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potteresque-ire · 4 years ago

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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - My Rambling Review

This is a book that at times floors me, at times frustrates me.

(Under the cut, because 1) rambling and 2) spoilers)

I’ll lay out my frustrations first — then, I’ll do a 180 degrees turn around and explain why these frustrations also make the book such a haunting, powerful read for me. All in all, I really enjoyed this book. It’s just that, while reading, I also kept thinking:

This book is a several edits away from a masterpiece.

I’ll begin with this. I can’t say how much I adore Suzanne Collins’ dedication in driving home the themes of the Hunger Games in TBOSAS. The nature of war and how it serves a tool for those who want to retain power, the opposing view of whether human nature is inherently good or violent or self-destructive.

Control, chaos, contract.

But this is also why, I think, the book stumbles in places. The themes are given such a strong, at times heavy-handed treatment that they threaten to swallow up other elements of storytelling. The plot, the characterisations etc have all at times given way to serve the themes, and the story’s believability is compromised. The Hunger Games, as a series, requires more believability to work than a novel about our world because of the sheer brutality of the games, both inside and outside the arena. This requires a sure hand in the writing. Suzanne Collins accomplished that in the original trilogy — I never doubted the existence of these games, and the horror that is the Capitol that has created and enjoyed them. But I did have moments of doubt while reading TBOSAS.

I think, if I have to sum up the shortcomings of TBOSAS, it is this: everything in this book is about war and totalitarianism. Every plot point speaks to these themes. Every major character is a walking symbol of a set of ideals related to these themes. Everything they think and do, every backdrop of their thoughts and actions including the imageries, the songs, the objects (compact, compass, snakes etc), all serve the themes in some way. This undermines plausibility of the story because actual human beings aren’t like that. Actual events don’t happen like that. Our lives are pulled in multiple directions by numerous purposes, most of them trivial. The trivialities may not serve any larger themes but they round us, complete us as humans. They provide the context, the texture of who we are.

Because only the aspects of them connected to the themes are told/emphasised, The characters in TBOSAS are prone to reading flat, textureless. Dr Gaul (DG) is the most extreme of examples. She feels no more than a voice (not a human) for the singular purposes of bringing up questions about the themes. Other major characters are relatively spared, but the issue is still evident in places. The thoughts of Coriolanus Snow (CS) are too focused on several issues (poverty; the three Cs; how the Plinths offend him, for example). Lucy Grey (LG) is somewhat saved by her songs and her mystery is her draw, but the same mystery also prevents us from engaging emotionally with her. Sejanus Plinth (SP) repeatedly tries to defy the Capitol, which is noble, but does little else that we’re aware of. His presence seems to serve as a contrast to CS rather than being a person on his own. The secondary characters suffer even more under the weight of the themes: the mentors, for example, are so similarly unlikeable that they border on cartoonish for me. It makes sense in the trilogy that Katniss doesn’t know much about those in the arena with her and their mentors; it makes sense that her descriptions of them veer towards two-dimensional and therein lies the tragedy of the Games — Katniss and Peeta are fully aware that every tribute is a human being but they’re robbed of any chance to treat them as such. In contrast, the mentors in TBOSAS are CS’s childhood friends. CS may be self-centred and calculating, but he’s too observant to see his friends as all alike. Symbolically, I can understand why the mentors share certain traits — they will be the audience for the next 65 Hunger Games, after all — but the implausibility of these mentors undermines the plausibility of the 10th Hunger Games itself, as CS sits among them.

The shortcomings in characterisations are reflected in the plot. The romantic scenes between CS and LG tend to get into the discussions of the nature of the Games, of Panem and the Capitol’s rule very quickly (for example, the one by the Lake, the one during their final trip out of District 12). It allows a direct compare-and-contrast between his views and hers, but at the plot level, it makes their romance, healthy or not, difficult to believe, which makes some of CS’ decisions hard to believe. Sometimes, I almost sense a disinterest in the writing, a hastening in the pace at what are significant plot points that don’t directly serve the themes (for example, the confrontation in the shed). And there are many of such beautiful plot points in this book, fantastic moments when things don’t go as expected or the writing nails the scene and brings the emotions to the max (The last hanging. * Sigh*). But this book, like CS, isn’t interested in lingering in those moments. This book, like CS, doesn’t allow itself to veer out of emotional control.

Related to the plot too is that I feel the treatment of the tributes before 10th Hunger Games is a bit too heavy handed, and as a result, fail to achieve the chilling effects of the games in the original trilogy. How the tributes are dumped in a zoo and treated with veterinarians, how they’re treated in the funerals etc … the cold-heartedness of these acts, the villainous nature of the Capitol is so overt that it’s difficult to imagine the Capitol’s citizens going along with them (watching the tributes at the zoo, for example; the fans outside the arena during the games). The luxury offered to the tributes before the Games in the original trilogy adds on a whole layer of brutality, because it’s there to appease the conscience of the Capitol citizens, because it’s equivalent to fattening the pig before slaughtering it. The 10th Hunger Games misses that. Like everything else, I understand this choice of presentation at the symbolic level (more on that later), but it also makes some of these sequences read almost caricature, if the Games were a human. It’s Evil spelled out for all to see; it’s evil for evil’s sake.

