Welcome to the REVIEW!

31 December 06 | 09:53

I don't hold much with New Year's resolutions, if only because they make you feel that much guiltier when you gain weight after vowing to lose a bunch. But I do need to drag myself away from my increasingly alarming habit of writing only about video games. So! I'll get back into the business of writing about completely unrelated pop culture ephemera. And maybe someday, someday, I'll actually write something worth reading.

For now, though, you'll have to settle for a manga review. Just kidding, it's actually a bunch of aimless rambling.



Welcome to the N.H.K. Vol. 1
Tatsuhiko Takimoto & Kendi Oiwa | TokyoPop | Oct. 2006

This year for Christmas, I asked for (and was given) a manga with a "parental advisory" emblazoned on the cover. This is what I get for adding random books to my gift list without doing proper research about why they've netted so much positive buzz. Or, say, looking at the cover. That's not to say the advisory actually made any difference; it just prompted some bemused comments from my mother. Sorry, mom. I won't ask you to buy me smut on Jesus' birthday ever again.

Not that I'd really classify Welcome to the N.H.K. as "smut." There's definitely questionable content afoot, but very little of it is intended to be titillating. Rather, it's there to help paint a more accurate picture of how big a loser the main character is, like Ataru Moroboshi's relentless lechery in Urusei Yatsura -- except that N.H.K.'s protagonist Satou possesses much less of Ataru's brain-dead goofiness and more of a real-world sense of patheticness, the kind you might actually encounter on an average day. There aren't too many lecherous idiots trying to escape the romantic advances of beautiful half-naked aliens in the world, but socially defective shut-ins? Folks, this is the Internet era. You're likely to be flamed by several of them on 4ch or NeoGAF today. Before breakfast.

Satou is a member of Japan's hottest new demographic, the hikikomori: young urban recluses driven to isolation by anxiety or depression. I've heard the word "otaku" means "your house" somewhere in its etymological lineage, and hikikomori -- a sort of elite division of otaku, if crippling emotional defects could be considered a sign of merit -- honor that linguistic root very literally by never, ever leaving their homes. In Satou's case, he dropped out of college two years ago and hasn't spoken to another soul since. And though he slowly blooms as a wallflower over the course of the manga, he mostly just brings embarrassment upon himself. He's unable to hold up his end of a conversation, mainly because he's so paranoid of others' critical thoughts that he inevitably blurts defensive remarks to accusations that exist only in his mind. And when he decides to make something of his life by teaming up with an old school acquaintance to create an adults-only PC game, his "research" consists of a week spent filling a hard drive with child porn.

On this level, Welcome to the N.H.K. reads more or less like a broad satire (and rather cruelly, since it's directed at a subculture that already feels like the world is making fun of it). At one point, Satou and his cohort Yamazaki sit down to create their game's love interest, who they hope will become the ultimate expression of "moé." Their result: she's the main character's childhood friend, his lover from another life, and a robot alien with a disease only the hero can cure. In short, she's moé's "protective love" mindset taken to an extreme! A very, very revolting extreme.

Which leads to the most interesting part of Welcome to the N.H.K., the aspect that makes it more interesting than your typical journey-of-redemption manga: deciphering the subtext. Are we supposed to despise Satou, a socially-crippled shut-in who loathes his own susceptibility to obsession? He certainly isn't particularly admirable, sitting in his filthy apartment getting high, hallucinating about conspiracies, wallowing in gigabytes of underage bondage porn, lurking around elementary schools with a leer and a camera.

On the other hand, he is the protagonist, and he's certainly presented in no worse a light than the non-hikikomori types around him. Misaki, the beautiful young woman who makes it her mission to cure Satou of his reclusive habits, is clearly every bit as obsessive as her target (and a bit on the creepy stalker side, too). His pal Yamazaki is a dope. Most tellingly of all, Satou eventually bumps into his high school crush (referred to only as "sempai") who unlike him is a "productive" member of society. Although she's actually as reality-shy as Satou. The difference is that her escape from the pressures of life is more figurative; clearly she didn't play enough N.A.R.C. or else William S. Sessions' important message that winners don't do drugs would have made more of an impression on her.

