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ofhouseadama · 3 years ago

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could I dm you this? yes. but also asks are fun even though this question is mean so. how do Ed and Lorraine react to the Vietnam war?

Okay so my Ed and Lorraine are absolutely Kennedy Democrats, are both very excited and enthusiastic about the first Catholic president, but both are against the Vietnam War and US military intervention from the start. Ed's already fought in one imperialist proxy war, he's got the PTSD to prove it, and Lorraine just is truly repulsed by violence of any kind.

And also like, to go completely left field for a minute -- I've been thinking a lot about how teenage Lored were effectively trapped at 17-19 years old. Mostly financially, and in different ways. in 1951, Lorraine wouldn't have been able to have her own bank account. Women wouldn't have the right to open their own bank account until the 60s or have a credit card until the 70s -- her money would have been her father's, effectively. and while probably not maliciously, since she was a young woman she likely wouldn't have had much access to her pay checks unless she was cashing them directly. Ed, meanwhile, while trying to survive a negligent/abusive household, absolutely would have been spending money on things most teens wouldn't have to in order to survive... and that's before getting the draft notice from the Selective Service, which took away even more control of his own life.

So I see Ed and Lorraine getting married young (even for the 50s, they're a few years younger than the median, though the war was actively driving that age down) mostly out of making the most out of what they could together. Ed putting Lorraine on his bank accounts and asking her actively to manage them while he's away, and her depositing her paychecks into his account would give her more financial control in her life than most women of the era. Lorraine's engagement ring (the size of that goddamn rock) is even an insurance policy most women her age and demographic didn't have -- often when women fled marriages, it was only with their jewelry to sell. It's half about Ed's possessive streak, half him showing he's not afraid to give her the money to run, if she needed to.

Anyway -- the trauma of their late teens and early twenties is entirely rooted in the rising Cold War anxieties and the locus of harm done to women in the 50s and I fully see their pursuit of demonology and the supernatural as something Lorraine initially started while working as a secretary for the Diocese, something she did to stay late at work and help people she could physically reach while Ed was away at war. She initially started staying late on the days she knew Father Gordon would be bringing in a scared family or terrified couple or frightened soul in through the back door hours after everyone had left, staying to pray and keep herself nearby, to be an observer to a fight she could be party to. Father Gordon figures her out quickly, of course, asking what interest she has in demons and exorcisms, and figures out she's clever with records and archives, almost to an uncanny degree.

And then figures out to exactly what uncanny degree.

After Ed came home and became the husband instead of the boyfriend, it turned into something Ed could throw all his metaphorical demons onto and a healthy way to exercise his control issues and fear and anxiety that doesn't (generally) affect Lorraine because she's fighting with him side by side in this, when before they were separated by thousands of miles -- the beginning everyone's favorite Catholic battle couple very much rooted in Ed and Lorraine parsing out who brought home metaphorical demons from the war, and who brought home literal ones, and bringing them to Father Gordon when necessary. Rooted in Ed needing to be useful, to dusting off his Catholic school Latin and reading everything he could get his hands on so that he could continue to help, continue to fight.

Lorraine would have been pregnant with Judy during the heightening tensions with Cuba and as Kennedy is sending more and more military "advisors" to Vietnam and Cold War tensions flared the hottest they'd get in the 1960s and I can just see both of their control issues revving up, especially with a few-months-old baby in the mix. Just the two of them laying bed, looking down at their three month old baby girl, wondering if they'd all get nuked tomorrow. If war would be declared tomorrow. If they'd all be dead, if they brought her into the world just to die violently. It's like taking guns off the street. They can't control the White House, or the Soviets, or Cuba or China or or or -- but they know about demons, they know about spirits, they know about taking these bombs off the battlefield, in the war of good against evil, and this is a war they can be foot soldiers in together.

Lorraine would get a bit of relief in the March of '63 when Kennedy dropped married men with children to the bottom of the draft pool, and then dropped the age of the draft pool to 26, aging Ed out of the Selective Service entirely. And then in November, JFK would be assassinated, and the photo of Jackie Kennedy covered in blood, leaving the hospital hand-in-hand with RFK, would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. It would be a jolt for both of them -- but it wouldn't fully hit Lorraine until seven years later, when she'd have her first vision of Ed's death and fully understand Jackie Kennedy's weary, "I want them to see what they have done to Jack."

After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August of 1964, they fully throw themselves into taking cases almost full time. As the war heats up, Ed pulls back from teaching art classes at the VA. If he spends too much time there, he has to face how pointless the violence has been. If he spends too much time there, now, he has to face that he still doesn't know why he survived. Why he lived, and everyone else on board the ship with him died. Because he still doesn't know, he still is fighting to make his life matter in a way that makes sense to him. All he has is his sense of duty, a couple of college credits, and his hands. On good days, he knows that he's loved -- that Lorraine loves him so much it makes it hurt to breathe, that he's a good father to his daughter, who will never be afraid of him.

Ed has a complete PTSD relapse in 1966, with the beginning of the ground war and the full-throated resurgence of the American propaganda machine and military recruitment. He's back in the guilt spiral, the "I never had it that bad, I was only in the Navy for two years, I never had it that bad," just feeding into "why did I live when everyone else I fought with died," back and forth until he can't sleep, can only sleep when Judy sleeps, accidentally ends up adapting himself to her nap schedule and has to sleep with his hand on her chest, feeling her breathe.

Lorraine calls in Chief, after Ed can't get out of bed for 72 hours and misses mass for the first time in his life. Chief, who comes up from Brooklyn to remind Ed of the time their entire ship exploded and Ed treaded water for eight hours and everyone else died. How they spent the next six months getting drunk whenever they weren't on duty and picking fights they couldn't get out of, and that one time they got thrown in the brig because Chief struck a superior asshole and Ed just followed him into the fight. (No, Lorraine does not know about that time Ed and Chief ended up in the brig. She will never know about that time. Judy will at some point in her early 20s learn about that time, when she needs to learn about how her parents are people, who have absolutely made mistakes in their lives.) "You and I spent six months drunk," Chief says, bouncing Judy on his knee in the kitchen over a cup of coffee, Ed refusing to look at him as he deep cleans the stove. "And then your dad died, and your sainted wife handled everything for you, and we realized we couldn't send you home to her like that."

"I still don't know why I lived."

Chief shrugs. "It doesn't matter why, son. The same reason any of us live, and any of us die. It doesn't matter. You have a little girl now who depends on you. She matters more than any goddamn reason -- you live for her, and your saint of a wife, and for all the people that you help. So that you can look them in the face, say you've been down in the hole that they're in now, and you know the way out."

Lorraine calls in Chief, because she absolutely picked a fight after mass that day without Ed, with Judy on her hip. Overheard Dorothy O'Malley running her mouth in the pew in front of her sounding like a national security ghoul and didn't even think before she opened her mouth and unloading the full force of her anxiety and anger on her. Only stops because she feels a gentle hand on her shoulder and Father Gordon murmuring in her ear, "Okay Mrs. Warren, you've made your point," while leading her away. It's the "Mrs. Warren" instead of the familiar "Lorraine" that jolts her back to herself, kissing Judy's head as she tries to shake herself out of it.

"Thank you," she tells Father Gordon, defeated.

He shrugs. "You don't come to confession until before Friday night prayer service. I didn't want you stewing on this all week." Pausing, he takes a moment to fondly tug on one of Judy's pig tails, making her laugh. "If Ed's not... feeling well, I know about that."

Lorraine bites her lip, knowing full and well that Father Gordon served as a chaplain in World War II. That seeing the violence of the Nazis firsthand is what convinced him that the Devil was more than a metaphor, that evil truly walked the Earth. Sent him on his own path, chasing darkness.

Lorraine nods.

"I could talk to him," Father Gordon says. "But it would likely come better from someone he served with."

When she gets home, she finds Chief's number in their phone book, and calls Brooklyn for the first and last time. He comes up the next day, and shoos her out of the house to do something for herself for the first time in months, telling her that he's more than equipped to look after a single three year old.

Ed goes back to teaching at the VA a few months after that, teaching art to the new round of mentally scarred children returning from war. He concedes to group therapy, and a few sessions with the VA psychiatrist to get something to take the edge off. He teaches at the VA until the troop withdrawals in 1970, reducing his class load as he and Lorraine take on more and more cases -- verging towards a hundred a year -- for the Catholic Church, and the media attention that comes along with that, the publicity engagements that help keep their bills paid, the articles and academic talks.

Even still, Ed occasionally brings home someone for dinner, just to make sure that they've only brought metaphorical demons home from war with them, not literal ones.

Sometimes it's literal ones.

#ask #rikertroi #otp: i forgot my pills #emily watches the conjuring #i cannot believe that Sam was just like #''I am going to give Emily an excuse to use her degree and hurt people''#this got... so very long

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scribeofred · 3 years ago

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Thanks to @onereyofstarlight for the tag!

1. What fandoms have you written for?

This is embarrassing but I actually had to look at both FFnet and AO3 because I couldn’t remember all of them. TRON: Legacy, Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, Sherlock, Final Fantasy VII and XV and Kingsglaive, Voltron: Legendary Defender, Merlin, Skyrim, and, of course, Thunderbirds. I have a couple other fandoms that crop up in various wips, including a Tom Swift/Thunderbirds crossover that I really should finish.

2. How many works do you have on AO3 &/or FFNet?

FFnet has 45, and AO3 has 41. There’s also a couple stories lurking on tumblr, notably a final chapter for Reflection.

3. What are your top 3 fics by kudos on A03 &/or Favs on FFNet?

AO3 dominates in this area, if I can use a word like “dominates” for stories that have less than 125 kudos each haha. Oh well, the numbers don’t matter!

1. 118 kudos on tell the shades apart (my world is black and white)

2. 94 kudos on Reflection

3. 91 kudos on The 43rd Hour

4. Which 3 fics have the least kudos & Favs?

Again on AO3:

1 kudos on I Am You (And You Are Me)

5 kudos on The Dragonborn Chronicles

6 kudos on cynosure

5. Which Fic has the most comments and which has the least?

Reflection has the most at 29 threads, and I Am You (And You Are Me) has the least at zero.

6. Which complete fic do you wish had gotten more attention?

Lodestar, definitely. Sure, it’s for something of a rarepair, but they aren’t that rare, and I just really really like the way the story came together. On the other hand, of course my unfinished Merlin fic has gotten probably the most attention, because that’s just the way it goes, eh?

7. Have you written any crossovers?

None that I’ve published! I have various crossovers lurking in mostly unfinished states, including the aforementioned Tom Swift/Thunderbirds crossover, and an Assassin’s Creed/Thundeerbirds crossover that is very good and I should also finish. There’s an Expanse/Thunderbirds fic lurking in my brain that I may or may not ever commit to paper, who knows. I’ve also very vaguely toyed with a Batman/Thunderbirds crossover, in the sense that “nebulous” is too strong a word for the kind of toying I’ve been doing.

8. What is the craziest fic you’ve written?

I don’t really write crazy or crack or humor in general, so probably the closest thing to “crazy” is On the Lam, which was the result of wanting to throw Scott and Penelope toward an Egyptian stud farm. It ended up being the host for a bad joke about that, courtesy of one @thebaconsandwichofregret, who consistently gives some of the best dialogue advice I’ve ever encountered.

Actually, the true answer is probably a chapter in Glimpses into a Supernova, maybe the one about blood? It seems bonkers when I think back on it now, but I admittedly haven’t read it in many years. Possibly I am misremembering. Glimpses has some weird ones, though.

9. What’s the fic you’ve written with the saddest ending?

It’s a tossup between The Painting and a place where the water touches the sky. The former deals with a prior off-screen death; the latter is (maybe??) an on-screen death. People seemed upset by it, at any rate. I said it was ambiguous!

10. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

“Happy” is probably a matter of perspective? Depends on the overall reading experience and the ending within that context. Either septet or Three Towels and a Tracy, they’re both pretty fluffy overall.

11. What is your smuttiest fic?

protoinstincts, which I completely forgot I wrote and then rediscovered like a year later and realized “hey, this is actually pretty good” and you know what, despite it not being overly spicy, it is pretty good.

12. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not hate, per se, but someone left a review on Less Than Nothing saying they “didn’t like” that I “wrote the story as a series of drabbles.” Cool, I didn’t write the story for you, random guest reader, and the back button exists, friend 😂 It didn’t bother me on a personal level because I wrote the fic for an audience of one (incidentally, not myself and rather the recipient of a secret santa event), but I was mad because the reviewer had no way of knowing where I was at as a writer, and I know from longtime observation how that kind of comment can crush less experienced or confident writers.

Don’t leave flames, kids, you don’t understand the power your words have. Don’t like, don’t read.

13. What is the nicest comment you’ve received?

The nicest? Goodness. Hmm. I’d have to go hunting to find the nicest, but in recent memory, @ayzrules sent me a couple passages from Spanish texts she’s been studying that reminded her of my writing, and I was honestly so touched by the fact that she even thought to make such comparisons, much less mention them to me. Taking the time to familiarize yourself with someone’s style until you can make comparisons between it and someone else’s work is so much more meaningful to me personally than a basic “Nice story!” or “Loved this!” type of comment ever could be. <3 Ayz <3

14. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I’m aware of, but I’ve never gone looking on any sort of copycat site or whatever either.

15. How many fics do you have marked as incomplete?

Two. First is The Dragonborn Chronicles, which is a retelling of Skyrim from Lydia’s perspective via her journal, to complement the in-game journal. It’s a slog of a style to write, though, even for someone who loves writing first person and doesn’t really want to write a lot of dialogue, and the outline is huge, and the story will be many times more huge, and just. Some day. Some day.

Second is tell the shades apart (my world is black and white), which has always been unfinished because the outline itself is over seven thousand words and the fully written story would undoubtedly land between 100,000 and 200,000 words, and there’s no way I’m writing that. I’ve always meant to upload the outline, but I got kind of self-conscious about the way I formatted it, and ugh I just haven’t bothered. One day, one day, right?

Moral of the story is I’m intensely a short story writer, and I’ve really found myself settling into that role over the last couple years. Better a clipped, punchy short story than a bloated slog of an epic.

16. Which of the WIPS will most likely be finished first?

Literally no one knows that. I wrote 95% of the observable entropy of a closed system over five years ago, and then I proceeded to pull it out roughly once a year and write and rewrite various endings until last month, which was when I finally figured out how I wanted to end the story. septet, too, languished for about five years before I finally remembered it existed and managed to wrangle an ending. Endings are hard, man. So are those third plot points. Terrible creatures, those, bog me down every time.

17. Which WIP are you looking forward to finishing?

Uh... mm. See. If I were looking forward to finishing any of them, I’d be actively working on them. At this moment, writing fic isn’t exactly high on my list of priorities, but I am also coming off a four-day idle game bender, so I still feel like I haven’t quite reengaged with myself as a living person. Give me another few days and I might have an answer.