Okay, so this seems to be a long list of complaints. If you get here, you must be wondering, how come I said I enjoyed the book? What is there left to be enjoyed, if the characterisations, the plot and the pacing all have somethings left to be desired?

And my answer is: this book is a very different book if I adjust my perspective, think of everything in terms of its themes and symbols. After this adjustment, TBOSAS becomes a very different read.

It’s also brilliant.

My thoughts are rough — I’m not familiar with the Hobbesian theories, but I’ll try to explain my alternate view of TBOSAS via my understanding of the 4 major characters, Coriolanus Snow (CS), Lucy Grey (LG), Sejanus Plinth (SP), and Dr Gaul (DG). I think of them as the major characters because I feel they each represent a set of perspectives regarding totalitarianism and the wars and chaos associated with it. In the books, these perspectives are engaged in a Hunger Games of their own, a battle raged because the governing set of perspectives, the one of Dr Gaul, is failing. The victor of this Game doesn’t get the Plinth Prize, but decides the fate of the Districts and Panem. I’d summarise the 4 perspectives as follows:

DG (Dr Gaul) is the closest to the classic villain. She views the line between the Capitol and the Districts as not the line between good and evil, but between winners and losers, who are violent animals without the line. The line is rigid and unmovable and must be maintained via constant war. She wants to make a totalitarian regime.

SP (Sejanus Plinth) is the closest to the classic hero. He also sees the line between the Capitol and the Districts, and as clearly and insistently as Dr Gaul (he insists he’s from District 2 throughout the book). The difference is, he sees it as the line between the oppressors and the oppressed, the evil and the good. He wants to break the totalitarian regime, make the line obsolete by making one side disappear. The road to achieve his ideals also involves war.

LG (Lucy Grey) refuses to acknowledge the line between the Capitol and the Districts. She has no trouble becoming friends / lovers with those who are from the Capitol as long as they do not commit the same brutality, while her sympathies also lie with the rebels who’re brutally treated. She has no interest in wars, in the making or breaking of any regime. She is her own judge of who’s good and who’s evil, who’s the oppressor and the oppressed and contrary to DG (and eventually, CS), she believes humans are inherently good.

CS (Coriolanus Snow), on the surface, also sees the line between the Capitol and the Districts. Unlike DG and SP, however, he sees it as something fluid, which can be erased and redrawn to suit a purpose. The line CS sees doesn’t demarcate good vs evil, or winners vs losers. It separates CS and what CS wants. Like LG, CS has no true loyalty to the Capitol or the Districts, has no inherent interest in wars or making or breaking a regime. Unlike LG, however, he is open to participating in them as long as there are rewards to be reaped. As such, CS has no qualms cheating in the Games, which does far more damage to the Capitol’s image of strength and control than anything else (by making LG a victor despite her unthinkable odds but more importantly, making her a person instead of an animal), or later on, taking over SP’s place in the Plinth’s family.

DG, despite being the game maker, is the first loser of this Hunger Games between the ideologies. Her control is cracking. Her Games are a bore, and discontent and hunger have lent chaos to the Districts, like the fight in the dark in District 12. Chaos is also in the Capitol when CS, discontent and hungry in his own way, begins to erase the line between the Capitol and the Districts by showing up in the train station with a rose. Despite her powerful façade, DG is also weak against LG and SP. LG defeats DG’s snake mutts easily in the arena. DG has to give SP chance after chance, given his father’s ammunition empire.

DG’s strength is that she’s aware of her weaknesses, and willing to adjust her tactics in exchange for the control she craves. I don’t think she’s grooming CS as much as she sees something in him that she doesn’t have. The something that is symbolised by the compact — the remaining humanity in CS after the war that allows him to gain the trust of LG and SP. DG fails to even pretend to have that. Like the 10th Hunger Games she’d staged, like her dumping the tributes in the zoo and abusing them, her intent is too obvious, her distaste too overt and … tasteless. Even the Capitol audience aren’t keen on her designs; they go to the zoo to watch the tributes but skip the Games. She needs a CS who knows how to re-package the Games as something that appears fun and harmless and beautiful, like LG. LG who can make tributes in a cage look dignified, who can entertain and sing DG’s snake mutts into oblivion.