And it's probably worth noting that N.H.K. was originally published in Shounen Ace magazine, which is targeted toward otaku types. Satou could be a "there but for the grace of god" cautionary tale to encourage hikikomori readers to get a life, but manga's a cynical medium. Shounen Ace, after all, is host to Sgt. Frog, a manga whose sole mission is to sell Gundam merchandise through marketable mascot characters and relentless panty shots of a 14-year-old girl destined to become unnaturally busty. So, yeah, more likely is the prospect that N.H.K. is intended to serve as a sort of answer to the "Train Man" franchise: yet another vicarious chance for dreary losers to say, "Even someone more pathetic than me can find happiness and love!" Except with more wackiness and moé, and less sloppy sentiment and 2ch canonization.

Still, there's an outside chance that Misaki's ulterior motives are far from altruistic, that Satou will end up heartbroken, that he and Yamazaki will find themselves in jail, that the ultimate message of N.H.K. is one of despair and bitter emptiness. And the prospect of bleak realism in manga, however slight, is reason enough to look forward to volume two. Well, that and the anthropomorphic toaster. I love that guy.

posted by: | category: manga | forums | 17 comments | §

Euthanasiavania

30 December 06 | 07:00

Oh dear, it appears that Wikipedia's Metroidvania page has been culled due to its general lack of merit. Looking at the page discussion, the blame falls squarely on me for failing to provide a solid definition for the term. Apparently, if I'd used the word in more of my professional writing, it would have been legitimized. Buuuut since the word is tacky and generally pretty much useless and I've made an effort to edit it out of anything ever to appear at 1UP, I guess it had to die. And all because of me! It's good to know I managed accomplished something worthwhile in 2006 after all.

Farewell, Unverifiable Neologism with Insufficient Reference Sourcing. I will desperately miss the three or four daily hits you used to provide.

Anyway, my final act of video game journalism for the year is online now: another 1UP retro roundup. Haha, "video game journalism." Sorry, I can never write that with a straight face.

posted by: | category: blog | forums | 18 comments | §

Castlevania: Blaster of Zombies

27 December 06 | 09:36

So! Portrait of Ruin. Very good, falling a bit short of great. I have, nevertheless, been determined to squeeze my $35's worth of entertainment from my copy of the game, a process I have set about with rather grim scientific precision. Filling the bestiary (including drops), mastering every subweapon I can find, completing every quest, even filling out that interminable list of items. I'm not sure I can really refer to this experience as "enjoyment" anymore, although there is certainly a dark satisfaction in knowing that each minute I play brings me a little closer to splaying this creation wide open like a pinned butterfly.

Fortunately, I did encounter a little Christmas cheer when I took a moment away from my mechanical handiwork to cruise through the Sisters mode. It's this little bonus that caused me to score the game as highly as I did -- sure, it's an incompletely developed bit of fluff, but the novelty of playing a Castlevania game entirely with a stylus (and controlling the villainesses to do it) simply can't be denied. Along the way, I inadvertently stumbled across the greatest Castlevania thing ever: a minigame I like to call "Zombie Blaster."



One of the most impressive details in Dawn of Sorrow was the fact that certain crumbly enemies and destructible objects would do their crumbling in accordance with the way in which you attacked them. Strike a zombie with a horizontal sword slash, for instance, and its upper half would detatch and fall while the legs stood a moment in confusion; but smash it with a hammer or great sword and its body would shatter, its individual zombie chunks being blasted into the ground at an impressive velocity.

But this quirk of game physics didn't truly come into its own until Sisters Mode, where Stella's slashing attack causes zombies and skeletons to disintegrate like most of the Dawn weapons did. But since her attacks are controlled by stylus, they can come from any direction... and at any velocity. A gentle little swipe from the side will destroy a monster much like Jonathan or Charlotte's attacks. But a fast stroke from below will cause its dismembered bits to fly into the air. And thus begins the game of Zombie Blaster.

The goal of Zombie Blaster is simple enough: try to get as much giblet air time as possible. Ideally, you'll want to use a quick 45-degree-angle stroke from below. The best place to play is in the Ghoul King areas of 13th Street, and you definitely get bonus points for flinging zombie bits all the way across the courtyard. Double if it's a Ghoul King.

