Listen to the Rain

Yesterday, sashagee took Laila to a speech evaluation. I've mentioned that she's been behind for a while, but only in expressive speech--she'll understand multi-stage instructions and I just talk to her using grown-up sentence structures at this point. Still, she has a hard time putting sentences together and it's especially obvious when she's in a group of her peers, hence the evaluation. I heard from sashagee that she came away very reassured, but it wasn't until later that I got the details.

To wit: they seemed to think it was more of an occupational therapy issue rather than a speech therapy issue. sashagee has mentioned she feels like Laila is just thinking much too quickly and the words don't have any time to get out, so she needs some help slowing down and reconnecting her mind and body (coupled with a bit of speech therapy to smooth the process out). Now if you've been following the story of Laila for a while, you may remember that Laila was in both speech and occupational therapy years ago, but graduated out of them. The person doing the assessment this time was pretty dismissive of Laila's previous therapists--sashagee told me that she said this was definitely something they should have noticed and they must "not have been very good" (direct quote)--but had some recommendations for therapists in the city for us to look in to, so that's the next step. At least from what sashagee said, this should hopefully be something that doesn't take that much time and then Laila will unlock her language. Hopefully that's the case.

Today was the parental information session for new families at Laila's new school, and while I couldn't go, I watched Laila while sashagee went. It ran over the hour they had set and sashagee didn't get to grab any coffee before she came home, but she took copious notes. Among those notes:

• It's an International Baccalaureate school, so it follows a standardized curriculum through all of its instruction (preschool through middle school).
• The school has a whole system of communications that goes through tiers, from emails and website announcements and fliers home and so on.
• There are a bunch of parent groups you can join, including some Facebook groups she said I should join.
• Breakfast and lunch are offered but optional, important because sashagee wants to make meals for Laila.
• There will be a "welcome back" day where we can take a tour of the school.

Something else that stuck out in her memory was overhearing a conversation about the condo to the south of us that was just on sale. A month or so ago, we were walking out on the sidewalk and I heard some people outside the condo showing say they already had twenty offers. Today, sashagee said she heard other people talking about wanting to move into the neighborhood to secure their kid a spot at the local school for kindergarten since if you're already in the school you don't have to change mid-year and it's possible that you'll get to stay in future years (depending on the school administration, how many students the school has, their admissions policies, the phases of the moon, and so on), and that the same condo had closed with over thirty offers and gone for 120K over asking price! Once again, me being very lucky has worked out in my favor--just a few blocks over and we'd be in another school district, none of which are as good as our local one.

So on Tuesday, I went with sashagee to get Laila registered for preschool, while Laila was still out at the grandparents. When we got there, there were a bunch of people in line ahead of us, and while waiting in line I realized that we didn't have a printout copy of our proof of income, so I downloaded a PDF on my phone and got ready to argue about access to a printer or an email address to mail it to. Then it turned out when we got to the front it didn't matter--the woman doing the registering couldn't seem to find Laila in the system, and when she started talking with sashagee it seemed there was a miscommunication somewhere. See, sashagee had registered Laila for half-day preschool, and the system--knowing Laila was four years old since this was after putting in all of her information--had let her. At the school, we were told that half-day preschool was only for three-year-olds and that she would have to talk to the Office of Early Childhood Education to get things sorted out.

sashagee was understandably upset by this, and went home and made some calls. A call to the school wasn't returned (I don't think we ever got that email back that we were supposed to get...) but a call to the family hotline told her that since we had applied to half-day preschool, and had received an acceptance notice for half-day preschool, they had to take her. She just might be in a class with three-year-olds.

Armed with this knowledge, sashagee sent off an email explaining things to the contact she had and then she (and Laila since she was back) went back to the school on Thursday to re-register while I was at work. She left fifteen minutes before registration opened (the school is within a few minutes' walk) and was gone until fifteen minutes after registration closed, and when she came back she told me a wild tale. There had been one person ahead of her and the same person doing the registration, and when the person ahead of her was finished, the woman saw sashagee, said hello, and went back into her office and just...didn't come back. After thirty minutes the security guard went back to see what was going on and someone else came out and finished Laila's registration no problem, other than reiterating that she'd probably be in a class with three-year-olds.