SP’s strength is, of course, his moral fibre, which is also his weaknesses. He’s too idealistic; his inability to accept compromises, especially when he’s still too young to bring about actual changes to the Capitol, render him useless towards his goal — even if he doesn’t meet his end, what good can he do for the Districts, for Panem, once he heads North (with the likes of Billy Taupe)? I find myself agreeing with CS when he talks SP out of the arena — morality is of limited use if it can’t be translated into meaningful actions. I also (somewhat shamefully) find myself agreeing with CS’s frustration / bitterness about SP’s constant, vocal insistence that he’s District, if only because I find it disrespectful to the actual suffering the District 2 folks must be going through. As the Plinth heir, SP is in a very powerful position to bring about reforms to Panem if he can be a little more patient, a little more scheming, … a little more CS. Instead, he constantly engages himself in largely performative acts that compromises his own potential. Acting out in front of Dr Gaul. The bread crumbs for Marcus, even. It’s touching, yes, but does it change anything? No. The bread ritual isn’t the same as Katniss’s funeral for Rue; Katniss and Rue are both tributes. SP gets out of the arena because of the privilege he has in spades but fails to see in himself. He should also know, because he’s seen it before, what happens to whichever tribute who would’ve killed him if CS doesn’t show up.

That said, it doesn’t mean SP doesn’t do any good; it’s just that the good he’s done isn’t what he’s intended, which, perhaps, makes SP’s end even more tragic than it is. I think SP and his idealism have inspired CS to be a better person. I believe CS, despite himself, like SP more than he admits and SP delays his final turn for at least a while. SP may not have helped anyone in the Districts as he’s wished, but he’s close to changing the mind of someone who’ll one day decide the fate of everyone in the Districts.

LG. Her strength is her independent thinking. She isn’t naive about the Capitol-Districts line she refuses to acknowledge — she knows where the snakes are. She knows that better than anyone else. On the surface, she appears to be the weakest among the four, the girl in a rainbow dress whose only survival skill is her ability to manipulate snakes. But someone can sense evil and manipulate it to their advantage is a threat; someone who doesn’t buy into the Capitol’s propaganda is a threat, especially those who remember that the cruel laws and “traditions” (the Games) the Capitol attempts to pass as “lessons” are artefacts and therefore, transient. Transient things are weak; subservience to them is then an option, not a must. LG and her kind can be even more threatening to the Capitol than the rebels, because while the latter can be rid of with sentences of treason, the LGs of Panem cannot be removed the same way because they haven’t acted against the regime. They cannot be sentenced for singing songs about the good and bad in humans, about human emotions, about the day to day sightings of their human neighbours, dead and alive, about the humans that arch between reality and imagination and prophecy. They cannot be hanged for knowing songs that predate Panem and the Capitol, for being the mockingjays that still have the jabberjays in them but nonetheless find a way to sing whatever they choose.

DG, I believe, fails to fully grasp the danger of LG, but CS does. His biggest fear of LG is that she can locate snakes, that she can see through him. They bond at first as they both sees themselves above the Capitol-Districts line, but once the Games are over, the cracks between them almost immediately begin to show. She thinks of her knowledge of snakes as self defence. He sees it as something she’ll coil around him one day. Like a hope — LG is CS’s chance of getting back the humanity he lost in the war — and also like a rope.

The weakness of LG is, of course, that she’s after all, just a girl in a rainbow dress. Even if she wants/needs to, she doesn’t have the power to make any changes to the Capitol. She can only run once perceived as a threat, but she can’t fight back.

She can’t fight CS, the ultimate winner.

All through the book, I keep shifting my own mind lens to see how I would perceive CS if I cannot read his thoughts, if I’m like everyone else around him. And I realise how he … smells like roses through a significant portion of the book, given how unifying awful his classmates are except SP. He’s the first mentor to treat a tribute like a human. He helps his classmates (Arachne and Clemensia; the mutts attack on the latter isn’t his intention). He’s the only Academy student who’s kind to SP and while he’s forced to save the latter, he does so with tact and an understanding of SP’s thought processes that can only come from friendship. Do we judge a person with his actions or his thoughts? I’d say, his actions, and from an outsider’s perspective, CS does seem to be the one who can change Panem for the better. He does seem to be the one who can fix the Capitol from within, who can get it to rethink its treatment of the Districts while preserving its own dignity as the ruling class. And herein lies the greatest strength of CS—he’s a diplomat; he’s all about soft power. He knows how to work within a system (eg. his cheating), how to wage a war without firing a shot. He can be everyone’s ally and at the same time: while he’s making a major contribution to the Hunger Games by his betting proposal, he’s also destroying the Games at its foundation by equalising his Capitol self and his District tribute (picnicking with LG at the zoo in front of the camera, for example). When DG says she destroyed the records of the Games because the mentors’ death makes the Capitol look weak, I wonder if it’s a lie. Aside from my suspicion that DG staged the arena attack — her intention being to remind the Capitol of the Districts’ “evilness” and draw the Capitol to watch the Games as revenge — I believe DG is aware that CS and LG are chiefly responsible for making the Capitol look weak during the Games. The invention she’s proud / confident enough of to go on an interview right before its introduction into the arena turns out to be pets in their collective hands.

My understanding is, DG sees CS as both her potential successor and potential threat. Her campaign is to find out where he stands and to get him on her side: her extra homework for him, the breadcrumbs she lays down for him (the peacekeeper-ship, the officership) are all to corner him to out of his diplomatic exterior and to force him take a stand, to bait him to take her stand.