Sadly, this is simply a makeshift experience and works entirely on the honors system for now. But next time I interview him, I'll definitely ask Koji Igarashi to implement some sort of scoring system in his next DS game. No, seriously. It's going to be awesome.

posted by: | category: games | forums | sixteen comments | §

Merry Groin-Injury-mas

25 December 06 | 14:49

I guess it's a little weird to update my blog on Christmas, isn't it? Maybe not, I guess, but it certainly doesn't seem to be the hip, "in" thing to do. Since I've added quotation marks around the word "in," though, I'm clearly not. So it doesn't really matter now, does it?

Anyway, I'm continuing my dewy-eyed nostalgia series with a Mega Man 3 write-up. I've always sort of felt this game had the worst box art in the series (at least until Legends 2) -- sure, the first two games had objectively awful artwork, but something about three was so much worse than a constipated dude rendered in crayon, or a middle-aged guy in spandex. Part of it has something to do with poor Spark Man being blasted in the crotch. It's not an accidental hit, either! Mega Man's eyes are clearly focused right on that spot, and there's a sort of sneering delight on his rubbery face. It's horrible.

But hey, at least it's not this.

As for me, I'll take my Christmas memories where I can get them, and going on about MM3 is a lot more in keeping with this site's charter than writing about, say, how my family used to buy a few boxes of flavored popcorn and drive around to admire the tasteless, over-the-top Christmas light displays in Lubbock's wealthier neighborhoods. (It was one of those you-had-to-be-there things.)

posted by: | category: games | forums | 32 comments | §

A fastately fapleasure fadome fadecree

24 December 06 | 13:15

To celebrate Christmas this year, I've posted a very special installment of the Metroidvania Chronicles: Faxanadu. You may be wondering what is so special and seasonal about Faxanadu, since it has doodly-squat to do with Christmas, winter, snow or gifts. And the answer is, nothing whatsoever. But I got the game for Christmas back in the day, so it gets the nostalgia nod. It's not quite a Christmas tradition, but it'll do. Mainly because no one else is even updating their sites this weekend. Tenuous retro-navel-gazing is better than none, right? Well, OK, that's probably debatable.

posted by: | category: games | forums | twelve comments | §

I believe I can fly

21 December 06 | 14:45

Ah, travel in the holiday season. Is there anything better?

Yeah, I started writing this post yesterday at the Las Vegas airport. It has free wi-fi! That is hot. But I had to stop because it also has slot machines, everywhere. Noisy slot machines which drilled into my awake-since-4:30-a.m. skull like a, uh... like drills. It's like the city very carefully laid out its strategy to remind people why they hate the very concept of Las Vegas the minute they disembark from the skyway. That is some fine civic planning right there if I do say so myself.

Anyway, I'm back in the fertile incubator of my existence, aka west Texas. I actually felt sort of nostalgic for a few minutes upon arrival, which surprised me. Then some guy started ranting about how he was all in favor of the Left Behind videogame because it lets you kill Muslims. (Real quotes burned indelibly into my brain: "Those ragheads go too far. Hell, if I were younger I'd join the army so I could pop a few myself. Nothing good's ever gonna come from the Middle East, no matter what happens. At least in Vietnam, those little brown people could go back to farming rice.") For some reason I suddenly remembered why I moved away.

So far I've spent most of my vacation finishing off Retronauts and the weekly roundup, but now that I'm done with that it's time to end my month-long FFXII drought. It turns out my sister is right at the same place I was when I left off, i.e. hunting marks and stalling before entering the Henne Mines. And what better way for a family to bond than by trashing Orthros together?

(A family of nerds, I mean.)

posted by: | category: blog | forums | 40 comments | §

Stupidest act of the month

19 December 06 | 10:10

Today I was going to write about the most horrible ideas for food ever (including "rhesus pieces" and "frottage cheese") but then I went and did something even more horrible: I ordered a PS3. I "won" that stupid lottery Amazon.com had going on this weekend, where you could sign up and maybe (just maybe) you'd luck into a 1-in-44 chance of getting the right to order a PS3.

The fact that I won makes me a little suspicious, as though the whole thing is perhaps some sort of rigged hype- and sales-building exercise. Honestly, I'd be OK with that, because according to their signup page, raw statistical fact makes it twice as likely that I'll develop hemmorhoids as "earning" this chance to buy an overpriced, likely-doomed-to-breakdown piece of gaming hardware. So if this sign-up event wasn't actually a cynical lie, I should probably stock up on the Preparation-H just to be safe.

