Pendell

This month CD-ROM Journal takes a dive into modern art with a look at Takashi Murakami's controversial sculpture Hiropon - and his rare early digital work from 1993.

I've always found Hiropon baffling and struggled to get a sense for what he's communicating, but looking at a rarely-seen digital version helped me finally understand what he's getting at and what exactly it is he's saying about otaku sexuality.

With huge thanks to Nice Gear Games for providing a translation to the audio in the digital work.

no level of cynicism will stop me from loving the little grasshopper going on adventures

The Nazis were incompetent criminals whose mythical reputation in warfare is wholly unearned, and whose utter incompetence was on display constantly. You should mock their drug-addled stupidity at every turn.

Nobody would do that. Nobody would do that! That's so incredibly dangerous! Your armour racing ahead of your infantry, nobody stopping to consolidate positions, a supply corridor that runs the length of an entire fucking country? That's insane. Unless you were racing to capture ports-OH FUCK!

That's why it worked once. Oh, you're gonna blitzkrieg into the Soviet Union? You got high on your own supply and decided you're geniuses, huh? Go on, then! Plough across thousands of kilometers of goddamn nothing which you now actually have to dedicate security units to policing because, once again, you've got a supply corridor thin as the streak of piss down your leg as the cossacks rampage through your rear? Great move, dingus!

You're gonna blitzkrieg across North Africa? Egypt, Libya, Tunisia... and THEN WHAT? It's the fucking desert you sundried sauerkraut shitstains! German and Italian forces are gonna see-saw across almost the entire northern stretch of the continent without ever achieving a knockout against the 8th Army? You'll spend all the ammo, fuel, and lives you can to get just... within... gasping distance... of Tripoli... when the Allies, pushed back against their ports and literally sitting right on top of their supply network, can thump you right in the face and chase you back to the Suez Canal? How many times?

Oh, smashing through the Ardennes worked once, right? Driving through Belgium hell for leather to divide Allied units and break apart their ability to counterattack, yeah? That worked so well the last time! You remember kicking the British out of Dunkirk, right? Do it again! In the snow! Drive! Throw everything into the pot, go for it! ...wait a minute, using WHAT FUEL? You've got all these magnificent Wunderwaffen ready to deploy against the fractious Allied nations, but nothing to make them go! BETTER START DIGGING HOLES IN BERLIN TO MOUNT A DEFENCE, YA DOINKS.

If anybody ever tells you that blitzkrieg was a surefire sign of superior German strategic acumen, you can pour a glass of water over them and walk away. The German army could usually excel at the tactical level, where relatively small units and ad hoc formations would be gathered up by competent mid-level officers and thrown against the wall, but at a strategic level? Where all the dipshit Nazis were jerking one another off with Clausewitz manuscripts? They lost the war in 1940, they just didn't know it yet.