The ones doing the tug of war with DG are SP and LG — if this is a war for CS’s soul, then SP represents his conscience, and LG, his humanity.

SP loses first. Between conscience and safety, CS picks the latter. This is a decision I can understand on some level; many in our world, too, have opted for safety (from being ratted out, punished by association) instead of speaking out against injustice, especially when the injustice is committed by those in power, especially when the association is also protected by power (CS is not entirely wrong in thinking that SP may be able to buy his way out of the jabberjay incident, given his privilege). LG goes second and last. The choice between humanity and power isn’t as much a more difficult decision to make as it is reserved for relatively few, for those already with power within their reach.

CS is aware of that.

It takes a 500+ page journey for CS to make a conscious choice of giving up his humanity. He misses it, and I believe his pain is real. He misses the humanity he lost during the war, symbolised by the loss of his mother who left him with the rose powder in the compact. The rose powder he smells for comfort. I think Suzanne Collins deserve major kudos for using CS as the sole narrator of TBOSAS. It’s a risky move and doesn’t always pay off, but it offers a unique, in-depth perspective in how real world villains come about. CS starts out as talented but also mundane in that on the scale of morality, he starts out as neither exceptionally evil nor exceptionally good. He’s neither the classic villain nor the misunderstood villain. His views of the world is still being shaped, and the book doesn’t shy away from the messiness of the process, the back and forth between CS’s better and worse thoughts, the discrepancies between his thoughts — including what he perceives as his motivation — and his actions.

CS so desperately wants to be believe he’s in love with LG and the renewed, post-war humanity she represents. He’s so convinced that he’s already in love. But he never truly is (he dislikes LG’s songs), because the rewards LG can offer him turns out to be far from enough. The rewards humanity can offer him turns out to be far from enough, not in a world where war, where the Capitol and the likes of DG have already so de-valued humanity. A life with LG will be about digging worms from the soil. Free, but poor in every other way. It may satisfy his conscience, but SP has already been killed at the Hanging Tree.

CS fails to kill his humanity as he did with his conscience. CS cannot fully divorce himself from humanity, being human himself. And so LG disappears into the woods.

With all this in my mind, the climax of the book, in which CS hunts for LG by the Lake, is both emotionally and intellectually intense. As his actions become more and more threatening, as he starts with a seemingly concerned search for LG and ends with firing shots at the echos of “The Hanging Tree”, his taking the stand of DG is complete. As a reader, his decision has been evident for a while, but this is when he faces and owns his decision himself, and the chapter is haunting as it is powerful. At that moment, CS turns into DG’s most powerful mutt, a human mutt but with its humanity left only as a veneer, like the compact he’ll get back from Casca Highbottom with his mother’s rose powder long disposed in the trash, with his only hope of a new rose powder — his renewed humanity in the form of LG — long banished into the unknown by his peacekeeper’s rifle. CS becomes an actualisation of DG’s and his own belief that he’s but an animal that requires constant control, which in turn requires with constant war. It’s an apt end for TBOSAS because by then, the fate of the Districts, of Panem for the next six decades is sealed. Because by then, the return of humanity into the Capitol, in the form of Katniss Everdeen, is also sealed.

No matter how much jabberjays there is in them, mockingjays will find a way to sing whatever they choose.

#pie metas #tbosas #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #the hunger games #thg

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searchingwardrobes · 5 years ago

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Review 1 of 2

I don’t normally post about a book when I’m only halfway through, but I just have so many conflicting emotions about this book that I poured words into my journal the other day about it. I’m going to share those thoughts with you because this book is making me FEEL things.

This is a novel (ie fiction) about Joy Davidman, most famous for marrying CS Lewis. His intense grief upon her death resulted in the book A Grief of Observed (which I have read and . . . there are just no words for the raw emotion of that book!)

I thought about re-writing and revising what poured out of me the other day, but I decided just to give you my raw emotional response so far to this book. This is gonna get long, so there’s more below the cut. I’m also going to include some excerpts from the book that have blown me away so far. Those will be at the very end. So here goes:

This book I’m reading about Joy Davidman has me thinking a lot. She longed to be known. She wanted someone to love and appreciate her mind, her intellect. CS Lewis did. {from now on, I will refer to him as “Jack” because that’s what Joy called him} I struggle because . . . was their letter writing wrong because she was married? The author had to imagine their letters because Jack and Joy destroyed them before she died. Why did they destroy them? Was this an affair?

Yet at the same time, I so identify with her as I read! I know it’s fiction, but much is based in fact. She WAS a writer, like me. I’m not as opinionated as she was, not as brash and bold (okay, not brash and bold at all), and I’m definitely not as brilliant. (She graduated from high school at NINE! Had a college degree at SIXTEEN! She spoke like four or five languages, including ancient Greek and Latin.)

So yeah, I admire her. Despite history throwing her under the bus. Like she was a crazy stalker or something. But Jack INVITED her to Oxford, first of all. Secondly, she was there for her health for a month before she went to see him. Plus, you can’t tell me historians aren’t biased when she was SO counter cultural to how women were supposed to act in the 1950s. Plus, she had a husband who was an alcoholic, prone to violence, who verbally abused her, and cheated on her constantly. But yeah, she was a crazy stalker seductress for escaping to England to befriend a man who was kind to her and admired her intellect.