Anyway, I went ahead and placed the order, but only so I can get the resulting write-off on my 2006 taxes. For the time being I really only need this thing so I can download software for the Retro Roundup. Otherwise, until MG4 and FFXIII make their way to stores, the PS3 doesn't have much use as anything but a hi-fi PSOne game player. And, of course, a handy tax deduction -- all in one! Oh, Sony, you were right all along. It really is the versatile wonder-console of the future.

(Hyper deluxe awesome Han Solo image totally bogarted from R. Stevens.)

P.S. Special prize to anyone who can name all ten Miis in the header up there.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 33 comments | §

Castlevania: Portrait of Type-A Personalities

18 December 06 | 16:36

With the release of all kinds of Konami-created Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin bonus art on the Japanese site, it becomes clear that the horribly-rendered official packaging and promotional illustrations (which made the hero look like some sort of amateurish Full Metal Alchemist reject battling a pimptacular Gollum) were a carefully-calculated plan to make the game fail. And that's just not cool. It's a fine game, even if the second half is a bit of a mess, but why would they possibly use horrible kids-anime art to sell the game when someone on staff is capable of rendering work like this?



Honestly, Konami. Sometimes you bewilder me.

Speaking of Portrait, I'm replaying the game in fits and starts, which I think may be the best approach for this particular chapter of the series. It all turns into a big homogenous blur when I play for more than 30 minutes at a time, but the "train ride home" approach makes it downright effervescent. I'm taking the most obsessive-compulsive approach possible, backtracking constantly, warping out of levels as soon as I acquire a skill that unlocks sections of other stages, grinding foes until I get their drops, that sort of thing. Currently my clock is at ten hours and I still have three more portraits to clear, if that tells you anything.

I've also been doing pretty much the same thing with everything I play in my spare time. I finished up FFV Advance over the weekend -- well, "finished" in the sense that I walloped the final boss, not that I've completed the bonus content. I had 40 hours on the clock when I finally faced off against Neo Exdeath, which I think may in fact have been too much. I managed to crush him with a party that included no Freelancer-class fighters but did contain a Ranger, of all things. That's probably a sign that my party was a bit overleveled.

I'm not the sort of person who does hyper-obsessive things, like "complete Final Fantasy Tactics with a party of all white mages" or "beat all the dungeons for every piece of gear in Disgaea 2" or whatever. I blame my steady diet of reviews, which forces me to rush through things at breakneck speed. I guess I'm exerting my free will be taking way too much time and being way too fixated on the mundane. Lord help me, I just know I'm gonna go after Yiazmat once I get to the end of FFXII. And the only way to go after that is downward into a never-ending spiral of lifeless fixation.

(In other words: MMOs, here I come.)

P.S., I've reviewed Twilight Princess for GameCube. I don't want to give anything away, but I hear it's pretty good.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 20 comments | §

Memoirs from the mirror universe

16 December 06 | 21:21

I'm reviewing Twilight Princess for GameCube, and it is kicking my butt. The culprit: the mirrored game world. Sure, technically the Wii version is mirrored and this was how Hyrule was always meant to be seen, but whatever. I'm using the version I spent 60 hours with as my frame of reference, and the simple fact of the matter is that having the game world completely flipped is making my brain explode. Or implode. Or something.


This game makes me feel like a blind person, and Nintendo came by in the middle of the night and stealthily rearranged my furniture. I see familiar landmarks and veer right when I'm really supposed to go left. I can no longer tell north from south. Link keeps stubbing his toe.

(Also I'm desperately fighting the urge to shake the GameCube controller to attack stuff.)

Wii Parade Update: There may in fact be no ceiling to this thing. I figured 500 Miis would be the limit, but now I'm up to 509. And they just keep coming. It's actually quite alarming. At some point they're going to run out of memory space, and that's when they'll start pouring out of the system to suffocate me in my sleep.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 21 comments | §

A decade of dissipation

15 December 06 | 12:21

Today is December 15, 2006... which by my notes means it's been exactly ten years since the very first version of this site went online in its horrible, prototypical form as a Geocities page mostly consisting of not-yet-created links. (Not unlike all the non-existant wiki links hidden within the site's current incarnation.)