(I am always most looking forward to finishing this ridiculous Ignis-drives-the-Audi-R8 fic that’s been languishing in my wips for literal years. As mentioned above, third plot points. Killer, man.)

(oh and also the working-titled the art of murder. Scott and Penny attend a private art auction. Things don’t go to plan. It, too, is stuck at the third plot point. I know, I know I have a problem, shush.)

18. Is there a WIP that you’re considering abandoning?

Any wip has the potential to be revived—this year and the old wips I’ve unearthed, dusted off, finished, and posted have been proof of that. I don’t intentionally permanently abandon anything for that reason, some stories just probably will remain dusty old wips forever because I didn’t actually need or want to write the full story for one reason or another.

19. Which complete fic would you consider rewriting?

Now that’s an interesting question. Hmm! Honestly? None of them. Once I finish a story, I’m not inclined toward rereading it again any time soon, to the point of years in some cases, and I feel like I’ve moved on from the stories I wrote one, two, five, eight years ago in the actual writing sense. They’re finished stories, and on top of that are relics of their time, which doesn’t mean the stories don’t have any ongoing significance on a reading level—I just don’t have any interest in rewriting those particular stories. I’ve gotten them out of my head, to the point of not remembering at least a third of them on demand anymore, and I don’t have any desire to “retell” those exact stories. I do tend to tighten the wording and fix perceived errors/weaknesses whenever I do end up rereading an old story, and I usually silently update the AO3 version if I make any significant changes because AO3 makes it a breeze to update a posted fic. I might do FFnet too if I’m feeling up to it or have the time.

20. Which complete fic is your favourite?

Once upon a time I would’ve said Holding On, but I honestly find it kind of unbearably melodramatic now. the observable entropy of a closed system is equally melodramatic, as it was written in the same era, but at least it has the excuse of being told in second person and via a style that is a half step away from being poetry. Possibly I will reread it in a few years and find it equally obnoxious and overly dramatic, but it received some shockingly positive comments, which I wasn’t expecting at ALL, and I’ve been honestly blown away by the amount of praise it’s received. <3 to everyone who’s said anything about it!

21. What’s your total published word count?

141,000 on AO3, 160,000 on FFnet, but technically the light of my life SS wrote fifty thousand words of each. It’s too late for math.

I tag @velkynkarma, @lurkinglurkerwholurks, @writtenbyrain, @thebaconsandwichofregret, and anyone else who wants to play!

#tag games

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newstfionline · 3 years ago

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Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Trudeau’s Liberals win Canada election, but miss majority (AP) Canadians gave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party a victory in Monday’s parliamentary elections, but his gamble to win a majority of seats failed and nearly mirrored the result of two years ago. Trudeau’s Liberals were leading or elected in 156 seats—one less than they won 2019, and 14 short of the 170 needed for a majority in the House of Commons. The Conservatives were leading or elected in 121 seats, the same number they won in 2019. The leftist New Democrats were leading or elected in 27, a gain of three seats, while the Quebec-based Bloc Québécois remained unchanged with 32 seats and the Greens were down to two. “Trudeau lost his gamble to get a majority so I would say this is a bittersweet victory for him,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal. “Basically we are back to square one, as the new minority parliament will look like the previous one. Trudeau and the Liberals saved their skin and will stay in power, but many Canadians who didn’t want this late summer, pandemic election are probably not amused about the whole situation,” he said.

COVID has killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 flu (AP) COVID-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic did—approximately 675,000. And like the worldwide scourge of a century ago, the coronavirus may never entirely disappear from our midst. Instead, scientists hope the virus that causes COVID-19 becomes a mild seasonal bug as human immunity strengthens through vaccination and repeated infection. That would take time. “We hope it will be like getting a cold, but there’s no guarantee,” said Emory University biologist Rustom Antia, who suggests an optimistic scenario in which this could happen over a few years. For now, the pandemic still has the United States and other parts of the world firmly in its jaws.

Why Louisiana’s Electric Grid Failed in Hurricane Ida (NYT) Just weeks before Hurricane Ida knocked out power to much of Louisiana, leaving its residents exposed to extreme heat and humidity, the chief executive of Entergy, the state’s biggest utility company, told Wall Street that it had been upgrading power lines and equipment to withstand big storms. That statement would soon be tested. On the last Sunday in August, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana and dealt a catastrophic blow to Entergy’s power lines, towers and poles, many of which were built decades ago to withstand much weaker hurricanes. The storm damaged eight high-voltage transmission lines that supply power to New Orleans along with scores of the company’s towers throughout the state. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were without power for days. Ida damaged or destroyed 31,000 poles that carry lower-voltage distribution lines in neighborhoods, nearly twice as many as Hurricane Katrina, according to Entergy. Lawmakers and regulators require utilities to ensure safe, reliable service at an affordable cost. The grid failure after Ida is the latest display of how power companies are struggling to fulfill those obligations as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather. In California, electricity providers have been forced to shut off power to tens of thousands of customers in recent years to prevent their equipment from setting off wildfires and to reduce energy demand during heat waves. In February, the grid in most of Texas failed during a winter storm, leaving millions of people without power and heat for days.

White House faces bipartisan backlash on Haitian migrants (AP) The White House is facing sharp condemnation from Democrats for its handling of the influx of Haitian migrants at the U.S. southern border, after images of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback using aggressive tactics went viral this week. Striking video of agents maneuvering their horses to forcibly block and move migrants attempting to cross the border has sparked resounding criticism from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who are calling on the Biden administration to end its use of a pandemic-era authority to deport migrants without giving them an opportunity to seek asylum in the United States. At the same time, the administration continues to face attacks from Republicans, who say Biden isn’t doing enough to deal with what they call a “crisis” at the border. Immigration is a complex issue, one no administration has been able to fix in decades. And Biden is trapped between conflicting interests of broadcasting compassion while dealing with throngs of migrants coming to the country—illegally—seeking a better life.

Haitian journey to Texas border starts in South America (AP) Robins Exile downed a traditional meal of plantains and chicken at a restaurant run by Haitian immigrants, just a short walk from the walled border with the United States. He arrived the night before and went there seeking advice: Should he try to get to the U.S., or was it better to settle in Mexico? Discussion Monday at the Tijuana restaurant offered a snapshot of Haitians’ diaspora in the Western Hemisphere that picked up steam in 2016 and has shown little sign of easing, demonstrated most recently by the more than 14,000 mostly Haitian migrants assembled around a bridge in Del Rio, a town of only 35,000 people. Of the roughly 1.8 million Haitians living outside their homeland, the United States is home to the largest Haitian immigrant population in the world, numbering 705,000 people from the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. Significant numbers also live in Latin American countries like Chile, which is home to an estimated 69,000 Haitians. Nearly all Haitians reach the U.S. border on a well-worn route: Fly to Brazil, Chile or elsewhere in South America. If jobs dry up, slowly move through Central America and Mexico by bus and on foot to wait—perhaps years—in northern border cities like Tijuana for the right time to enter the United States and claim asylum.

‘We were them:’ Vietnamese Americans help Afghan refugees (AP) In the faces of Afghans desperate to leave their country after U.S. forces withdrew, Thuy Do sees her own family, decades earlier and thousands of miles away. A 39-year-old doctor in Seattle, Washington, Do remembers hearing how her parents sought to leave Saigon after Vietnam fell to communist rule in 1975 and the American military airlifted out allies in the final hours. It took years for her family to finally get out of the country, after several failed attempts, and make their way to the United States, carrying two sets of clothes a piece and a combined $300. When they finally arrived, she was 9 years old. These stories and early memories drove Do and her husband Jesse Robbins to reach out to assist Afghans fleeing their country now. The couple has a vacant rental home and decided to offer it up to refugee resettlement groups, which furnished it for newly arriving Afghans in need of a place to stay. “We were them 40 years ago,” Do said. “With the fall of Saigon in 1975, this was us.” The crisis in Afghanistan has spurred many Vietnamese Americans to donate money to refugee resettlement groups and raise their hands to help by providing housing, furniture and legal assistance to newly arriving Afghans.

‘Crisis of trust’: France bristles at US submarine deal (AP) France’s top diplomat declared Monday that there is a “crisis of trust” in the United States after a Pacific defense deal stung France and left Europe wondering about its longtime ally across the Atlantic. France canceled meetings with British and Australian officials and worked to rally EU allies behind its push for more European sovereignty after being humiliated by a major Pacific defense pact orchestrated by the U.S. Speaking to reporters in New York, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said European countries won’t let Washington leave them behind when shaping its foreign policy. Le Drian reiterated complaints that his country was sandbagged by the submarine deal between the U.S., Britain and Australia, which led to France losing a contract to sell subs to Australia. Washington, London and Canberra say the deal bolsters their commitment to the Indo-Pacific region, and it has widely been seen as an effort to counter an increasingly assertive China. But Le Drian, who is in New York to represent France at the U.N. General Assembly, said it was a “brutal, unexpected and unexplained breach” of a contract—and a relationship.

Pedestrians take to the streets of Paris to celebrate the city’s seventh annual ‘day without cars’ (Business Insider) On Sunday, Paris turned over its streets to pedestrians so that citizens and visitors could enjoy its seventh annual “day without cars.” Announced by socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo in 2015, the city received enthusiastic support from both ordinary Parisians and unlikely parties including the head of a French drivers’ association, USA Today reported. From 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., cars, motorcycles, and scooters are banned throughout Paris, and any offenders face a fine of 135 euros, according to the Paris Without A Car website. Certain vehicles like buses, emergency vehicles, taxis, and private drivers are allowed to circulate, although their speed is limited to 20-30 kilometers per hour (12-19 miles per hour) in certain areas. Events at this year’s “day without cars” included a techno parade, picnic, bicycle fair, rollerblading marathon, and street art exhibitions, according to the event website.

More evacuations as lava gushes from Canaries volcano (Reuters) Lava gushing from the Canary Islands’ first volcanic eruption on land in 50 years has forced authorities to evacuate another part of El Paso municipality on the island of La Palma and to urge sightseers attracted by the phenomenon to stay away. About 6,000 of the 80,000 people living on the island have been forced to leave their homes to escape the eruption so far, TVE said. The volcano started erupting on Sunday after La Palma, the most northwestern island in the Canaries archipelago, had been rocked by thousands of quakes in the prior days. It has shot lava hundreds of metres into the air, engulfed forests and sent molten rock towards the ocean over a sparsely populated area of La Palma. Experts say that if and when the lava reaches the sea, it could trigger more explosions and clouds of toxic gases.

Magnitude 6.0 earthquake strikes near Melbourne (Reuters) An earthquake with a 6.0 magnitude struck near Melbourne in Australia on Wednesday, Geoscience Australia said, causing damage to buildings in the country’s second largest city and sending tremors throughout neighbouring states. The quake’s epicentre was near the rural town of Mansfield in the state of Victoria, about 200 km (124 miles) northeast of Melbourne, and was at a depth of 10 km (six miles). The quake was felt as far away as city of Adelaide, 800 km (500 miles) to the west in the state of South Australia, and Sydney, 900 km (600 miles) to the north in New South Wales state, although there were no reports of damage outside Melbourne and no reports of injuries.

‘An iron curtain’: Australia’s covid rules are stranding people at state borders (Washington Post) The four figures huddled in the shade on the side of the highway, eight miles from a border they had hardly noticed until it slammed shut behind them. As flies buzzed and crows circled and their supplies ran low, they waited for emails that would allow them to leave New South Wales and return to their home state of South Australia. Teresa Young and her husband had been stuck at the rest stop—little more than a toilet in the middle of the Outback—for 10 days. “All of a sudden, Australia has been cut up like pieces of a cake,” the 75-year-old said on a recent day. Welcome to covid-era Australia, where state border closures designed to keep the coronavirus from spreading have turned retired office workers into roadside nomads. When the pandemic began, many Australians found that the leaders of the country’s six states and two territories, rather than the federal government, suddenly controlled the most vital things in people’s lives, including who could go to work and where they could travel. The closures have upended domestic travel and stranded scores of Australians internally, even as a vaccination ramp-up means some states—and international airports—will soon open up. People in Sydney could find it easier to fly to Singapore or Los Angeles than to Adelaide.

Sudan’s coup attempt (Foreign Policy) Sudanese state media reported a “failed coup attempt” early Tuesday morning. The coup reportedly involved an attempt to take control of the state radio services. If confirmed, the attempted power grab would be the fourth putsch attempt the African continent has seen this year, following military takeovers in Guinea and Chad and an unsuccessful coup in Niger.

#headlines #news

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letterboxd · 5 years ago

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How I Letterboxd #2: Dave Chen

In our second of this series, we put Dave Chen in the Letterboxd spotlight. The podcaster, musician and filmmaker is most famous on Letterboxd for his weirdly specific lists. He tells us how he uses the platform, why every film that exists is miraculous, and why we shouldn’t sleep on Not Another Teen Movie.

Hi Dave! How long have you been on Letterboxd? About eight years. I believe I first signed up when it was in beta. I loved (and still love) the interface: how smooth the user flow is for logging/reviewing films, and how beautiful all that movie art looks as it’s organized on the site.

What do you mainly use Letterboxd for? I love reading the reviews on Letterboxd. On a film’s page, the site surfaces many of the most popular reviews and I find it’s a great way to find some quick, witty, and thoughtful comments on something I might be considering watching. But of course, I also love reading and making funny lists. Finally, I’ve heard Letterboxd is great for keeping track of films at a film festival but sadly I haven’t yet attended one since I started using it again.

Do you rate films? Would you consider yourself a generous or harsh rater? I rate films to remind myself how I felt about them at the time I watched. Of course, my opinions on movies change but it’s sometimes interesting to look back and think back to a time when, “Oh right, I did love that movie in the summer of 2019 when I was going through XYZ”. Our feelings about movies can often reflect what’s going on in our lives.

That said, over time, I’ve come to understand that films are miracles. I don’t think I’m the first person to come up with this observation but they are like miniature plays resulting from the collective work of hundreds or thousands of people that have been preserved for your amusement, and you can just play them on demand. Many of them cost only a few dollars. Some are free! Every film that exists is miraculous.

So, despite some of my harsh reviews, I do try to keep that perspective in mind.

You’ve been a member for a while but most of your reviews are recent. What brought you back? We note that you restarted with your third viewing of 1917! I am pretty active on Twitter and I started seeing a bunch of screen-capped reviews go viral there. But to be honest, much of social media can be exhausting to me these days. What I realized recently about Letterboxd was that much of it is free of the negativity. It’s just a bunch of folks who love movies sharing thoughts on those movies, but it also feels like a real community of people. There are filmmakers on there who share their thoughts on films and their favorites, and that’s of course endlessly fascinating (such as Sean Baker). Even the negative reviews can be fun to read. There’s a lot of pithiness and wit on the site, and its design really helps facilitate that.