Unbelievable. Just wild unprofessionalism. And I bet we'll have to deal with this woman again too, since this is our neighborhood school. Hopefully Laila's actual preschool experience goes better than her registration does!

I didn't write this--it was a tale on the SCP Foundation that I read a long time ago and found really inspirational. I read it while I lived in Japan, and it was gone only a year or so later--the Wayback capture shows it existing in 2010 and the next time it checks in 2012 it's gone. I've thought about it often since then, and today I thought to look using the standard tale URL format and found it once again, so I'm posting it here to preserve it.

It was written before articles had comments or rating, so I don't know what it was supposed to mean. But I love the story.

( Endless Levels )

Original source (through wayback) is here.

Laila is four years old! Happy birthday Laila!

This year, sashagee decided to have a smaller party this year, with just family. Unfortunately, almost no one could make it--her brother and my sister had to work and her parents were out of town on vacation, so it was just my parents that came. Laila didn't care at all, though, since she'd been talking for days about wanting to go spend time with papa and nana at their house and she was overjoyed at an entire day of attention from them. While I worked (at home, since my boss had offered that I could work from home on her birthday), Laila and papa and nana disappeared into Laila's room and read books, listened to stories on her Yoto (a gift from her grandma and grandpa), and drove cars around on her roadscape rug. When dinnertime came around we asked Laila what she wanted and she said tacos, so the entire family went on a short walk to sashagee's favorite local Mexican place, placed our orders, and walked back and ate. Shortly afterwards, papa and nana had to go home, leaving Laila with more Cars cars to drive around her rug, books, and some other presents.

Laila really loved her butterfly decor:


In more general updates, I already wrote about how we're worried about Laila's speech and we're going to get her evaluated, but she's been doing better in other areas. Today sashagee heard noise and woke up to find Laila had gotten up and gone to the bathroom all by herself! She doing better in swim class, and while she still has a bit of trouble with waiting her turn and with not messing with the floating toys the teachers use for helping to teach lessons, she understands that the appropriate thing to do in class is to "take turns." Or at least, that's what she tells me when I ask her, so she remembers it. Getting her to do it is another thing. On the other hand, she stuck her head underwater on the lesson after the one where the teacher told me that she had been asking to wear goggles, so that's progress! Only once, but I took Laila to a lesson where the parents spent the entire time trying to convince their son to get into the water and he simply would not do it. Laila has never had a problem like that.

We used to keep her door locked at night so she wouldn't get up and get in trouble, but since we're trying to teach her to go to the bathroom on her own, we've stopped. She used to bust out of her room just after we put her down for bed all the time, but she doesn't do that anymore. She's transitioning into a period where she actually wants to go to sleep. I don't expect this to last but I'll enjoy it while it does.

Lately she's been really into her Yoto, which is essentially a radio-esque toy. It has a daily short podcast or music on it at base, and then you can buy cards that kids can put in with various short stories or songs on them. Laila has been listening to a lot of the Little Mermaid. I was initially very skeptical of it because we have a rule about no flashing lights and no interactive buttons for Laila's toys, but I was won over by being told that there weren't videos to accompany the stories, it was just pixelated images and no more than one per chapter--so Little Mermaid only has three pictures (one of Ariel, one of King Triton, and one of Prince Eric). The music only has the image of a radio. We have been stopping her from skipping chapter after chapter, though, in the same way we don't keep reading if she skips ahead in her books anymore. Teaching patience is very important, even though Laila is definitely not happy about having to learn it.

She's turning into a fashionista as well. After five years, sashagee started wearing her earrings again and Laila immediately decided she wanted to wear them too, so we got her some shiny stickers that we use for "earrings." A couple weeks ago while we waiting for the bus, there was a woman wearing a bear of high-heeled gogo boots, and Laila physically put her hands on my cheeks, turned my head, and she, "She [I] like her boots!" Only four and she's very concerned with cuteness.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Final image: the cupcakes that sashagee baked for Laila's birthday.