All of Lewis’s friends hated her, too, except for his brother, but she was a loud, opinionated American divorcee with a heavy New York accent. Not to mention seventeen years younger than CS Lewis. (He was in his fifties, she her thirties - not that scandalous age wise, seriously!) Why would his male, academic, British friends like her? Of course they wouldn’t!

While I don’t understand, as a mother, how she could leave her children for so many months and not be with them at Christmas or their birthdays, in other ways I do get her as a mom. She was considered a poor mother by 50s standards. She was awful at keeping house and keeping up with the mending. But she read to her boys constantly, she dug in the dirt with them, went “adventuring” with them in the woods, and laid on a blanket under the night sky to look at the stars. I’m the same way. I’d rather be with my kids than just take care of the house. And, like her, when I get a spare moment, I choose to write, not do housework.So, like her, my house is usually messy. But for me, that’s socially acceptable. For her, it wasn’t.

Jack thought she was a great writer, but I can’t say that for myself since I’ve never read her stuff. I had no idea she wrote so much! Sadly most of it is out of print now. I already looked for her novel Weeping Bay with no luck, but I’m going to try to find her other stuff. She apparently also helped Jack write Till We Have Faces, which I’ve been meaning to read and want to even more now. (Some say she should have been listed as co-author.)

Anyway, it just makes you wonder - would she have been such a controversial figure or so hated if she had lived in a different era? There is so much more to her than I ever knew! There’s so much gray in her relationship with Jack, and it’s challenging me. Yet it also makes them more human.

Some of my favorite passages so far (the book is written in first person from Joy’s point of view):

“Dr. Cohen, the gray-haired family doctor with glasses as thick as windshields, visited the house one afternoon and sat at my bedside with his stethoscope dangling and his weedy eyebrows bending toward each other. He directed his words to Bill as if the illnesses had left me invisible. ‘Your wife must get some rest now.’

His wife. My definition now. I was the object of someone else’s life now instead of the subject of my own.”

“The sticky, primordial aroma of sex overwhelmed my senses, making me dizzy. If only the pain meds could dull the pain of betrayal. ‘Where have you been?’ My voice rose, exhausted but steady.

‘Hey,” he [her first husband Bill] said softly, ‘don’t be angry. This has nothing to do with how much I love you, Poogle. Can’t you see that? A man’s needs must be met, and you’re in no condition to meet those needs. I’m just trying to be kind, give you a chance to heal while I recharge my batteries.’

‘Who was it this time?’ My question was a whisper, a last breath.”

“Must I settle for the trouble that was mine? A life of disappointment and anger, alcohol, and despair with Bill.”

“He can’t hear me, Jack. When I get upset, he asks if I’m on my period or if my shoes hurt. And then he launches into his ten million excuses.”

There was another passage I love where she’s trying to tell Bill how her writing is going, but he barely listens then asks her for what’s for dinner. She says “I don’t know” and drops her head to the table “weary of it all.” I forgot to mark it - but I felt that passage to the depth of my being!

#melanie reads #becoming mrs lewis review #part one #feminism #women in the 50s

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ichbinainat-blog · 6 years ago

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Command: cl_crosshairstyle It sets the style of the crosshair in terminology of look and behavior during managing / recording (values 0 - five).

cl_crosshairstyle 0 (dynamic)

cl_crosshairstyle one (static)

cl_crosshairstyle two (dynamic)

cl_crosshairstyle 3 (dynamic)

cl_crosshairstyle 4 (static)

cl_crosshairstyle five (static on the action, powerful on shooting)

Command: cl_crosshairsize It determines the measurements of the crosshair, however the last size will depend on your in-game resolution (values 0.5 - 100).

cl_crosshairsize 0.5

cl_crosshairsize 2

cl_crosshairsize 4

Command: cl_crosshairthickness It lets you alter the thickness of the crosshair lines (values 0.5 - 10).

cl_crosshairthickness 0.5

cl_crosshairthickness 1

cl_crosshairthickness 3

Command: cl_crosshairgap

It establishes the distance of the crosshair lines coming from the middle of screen (positive and negative values, from -5 to 10)

cl_crosshairgap -3

cl_crosshairgap 0

cl_crosshairgap 2

Command: cl_crosshaircolor

It adjusts the custom color of the crosshair (standard color names or perhaps numbers: white, green, blue, turquoise, yellow, red)

cl_crosshaircolor 0 or cl_crosshaircolor "red"

cl_crosshaircolor one or even cl_crosshaircolor "green"

cl_crosshaircolor two or even cl_crosshaircolor "yellow"

cl_crosshaircolor three or cl_crosshaircolor "blue"

cl_crosshaircolor four or perhaps cl_crosshaircolor "cyan"

cl_crosshaircolor 5 or perhaps customized via cl_crosshaircolor_r, , cl_crosshaircolor_g cl_crosshaircolor_b