Okay, take us way back, what was the film that got you hooked on cinema? My first cinematic true loves were the films of John Woo. I’d watched action movies before but I was introduced to John Woo ironically by a counselor at my church youth group! I became dazzled by movies like The Killer and Hard Boiled. It was then that I realized that things I had seen dozens of times (e.g., a shootout in a warehouse) could be elevated by sheer craftsmanship.

What keeps you from sharing your four favorites on your profile? A few reasons. For me personally, it takes months if not years for my thoughts on a film to really crystallize. My relationship with a movie doesn’t end when the credits roll—its ideas and themes and images are often clanging around in the back of my head for months if not years afterwards. As a result, my favorite films of all time change pretty frequently and I didn’t want to have to think about maintaining my four favorites over time.

Michael Caine in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Children of Men’ (2006).

Is there any film you could say is your all-time number one? If I had to name one though, it’d probably be Children of Men. It combines all my favorite things into one movie: science fiction, action, Michael Caine and a heartfelt message about how humanity has to be kinder to one another if we are to survive the challenging days ahead.

Your most popular lists are weirdly specific and fun (but true!). What are some other weirdly specific lists on Letterboxd that spoke to you? All the lists I like fall into that category. I love it when people make connections that I never otherwise would’ve thought of. To make a funny list, I think you need to be able to juggle extremely specific pattern recognition with a description that makes people feel like they are learning something about the films or their subjects. While the vast majority of the time these are just for fun, sometimes they actually can lead to insights about filmmakers, actors and the specific themes they try to bring to life in their work.

Also, shout out to Thijs Meuwese, who is leading the way on creative lists.

What is your favorite or most useful feature on Letterboxd? The Stats page [generated for all Pro and Patron members] is a beautiful visualization of the history of my film watching. As I continue to build out my watch history, I’m curious to see the trends that will arise.

What’s a movie where you don’t understand why Letterboxd members love or hate it so much? To answer this question, I took a look at some “worst-rated films on Letterboxd” lists and here’s a totally random one for you: the teen romantic comedy parody Not Another Teen Movie. It’s rated a 2.6 and a lot of the humor of this film has aged poorly but there are some amazing gags in here and it features Chris Evans in a performance that will likely be the apex of the comedic phase of his career. My brother and I still quote this movie to each other. Don’t sleep on it.

Chyler Leigh and Chris Evans in ‘Not Another Teen Movie’ (2001).

Your feature film, Stephen Tobolowsky’s one-man show The Primary Instinct, has a Letterboxd page and a pretty solid rating, congrats! How do you feel having that livestream of instant reactions to it? I’m glad that the ratings are decent, but to be honest, I can’t bring myself to look at them! As part of the filmmaking process, I’m totally open to constructive feedback from people I know and trust, but I’m not sure I can handle the same from strangers. Nonetheless, I’m grateful some Letterboxd members have seen fit to watch the film and take the time to rate it! Perhaps if I make more films in the future, I’ll feel better about checking out the reviews for an individual one.

Among your other skills, you are a talented musician. Can you tell us about some of your favorite film scores? Any cello-heavy scores or composers you find particularly influential? While not really cello-specific, the music of Nicholas Britell makes amazing use of strings (see Moonlight and [TV series] Succession). His music is achingly beautiful and is often in rotation in my playlists.

More generally, Hans Zimmer and John Williams are both legends and I’ve always found their work to be very interesting. In recent days, I’ve been quite taken with the work of Daniel Pemberton, whose work on films like King Arthur and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. have a great populsive energy to them. Finally, when I’m into something more moody, atmospheric or modern, I appreciate the work of Cliff Martinez.

Are you self-isolating right now due to Covid-19? Discovered anything great and new to you to pass the time? We hope everything is alright otherwise! Yes, I'm quarantining due to a “stay safe and healthy” order in Washington State right now. Like many people staying at home, I’ve been watching a lot of TV, which includes things like Tiger King, Devs, Better Call Saul, and Dave (the show on Hulu). These are the things that give me comfort and distraction these days.

Jennifer Ehle in Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Contagion’ (2011).

What are your go-to comfort movies that you recommend to people at this strange and difficult time? This is a weird recommendation, but I’d say Steven Soderberg’s Contagion is a great choice. Contagion depicts a virus far more deadly than Covid-19, and how it eventually leads to the deterioration of the social order. But it’s also a deeply hopeful movie. You see governments come together to try to figure this thing out. You see the people on the front lines risking their lives to fight the fictional virus and I think it’s a great way to help people understand how courageous and valuable all our medical workers are in times like these. It’s “competence porn” in an era where I think we need to be reminded of what competence looks like.

[Editor’s note: Dave isn’t alone, Contagion has consistently been in our 20 most popular films for the past month.]

When the universe is allowed to go back to the cinema, where do you prefer to sit? As close to the center of the theater as possible, with my eyeline at about halfway up the screen.

What’s in your ‘hall of shame’—the movies you haven’t seen and know Letterboxd will boo at you for missing? Don’t worry, we’ll protect you. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Say Anything. Also Firefly, the Joss Whedon show which I don’t think is on your website anywhere. Many people have been complaining to me about this oversight in my viewership for years so I think it’ll do well if we can list it here.

Which film from the past ten years that went by fairly unloved do you think will be a future classic and you’ll fight to the death for loving? I’m going to cheat a little and list a movie that’s eleven years old: Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity. This movie didn’t do super well at the box office when it was first released and currently has a 2.8 on Letterboxd. But it was one of my top ten films that year. I think Clive Owen and Julia Roberts have great chemistry, but I think the film’s depiction of corporate espionage is outlandish, fun and irresistible. These characters are playing a "triple game" and it’s so much fun to see the layers upon layers of deception that they’re creating, and the cascading impacts they have on their relationship. Also, how can you say no to a movie that has Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson as competing CEOs literally going at each other?

And finally, please name three other Letterboxd members you recommend we follow. I collaborate with Melissa on YouTube/podcast reviews and she is incredibly thoughtful and articulate. I always appreciate Khoi’s thoughtfulness. And Mike Ginn—this guy is hilarious.

You can enjoy more Dave on his website; his YouTube channel; and his podcasts The Slashfilmcast and Culturally Relevant. Dave was photographed by Brandon Hill.

#letterboxd #how i letterboxd #dave chen #letterboxd members #letterboxd community #cinephile #film lover

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chroniclesofamber · 5 years ago

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THE CHRONICLES OF AMBER & History Lessons

It should be obvious that writers, composers, painters and all artists respond to the time in which they live, and that this is reflected in their art. And it should also come as no surprise that some material is more strongly influenced by the historical moment than other art. All this is at least as true for Roger Zelazny and his idolized Chronicles of Amber — perhaps somewhat more so, given that these five books in no small way chart a complete decade.

NINE PRINCES IN AMBER (1970)

History: Pieces of the first book saw print as early as 1967. It appears Zelazny worked on the book here and there for three years or more until its publication in 1970. Still looming over the political landscape of the time was the assassination of John F. Kennedy years earlier, which had led to the Johnson “great society” era and from there to Nixon’s struggles with China, the Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. Just as influential was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., as well as that of Robert Kennedy. The 1960s were dominated by these issues, the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation, the rise of the counter-culture and protest movements, the Beatles and Woodstock, and the first landing of men on the Moon.

As someone familiar with Jungian psychology and Frazer’s Golden Bough, Zelazny saw a way to harness the interregnum turmoil of the Sixties while incorporating the ritual of “the Killing of the King.” (Conspiriologists left and right — politically, and otherwise — have long adhered to the notion that it was not a coincidence that this particular killing of the king had been carried out in accordance with ancient ritual.) The King of Amber is missing or deceased. Factions have quickly aligned to jockey for the best position to take advantage of the power vacuum. That a conspiracy to remove both the king and Corwin is uncovered, a few books later, also mirrors the deaths of the Kennedys. Our hero, already in a state of confusion over his own identity and situation, is thrust into the midst of this power-struggle and — like Armstrong and Aldrin aboard the Eagle — soon finds himself visiting another world.

Lesson: Corwin charges in somewhat blindly, and is literally blinded (and imprisoned) as a result. When he miraculously regains both his sight and his freedom, he vows that patience and planning will guide him going forward and that, this time, he will prevail and take his rightful place in Amber. He also learns that what drives you, what you want, has a lot to say about who you are.

Journey: He starts out being held against his will in a hospital, recovering from broken legs and near-drowning from a car accident. By the end of the book, he is recuperating from years of blindness and imprisonment under much better circumstances in a remote lighthouse while cared for by an old friend. When he leaves the lighthouse, no one tries to thwart his departure (he is voluntarily assisted, in point of fact), he knows exactly who he is and what he wants, and has a clear idea of his objective and how to achieve it.

THE GUNS OF AVALON (1972)

History: Two years pass, eventful ones. No shortage of natural disasters — major cholera epidemics in Istanbul and Slovakia; avalanches in France and Peru; earthquakes in Tonghai, Gediz, Burdur, Bingöl, Peru and elsewhere destroy cities and kill thousands; Mount Etna erupts; Montreal is buried by the blizzard dubbed La Tempête du Siècle; the Odisha cyclone overtakes the Bay of Bengal and claims 10,000 lives; 50 tornadoes tear through Louisiana and Mississippi; floods put Bangladesh and eastern Bengal underwater; the Bhola cyclone wipes out half a million people. But the real disasters turn out to be man-made, so much so that this period could easily be described by the phrase “state of emergency.” The Apollo 13 mission fails, though the astronauts survive and the summer of 1971 sees a rover rolling across the surface of the Moon. Oil-price instability and Nixon taking the dollar off the gold standard together signal economic and energy crises yet-to-come, but the real instability is social, political and military. Coups and assassinations become commonplace as former colonial possessions are granted independence.

Keyword: Napalm. Bombs, terrorism, murder and violence, state-sanctioned and otherwise, plague the United Kingdom due to resistance to British rule in Northern Ireland. American incursions into Laos and Cambodia fuel growing anti-war sentiment. The publication of the Pentagon Papers and the COINTELPRO documents stolen from FBI offices in Pennsylvania, news images of the Kent State shootings, and revelations of the My Lai Massacre throw gasoline onto the fire: 150,000 protest the Vietnam War in San Francisco on the same day that half a million march on Washington, D.C. 60% of Americans oppose American troops in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the ashes of Hitler, Eva Braun, and the Goebbels family are scattered in East Germany’s Biederitz River. Echoing all this, Zelazny pulls from the Grail quest an idea which unites the chaos reflected in the natural and human worlds in a single image — the Wasteland — and gives it the form of the Black Road, which Corwin discovers runs all the way to the outskirts of his beloved Amber.

Lesson: Corwin struggles with his commitment to his system of values as demonic beings and foreign-imposed dictatorship threaten the shadow world Lorraine and Amber herself. With some reluctance, he risks his own neck for a place lost to him long ago, and abandons his scheme to turn his troops and guns against Amber when the kingdom seems on the brink of falling to an enemy coming in strength. He understands the necessity to adapt to changing conditions and to remain flexible while pursuing his goals.

Journey: Corwin intends to sail straight to Avalon but gets lost in his very own Wood of Error, so that a spontaneous choice leads him instead into the hell of Lorraine, its Goat, and the citadel at the heart of the Black Circle. Toward the end of the book he is again diverted from his course in that his original mission, to exact vengeance on his brother Eric and seize the throne, is set aside when he comes upon the creatures of the Black Road at Amber’s gates. Just as he set out seeking gunpowder in Avalon but found something else along the way — the knight errant he once was long ago — he marches to Amber to find that the regicide he believed he desired was not what he would ultimately want or choose to do.

Vietnam and the 1970s

The tide had definitely turned against U.S. participation in the Vietnam War by the first years of the decade. Nixon, having seen Johnson’s presidency founder and meet an early end due to the war, initiated a draw-down of forces. Australia and New Zealand pulled out of the war in 1971. By the end of that same year, American ground forces had been withdrawn from the war effort, though involvement would drag on a few more years.

Britain, though victorious after World War I, had been left depleted and weary of war — brutal trench warfare had cost the nation more than a million lives. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 more or less marked the beginning of the Vietnam War in the minds of Americans, when U.S. troop strength went from 23,000 to 184,000. It had therefore gone on longer than World War I and wound up costing approximately 60,000 American lives. In America a fatigue had taken hold which was not so different from what post-Great War Britain had known.

Zelazny may have been responding to the mood of the times when portraying the enormity and senselessness of the losses witnessed, and caused, by Corwin and other princes of Amber.

From the first book:

“…ten thousand men dead in a plains battle with centaurs, five thousand lost in an earthquake of frightening proportions, fifteen hundred dead of a whirlwind plague that swept the camps, nineteen thousand dead or missing in action as they passed through the jungles of a place I didn’t recognize, when the napalm fell upon them from the strange buzzing things that passed overhead, six thousand deserting in a place that looked like the heaven they had been promised, five hundred unaccounted for as they crossed a sand flat where a mushroom cloud burned and towered beside them, eighty-six hundred gone as they moved through a valley of suddenly militant machines that rolled forward on treads and fired fires, eight hundred sick and abandoned, two hundred dead from flash floods, fifty-four dying of duels among themselves, three hundred dead from eating poisonous native fruits, a thousand slain in a massive stampede of buffalo-like creatures, seventy-three gone when their tents caught fire, fifteen hundred carried away by the floods, two thousand slain by the winds that came down from the blue hills.”

What tends to jump out from that passage (especially to readers harkening back to the ’70s):

(1) napalm dropped from aircraft on troops moving through jungles below results in a number of casualties far higher than deaths from any other cause;

(2) immediately after thousands depart for paradise, their desertion is contrasted with the hell of the detonation of a nuclear weapon;

(3) aside from deaths due to centaurs, war machines, nuclear warfare and napalm, natural disasters are responsible for the mass losses of life, yet the total taken by disaster is still dwarfed by the number slain in combat.

There is not much other commentary on war in the series. The subject of warfare is largely confined to the first two books. But there is this from the end of the sixth chapter of Nine Princes in Amber:

“As I stood on a hilltop and the evening began around me, it seemed as if I looked out over every camp I had ever stood within, stretching on and on over the miles and the centuries without end. I suddenly felt tears come into my eyes, for the men who are not like the lords of Amber, living but a brief span and passing into dust, that so many of them must meet their ends upon the battlefields of the world.”

[…to be continued in a future post…]

#the chronicles of amber #roger zelazny #vietnam war #chronicles of amber #nine princes in amber

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schoolcalidity · 6 years ago

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Better to be Jews than Christians

Anton de Montoro and the Spanish Converts

By Jeffrey Gorsky

(adapted from a chapter in my history: Jewish Blood, the Tragedy of the Iberian Jews.)