( Butterflycakes )

The new pope is from Chicago.

...but is he a Cubs pope, or a Sox pope?

...unless I'm the one doing it to other people in the critically-acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, with an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Stormblood expansion up to level 70 for free with no restrictions on playtime:



That's the gil cap--you are not allowed to carry any more gil on your person than 999,999,999. Fortunately, I have several retainers that I can put my excess gil on, so after I took this picture I gave each of them 100,000,000 gil and now I can work on trying to get all of them up to 999,999,999 gil!

That's not going to happen. It took me years to get to gil cap, I'm never going to hit max gil for everyone.

Now if only real life also required no ongoing costs for food and shelter, no need to sleep, and I could maintain 100% focus on the task at all times, so I could replicate my feat in real life.

Back in Japan I used to go view the cherryblossoms every year, multiple times a year. I remember sitting by the banks of the Motoyasugawa with friends, tons of people all around us on blankets at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and drinking sake and eating kushiyaki while we chatted for hours at a time. One time we all went up to Shōbara and had a picnic in Ueno Sakura Park, where a bunch of us rented rowboats and went out on the pond. Halcyon days.

Well, we can't get that experience in Chicago but we do have cherryblossoms here, planted down in Jackson Park. The last couple of years the weather has been cold enough that they didn't bloom, and this year the weather was also pretty changeable but the blossoms were out, so on Saturday morning after sashagee and I woke up late and ate breakfast, her parents brought Laila back from her grandparents stay, and then we all drove down to the Garden of the Phoenix to look at the blossoms. What blossoms there were--Chicago weather being what it was, a couple days prior it had been 26°, it was now 10° with chill winds. What's more, the day before there had been a strong rainstorm that had washed a bunch of blossoms off the trees, and they were on the ground and in the lake when we got there. Some trees were almost devoid of blossoms entirely! Despite that, there were still some trees to be seen:


The most interesting trees were right near the parking lot as we entered. We walked around the lake, where there were some trees but only a couple with enough blossoms to bother looking at, and then when sashagee asked me about the festival that was supposed to take place that day I said it wasn't until 1:30 p.m. (it was 10:15 a.m.), so sashagee's parents drove us all back home and after hanging out with Laila for a bit, they left.

We put Laila down for a nap but she did not take one, and she had enough energy later in the day that she kept demanding we go for a walk, so we went. The temperature had gotten a bit warmer, helped mostly by the sun finally coming out, but that meant when we went to the park there were a bunch of people there and Laila asked to leave after only ten minutes. She still wanted to go for a walk, though, so I kept walking down to Broadway and we went down to the other park further south, and Laila ran around for a while. She told me she wanted to leave once and then changed her mind, and it turned out to be fortuitous because after we had been there for twenty minutes, some of Laila's classmates from gymnastics showed up! I actually got to see Laila play together with some other kids. The cutest part was when two of them were on either end of the seesaw, and the second-cutest part was when Laila was beneath the playground equipment and two of her classmates were up top, and they were all looking for each other. When a bubble-shooting gun came out, they all got distracted and Laila eventually got tired and we went home.

The next day was a lazy day most of the day, but in the evening I had an invite to worldbshiny. I was also invited to go to see The Sinners in the afternoon, but I already wrote about why I didn't go. Since I handled most of that, I took the evening off and walked down to the bar where the party was being held, arriving a bit later, but it turned out that it wasn't too late because poor worldbshiny had her car towed while she was in the movie and had to move the time back. But once I did get there, it was lovely--I spent a while talking to lisekatevans's housemate about sightseeing in London, we all (except me) discussed The Sinners, I had a couple drinks and listened in, and after two hours I called it a night and went home. It's how I used to spend multiple nights a week that way.

I listened to Gorgeous on the way home, just like I used to on summer nights, all those years ago.

Usually when Anime Chicago has an event, only one of us can go, or (more often) neither of us can go. But yesterday when Laila was out at the grandparents, Anime Chicago had a dinner and chat event at Gangnam Market in River West, so after I was done with work we took the Red Line and a bus the ~hour out. We were late, thanks to the CTA, but we did get there.

