

This is the real game. The teams (which are called 'stables,' to give you a sense of why there might be a problem here) are competing with each other to win the title of Who Can Put The Most Calories In A Guy.

It's nightmarish, but if I'm being honest, it's also compelling. Like, this is what all pro sports do: relentlessly instrumentalize human beings into honed single-purpose machines. But in sumo the qualities being optimized for are moving fast, hitting hard, and being huge. And it turns out that a person can get really good at all three of those! It's impressive! Inspiring, even! It's just too bad that, you know, it eventually kills them.

Pro sumo is a dangerous, exploitative sport. It probably shouldn't exist. But as long as it does, do yourself a favor: Check out that stream, pull up the wikipedia page on sumo to read along so you can figure out what they're doing, and bear witness to a spectacular and deranged application of human ingenuity and drive.

It does help if you know hiragana so you can read their names. But, cmon, it's 2023. Learn hiragana already. It takes like a couple days on duolingo. The stream chat also has a bot that gives a short bio of any wrestler if you type ![their name]. If channel host sahairah happens to be there, and they often are in the evenings, they will patiently answer questions you have. but don't show up there and ask a ton of dumbass questions, because that would then be my fault.