The 15th Century Castilian Anton de Montoro was the most representative poet of the Spanish "conversos". A convert to Catholicism, he flaunted his Jewish heritage. He dramatized the plight of his fellow converts, victims of discrimination and violent persecution. He wrote about something unique in Jewish history—a community of thousands brought into Catholicism through force or compulsion, trying to fit into their new Christian world.

The conversions came at the end of one of the most successful Jewish periods in human history. For centuries, during the "convivencia", Jews prospered from unprecedented, if limited, tolerance from Muslim and Christian rulers. The Jews exploited new opportunities for power, riches, and cultural and scientific encounters. Their success led them to call their land Sepharad, a name from the book of Obadiah that implied that Spanish Jews were the successors to the Jews of Israel.

This world ended in 1391. A rogue priest named Ferran Martinez incited mobs to riot throughout Spain with the slogan "Convert or die". When the violence ended, further State and Church repression followed. After 20 years of repression, a third to half of the Spanish Jews had converted.

These "conversos" quickly achieved enormous success. They obtained high public office, rose to the top of the Church hierarchy, and married into the aristocracy. But their success bred resentment. During 60 years of civil war and instability, they became handy scapegoats. They inherited the hatred and resentment traditionally directed against Jews. This led to violent anti-Convert riots, mostly centered in Southern Spain.

By the reign of Enrique IV (half-brother to his successor, Queen Isabella), most conversos had been Christian for two generations or more. This new generation had much less solidarity as conversos than their previously converted forefathers. The instinct of Jews and early conversos to side with the King for protection led the first generation to side almost unanimously with King Juan II and his principal minister Alvaro de Luna—but Luna sold them out. When Juan's son Enrique inherited both the throne and civil unrest, conversos were on all sides of the new civil wars: some stuck by the King, some sided with his brother Prince Alfonso, while others supported the untrustworthy minister Don Pacheco even after he showed he could be as treasonous to conversos as he was to the King.

The new political loyalties of the conversos reflected their assimilation and adoption of Old Christian manners. But while the conversos rejected Judaism (whether through free-will or compulsion) they were still distrusted and discriminated against by Old Christians. This blocked full assimilation. Conversos developed their own perspective and customs. This soon became an important force in Spanish art and culture.

The converso perspective first erupted through humor. The court jester, or truhan, became a feature of the Court in the 15th Century. The jesters were largely or wholly conversos. This may have been in part due to the Jewish cultural acceptance of humor. It also reflected the conversos marginal status—it was easier for Old Christians to make fun of these former Jews, and they in turn could look more skeptically and satirically at Castilian society.

A school of poetry developed during this period, with the poets called the Cancieneros, or songsters. While these poets wrote in a wide variety of styles, much of their poetry was burlesque, jester poetry written to entertain and gain the patronage of the royal court and grandees.

Many if not most of these poets were conversos. Among them, Anton de Montoro stood out as the cancionero poet who most openly admitted to his Jewish heritage. He dramatized the plight of the converso, and protested the killings and discrimination conversos suffered in Castile.

Born a Jew around 1404 in or near Cordoba, Montoro probably converted around the time of the anti-Jewish legislation of 1414. His Jewish name was Saul, and his mother remained Jewish.

He became known as the "Ropero", or clothes peddler. Trade had a low status in Castilian society, and this trade was particularly low. A tailor could service the aristocracy, and anyone with money would have clothes made-to-order. A seller of used or ready made clothes only serviced those too poor to buy fashionable wear.

He became known as a poet late in life. His first known poems date from the 1440s, when he obtained the patronage of the dominant aristocrat of Cordoba. He became one of the most successful poets of his day, engaging in poetry duels or correspondence with other well-known poets, and leaving a reasonably substantial estate.

Montoro may have stressed his low class and Jewish background partly as a pose. Like jesters, the comic cancioneros poked fun at themselves. Juan Baena, for example, a prominent converso poet, pointed to his physical ugliness and short-stature.1 Montoro's low-class occupation and Jewish background allowed, like a physical defect, for self-deprecating humor.

Montoro often satirized his Jewish descent. In a poem to his wife, he notes that they were well matched as conversos, and that he won the match because she was considered unworthy for any reputable Christian:

"You and I and to have but little worth, we had better both pervert a single house only, and not two. For [wishing] to enjoy a good husband would be a waste of time for you, and an offense to good reason; So I, old, dirty, and meek, will caress a pretty woman."2

As a comic poet of his era, he could be bawdy even by our standards. One of his poems is called, To the Woman Who Is All Tits and Ass (Montoro a Una Mujer Que Todo Era Tetas Y Culo)3. In Montoro to the Woman Who Called Him Jew, his response to what a woman meant as an insult is to refer to her as a sodomite, implying that the mouth that sent out that insult was used to perform oral sex.4

In several poems, without entirely abandoning the satiric voice, he bitterly protested the mistreatment of the conversos. After the attacks on the conversos in Carmona, he addressed King Enrique IV: "What death can you impose on me/That I have not already suffered?"5

The massacre of conversos in his hometown of Cordoba elicited a lengthy and complicated poem to Alonso de Aguilar, the aristocrat who after befriending the conversos deserted them during the attack and then allowed them to be exiled and barred from public office: "Montoro to Don Alonso de Aguilar on the Destruction of the Conversos of Cordoba". The poem begins as a fulsome panegyric to Aguilar, possibly reflecting Montoro's need to continue to live under Aguilar's protection in Cordoba. Only after eight verses of praising Aguilar does Montoro turn to the massacre, noting that after this disaster "it would serve the conversos better to be Jews than Christians."6

By verse 19, he praises the Grandee, and abjectly begs mercy for the conversos: "We want to give you tributes, be your slaves and serve you, we are impoverished, cuckolded, faggots, deceived, open to any humiliation only to survive." In the next verse, Motoro describes himself as "wretched, the first to wear the livery of the blacksmith" (the man who started the anti-converso riots). He pleads for the grandee's mercy, while he remains "starving, naked, impoverished, cuckold, and ailing."7

It has been suggested that this poem is an ironic attack on his former patron. Yet there is no apparent irony in the poem. The main attitude seems to be helpless despair in wake of the destruction of his fellow converts.

His best-known depiction of the plight of the conversos comes in his poem dedicated to Queen Isabel:

"O sad, bitter clothes-peddler [ropero] who does not feel your sorrow! Here you are, seventy years of age, and have always said [to the Virgin]: "you remained immaculate," and have never sworn [directly] by the Creator. I recite the credo, I worship pots full of greasy pork, I eat bacon half-cooked, listen to Mass, cross myself while touching holy waters-- and never could I kill these traces of the confeso.

With my knees bent and in great devotion in days set for holiness I pray, rosary in hand, reciting the beads of the Passion, adoring the God-and-Man as my highest Lord,"8 Yet for all the Christian things I do I'm still called that old faggot Jew.

The epitath at the end of the verse, "puto Judio" is a generic insult, not an imputation of homosexuality—it is the worst insult in the language: "behind the sodomite, bearer of pestilence, is the outline of the converso. They are joined in the worst popular insult that could be hurled: 'faggot Jew!.'. 9 "The English translation of "puto judio" cannot fully convey the pejorative sense of this masculinization of "puta," which figures the Jewish male subject both as a whore and as the passive partner in the homosexual act. " 10

The poem ends with a chilling prediction of the soon to be established auto-da-fe: He asks Queen Isabella, if she must burn conversos, to do it at Christmastime, when the warmth of the fire will be better appreciated.

Montoro evaded the Inquisition. He died soon after writing the poem, probably before the Inquisition came into force. He showed his lack of respect for the Church by leaving it only a nominal sum in his will. His wife was not as fortunate: she was burned as a heretic before April, 1487.11

As an artist, Montoro represents both a dead-end and a harbinger. He was a dead-end because with the imposition of the Spanish Inquisition and the purity of blood laws, conversos after him could no longer proudly point to their Jewish roots. That attitude would lead to being burned to death as a heretic. Converso artists turned instead to secrecy and indirection. It is no coincidence that the two most important works by conversos, La Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes (both classics of world literature), were both initially published anonymously.

He was a harbinger in that the attitudes he and other cancioneros embraced: irony, irreverence, and the use of low class characters to attack the pretensions of the higher classes, would soon inspire a much more important genre. Picaresque literature came out of the cancionero tradition.12 The picaresque novel, in its turn, was to become part of the foundation of modern literature.

Francisco Marquez Villanueva, "Jewish 'Fools' of the Spanish Fifteenth Century",

Hispanic Review

, V. 50, No. 4 (Autumn, 1982), P. 393.

2 Yirmihayu Yovel, "Converso Dualities in the First Generation: The Cancioneros", Jewish Social Studies, V.4, N. 3 (1998), P. 4-5.

3 Montoro, Antón de. Poesía completa. Ed. Marithelma Costa. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Press, 1990., Poem No. 12

4 Ibid, poem No. 10

5 Marquez Villanueva, P. 403.

6 Montoro, Antón de. Poesía completa, P. 23

7 Ibid, P. 29-30

8 Yovel, P. 5-6

9 Barbara Weissberger "A Tierra, Puto!", in Queer Iberia, (Duke University Press, 1999), p. 294

10 Ibid, P. 316

11 Marquez Villanueva, P. 397

12 Victoriano Roncero Lopez, "Lazarillo, Guzman and Buffoon Literature", MLN 116 (2001), P. 237.

This article is adapted from a chapter in my draft history: Jewish Blood, The Tragedy of the Iberian Jews, about the Spanish Heine, Anton de Montoro, who dramatized the plight of the forced converts in 15th Century Spain.

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tiny-princess-catherine · 6 years ago

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a tiny princess’ big list of favorite games

It’s been about three years since I sat down and considered my top 10 favorite games, and I was curious to see how my tastes had changed. I love making lists, and this was really fun! I ended up writing a whole fuckload of words about them so I’ll put them beneath a read more; feel free to read over them if you like!

Doom II is, for my money, the greatest videogame ever made. No other game has captured the purity of gameplay and design that was managed back in 1994; it’s nearly perfect in every way. Monster and weapon design encourage you to be moving constantly, never hiding behind cover but weaving between attacks. Every monster is threatening in its own way -- the deadliest enemy is the shotgun guy, one of the earliest and weakest you’ll see. Every weapon has its use in various situations (except the pistol, unfortunately). The level design was, by and large, better than the previous game, but even if you don’t like those levels, the game is infinitely moddable and tens of thousands of maps have been released over the last twenty-four years. I’ve sunk thousands and thousands of hours into the game and it absolutely never gets old. Doom II is perfection.

Chrono Trigger is a game that needs no introduction or explanation; anyone who has played JRPGs has assuredly played Chrono Trigger, and it’s much-lauded for very good reason. The characters are varied and interesting, the battle mechanics utilizing combos and positioning are compelling and encourage you to swap around characters in your party to find out what all the double and triple techs are. The plot is a masterful swerve from ‘extremely standard’ to ‘what the fuck is happening’, the prime antagonists extremely memorable (Magus, Queen Zeal, and Lavos are all much more complex than they seem at first glance, and the game fleshes them all out phenomenally), and the soundtrack puts pretty much every other one to shame. The game goes from comedy to pathos with ease, and it’s exactly long enough to finish right when it’s about to wear out its welcome. It’s a real, real good game, y’all.

Nearly the pinnacle of JRPGs, Suikoden II possesses, in my experience, by far the single most compelling story in a video game, and I think it’s largely in part because it keeps itself relatively simple. A story of war, of friends and family torn apart, allegiances shifting and loss and friendship; it never reaches further than it should nor ruins immersion for even a moment. It has some of the worst, saddest, most heartwrenching bad ends I’ve ever seen, and it was those that lingered in my mind far more than the ‘good ends’. The gameplay is fluid and a solid refinement of turn-based RPGs of the era, the spritework is beyond compare for each and every one of its 108 recruitable characters and the background art is perfect. The only real flaws it has is a bit of filler -- did we really need the Neclord subplot in Tinto? -- but it’s so minor as to not detract at all from the overall package.

I was six years old when Myst came out in 1993: my grandfather bought a new computer and Myst was a brand-new pack-in with the CD-ROM drive. From the moment I loaded it up, I was utterly blown away with the most gorgeously rendered, fully realized world I had ever seen in a videogame; keep in mind I was playing shit like SMB3 at the time, so Myst was a whole new world. It showed me that games could be so much more than what the NES could produce, it could be true worlds for me to explore. It helped me to learn how to read, hours spent in the library poring over the books there; it taught me my adoration for exploring empty, lonely places, and ultimately it was Myst that inspired me to legally change my name. Few games have had such a powerful impact on me, and it’s for that reason that I've forever loved the game (and the series that followed!) I cried and cried in simple joy when I learned about the recent kickstarter to rerelease all of the games; few things have managed to worm their way into my heart the way this humble little game did.

A much more recent addition, but no less important to me: Persona 5 was the first game in the series (including all of SMT) that I ever played, and the degree to which the fictionalized Tokyo is a world fully realized utterly blew me away. For dozens of hours, I lived with characters I came to love, I forged bonds and fought for justice, I agonized over which romantic overtures to accept (I went with Futaba my first time). The calendar and social link system is phenomenally cool to me, the battle system is fluid and intuitive, the Palaces had fun design (mostly; some exceptions exist). So deeply was I ensconced in that world that I ended up writing two hundred thousand words (so far) of fanfiction about it, as a result of one of the game’s few major flaws: for a game that seemed so willing to have the protagonist be such a blank slate and a cipher for the player, it saddened me immensely to be forced into one gender. Between that and a few other examples of somewhat socially regressive design (the gay panic scene, the treatment of Ann in some ways) I can’t say the game is perfect, but it’s awfully close to that for me.

I caught sight of the gigantic Earthbound box in a Blockbuster when I was a kid, and my curiosity demanded I rent it and see why it needed such a massive box - the answer, of course, was that it came with its own incredible strategy guide. Earthbound was my very first JRPG and welcomed me into a new kind of game I had never imagined. Fighting with numbers instead of jumping on an enemy's head! Equipment! Stats! A long, involved story that guided me through hugely diverse locations! Humor! Earthbound is a game that doesn't entirely hold up these days, gameplay-wise; there's way too much combat and there's not a lot to it, but its tone and writing remain absolutely top-notch, not to mention its soundtrack. Based on pure quality alone, Earthbound wouldn't be in my top 10, but its impact on my life is nearly more than any other game.