We went to a similar event around six months ago and I remember the food being very good--I got some kind of donburi at the time--but that wasn't the case this time. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing that happened after we checked in was that we walked over to the restaurants and ran into worldbshiny! She had had a bad day at work and come in to get ramen, which she recommended to me, and we chatted a bit about her day before we left to get food. I say "left" but worldbshiny was sitting less than a meter from the restaurants, and sashagee went a bit further away to Gangnam Taco while I turned around to go to the Seven-Faced Bird (from the Japanese for turkey, 七面鳥, shichimenchō). worldbshiny recommended the ramen so that's what I got, plus a kara-age bao, and sat down at a nearby table:

( Ramen picture )
Unfortunately, we were both a bit disappointed. My ramen wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. The broth was great and the ground turkey they put at the bottom was a nice surprise, but the noodles were a little too squishy (when I told this to worldbshiny later she said she gets her ramen without noodles). Meanwhile, sashagee thought her tacos were bland and too small, just not really worth buying at all. I heard other people later say that they weren't too satisfied either, which is disappointing because I remember it being more delicious last time.

After eating, sashagee really wanted to hit the gacha machines, so we got $20 worth of tokens (ten tokens and each pull takes more than one token because gacha is a scam). I was going to do one pull on the Kirby machines but despite all the available machines, both Kirby machines were totally sold out. One of them even had three possible Kirbys out of the four results! I can see why it was sold out, but come on. I had to (sashagee demanded I pull at least one thing for myself) pull the That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime and won a crowned Rimuru that now lives on my desk. sashagee got some Hello Kitty toys, including a dessert-themed Pompompurin that's in a pudding cup that we immediately had to pick up and put out of Laila's reach because we knew she would gravitate to it (which she did). sashagee's gacha addition thus satisfied, we split up. I spent most of the time talking to mhhilker about video games and our respective Passovers before someone mentioned that the grocery store was going to close soon, so sashagee loaded up on mochi, udon, dorayaki, and various other things that are a bit harder to get in the Asian markets close to us, and when we had paid, we went back to the food court and said our goodbyes.

While we were walking to the bus stop, an autonomous food delivery drone whizzed by on the sidewalk.

The Constitutional Crisis Is Here.

Most Americans, having not lived under authoritarian regimes or dictatorships, don't actually know what they're like. They imagine doors getting kicked in, social chaos, constant warring gangs or warlords, that kind of thing. But the truth is that society basically functions the same way it does everywhere else. People go to work, they go to the movies, they meet up at restaurants and go to religious services and form clubs. Very few people just disappear.

But everyone knows that people do disappear, and that if they're not careful, it could be them, and they act accordingly.

Americans mostly haven't internalized that yet because they think it can't be them. Oh, those people being sent to foreign prisons were foreigners/criminals/radicals/communists/antisemites/American-haters/whatever, there must have been some reason. This is America and we love freedom, the government wouldn't just scoop someone off the street and bundle them out of the country for no reason. There must be a reason. If there's no reason that would mean that it could happen to me, and for my own psychological safety I cannot consider that I am subject to having my life ruined in an instant due to things I have no power to affect, so there must have been a reason.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.[...]

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.[...]

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."
-Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

I wrote after the 2016 that we were in the final days of the Republic, it would just take some time for the country to die. Maybe we'll find a miracle cure, but I suspect not.

Appropriate ("appropriate") that this all happened on Pesaḥ, the holiday where as part of the Seder we repeatedly say "Once we were slaves, but now we are free."