Command: cl_crosshairusealpha It lets you alter the crosshair's transparency (with "0" getting OFF for the possibility of change, then "1" for ON).

cl_crosshairusealpha 0

cl_crosshairusealpha 1

Command: cl_crosshairalpha

It sets the degree of crosshair's transparency on the screen ("0" being invisible, and "255" staying completely visible)

cl_crosshairalpha 10

cl_crosshairalpha 120

cl_crosshairalpha 255

Command: cl_crosshairdot

It finds out if there's a dot in the course of the crosshair (value "0" or "1")

cl_crosshairdot 0

cl_crosshairdot 1

Command: cl_crosshair_drawoutline It provides a stroke to the current crosshair ("0" being OFF, and "1" being ON).

cl_crosshair_drawoutline 0

cl_crosshair_drawoutline 1

Command: cl_crosshair_outlinethickness It sets the crosshair's stroke thickness when the drawoutline is ON (values 0.1 - three).

cl_crosshair_outlinethickness 0.5

cl_crosshair_outlinethickness 1.5

cl_crosshair_outlinethickness 3

Command: cl_crosshairgap_useweaponvalue

It discovers if the crosshair is dynamic throughout the transformation of tool ("0" being OFF, and "1" getting ON)

cl_crosshairgap_useweaponvalue 0

cl_crosshairgap_useweaponvalue 1

There are lots of amateur players which set CS:GO pro crosshair options and https://colossalcheats.com/cheats/csgo-aimbot-wallhack/. This is not surprising, because in most instances, if you're a fan of a few pro participant, you ought to end up with a small part of him in the game of yours, right? In spite of the point, that in idea the change of the crosshair to one of the pro crosshairs doesn't assist, in training it can boost your belief in the game (by taking a look at mental things). We do not have some recognized materials or research about that here, but merely contemplate - did not you feel even more psyched after changing to the idol crosshair of yours? Many will somehow concur!

#CS:GO

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cheapcsgo-blog · 7 years ago

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superbchildcollectionblr-blog · 7 years ago

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omcik-blog · 7 years ago

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New Post has been published on OmCik

New Post has been published on http://omcik.com/subprime-is-now-nonprime-high-risk-mortgage-lending-is-back/

Subprime is now ‘nonprime’: High-risk mortgage lending is back

It was about a decade ago that Dan Perl chucked it all in to go surfing in Mexico. As a veteran underwriter of subprime mortgages, he’d seen enough by April 2007 to know that there was serious trouble ahead. So he pulled down the shutters, took an extended break in Baja, California, and then lay low for a few years, trading loans for a New York firm, Carl Marks & Co.

But now he is back in the game, leading a small band of lenders making subprime loans once more. Or “nonprime”, as they prefer to call it these days. The sector is on course to produce about $10bn this year — a tiny slice of America’s $1.6tn overall home-loan market but one that’s growing rapidly.

Plenty of people told Perl, 68, that he couldn’t bring this stuff back so soon after the global financial crisis, and after regulators all over the US radically tightened rules on mortgages. People said he was risking his net worth, that he’d “be sued into oblivion”.

“How many times we hear that, Kyle?” he asks, turning to his protégé, 39-year-old Kyle Gunderlock, who was a VP of sales at Perl’s old firm and is now president of the new one, known as Citadel Servicing Corp, based in Irvine, California.

“‘You guys are going to get f***ing arrested,’ is the one I always remember,” says Gunderlock.

The way Perl and his peers see it, there’s nothing shady or menacing about the business of subprime. On the contrary, they say, specialist lenders in this area are performing a vital service for the world’s largest economy. For every comfortably off professional who could walk into a branch of Chase or Wells Fargo and get a home loan without any fuss, they argue, there are many more who would struggle. People who are self-employed or on variable incomes, for example, may not check all the boxes a big bank needs. Ditto new immigrants with thin credit histories, or people with a few scratches and dents in their files.

“Making credit available to borrowers who are subprime is national policy and it is an important part of economic growth,” says Julian Hebron, head of sales at RPM Mortgage in Alamo, California. “It’s untrue to call it a scourge.”

But what’s worrying some economists is a feeling that we’re on a slippery slope; that the same forces which fed the crisis last time round — rampant demand for yield among investors, skewed incentives on Wall Street and a government determined to relax regulatory restraints — could feed another.

Under President Donald Trump, for example, agencies are under orders to review just about every financial rule that emerged under Barack Obama. In June, the Treasury department put out a report saying that tight underwriting standards were partly to blame for “anaemic” growth in housing, which accounts for almost one-fifth of GDP.

The market for securitising subprime loans is picking up, too, spreading the risk of default in much the same way as before. Fitch, the credit rating agency, expects $3bn of issuance of nonprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) this year, up from about $1bn over the previous 18 months. (Back in January, it was predicting $2bn for the year.)