Guild Wars was a game before its time. It was perceived by many as a cheaper alternative to WoW, which had come out six months prior, but the comparisons between the games were never really fair. Guild Wars wasn't an MMO and didn't pretend to be one; it was a much cozier affair with many fewer people involved, the combat areas were all instanced to your party alone, and it had a massive emphasis on solo play with its NPC party member system. The story wasn't anything to write home about, the combat was effectively the same hotbar-based combat as WoW, and the level design was okay at best. All of that said, the character customization was incredible, forcing you to select only eight skills at any given time, so that along with the rest of your party, it was more like building a deck in a card game than standard class-based party composition. Its crossclassing was deep and helped to even further differentiate players from another, its mission system was memorable and fun, but what mostly makes Guild Wars stand out for me was the PvP content. Normally, PvP is something I have no love for, but the 8v8 guild battles were incredibly exciting, fast-paced, and frenetic like nothing else I've seen before or since. I fell in love with it right away and met a community of friends that lasted me for years, and ended up having another enormous impact on my life. I've spent four thousand hours in the game, enough to do literally every scrap of content offered, and still I go back every now and then to play through a mission; its systems just work so, so well. And this isn't even getting into a lot of the stuff that made it unique, like its super-customizable NPC party members, its incredible enemy AI, or the sheer uniqueness of the Mesmer class; there is a lot about the game that I just adore.

The RPG in which you don't have to kill anyone! Everyone knows about Undertale, so I'm sure I don't have to say too much about it. It took normal JRPG tropes and turned them on their head, its sense of humor and overall writing are absolutely outstanding, its characters memorable and varied, and the bullet hell gameplay a fun take on RPG combat. It marries its mechanics and plot more tightly than any other game I've ever played, its soundtrack is incredible, and its emotional moments took me all over the place; just thinking about the hug at the end of the game just makes me tear up. Past all the memes that spawned from it, Undertale is just an extremely solid game that more than lives up to the hype. Please play Undertale.

FFXIV, unlike Guild Wars, is a game that almost seems *after* its time. It came out in a post-WoW world where many MMOs had already played their hand and died, its combat isn't incredibly different from WoW and doesn't seem to have much to set it apart, especially considering it dares to ask a subscription. And yet, it has flourished to become one of the only subscription-based games remaining and has turned an incredible profit for its developers. This is all, I believe, because the game is a giant, well-crafted love letter to the whole series. Enemies, locations, plot mechanics are all deftly drawn from prior games and woven into a tapestry that clearly shows a great deal of love and affection for the previous entries. The story is phenomenal - not just for an MMO, but for games in general. The character animations, armor appearances, and glamour system make it one of the best dress up games available, and it helps that the combat is fun, the bosses true spectacle, and the developers remain wholly committed to the game, constantly releasing content every few months. It keeps a special place in my heart, again, for the people that I surrounded myself with while playing and the extremely fond memories I have of all of the things we did together ingame. FFXIV is incredible and more than just another MMO.

The last spot on my list was hotly contested, but I ended up having little choice but to give it to this bizarre, unknown little rhythm game. Thumper is incredibly unlike any other rhythm game you've ever played, however; even after I beat it I couldn't remember a single song, because it wasn't really about the music, which consisted primarily of pounding drums, howling screeches, and relentless, rising dread. The developers refer to it as 'rhythm violence', and that's an extremely apropos genre; the game is dark, heavy, and endlessly captivating. There's really no describing it, but it's an experience unlike any other. It's apparently available on VR, but I couldn't imagine playing it there - I'd have a heart attack.

#games #cat writes #lists

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delcanprobably · 3 years ago

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Assassin’s Creed II Review

i finished assassin’s creed ii (2) and now i will write a thing about it

visuals and gameplay (which i normally wouldn’t group together but for this game it makes sense)

It’s from the era where everything is a desaturated shade of murky brown or sewerage green but once you get past that, it’s really a beautiful game. I think some areas get less desaturated as you play, but that might’ve just been time of day or me getting used to it. Having finished the game, I’ve reached the point where I’m not taken out of it by the visuals, and I actually appreciate the views a lot. I certainly liked it early on, but it took a while before I took it in that much. I feel that everything fits together really well, hard to explain exactly, but it’s just very solid and quite immersive. I didn’t learn the map very well, there are landmarks, but most of the cities are so samey that they don’t have many memorable areas. They’re distinct from each other, but internally, they feel pretty much the same wherever you are. It’s probably historically accurate, but it sometimes feels like you’re just running through what might as well be a procedurally generated series of tiled rooves. Overall though, the world looks good and serves the parkour system pretty well, and that’s what’s important. The parkour system gives the whole freedom thing but is also a bit unpredictable at times. It doesn’t magnet you into things as perfectly as newer games do, so I pretty regularly missed jumps (though I do kinda suck on a controller). It’s especially frustrating when you’re trying to do a leap of faith (super high jump into a hay bale indicated by a flock of birds and birdseed) and you somehow miss, like 99% of the time you go in, but if you don’t you make a complete fool of yourself. I started checking some of the less obvious ones, which kind of defeats the point of the whole system. NPCs are fairly primitive (maybe good for the time considering the crowd density?) but for whatever reason, I found that in tandem with the world, it was enough to be pretty immersive. In typical Ubisoft fashion, the world tries to be immersive while also being very gamey, as in there are all these consistent, familiar setups that you learn and can use as tools. Of course, this does mean in missions you sometimes find many conveniently placed solutions nearby, but rarely was it annoyingly blatant, and it kind of fueled the whole badass thing. The main thing that took me out is that there are a bunch of bugs. Visible spawn-ins (a couple of times I sprinted full pelt into a squad that spawned like a metre in front of me), parkour bugs, odd NPC behaviour etc., are pretty prevalent. It’s not Cyberpunk 1468, but it’s pretty meh. Money is fucking dumb. For the first hourish you’re barely able to afford anything. Then you get access to a town that generates shit-tonnes of money for you, and then you start getting thousands of florins when you so much as cough impressively and money becomes an entirely empty system. It’s honestly kind of comical. It’s good because you don’t have to worry about a stupid economy system, but it’s also obviously a bit dumb. I see what they went for, like you’re meant to build up this place to have a higher value and generate more money that you can then spend upgrading it and stuff, but I was more than comfortable with the amount of money I was getting in when I’d done like 10% of the upgrades. Oh, and then there’s this retarded system where you can buy artworks to add value to your base, but you never see them, they don’t add much value, and they’re really cheap. So honestly they’re just kind of there for the sake of being there, and near the end I started just going to the town’s art shops and bought all their artworks with the billions of florins I’d saved up. Also, to max out your base’s value, you have to buy every armour piece, even if it’s weaker than the one you’re up to (and the best armour is unlocked in the story anyway). And you can’t change which armour/weapons you have equipped without going back to your base. Not that it matters because it’s so easy that it doesn’t matter what you have equipped, more on that later. The classic issue that’s plagued AC forever is the repetitive fetch-questy bullshit missions, and yes they are there, but they honestly didn’t annoy me much at all. There are probably less than one for every story mission, so it honestly becomes a nice way to break it up. The exception is the assassinations, but they’re basically just cool bonus missions. You can do them whenever you want, and they have the gameplay of the main assassination missions. So they’re almost like missions distilled to their best bits without much backstory or polish. Oh yeah, and then there are the towers, but they’re kind of fun. You have to figure out how to get to the top (usually relatively straight-forward), the parkour to get up can be pretty fun, and then you get a nice view at the end. Honestly enjoyed them a lot for what it’s worth.

A major problem I had is that the game is just too damn easy. Yes, it’s meant to be a badass simulator to some extent but even if you don’t touch the controller for a whole fight, by the end of the game it’d take several minutes for enemies to knock your health down close to zero and then you have a gazillion health potions that start you all over again. More and more I felt very little risk in anything, and if I failed to do a cool plan for an assassination, then it usually wouldn’t matter and I’d be better off just going with it than I would waiting to die to try again. Fights with a small group are fun and break things up but it becomes a chore quickly and you start running away just out from fear of boredom. The best moments for difficulty were the forced stealth sections where you can’t get caught, but the problem with those were that if a guard becomes alerted then you instantly lose, even if they went from zero to alerted as you fall into an air assassination. The most fun with stealth outside those missions was the slim margin moments where you kill a guy just barely before they alert everyone, but you can’t even do that in stealth only missions. The ‘hidden in plain sight’ approach to stealth is pretty neat though so I’ll give it that.

It’s action-stealth but very action-oriented. It isn’t like a stealth game that you can jankily do some action stuff in, it’s easy to do things guns-blazing and a bit awkward but possible to be stealthy. I usually took the route of staying relatively hidden until I was in a good spot to assassinate my target and then got them and ran off, and I’m pretty sure this is how they want you to play based on the trailers and such. Coming with the easiness thing is that there are so many ways to kill people. You have a radial menu with around eight different weapons, and I can tell you that I used only three - two of which have quick access on the d-pad - outside of some very specific cases. I could’ve finished the game with just the hidden blade, sword, and throwing knives. It’s honestly absurd, for instance, there’s a knife that does less damage than your sword and is maybe slightly faster(?) Not only do you rarely need something between the sword and hidden blade, but there’s also no quick button for it on the d-pad, so it just never gets used. The excessive number of weapons include a couple that are meant to be tools for stealth, but it’s such a faf to go into the menu and select them that I rarely could be bothered.

story and stuff idk The story was pretty great, but I think some people exaggerate it a bit. Yes, the writing is pretty good, and Ezio is a great protagonist as far as video games go. What compelled me the most in the story was uncovering the conspiracy, not the characters’ story arcs. Even then, I got a bit lost halfway through. That’s not to say the characters are bad, they’re A-tier as far as video games go, but there’s no interesting development or real emotional thing behind anyone other than Ezio, and even then, it’s a kind of. He has some character development, but it’s pretty much done in the first third of the game. I will say I definitely cared a lot and was never annoyed by the story, and that’s rare for me. There are some dumb plot points when you think about them for a bit though, and there’s a retarded twist near the end. There’s the standard moral ambiguity thing you get in video games though. You learn about how you need to respect who you kill and only kill people for the common good and blah blah, but then you regularly kill half a dozen guards to go pick up a few hundred florins out of a box. And then there’s the fact guards instantly get sus if you’re on the rooftops (fair enough), which gives you an incentive just to kill them so that you can keep using the more fun method of travel. Whatever though, video games be video games. (story spoiler for people who have never played assassin’s creed, skip the italic bit if you wanna avoid) Oh yeah, the modern-day bits. Almost felt like there weren’t enough, to be honest. Like, I’m more interested in Ezio’s story, but there is so little closure in the modern-day stuff. Felt a tad underdone. The conclusion of the game gives a pretty intriguing ending for the like the lore of the modern-day story, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered for both Desmond and Ezio’s story, and honestly, overall, it kind of feels like a massive cock tease for the rest of the Ezio trilogy. The last level is here and there. Very out of place and comes out of nowhere, but also pretty epic I guess. The final boss is pretty meh though; they’ve built a system where it’s impossible to make it actually difficult, so it’s basically just another fight.

Small note: the DLC is basically two extra chapters before the final chapter. So you end up hitting that, and you get voice lines that are kinda confusing (cause they’re written like you’ve finished the game and come back), and then you have that thing where you can tell that it’s DLC and not the main game. Kinda takes steam out of the tension built up to the second-last chapter of the main game, but whatever. The DLC itself is pretty great, but I’d maybe not be saying that if I’d explicitly paid for them and it wasn’t just included with the PC version. Oh yeah, there’s one mission that I loved the premise of but hated in practice, and it’s pretty much the peak mission in the whole game (it’s even the one depicted in the trailer). Basically (major game spoilers, minor story spoilers, skip the whole paragraph), you have to win a series of games at a carnival to get a ticket into a party hosted by your target. Once you’re in, the guards start to catch on, and you have to blend in while they swarm the party. Then your target shows up on a boat for a speech, and you have to kill him, preferably without having the entire city guards notice you. So conceptually, that’s pretty sick really. But there are so many issues with it that completely took me out of it. First, the carnival games. Instead of being bothered to program a whole new system to make this make any sense, you just have to “win” all of the games, two of which are basically just standard side-quests where you’re just competing against a clock or not dying. It completely took me out how the whole concept doesn’t make any sense, like you only get the ticket if you *win* all the games? What if you came second in one? I’m competing against no one though, so there is no second. It just makes zero logical sense. Then there’s the party. It’s pretty good up until the bit where you actually have to assassinate the guy. A character you’re with suggests that you don’t swim across, and instead you shoot him with the gun you just unlocked and do it in time with the fireworks that are going off, so that no one notices, and it’s given in that typical video game character giving gameplay directions kinda way. Great, except the fireworks are just a background sound, and there’s no difference whether you time it right or not. Also, guards get alerted the second you start charging up your shot if you’re not entirely hidden, so it doesn’t even matter. You still get the guards chasing you if you do the suggested method. However, I realised that there was a convenient tower nearby and thought maybe I was meant to sneak to the side of the party and climb the tower and “snipe” him! But no, because the game doesn’t let you target him from that high up. As far as I could figure out, there’s no particularly elegant way of taking him out, especially not without getting the guards on you. It was just so unsatisfying to have this great setup, probably the best in the game, but have it feel rushed and broken. Other than that I rarely had a problem with the story missions, other than the standard few “oh great a tailing mission” moments, but come on man, that’s such wasted potential. [spoilers over]

conclusion What I loved about this game was the atmosphere and jumping around exploring 15th century Italy. That’s followed by the aforementioned badass simulatorage and some aspects of the story. There was very little about this game that I proper disliked other than what I’ve mentioned. It’s an easy game to get lost in, and it’s not as stupid long as most open-world games, so if you’re a little interested, it can’t hurt to give it a shot, I guess. You have to appreciate exploring worlds a lot though, which I do. Zero challenge, so avoid like the plague if that’s an issue. If you want an actual stealth game in a similar setting with far more choice and challenge, you want Dishonored (which imo is the better game, but it’s a different type of game). This game is more jumping around buildings and taking in the world, and oh yeah also you’re meant to be a sneaky assassin. Also would highly recommend using a controller. Avoid playing the Xbox 360 version on backwards compatibility though, because I did that, and apparently, it’s a common problem for your entire save to get wiped at one specific bit. How d’you reckon I found that out? Thankfully, my old PC save was at the right point. Also, Ubisoft protected sexual predators for years :). Thanks for listening to my TEDx Seatle talk.

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

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Yes, Andrew Yang could be New York City's next mayor

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/yes-andrew-yang-could-be-new-york-citys-next-mayor/

Yes, Andrew Yang could be New York City's next mayor

The answer, to the astonishment of many, is yes. And with each passing day, time is running out for Yang’s rivals — a diverse field loaded with governmental, civic and business leaders — to chase him down.