Ah, Geocities, how I don't miss you at all. The overloaded servers, the terrible "site builder" function that crawled even on a T1 line, the inexplicable section naming conventions. But you allowed me to post a website that used a gigantic-for-the-time 190Kb animated gif of a frog bursting into flames as the header, and things only went downhill from there.

To celebrate this unhappy occasion, I'm planting my face despairingly in my hands while sighing in disgust at ten years of time wasted. And also phasing out the toastyfrog.com domain. Yeah, screw you, Google index ranking. It's time to move along.

And speaking of moving along, pretty much all the stuff I sold off to fund the server move is priority mailing itself to the proper recipient. Concerned parties may email me with their zip codes and receive a delivery confirmation number in return.

posted by: | category: blog | forums | 24 comments | §

All-singing, all-dancing

13 December 06 | 10:37

Say, uh, it's been a while since I last updated, eh? I blame Rogue Galaxy, which I've been playing through for review. (Not the big review, so haters take heart! My score won't count.)



Rogue Galaxy is like a mashup of Skies of Arcadia, Kingdom Hearts and FFXII, but not quite as good as any of them. Well, OK, it's better than Kingdom Hearts. Like that's so difficult. The disparity in quality between Level 5's various projects makes me realize they are less a developer and more a tool, and the outcome of their work depends entirely on the skill and involvement of their current publisher. I'm sure Dragon Quest IX will be totally great, because Yuji Horii is way more anal and controlling than Sony. You can't say that about just anyone, you know.

Anyway, the real reason posts have been so few and far between has more to do with the fact that what little free time I have is squandered browsing the forums. Yes, the site is being undermined from within. So far I've been most impressed by everyone's eagerness to take my demands for an "all-singing, all-dancing, all-haiku" translation of Final Fantasy VI. It's been short on the singing and dancing so far, and that's probably to everyone's benefit. But the haiku is flowing like... like funky flow.

Medieval pervert!
Leading on that poor woman
And porn in the chest

Katarin's pregnant.
What am I supposed to do?
Mobliz has no jobs :(

Economizer
and gem box make Kefka look
like a mama's boy.

And the winner:

I HATE HATE HATE HATE
HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE
HATE HATE HATE HATE YOU

Finally, there's my own humble entry, which I forgot to post in the thread. Luckily, I have no compunctions about abusing my "only person who can post on the main page" privileges to place it here:

Leafers drenched in flame
M-m-m-m-m-magic!?
She's loaded for bear

Anyway, as soon as our rain lets up I'm mailing all those Crap I Want to Sell packages. They've been sitting here for a few days, but the post office is a long walk from here and I don't want everyone's stuff to get soaked along the way. I'll be shipping priority, though, so everything should be there pretty dang quick, like.

posted by: | category: games | forums | sixteen comments | §

Critter tripper fripper!?

07 December 06 | 15:20

First, thanks to everyone who bought the various bits of crap I wanted to sell in order to raise money for the server migration. The move has more than been paid for, and I'll be mailing out all the aforementioned crap over the next few days. In the meantime, let's celebrate by declaring a moratorium on news articles consisting of stupid sales number comparisons for next-gen consoles. Because really, when one week you report that the Wii shipped in double the quantities of the PlayStation 3 and the next week your big story is that the Wii sold in double the quantities of the PS3, you're not really doing anyone much good.

Speaking of Wii -- and don't we always, around these parts? -- as of last night my Mii Parade cracked the 300 mark. I really have no idea what the upward limit on this thing is, but at the moment it takes nearly a full minute for the whole crew to march their way across my screen. (Even longer if widescreen is disabled.) That's a lot of Hitlers, George Bushes and transvestite Luigis. In a surprising twist, my own Mii rendition of Solid Snake appeared in the parade after I had to delete him from the Plaza to make room for new arrivals. It was heartwarming. Even the studio audience was all like, "Aww."



My copy of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order #8 arrived. Yes, I know, the image up there is pre-Last Order. Whatever.

When last we visited Last Order, our esteemed webmaster was in a cranky mood. Volume 7 had just arrived and it seemed the plot had been hopelessly lost. Then found and taken back behind the shed and crammed through a wood chipper. Then the resulting mulch was used as fertilizer for skunk cabbage. It was a dark time indeed.