Today was another session of Laila's Hebrew school (called משפחתון Mishpachton, after the small-scale daycares that exist in Israel) today. I've been dreading going, because Laila is pretty wild and usually goes crazy in class. This time, I had the bright idea to make her walk all the way to the bus and then walk all the way from the bus to the Mishkan headquarters, and it worked! She asked a couple times for me to carry her, I always told her no, and by the time we actually got there she was willing to sit in my lap or have me hold her while the teacher sang the opening and closing songs and when it came time for activities (it was a Pesaḥ lesson), she went over to the tambourine-making station and picked out all the tambourine bells herself, ran to the "color a burning bush" station and did a bit of coloring, and then spent the entire rest of the lesson drawing on the whiteboard and asking me to draw in shapes so she could fill them in. I did draw this extremely sophisticated burning bush image of my own:


These are three and four years old. Not a lot of religious instruction at that age. We did sing dayenu briefly at the end, and there were some other songs in between, butwith young kids the important thing is to keep them engaged. They apparently did a lesson on keeping kids engaged at the Seder, because of course all the discussion and debate and talking about the lessons of Egypt and the wilderness aren't important to hungry children. It's only a benefit if you get to do any of the parts of the four children, and Laila's still a bit young for that. We'll see how she handles the Seder this year.

I do have one bit of sad news, though. We walked part-way back to the bus--I relented and carried her another part of the way--and got on the bus to go meet sashagee for lunch. I got off a little early to go to the Middle Eastern Grocery Store to pick up some hummus for Laila, but on the way I noticed something on a nearby lightpole. And when I went closer to look, well:

( antisemitism )

This is the same neighborhood where I've seen people tear down innocuous "Bring them home now" posters about the hostages, though, so I'm not that surprised. I'm just glad that Laila is young enough she didn't notice it or care about it. I only wish that I could have faith that antisemitism would be getting better, instead of on an obvious trajectory to get worse and worse for the rest of our lives.

Insert that quote about how "I'm a content creator--I create problems for myself."

If you know anything about JSON, you might think "refactor JSON? What are you talking about?" If you don't, JSON is a way of storing data that makes it easy for both machines and humans to read. It's all done as key-value pairs, so you have like

"name": "Item",
"Description": "This is an item.",
"black": true

and so on and so on, with as many fields as necessary.

The reason for the refactor is that Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead has a JSON-based scripting language incorporated into it. A lot of games use Lua for modding, a programming language where one of its main feature is that it's designed to be embedded in other codebases (such as that of a video game), and indeed some other forks of Cataclysm use Lua as well. CDDA does not, for several reasons, but as far as I know the most relevant is that it's open source, multiple builds come out every day, and the Lua integration would need constant work and constant tweaks to keep working with all the changes. A full game that releases discrete patches can make sure all the Lua binds are working before releasing the patch, thus avoiding constant mod disruption.

Anyway, CDDA has a scripting language called "Effect on Condition" that's all built out of the dialogue system, which allows certain dialogue choices to only appear sometimes depending on what Conditions are set--what other quests you've done, how long since the start of the game, if you have certain items, etc.--and cause an Effect, like setting NPC opinions, giving you quest rewards, and so on. That was all expanded out to scripts that run under certain Conditions and cause certain Effects. Nowadays a lot of the game is reliant on this system for more complicated effects, since it's easily expandable and testable without re-compiling the game, which lowers the barrier for contribution. One update allowed crafting recipes to run a script on completion, and I used this to make training psychic powers for my Mind Over Matter mod into crafting recipes. At the time, I did not have the skill to come up with a generic framework, so every single recipe (something like 200) had individual handling for training whatever power it is attached to.

Well, this week I pulled the trigger and rewrote every one of those 200 scripts so they all called on a set of ten total scripts, nine for each of the psionic paths (telekinesis, telepathy, etc), and then a final one that handles which power you're using and appropriately trains it. That means if I ever want to make changes in the future, I only to do it at most ten times, and more probably only one time, rather than having to mirror the change 200 times and hope that I never mess it up. It only took like six hours to go through thousands of lines of JSON and make all the changes, but now it's all done and easy to make further changes. I'm already thinking of how to make learning powers a bit more complicated--currently it's a straight Skill + 1d10 vs a difficulty roll, and when that was repeated 200 times I was loathe to change it. But now that I would only have to change it once...

The eternal battle between "add new things" vs. "do boring work of making old thing better" and this time the second one won.