Meanwhile, some old characters are re-emerging, including a few who gained a certain notoriety a decade ago. Kyle Walker, the former head of Fremont, a big mortgage firm that was rapped by federal regulators for “unsafe” practices in March 2007, is back running a nonprime shop called HomeXpress in Newport Beach, California. Dan Sparks, a former Goldman Sachs trader mentioned more than 500 times in a Senate report on the mortgage meltdown, is now buying low-grade loans from a hedge fund up in Stamford, Connecticut. (Walker did not respond to requests for comment and Sparks declined to comment.)

All of this is happening without a proper reckoning from the last time around, says Richard Bowen, a former chief underwriter at Citigroup, which ranked as America’s top subprime lender in 2007. Bowen says he tried to raise the alarm internally about rampant fraud in mortgage applications, before being stripped of underwriting responsibilities. He left the group in 2008. He draws a contrast with the savings and loan crisis in the US in the 1980s, after which about 800 senior bankers went to jail. The running total from the crisis that began in 2007? Zero. Even though it was “many, many, many” times worse, says Bowen, “no one has been held accountable. And I can assure you it’s not because of a lack of evidence.”

On the morning I meet Perl, on a blazingly hot day in June, he’d been up the hills behind his house in San Juan Capistrano with his white Labrador Ella. Now he’s showered and holding court in his office, dressed in jeans, loafers and a checked shirt.

He was born in Brooklyn to a conservative Jewish family but grew up in Sherman Oaks, a relatively spacious suburb of Los Angeles, and Santa Monica. After a degree from UCLA and an English teaching job at Santa Monica High, he formed a loan brokerage in the mid-1970s with his college pal Bill Ashmore, who now runs Impac, another mortgage firm based a few miles up the San Diego Freeway from Citadel.

After the crash of 1987, Perl-Ashmore parted ways; Perl into subprime (or “Bs and Cs”, as lower-grade loans were called then) and Ashmore into “Alt-A”, slightly classier yet not quite prime. In the 1990s Perl’s business grew strongly, partly on the back of a loan he invented called the NINA — aimed at customers with “no income, no assets”. He was known as the Big Kahuna.

But by 2005, says Perl, it was clear that things were slipping out of control. His outfit, then known as First Street, was a top 20 underwriter nationwide, in a sector which produced about $1tn of subprime mortgages — about one-third of the total US mortgage market — that year. Also clustered in Orange County were some of the best-known subprime shops in the country, such as New Century, Ameriquest and Fremont.

But margins were shrinking and loans were being written that should never have been written. At one point New Century had a 2 per cent error rate, meaning that one in every 50 of its borrowers never made a single payment. The company’s collapse in early April 2007, owing $8.4bn to banks including Morgan Stanley, Barclays and UBS, was one of the defining moments of the crisis.

Mike Fierman, managing partner and co-CEO of Angel Oak of Atlanta, Georgia, was also in the thick of it back then, running a firm called SouthStar Funding. He says he had no choice: if he wanted to compete, he had to drop standards. Like Perl, he bailed in April 2007, after Goldman and Lehman Brothers said they’d had their fill of subprime. But until that point they and other investment banks had hoovered up everything he’d offered them. They’d then wrap it up into MBS, on which credit rating agencies — competing between themselves to win the most business — would typically slap an attractive rating.

“Everyone was complicit,” says Fierman. “You felt trapped; investors were demanding more loans than could be produced in a responsible way. The only way to produce that kind of volume was to be irresponsible.”

Brokers were going after “gardeners and serving maids and house cleaners and gas-station attendants and strippers on poles,” says Perl. “That’s not lending. That ain’t the way you do it.”

He got out about 18 months before the collapse of Lehman brought the world economy to the brink of ruin. “Honest to God, Ben, do you ever just get a bad vibe?” he asks me. “Do you ever walk down a dark hall and say, ‘This is not a place I should be?'”

This time it’s different, say the lenders. Thanks to the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the nonprime loans being written now bear little relation to the sludge that stunk up the system a decade ago.

Perl and Gunderlock say they spent weeks going through the 800 pages of Dodd-Frank that was relevant to mortgages, as they looked to crank up the machine again. There were all kinds of proscriptions on funding and closing and servicing a loan, says Perl, but in the end it came down to this: “People have to be relatively reasonable about how they treat borrowers. You can’t lie, you can’t cheat, you can’t steal.”

Gone, as a result, are some dubious features that caused trouble last time round, such as zero deposits or low teaser rates that adjusted sharply higher in two or three years. Gone, too, are the negative amortisation loans that allowed borrowers to pay less than the interest due, so that the loan balance actually grew.

There’s no more “stated income” either: whatever the borrower declares, the lender has to check by looking at pay stubs and tax returns, rather than assuming it’s the truth.

Granted, standards in nonprime are generally looser than those that apply to mortgages eligible to be bought by government agencies such as Fannie Mae. Such loans are known as “qualified mortgages”, or QM, and they account for the vast majority of America’s home-loan market.