In a year of death, drudgery and economic destruction, Yang, a tech entrepreneur whose moonshot 2020 presidential primary bid amassed more goodwill than votes, has distinguished himself from the pack with an uncomplicated message: He wants to make New York fun again. The defining clarity of his campaign has, for now, largely obscured the most powerful argument against it — that even for those who admire Yang’s ambition and joyful candidacy, the 46-year-old is still a political newcomer and ill-suited to lead the city out of its worst crisis since bankruptcy beckoned in the 1970s.

His time in the private sector, launching start-ups and then running a presidential campaign, he argued, made him New York’s best bet to juice the kind of recovery that delivers for both workers and their corporate bosses.

“There are a number of people who’ve been in government for years in this field, but many of us have felt let down by city agencies over the past number of months,” Yang said. “So you have to ask yourself, do you really think that someone who’s been embedded in these bureaucracies is going to be the best person to lead us out of this crisis?”

The stakes are stark — and Yang has sought to become a better-rounded candidate in his second campaign. His advocacy for a universal basic income and warnings that automation could decimate the American workforce, the pillars of the presidential run, have largely taken a backseat to talk about creating more affordable housing, attracting investments from business titans, who have threatened to flee if their tax burden rises, reviving the arts and restoring public safety.

Here and around the country, the pandemic has laid bare old inequities and exacerbated others. More than 30,000 New Yorkers, a heavily disproportionate number of them from working poor, minority communities, are dead. Many multiples more are grieving. Even as the candidates spell out their post-Covid plans, the virus continues to spread, with new cases hovering at a dangerously high plateau. The city has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, countless small businesses, and even with the shot of financial adrenaline provided by the recent federal aid package passed by Democrats in Washington, the city’s robust public sector — bus drivers, sanitation workers, subway operators — could still, in the absence of astute leadership, face devastating cuts. Yang’s campaign likely hinges on undecided New York City Democrats, the largest bloc in every poll of the race to date, embracing a fundamental trade-off — by choosing an exuberant cheerleader over candidates with deeper understandings of the city’s infinitely complicated levers of power.

His rivals remain publicly confident that they won’t. There are debates to come and millions of dollars of television ads to roll out. At about the same stage in 2013, the last open mayoral primary, Anthony Weiner was the favorite and future Mayor Bill de Blasio looked like an afterthought.

Candidate Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer and former counsel to de Blasio, suggested in a recent interview with Bloomberg News that Yang’s advantage in name recognition would fade alongside his lead in the polls.

“My daughter had a Howard Dean Beanie Baby and that didn’t help him,” Wiley quipped. “T-shirts don’t win elections.”

‘A happy warrior’

The challenge for Wiley and others, in what could charitably be called an eight-deep field of candidates, is to figure out a path up or around him.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain who advocated for reforms during his time on the force before serving as a state lawmaker, is widely regarded as best-positioned to overtake Yang, something even his top advisers acknowledged in a recent press briefing. Wiley and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, along with former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, are the liberal favorites, though only Wiley and Stringer appear to be in touching distance. Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner with a deep knowledge of city government, has lagged behind.

So too have Ray McGuire, the former Citigroup executive, and Shaun Donovan, who served as commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development under Mayor Michael Bloomberg before going to work for the Obama administration. Both have independent expenditure groups ready to boost them as election day nears.

“Right now, there are so many candidates and so little attention being paid to the campaign because of other things that are going on — the pandemic, everything in Washington and (with the scandals surrounding Gov. Andrew Cuomo) — it’s impossible for any candidate to communicate positions on issues to a large number of voters,” said Kenneth Sherrill, a professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College.

The draw of Yang, he added, was easy to name.

“This guy’s a happy warrior,” Sherrill said. “People may well just be craving happiness. And I’m not talking about a comedian. I’m not talking about a clown. I’m not talking about a demagogue — just somebody who likes people and likes life.”

Yang has mostly worn his frontrunner status lightly, pivoting — like the more seasoned politician he is now — from questions about the prospect of taking on such a heavy responsibility. But the historic implications of his campaign, which could end with Yang becoming the city’s first Asian-American mayor, have been heightened by a citywide surge in anti-Asian violence.

“It’s something that’s affected everyone. But it certainly hits home for Asian Americans, who feel like our race is putting us in a position to worry more about being able to go on the subway or walk down certain streets at night,” Yang said. “So I feel these issues very personally, but I think a lot of Americans do. It’s just a really devastating time for the Asian American community.”

On the boardwalk at Coney Island on Friday afternoon, as some of those other candidates came and went to mark the landmark’s formal re-opening, Yang took questions from a smattering of reporters and few inquisitive cameramen.

He said he was “thrilled” by the freshly approved New York State budget, which includes new aid to schools, a tax hike on the wealthy and financial aid to undocumented workers who had been excluded from federal legislation. The legalization of marijuana, which passed separately but almost concurrent to the budget, also got his stamp of approval. On the issue of his Nathan’s hot dog order, he confessed to keeping it simple — ketchup and mustard, self-applied, declaring himself “a little sauerkraut dubious.”

He then paid tribute to the rapper and actor DMX, a beloved New York native, whose death had been announced earlier in the day. When the would-be gotcha question came — what was his favorite DMX song? — Yang named “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” and talked affectionately of the “bad action movies” he starred in.

“Like, good bad action movies,” Yang clarified after being accused by a photographer of suggesting “Belly” was not, in fact, good. “Like action movies that were in the target and I was very much the target during that era.”

That brand of gleeful, accessible campaigning was the trademark of Yang’s unexpectedly strong presidential campaign, transforming him from a no-name gadfly to a regular on the debate stage. But the issues facing New Yorkers, in this race, are much different. Yang leads in the polls — and his every utterance is coming under harsh scrutiny from the other candidates, the press and skeptical voters.

Lis Smith, the veteran New York political operative who helped lead Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, said the “biggest hurdle” Yang has to overcome is proving — again and again — that he could take a punch and stay on his feet.

“Could he withstand the scrutiny of being a frontrunner?,” Smith said. “The simple answer, so far, is yes.”

The backlash intensifies

Yang’s flirtations with a bid to become New York’s 110th mayor began almost immediately after he exited last year’s Democratic presidential primary. He seemed to be shying away from the prospect, though, when he signed on for a brief stint as a Appradab political commentator and founded a nonprofit.

By mid-December, though, the chatter picked up. Private conversations became public knowledge. Yang spoke to local leaders, like Rep. Grace Meng of Queens and the Rev. Al Sharpton, and eventually enlisted some of the city’s top political operatives to chart his path.

Then, on January 13, he made it official.

“Seeing my city the way it is now breaks my heart,” Yang said in a video directed by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. In it, he introduced a signal endorsement, from newly elected Rep. Ritchie Torres, chatted with his wife, Evelyn, about his favorite sports teams (Mets over Yankees; the Knicks, in spite of himself) and school funding, ticked through his signature policy proposals and greeted passersby who, months later, still clamor for selfies and snips of conversation.

But Yang’s appeal on the street and its evidence in the polls also set off a backlash.

On Twitter, he is under constant scrutiny from critics who question his knowledge of the city and commitment to its civic life. He was mocked for taking pictures in a “bodega” that looked more like a supermarket. And piled-on again after posting a snap from a subway line that didn’t run to his stated destination. (His campaign subsequently told reporters that he transferred lines en route.)

More substantially, Yang struck a nerve early on when he revealed that, at the height of the pandemic last year, he and his family left the city for their second home — a couple hours away, upstate.

And his recent suggestion on Twitter that the city more strictly enforce rules against unlicensed street vending angered advocates who worry a new crackdown would target immigrant workers. Yang has also said he wanted to increase the number of licensed vendors, which could put him at odds with brick-and-mortar shops. (On Monday, he backed off “the sentiment as it was described on that thread” and said he didn’t view the issue as a “zero-sum game” between vendors and retailers.)

Under sometimes harsh examination from local media and activists, Yang’s big ideas — guaranteeing a basic income for the half-million New Yorkers in greatest need, establishing a public bank, appointing a police commissioner “whose career is not primarily in law enforcement” — can sound less inspired than half-baked. His plans to fuel an economic revival with public-private partnerships and skepticism over tax hikes on big businesses and the wealthy, coupled with distrust of his idiosyncratic ideological bearings, have made Yang an enemy of the city’s ascendant progressive and leftist political organizations.

The speed and sharpness of the attacks from his rivals has also accelerated as the election nears.

Stringer recently accused Yang of peddling “municipal Reaganomics.” Adams, in perhaps the most heated back-and-forth to date, slammed his business record and falsely claimed Yang had “never held a job in his entire life.” A spokeswoman for Wiley, responding to his call for de Blasio to slow the spending of federal stimulus funds, labeled Yang a “mini-Trump.”

Asked on Friday about that particular turn of phrase, Yang half-laughed.

“I genuinely don’t know how to respond to that,” he told Appradab. “I just find that very confusing. Genuinely.”

Yang’s campaign has also aggressively pushed back on the assertion that handing him the city’s top political job during a period of historic uncertainty could imperil its recovery.

“What is a risk,” top Yang strategist Chris Coffey said, “is doing the same thing over and over again and getting the same results.”

The wild cards

Whether Yang can maintain his lead — and bring in new voters — as the other candidates crack open their war chests could boil down to a few key strategic decisions by the remaining, undecided political movers in a city where the old machers, like the county parties, have mostly been relegated to the sidelines.

The big labor unions have largely split their support among Adams, Stringer, Wiley and Garcia. Progressive groups seem to be hesitating, though, stuck between Wiley, Stringer and their affection for Morales. A number of increasingly influential, young, liberal city-based state lawmakers backed Stringer early on, but it is unclear if their support will help fuel a consolidation on the left.

That uncertainty has been heightened by the introduction of ranked-choice voting, a system that typically rewards candidates who, even when they are not a voters’ top pick, can maintain some level of popularity — and acceptability — across various constituencies. But there is no indication, at this point, that the candidates trailing in the polls are prepared to alter course and consider strategic cross-endorsements.

If they do, the shift could happen in the coming weeks, after three of the handful of remaining outside influencers pick their horse. At the top of the list is The New York Times editorial board; the United Federation of Teachers, which has a losing record in recent elections but has seen its membership unified by the backlash over school re-openings; and the Working Families Party.

Emboldened by its staying power despite Cuomo’s best attempts to unravel it, the WFP is one of the few progressive organizations with the name brand and grassroots power to drive support to one (or more) of the leading liberal candidates.

“During a pandemic year, where candidates aren’t campaigning traditionally, we need to have a real path to victory,” WFP state director Sochie Nnaemeka told Appradab. “We cannot solely make our endorsement about value signaling. It has to be about who is the best vehicle for the progressive movement, for working people in the city to have representation at City Hall.”

Yang’s campaign, meanwhile, is projecting optimism while digging in for a dogfight.

“No one here is going to say there is no way for us to lose this race. There absolutely is,” Coffey, his strategist, said during a recent briefing. “But I’d rather be us than anyone else.”

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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CHANGE YOUR MIND

You can work 16-hour days for as long as you fix bugs right away, the net effect, for the average startup fails. Why do startups have to be trimmed properly; the engines have to be paid enough to prevent them from having fun. This way of writing software is a double-edged sword of course. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money from. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other. It's what impresses reporters, and potential new users. One reason they work on big things is that they have less invested in them. But I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, because YC is an improved version of what happened to our startup, one of the preceding five sources. If someone broke into the clothing retailer's servers, it would create a self-sustaining what drives it is the people. If it were simply a matter of working harder than an ordinary employee and getting paid proportionately, it would be tedious to let infect your private life, we liked it. If the founders aren't sure what to do next, and the company could have died. The test drive was the way to do it, you'll be ahead of most startups.

The name is more excusable if one considers it as meaning that we enable people to escape cubicles. There will be too many different types of clients for them to retain board control as well. Bill is smart and dedicated, but Microsoft also happens to have been the beneficiary of one of the founders of a lot of people. Younger would-be founders are often surprised that investors expect them either to sell the company or go public. You already know them. Their previous business experience consisted of making blue boxes to hack into the phone system, a business with the rare distinction of being both illegal and unprofitable. Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, leaving only a few thousand are startups. Instead start with the obvious one: lobby to get Sarbanes-Oxley. This was the era of those fluffy idealized portraits of countesses with their lapdogs. And when there's no installation, it will help them to see through intellectually dishonest arguments. Yes, he may have extensive business experience.

You can have wealth without having money. And that means the overall amount of wealth created can be greater, because strategies can be riskier. And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better. The other reason creating wealth is such a good idea, why did it lose last time? But the problem the patent pledge does fix may be more pain in your own country. You're rolling the dice again, whether you like it or not. The source of the problem may be a variant of ad hominem—and a particularly useless sort, because good ideas often come from outsiders.

That's the difference between the people who'd been out in the world. We lost several high-end merchants to Web consulting firms who convinced them they'd be better off taking money from less known firms is that people work a lot harder, and get as much done in an hour. We'll suppose our group of founders have something they can release. The best one can say is: if you're in a moderately large city, drop by the main post office and watch the body language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. It's demoralizing to be on the receiving end of a paternalistic relationship, no matter how much money you raise, how you market yourself—they all depend on what you're making? Before Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, his default expectation was that he'd end up working at Microsoft. And it's only now that you can see the evolution of the Web as closely as anyone, and I expect this to become increasingly common. But one of the biggest threats to a startup, there are all those people have to be more outsiders than insiders, if insider means anything. I've deliberately traded precision for brevity. One is that you can use from any browser will be enough of a win in itself to outweigh any awkwardness in the UI.

Fortunately, there were few obstacles except technical ones. VisiCalc, the first three were our biggest expenses. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these. But this isn't true with startups. Many employees would work harder if they could get paid for it. But while there are a lot of development over the past couple decades. In art, for example, imply that you're bootstrapping the startup—that you're never going to make the startups they funded. The patent pledge is in effect a narrower but open source Don't be evil. Her immense data set and x-ray vision are the perfect storm in that respect. But the best thing of all is when people call what you're doing inappropriate.

When you hear people say that you shouldn't major in business in college, but the pool allowed to write on general topics was about eight people who went to the right parties in New York. The intermediate stuff—the medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It's obvious why: the lower-tier firms exactly the startups that are likely to be one-directional: support people who hear about bugs fill out some form that eventually gets passed on possibly via QA to programmers, who put it on their list of things to do. As anyone who has tried to optimize software knows, the key is measurement. Lots of people get rich knowing nothing more than a pretentious version of u r a fag. Since most startups are in the earliest stages, will invest based on a two-page agreement. The reason is that variation in productivity. While some VCs have technical backgrounds, I don't think they'll dominate this new world is the way they're paid. The startup usually consists of just the founders. Reward is always proportionate to reward. Closely related to poverty is lack of social mobility. The trade press, we learned, thinks in version numbers.