I kind of exist adjacent to most fandom endeavors. Despite my long presence on Dreamwidth and Livejournal before it, I've never really participated in any fandom communities. I have a fanfiction.net account and have used it to read maybe half a dozen stories ever, and I have an AO3 account and have used it to post a single story and haven't read anything on that site at all. Of the stories I have read, some of them aren't on fanfiction.net--like the old classic Children of an Elder God that I read while it was updating at university. On fanfiction.net I read Aeon Natum Engel--you can see my interests here, in the intersection of cosmic horror and giant robots--and...I think that's all I can remember? I have a bunch of stories I turned into ebooks with the intention of reading them and then just never did. Part of it is that I'm not at all interested in romance in fanfiction. I found one Stargate/Cthulhu crossover fanfic, an area I had thought would be ripe with potential, and never ended up reading it because 1) it was abandoned 2) it was Stargate: Atlantis and 3) it was mostly slash. The only part I remember is that the nanoswarm cloud in the original Stargate: Atlantis was turned into a rogue shoggoth in the fic. I read a relatively short fic about what if Harry Potter were raised by the Culture (which I really appreciated because it did not assume that the Culture Minds automatically understood magic, they were baffled how an owl traveled thousand of light years from Earth to poof into a room on an Orbital) which ran about nine chapters before it petered out.

I have read a lot of Let's Plays, and some of them approach fanfiction by using video games to tell a story. I read the Final Fantasy VIII Altimate Rewrite, which was very good but also never finished. I read a long narrative let's play of Morrowind that was originally hosted at morningstarlady until it was purged and moved to Dreamwidth, which was then hosted at lady_morningstar until it was locked and limited to access only, and is now seemingly being remade (again!) using models from The Sims at aeronwen. I only got partway through the previous version (they were very long), but I think they never finished as well. You can probably see where the source of me being leery of reading fanfiction comes from, here.

I guess the most fanfiction I've ever read, now that I think about it, are the stories set in The Night Land. I read every single story on that site and keep thinking about buying the books, especially after the untimely death of its maintainer.

The reason I brought all this time is because last night I thought "I wonder if that old Sailor Moon website I found back in the day is still around..." and it turns out it wasn't, but it's still available on the Wayback Machine. Sailor Moon Expanded ran from the late 90s through the early 00s and...well, I have to admit that while there's a ton of fanfics I've never read any of them. At the time, 2010, I had never seen a single episode of Sailor Moon, and wouldn't watch any until Sailor Moon Crystal came out several years later. The part that drew me in was the meticulously-expanded bestiary, maps, and cultural information on the Dark Kingdom and the Silver Millennium, which was envisioned as a magic-based solar-system-wide confederacy that ended with the sealing of magic after Queen Beryl attacked the moon. Or, as I described it at the time, "The war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts when the Unseelie Court wanted summon Cthulhu."

The other reason is A Dark, Distorted Mirror, a Babylon 5 AU fanfic that assumes that the inciting event of most of the plots in the early series--the Earth-Minbari War, a war where the vastly-technologically-superior Minbari curbstomped the humans for two years, only losing a single capital ship in all that time, until on the very moment of victory as they annihilated Earth's last defensive fleet before suddenly ceasing fire and surrendering--did not end with a treaty. As a result, Earth was glassed, most of humanity was killed, and the series is much less hopeful in tone. I did actually make it through the entire first book but tapped out when I had four more books of around 200K words each left, around the size of a doorstopper fantasy book. That one is still online and is finished, though, so maybe I should go back and read it.

I apply to fanfiction nowadays the same principle I apply to fantasy series--once the author finishes it, maybe I'll read it.

If anyone has any recommendations for finished, good Cthulhu crossover fic, I'm all ears. I had a lot of hope for Aeon Natum Engel until the author blew it up with a "rocks fall, everyone dies" sudden ending. They then declared they were going to re-write the entire thing better and higher quality, and I read the first chapter of Aeon Entelechy Evangelion and, when I saw how overwrite and baroque it was, I said to myself "This will never be finished" and stopped reading. And, well...it was never finished.