With volume 8, the plot has gone even more awry -- and, weirdly, it works. Alita herself figures into about the first fifteen pages of the book, after which a lengthy flashback kicks in. By lengthy, I mean "it's still going 160 pages later and will apparently continue next volume." And by "flashback" I mean "500 years in the past to the fall of contemporary Earth civilization in the wake of an extinction-level event." Not really what i expected to see coming right on the heels of Alita's grand epiphany about her true involvement in the death of a whole heck of a lot of people two centuries prior.

"But wait," you say. "If we go 500 years into the past, and Alita was only born 200 years before the events of the manga, who stars in the flashback?" Why, none other than ridiculously overpowered vampiress Caerula Sanguis -- who resultantly develops into something more than your typical badass with a transparently Latin-derived name. She almost becomes, I dunno, likable. And you get a better sense of the series' history. Not that we really need to know -- the original series was just fine with nothing but vague hints of the backstory to go by -- but it all comes together just fine simply because it the first time in ages that Last Order has really had that lovely Kishiro-ish-ness that made the early volumes so enjoyable.

Of course, at some point -- probably a little ways into volume 9 -- the series will inevitably turn its focus back to Alita and the excruciating Zenith Of Things Tournament. But hey, a little relief was all it took to convince me not to give up. Yet.

Also: Retronauts. It's back.

Edit: The Mii Parade now stands at 325. I wish parading Miis credited their creators, because I want to give the person who created Trumpy a big hug.

posted by: | category: media | forums | 21 comments | §

2006: Year of the weaksauce platformer

05 December 06 | 13:45

My 1UP review for Portrait of Ruin just went up. I was stunned a few moments ago when I grabbed a just-arrived advance copy of the latest EGM only to discover that the other reviewers on the game scored it considerably higher than I did. I guess my HATER reputation won't be clearing up anytime soon.

I dunno, I've found this year to be seriously disappointing on the platform gaming front. 2D sidescrolling action is still pretty much my favorite expression of gaming ever, and I've found this year's offerings to be heart-wrenchingly lackluster. This isn't weepy nostalgia speaking, either; in the past year I've played through a repulsive number of classics -- 8-bit, 16-bit, portable, you name it -- so this is an observation borne in the glaring spotlight of side-by-side comparison.



Portrait of Ruin is the latest letdown, but certainly not the worst. At least it (like New Super Mario Bros. before it) has superlative production values, tries to do some new things and is laden with homages to its own history. Not that fan service is any substitute for great gameplay, but it certainly helps. I just wish the same amount of effort had been put into the map design as into creating hidden skeleton bartenders who attack by sliding poisoned Mai Tais down the bar at you; Portrait wants to be Dracula's Curse and Symphony of the Night all at once, and had it succeeded probably would have been the greatest game known to mankind. Depth and exploration meets deviously challenging level design? I would buy this game. And love it gently. And probably pick up some extra copies for my friends.

Portrait, though... not so great. Linear stages just don't mix well with the boxy, hazard-free design of Symphony's children; the only challenge comes from attrition, and the only genuinely difficult parts are the bosses (which are insanely overpowered, capable of flattening the heroes in five seconds or less) and the CotM-style optional gauntlet. To make it worse, the game practically demands tons of backtracking -- but since every area is a start-to-finish shot, you have to take the same route every time. There is a word for this style of map design, and that word is, "Zzzzz."



Like I said in the review, though, the game's details are as much a saving grace as a woeful shortcoming. The bonus modes are incredible (albeit incredibly easy), the music is spectacular (especially the stuff by Yuzo Koshiro, who managed to craft tunes which sound like they were taken straight from the NES chapters even though they're original compositions), the tag-team system works perfectly, and the final battle is mind-blowingly cool. I think another six months of polish would have saved this game's undead bacon.



And so it goes with all of this game's 2D letdowns. I can certainly understand why a lot of people review old-school games less critically -- there's a strong temptation to say, well, no one makes stuff like this anyway, so we should give it a free pass just because it's so nice to see a nod to a bygone era. Ideally, though, modern 2D games would excel by building on their predecessors rather than struggling just to equal them. Is it any surprise that 2D gaming is increasingly a niche category when the games are so flat -- and in ways that have nothing to do with the visuals?

(Oh snap!)

posted by: | category: games | forums | 37 comments | §