Because the software in a Web-based application. The challenge is whether we can keep things this way. So what will business look like when it has assimilated the lessons of open source and blogging have to teach business: 1 that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. The startup didn't have enough money to reach the speed where you can get at least someone to pay you significant amounts, the money comes with more restrictions. I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea. As we later learned, it probably doesn't work to stick to old forms of distribution just because you make more that way. There were not a lot of them wrote software for it. Name-calling. Now the group is looking for more money: they want enough to last for a year or more, will be custom deals for the forseeable future. Scientists, till recently at least, nothing good.

I want to examine a more specific question: why Europe grew so powerful. This time founders may keep starting startups. In the channel era, both flowed down from the top. News. In principle you could avoid getting fat as you get old, but few were in 1998. I think it's a pretty clever piece of jiujitsu to set this irresistible force against the slightly less immovable object of becoming rich. If I had to predict now, I'd say that startups will build on, they have to be more outsiders than insiders, if insider means anything.

Thanks to Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell for reading a previous draft.

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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Between Gods and Rats, the Moynihan Train Hall Is a Temple to Modern Mediocrity

There are three types of photos of the original Penn Station in midtown Manhattan, the one that got knocked down in the mid-1960s. The first type are photos of it being built. The second are those of it being used throughout the first half of the 20th century. Finally, there are the photos of it being destroyed in the 1960s.

As it happens, these periods roughly coincide with three definitive eras of New York City lore. The early 1900s is when modern New York became itself, the early-to-mid 1900s were arguably its peak, and the post 1960s saw its rapid decline. In this sense, the photos of Penn Station are a handy starting point to understanding the city's 20th Century story.

It is a story that doesn't end as much as it sloppily devolves. In 2019, New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman likened the historic preservation movement—born from the Penn Station rubble—to collective pessimism. The destruction of the old Penn Station "flipped the optimistic narrative" of the city, Kimmelman argued. People began to assume that anything good that was lost would no longer be replaced with something better. Instead, they felt a growing sense that what came next would be worse. The main goal was no longer to build back better, but to cling to what we have.

And so it is in a sense fitting that the Moynihan Train Hall, the city's first real attempt to replace a portion of what was lost some 55 years ago, opened on January 1, 2021, the day after one of the most dire, harrowing years New York has ever faced. If buildings can be narrative-shifters, this is quite the timing.

That's a lot of pressure to put on a building. Moynihan could never be a true Penn Station successor, much less change the tune for New York City. For starters, the old Penn Station is still there underneath Madison Square Garden, just as it has been for the last half-century, and will continue to be used by hundreds of thousands of people every day whenever we return to some semblance of normalcy. All New Jersey Transit riders will still descend under the Garden. Many Long Island Railroad riders will, too. Like the original Penn Station, which was for Pennsylvania Railroad customers first and foremost, Moynihan is largely for Amtrak riders.

The new train hall—it is not accurate to call it a new station, as the tracks and platforms are the same—also occupies a different physical space than the old Penn Station. It is across the street, in part of the old James Farley Post Office Building, which was constructed just a few years after the original Penn Station, designed by the same architects, and intentionally mimicked the Penn Station Beaux Arts style (it received landmark status in 1966, thanks to the preservation movement Penn's destruction ushered in, so the original facade has not been altered).

But the main reason Moynihan cannot and will never match the original Penn Station is because it is an ornamental decoration to an otherwise private office building.

The train hall may be the headliner, but it is just a part of the Farley Post Office rehabilitation. The United States Postal Service sold the building to the state, which then leased it for 99 years to private developers. Per the lease, 475,000 of the total 1,112,000 square feet—less than half—are for the train hall, LIRR and Amtrak facilities, and "transportation-oriented retail space." That's much smaller than the massive, eight-acre old Penn Station, which was on a similarly sized plot. The remaining 637,000 square feet have been leased as office space to Facebook, plus some 70,000 square feet of developed outdoor roof space for the social media giant.

This was not merely a happy accident for the private developers, but in many ways the key that unlocked the entire project. The state authority that orchestrated the plan, which has been decades in the making, is called the New York State Urban Development Corporation, otherwise known as Empire State Development. As ESD vaguely alludes to in an environmental impact document outlining the project's history, Amtrak originally proposed using most of the Farley building for a new Penn Station site in the 1990s, but "further refinement of the project scope and more detailed cost estimates revealed that the project would only succeed through a funding partnership between the federal, state, and city governments and the integration of a private development component." Only once "economic opportunities afforded by the utilization of the unused development rights associated with the Farley Complex" did the project finally get off the ground and through the gears of bureaucratic morass.

The project's backers have argued the private development was the only way to make it viable, and so it is either a smaller train hall with lots of office space or no train hall at all. But this, like many other aspects of urban development schemes, demonstrates a lamentable lack of imagination. The total cost, which includes funding from Amtrak, a federally funded agency, was $1.6 billion, a lot of money by any measure but hardly insurmountable for a project with local, state, and federal financing, and about half of the original Penn Station's cost in inflation-adjusted dollars. Like so many other redevelopment projects in the city over recent decades, this whole project is not about palaces by and for the people. It is about "economic development," and the people get a little something for the trouble of selling off a massively valuable real estate asset that we used to own.

The bar of what to do with underutilized publicly-owned spaces is so low that the mere presence of the Moynihan Train Hall can, justifiably, be hailed as a victory of sorts. Steve Hutkins, who has documented the gradual sell-off of American post offices at his website Save the Post Office told Motherboard via email that "this fate is a lot better than what happened to many other historic post offices, like the one in the Bronx that got sold to a developer who never finished the project. Ditto for the Venice, CA post office, sold to a movie producer for his offices and now sitting empty for years. Selling off buildings is the worst; repurposing them in ways that the public can still use them is much better."

So, it is with this it-could-have-been-worse spirit I will attempt to look on the bright side for a minute. The hall does what it can, and it does it well enough. Without venturing too far into architecture criticism, a field in which I am wholly unqualified, I found the train hall about what it promised to be. It is sleek, modern, and bright. Without a doubt, it is a vast improvement over the contemporary Penn Station experience, but that is a bar so low it has been buried under a sports arena. For this sometimes-Amtrak traveler's money, the biggest upgrade over Penn Station is probably not in the main hall, but in the bathrooms. They feel legitimately fancy and have those slick three-faucet setups—which Penn Station got during a 2018 facelift—where the first one is for soap, the second for water, and the third a hand dryer. Considering the bathrooms are some of the most frequently-used facilities at train stations, this is no small deal. Doubly so considering the dearth of publicly available bathrooms in Midtown Manhattan and the historical state of Penn Station bathrooms as the single worst room in the entire city.

Fancy new bathrooms oooooooo Photo: Aaron Gordon

Yet, it seemed obvious to me this is not a building that was designed to be a train hall, but rather an office building that happens to have a train hall in it. To start, the main hall itself—from which riders are supposed to converge and access the platforms—is simply not very large. The size struck me as so inadequate for a major transportation hub that this basic observation is what led me to investigate the lease terms in the first place. Even on New Years Day, in which virtually nobody was using it for its intended purpose but a few hundred architectural tourists wandered about, the station felt populated, even crowded.

In theory, the building is supposed to accommodate some 225,000 passengers a day. I find that difficult to envision. The passenger waiting area is smartly designed with modern wooden benches and could maybe fit two train cars' worth of people. As of now, there is literally nowhere else in the station to sit. Other than that waiting area and the exclusive airline-style lounge on the second floor for Acela passengers, there is a total absence of seating of any kind. (On the one hand, that is also the case for Grand Central, where the only seating is in the food hall downstairs, and a food hall is opening at Moynihan later this year. On the other hand, there's less of a need for seating at a commuter rail station like Grand Central where riders do not buy tickets for specific trains that in theory depart frequently versus an Amtrak facility.)

Still, the lack of seating is perhaps a secondary concern to the limited access from the hall to the trains themselves. From the main hall, there is just a single escalator, wide enough for one person, down to each track. This, almost assuredly, will result in the same long, snaking lines and masses of humanity Northeast Corridor riders are already too familiar with, the kind of lines that clog spaces much larger than the Moynihan hall.

Those not wishing to wait in a long escalator line can circumvent the main hall entirely, take the stairs down to the lower hallway, and then another set of stairs to the platform. But if the smartest, most efficient way to board the train is to circumvent the main hall entirely in a roundabout fashion, then what does that say about the train hall to begin with?

Mostly, this is not the building's fault. There is an insurmountable geographical problem: the train platforms are, for the most part, not underneath the train hall. As I mentioned above, these are the same tracks and platforms that stretch from Seventh to Eighth Avenue Penn Station riders have been using for decades. But the new hall is a block over, between Eighth and Ninth. Only a small portion of the platform extends beyond Eighth Avenue underneath Moynihan, creating a natural bottleneck for anyone who wants to enter or exit through the fancy new building.

This problem was perfectly illustrated in a station directory map in the train hall itself:

Photo: Aaron Gordon

At the very bottom, you can see a faded diagram of a train stretching mostly underneath Penn Station, with only the very edge of one end below Farley. Needless to say, there is something fundamentally flawed about a train hall that only just barely connects to the train itself.

This spatial problem encapsulates not just the Moynihan Train Hall's conundrum, but a lot of our other problems too: it is the public infrastructure we get when we try to fix the mistakes of the past without fully reckoning with what the mistakes actually were. The problem with Penn Station never had anything to do with the Farley Post Office. The problem was, of course, the demolition of Penn Station, which bathed passengers in light and grandeur from the second they stepped off the train, an architectural achievement that can only be accomplished by having the station above the actual tracks. The problem with the current Penn Station is, of course, the absence of an actual train station.

We will never top this. Photo: Library of Congress

And here we arrive at the ultimate question the Moynihan Train Hall poses: should we be happy with it because it exists? When opening the hall, Governor Andrew Cuomo said Moynihan is "a testament and a monument to the public and they deserve the best and they can produce the best." For all its nice touches and pleasant aesthetics, Moynihan is a middle ground inextricably linked to two extremes: the majestic yet tragic glory of the original Penn Station and the squalid tangled cavern of the current Penn Station. It is, to paraphrase the infamous Vin Scully quote about the new and old Penns station, somewhere between gods and rats. By definition, Moynihan was always going to be better than the worst and worse than the best.

The destruction of the original Penn Station helped instill a bleak conservatism over the city, but the Moynihan Train Hall offers neither doom nor gloom. Instead, it offers a quiet acquiescence to the forces that have reshaped New York City since Penn's destruction, a kind of surrender to the "privately owned public spaces" (POPS) in office tower lobbies in exchange for tax breaks or turning streetspaces into "business improvement districts" (BIDs) that often exacerbate inequality and erode at the meaning of an actual public space. POPS, BIDs, and all manners of public-private partnerships do more for the people than selling out entirely—or doing nothing at all—but it will never get us another Penn Station or Farley Building. There are plenty more Moynihans where that came from.

In a deeper sense, the Moynihan model encapsulates the flaws of Cuomo's pragmatic optimism about the power of government. "Faux progressives frustrate the public by raising false expectations and by failing to improve matters," he wrote in his hastily published book. As Gothamist's Christopher Robbins noted in his review, "Cuomo never states what 'real progressives' will do, just that they will do it." It's a neat rhetorical trick; the right thing to do is the thing that happened, meaning whatever didn't happen was wrong. By that logic, I am wrong to say that the train hall's existence is not enough, that we lost something important by selling the rest of the building off, that with each sale, we make it even harder to save what little we have left under the public's name, that the 700,000 square feet of the Farley Post Office that used to be ours is yet another capitulation to the very impulses that destroyed the original Penn Station to begin with.

I left Moynihan with no particular desire to ever seek it out again, in the way I would never willingly hang out at an airport, even if the airport has solid food options. Walking down Broadway to sit in Madison Square Park, I thought of one old photo of Penn Station that doesn't fit neatly in the three-part structure. Taken on July 6, 1965, the photo is of passengers waiting, reading, looking at one another. Fourteen suitcases are arranged neatly on the floor. A wrecking ball dangles in the background, waiting for the people to leave. The building is doomed, but it is still there.

Specifically, I thought about how at the time, this was billed as progress. The people were told Penn Station was too expensive to maintain, a relic of an antiquated era. Madison Square Garden and One Penn Plaza were the future, they said. It was, they said, unrealistic to keep Penn Station around.

I suppose, to a certain type of person at the time, advocating for the city or state to step in and purchase the old Penn Station for the $50 million for which its air rights were sold and rehabilitate it could have been rephrased as "raising false expectations by failing to improve matters." In hindsight, it would have cost substantially less in inflation-adjusted dollars than the entire Moynihan project (assuming rehabilitating it would cost less than 1.2 billion in today's dollars). That same type of person would likely be telling us today about the false expectations of redeveloping the Farley Post Office into a truly public space. But I am not that type of person. Those 700,000 square feet could have been anything.

Between Gods and Rats, the Moynihan Train Hall Is a Temple to Modern Mediocrity syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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readymade-journal-en · 7 years ago

Photo

Sharon Cheung / Yi Jie Communication Company Limited CEO Paint Crisis Into Opportunities

As you grow, you experience more of the world. All these new people you met and glamorous events you went to are silently dragging you into this boundless social network, the swirl of society and the midst of the crowd. Gradually, solitude and self are obliviated.

Sharon Cheung, the former anchor at i-Cable News, spent 11 years of her life running around newsrooms. In 2000, she reported at a Beijing press conference and triggered the former Communist Party head Jiang Zemin, who hit back with the well-known comment of "too simple, sometimes naïve". Jiang's temper did not just fail to deter Cheung from repeating her question, instead, it had her risen to fame in no time. Despite the heydays in journalism, Cheung chose to leave the industry to further study at Oxford University. After that, she joined Media Asia Group for another eight years, before founding her own communication company. Today, she is also a book author, a brand spokesperson, and a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Although she has planted a strong and fearless image in our minds, she had her moments of darkness and negativity in life. Trying to walk out of depression, she picked up the paint brush after twenty years, and began to fill her canvas up with strokes of colours and emotions. In the end of last year, she gathered all her paintings together and decided to hold an exhibition to raise funds for a non-government organisation. Once again, there she was turning crisis into opportunities, and misfortune into success.

Now, if emotions was a party crasher, would those who lost themselves in the midst of the crowd still remember their way out?

youtube

You were a journalist , an entrepreneur, an author, a spokesperson, an artist, and a lecturer, which experienced brought you the most benefits? Every industry brought me a lot of benefits. I worked in journalism for 11 year. I met a lot of people and cultivated a lot of good qualities, such as not to be afraid of unfamiliar people and things. Every day, I need to report different things, meet different people, go to different places. If one is not courageous enough, you cannot do well in journalism. Under ten years of intensive training, I become fearless, and this is in fact a great advantage. Besides, journalism requires instant judgement, especially when I work in politics news around the clock. For example, when official Jiang Zemin visits, he only shows up once, and you only have that moment to catch him. You have no time to struggle but think fast. I am a Virgo and Virgos are problematic. We think a lot and analyse too much. It has been with me since I was small, but journalism does not allow that. It improves a lot of my personality weaknesses.