But today every mortgage has to conform to an overarching standard known as ATR, or “ability to repay”. Unless a lender can be convinced in eight separate ways that the borrower has the means to pay the thing back, it can be sued down the track if the loan goes bad.

The new regulatory framework is “actually pretty rational”, says Matt Nichols, founder and CEO of Deephaven Mortgage, who set up the Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm in 2013 after more than a decade running Goldman’s residential mortgage business. So far he’s bought about $1bn of nonprime loans from a network of 100 or so brokers, and has resold about half of that into the MBS market.

In a $250m MBS deal in June, more than 40 per cent of borrowers who got mortgages bought by Deephaven had had a prior “credit event” such as a bankruptcy, foreclosure or short sale, according to Kroll, a credit rating agency. The deal was roughly six times oversubscribed, nonetheless.

“Ability to repay, as a rule, is common sense,” says Nichols. “You’ve got to rely on something other than their word for it, right?”

Perl and others note that investors in these new classes of nonprime MBS have extra degrees of comfort. Under Dodd-Frank reforms that took effect in 2015, sponsors of a deal need to retain an interest of at least 5 per cent of the aggregate credit risk of the assets they’re turning into securities. It’s known as “skin in the game”: if originators are on the hook for losses, the theory goes, they’ll take a lot more care over what they’re producing.

Before the crisis, there was no minimum ownership, resulting in mortgage firms simply flipping all kinds of dross at Goldman or Merrill or Bear Stearns. “This is not an originate-to-sell model; it’s an originate-to-own model,” says Fierman of Angel Oak. His firm, which buys nonprime loans from other brokers as well as originating its own, has been the most active of MBS issuers, completing four deals since 2015 worth a total of $630m. He says that Angel Oak has gone well beyond the basic 5 per cent threshold, owning as much as 10 per cent of its MBS deals at various points. “Trust has to be built with investors,” he says. “They’re watching us closely.”

Some of the big names on Wall Street have already tiptoed back in. Pimco, the world’s biggest bond house, has 25 per cent of the equity in Perl’s Citadel, according to a person familiar with the ownership structure. Blackstone, the private equity giant, has a cluster of nonprime investments, including a stake in Bayview Asset Management, a firm which buys mortgages from Coral Gables, in Florida.

Will the big US banks get back into subprime? Inevitably, says Guy Cecala, CEO and publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, the industry bible. He notes that overall mortgage originations in the US have slipped about one-fifth this year, mostly because a rise in interest rates has caused refinancing business to drop.

“At the end of the day, every lender out there, unless they want to see their business decline, has to look at alternative products,” he says.

In the meantime, other banks are taking supporting roles. Credit Suisse and Nomura, for example, are supplying lines of credit to originators and underwriting securitisations of subprime mortgages. Fitch, DBRS and Kroll, the credit rating agencies, have given their stamps of approval to a succession of securitisation deals.

Even Standard & Poor’s, which paid $1.4bn in 2015 to the US Department of Justice to resolve a probe into ratings inflation, is back on the scene, rating five deals this year. (Moody’s, which settled with the government in January this year, has yet to re-appear.)

Some investors, for their part, are reluctant to dive in. Tracy Chen, a fund manager at Brandywine Global in Philadelphia, says she’s tempted, but wants the MBS market to increase to about $20bn in total before she would feel comfortable trading in and out of positions. “The market is still not very transparent, and there’s not much trading volume. I need to wait for it to scale up before I enter.” The caution is understandable: she was at UBS in the run-up to the crisis, when the Swiss bank took tens of billions of dollars of losses on its subprime portfolio.

But even the more cautious investors may change their minds, in time. As long as interest rates stay near historic lows, “anyone will scramble for what yield they can find”, says Bowen, the ex-Citigroup whistleblower, who now lectures on ethics.

He cites the sale of junk bonds in August by Tesla, the trendy carmaker that is still consuming much more cash than it is earning. The $1.8bn deal, which lacks restrictions to stop Tesla issuing more debt whenever it wants to, is “insane”, he says.

For now, loan books are in good shape. At Impac, just a handful of non-QM loans written over the past three years are more than 60 days delinquent, says Ashmore, the CEO. Only one loan is in foreclosure, among about 2,200 in total.

He expects the total nonprime market to increase to $100bn before long. “I believe if I can deliver superior risk-adjusted returns, there’ll be more than enough capital.”

At Citadel, which normally aims a notch or two below the typical Impac customer, in terms of credit score and debt-to-income ratios, there are seven foreclosures among 3,500 or so loans. That has prompted Perl to push out the boat a bit. In August he launched a new loan called “The One”, allowing a self-employed borrower to qualify based on one month’s bank statement rather than the usual 12.

The move has “got everyone a little nervous”, he admits, despite a long list of safety features. But he reckons he has another four to five years of “clear sailing” before the market starts to turn once more.

One regret? Not trademarking “nonprime”, which he thinks he coined five years ago.

As for “subprime”, he never liked it.

“It sounds kind of Neanderthal, doesn’t it? It sounds almost like you’re a monkey and humans are better. But nonprime has a nice ring to it.”