Cheung worked at i-Cable TV News as a journalist. Source: CUHK

Then I started working for an entertainment company. I worked there for eight years. It opened up another door for me. In the past, my whole world is about politics news. All my friends are from that circle. Entertainment is another world, a very glamorous world. Their values, the way they dress and the way they think are completely different. There are not many people who have the chance to soak in such different worlds for so long, one for 11 year and another for 8 years. Those places have trained me up. I met a lot of people and understand different people's values and benefits relationship. After that, I wanted to test myself, and so I found my own company.

Cheung worked in the Journalism industry for 11 years. Source: CUHK

You were so successful in journalism when you chose to left for Oxford to study. Why did you make that decision? At that time, there were indeed quite a number of people who know about me, my development at the TV channel was going smooth and they gave me a lot of resources. But the problem is I had been working for 11 years, and journalism is such a fast-paced job that I have been giving all the time. As time goes by, I felt like I gave too much and took too little. All the things I had learnt were no longer sufficient to deal with my daily duties. In fact, this is very normal. Once you have worked in the same job for so long and every day is so demanding, you will realise how you do not even have the space to think. It is time to stop and absorb, think about the future, consolidate the learning, and think about how they could help you in the future. Eleven years have taught me a lot, not the traditional way to learn but learnings from everyday life and people I met. That was why I decided to spend a year to study, as an interval to stop for a while.

Cheung studied at Oxford University after leaving journalism. Source: Oxford China Office

What are some other areas you wish to develop in the future?

I quite like paintings. I did think of spending more time on painting. Last year, I did an art exhibition and it was more successful than I expected. We raised funds for Food Angel and donated 250 thousand dollars. They are happy and I am happy.

As I was painting I came up with new ideas. I want to start on a new series of a new theme. I have high expectation in this series, it should be able to make some noise.

I also thought of having my own studio. I have a lot of artist friends who like painting too. With a studio, I would have my own place to art-jam and teach children to paint. But this is just an idea, I have not come up with a detailed plan yet.

Cheung held charity art exhibition Woman in the Nude World in 2016.

When did you start painting?

I started since I was small, but not a lot of people know about this. I had been painting for seven or eight years but stopped after going to college, as there are much more exciting things to do, such as student union and associations. It was around twenty years later, I passed by here (Swiss Studio) after I left Media Asia Film, and I thought of how long I have put this hobby down. It has been hidden for 20 years in my mind that I almost forgot that I could paint. Since then, I picked up painting again until now.

Cheung's work at her art exhibition.

What are art, painting and creativity to you?

In my opinion, painting is a very personal thing. Colours cannot lie. When you see the colours of a painting, you know how the person feels or what the person thinks. When you are down, the colours are dark. Look at this colourful painting, it actually looked like this before: a woman walking towards the water and snow mountains, very dark, almost scary. I painted this in the beginning of last year when I was in a really bad mood. I could not use any bright colours, I almost felt uncomfortable seeing them. But the best thing about paintings is that you can change them afterwards. Recently, I decided to change it completely, to something colourful and upbeat. Painting really allows me to let my emotions out.

Cheung's art exhibition at the Harbour City.

Besides, I think art may not directly contribute to a society's GDP, but it moves hearts and sooths emotions. Art can add taste to a society. Similarly, taste may not have very visible contribution to economic growth. But when a society with taste is compared to a shallow society, the difference is huge.

Cheung's painting during her dark days.

How does painting help you let go of your negative emotions?

Painting is a very peaceful activity, as in I do not have to talk to people. Sometimes, I paint continuously for eight hours. Painting could be very tiring, especially to large ones. My eyes get tired since you get very focus. This is a good form of therapy, as well as a sustenance, especially for Virgos who think and calculate too much. I kept calculating things that I almost felt myself going crazy, but I could not control it. All I could do was keep painting, until I get exhausted and fall asleep.

Cheung's art exhibition raised HKD250,000 for Food Angel.

Cheung's sharing on her charity exhibition Woman in the Nude World.

Do those dark and negative paintings undermine your strong and fearless image?

I think if someone tells you that they are the superman, it is not true. Even the president could feel down and probably hide crying at the corner. People nowadays are smart, they no longer believe that superman will always be a superman. Human is always in 360 degrees, has strengths but also weaknesses. I don't think this will make me look fragile. I admit that the emotions was dark, but when I was in the darkest days in my life, I was strong. I held an art exhibition to help those in needs instead of taking drugs and drowning myself. Helping myself and the others, what in the world could be better than that? At least I answered to myself by spending time on something meaningful.

Cheung is the spokesperson of a beauty brand.

Cheung writes about personal branding in her book Brand U.

As a professional personal brand builder, how do you see the KOL (Key Opinion Leaders) nowadays?

I think KOL is a new profession formed under the Internet era. The emergence of social media means that youngsters can choose what they like to see and follow who they want to follow. The era needs KOL, because people needs somebody to take the lead and give them viewpoints to follow. When I am teaching in Chinese University of Hong Kong, I teach them how to maintain a Facebook fan page. You do not always post your pretty pictures, as people will get tired of it, but your special content. What kind of content do you sell to your followers? This is a very healthy habit, as everyone must have something they like or some strengths. It could be painting, politics, fashion or food. When you share this knowledge, there are people who like and follow you. This makes you think about your personal brand and your strength. Nowadays, there are different social media, free of charge and barriers, why not do it? This is also part of the self-reflection process, not bad.

Cheung was involved in John Tsang's Chief Executive Election Campaign.

How can traditional media be sustained?

I believe in "content is the king". The content is always expensive, but the distribution channel needs to be changed. Traditional media is like when you turn on the television, you passively take what is fed. Newspaper is spoon-feeding as well. However, since social media and the Internet are so popular today, everyone actively takes what they like. For instance, the mode of myTV SUPER is to satisfy today's habit of reading things: read whatever you like, whenever you like. The key is convenience. Besides, content is also changing. In the past, we watched soaps, but people nowadays like reality shows. People generally have more reactions for something related to current issues, especially the atmosphere in recent years has got us care and resonance more. So content became different, distribution channel became different.

Sharon Cheung Facebook Page

Video Interview by Michelle Wong

Text by Michelle Wong

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chaosmagetwin · 8 years ago

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Dark Wizardess: Magic System

From @characterdevelopmentforwriters are a bunch of posts about magic, and how it works, and the like. I’m just compiling it all into one spot with an answer to each and every question that is appropriate in an attempt to work out and exactly define the magical system.

Origins

How did people discover magic?

Magic wasn’t discovered, so much as it has always been there. Some people had it, some people didn’t, but it was pretty much always there. >>What were they trying to do when they discovered it?

Magic was primarily used in roles that were traditional to their users; men used it for hunting, women used it for growing things. Eventually, both discovered they could do the other, but for the most part, there was a division for a very long time. >>How did they figure out how to make others able to do it?

Magic was always an art, one in which you either had magic, or didn’t. Later it became more clear that it wasn’t that they did or didn’t have magic so much as they did or didn’t have MANA, the resource that using magic consumed.

>>How long did it take for them to figure out what other types of magic could be used?

That took a while, since we’re talking about a time over tens of thousands of years. It wasn’t until the first civilizations really started that experimentation really began.

>>How did other people react?

For the most part, people were okay with magic. However, time has a way of changing peoples minds and views, and ten thousand years is quite a long time for anti-magic societies to spring up and dissolve. Ultimately, most societies wound up agreeing that magic is a useful tool for a country. There will always be a few that are anti-magic, but they are seen as backwards, and incomplete.

Was it given by gods?

This is an unknown, but the world is made up of many countries and cultures. Suffice to say that plenty of them have different ideas of which gods gave them magic.

>What god or which gods?

When a god gives magic, usually their domain is ONLY magic, as it is considered complex enough and important enough that gods generally have to focus on it.

>>What type of magic was given?

Most cultures don’t place limits on what types, and more it was the gift of Mana that was given. A few say there were types of magic given along side it, but innovation would always be key.

>>>Was this expanded on by people to create new types of magic?

Yes. Most certainly yes.

>>What was to be accomplished by giving magic to the people?

Some say independence, some say control over their lives, and some say because it was funny.

>>What happens if someone they don’t like uses magic?

Nothing. Whether that is because the gods aren’t real or because they don’t care, or because they can’t do anything is up for debate.

>>Do the gods control what spells work or when they go off?

No.

>>>If someone uses magic to kill someone, with magic, is it considered the magic user’s fault?

Yes. Magic is considered a tool, which the user has complete control over. Losing control, purposefully killing someone, or otherwise harming someone is considered the direct act of the magic user.

How long did it take for different types of magic users to go against each other and form cliques?

Almost immediately after the first civilization began did this happen, and it was “City Mages” against “Shamans”. The city mages won in this conflict, and the following ones (it was a recurring conflict) handily.

Do Magic Items Exist in Your Setting?

How common are they?

Magical Items are a relatively new invention, being only ~4,000 years old. In that time, enchanting has been lost, found, lost again, and found again. Ultimately, magical items are moderately rare, but cheap enough that upper class merchants can afford the odd item.

Who can create them?

Any mage with the training can make a magical item, but a lot of hours go into it. Enchanting is not an art, like most magic, but a science, carefully applied and moderated at all levels.

How difficult are they to make?

Magical items are moderately difficult to make, but far from impossible. Training to become an enchanter is the main barrier to entry.

>Does it depend on the type of magic?

No.

>The type of item?

Yes. The larger the item, and the more powerful the enchant, the harder it is to make. Most enchanted items are just crystals holding light.

How long do these items last?

Most enchants last for as long as their creators are alive, plus or minus a few years, with a few exceptions; the better an item is made, the longer it lasts. There are a few relics of old that are still magical and have lost no power, despite being hundreds, and in a few cases, thousands of years old. The modern era considers the making of such items a lost art, although they can make versions that are just as powerful that only last a life time.

What form can magic items take?

Magical Items can take on any form, but it is usually a form associated with their function. Crystals store light. Swords hold fire. Shields create barriers. The more unique the form, the more it can differ from the norm.

Who can use them?

Anyone can use a magical item, as the enchants do not require power. Most enchants are a sort of passive effect rather than something that is consciously decided upon. For instance, a suit of armor can be enchanted to be stronger, or to enhance the users strength. A set of clothes can be enchanted to repel dirt and water. Wands are rare, and more or less hold a spell that anyone can use. For instance, there could be a wand of telekinesis. However, without knowing how telekinesis works, the average person wouldn’t be able to get the wand to work properly, so there are generally additional enchants on wands ot make them usable. Specifically, there is an enchant to open up a ‘prompt’ within a users mind (like a computer in our world), giving them an understanding of how to move the wand to get what they want.

What is the average cost for a magic item of average quality? Most magical items are expensive, but not to the point of total exclusion.

Does Magic Exist in Your Setting?

Obvious answer is obvious.

If so, how does it work?

Magic works via mana and control. Mana isn’t a physical thing, but rather a force that exists within a persons mind / body / soul. Not everyone has mana, although something can be converted into it, even if that person has no mana themselves. Such an act usually requires some catalyst of mana already, and is considered Dark Magic. I.E. sacrificing someones blood converts that blood directly into mana (And quite a bit of it at that). Sacrificing someones life and soul does even more (more than all the blood of a single persons body, but not all the blood you can harvest from someone over a life time without killing them). When converted in such ways, the object (blood or body) disappears as if being burnt by a blue flame. There are instances of good people using Dark Magic, but in such cases it is always their own blood or body. using anyone elses, even if it is given willingly, is always considered a bad thing.

Ultimatley, Mana is like oil, and magic is the engine that uses it. Each spell, a different engine. Anyone can learn any type of magic, but each new type takes learning, and sometimes even certain spells have to be learned seperately. There is no limit to the types of magic one can do, beyond time and effort.

Everyone is born with a different maximum amount of mana, and this amount is never going to change. Most mages can cast a few spells a day before they can’t do any more. A strong mage can usually cast for about two hours straight. Kayla is extremly strong, able to cast for nearly eight hours straight before needing to rest. Crow / Penny seems to be capable of going for even longer, and her limits have not yet been found / shown.

A few spells require tools, but they are generally in summoning, or advanced spells. The more advanced a spell is, the more likely it is to require a tool. Common tools are wands, but I use that term here loosely; it’s the shape of the item that is important, not the actual capabilities of it. A stick could be used in place of a wand or staff, candles can be replaced by small rocks, cauldrons by pots, and potions by a drink of water.

Magical circles come in two forms; the first is purely magical, with no physical attributes at all. It is created when a mage puts down a spell enchantment that they are actively powering, and also in summons. They are rather rare, and more or less just show that magical power is being used, and is not something a caster chooses to make. It shows what the spell is, if one can read magical circles accurately, and is always needlessly complicated. The second form is a physical magical circle, and is used by mages to create a spell effect more cheaply in terms of mana. They are always copies of the ones that spontaneously occur, but are often just as powerful. Few understand the language the magical circles have, and the ones who do are considered to be incredibly powerful, even if they have very little mana. Such people are known as Rune Casters, and so long as they have time to set up, they can cast any spell for almost free, requiring only a catalyst.

Magic can be used remotely, and is often a mental task, not a physical one. However, linking spells to physical actions makes it easier to actually cast the spell; you CAN do a spell completely from ones mind, but it is often more expensive in mana cost.

Using mana is not taxing on the average caster, simply because they don’t have enough mana to notice. The more mana a person has however, the more noticeable and taxing it is when it starts to disappear. Some say that those with more mana have their lives inexorably linked to their mana, and it is theorized that the most powerful of casters would actually die if all their mana was taken away. Crow / Penny, for example, passed out when a spell kept draining her magic away when she tried casting. it is doubtful she ever actually lost all of her mana, however. Using mana for such powerful casters is usually more like a workout than not, although it won’t help their muscles. There have been a few instances of Dark Magic casters who were fat and used that fat to power their spells, literally burning their fat. This is rare, however, and there are plenty of normal mages who are fat. Generally speaking, mana is practically free; using it has no ill effect for the average user, and can often supplement their income.

Magic users are treated like a normal member of society, who just so happens to have a skill that others may not be able to learn. People with strong magic are usually treated with more respect, but for the most part, people don’t think about it too much. There is envy, of course.

Mana cost is brought down through certain acts, through experience, through the use of physical magic circles, and various other ways. Experimentation is less about discovering what one CAN do, and more about how one can do it for cheap, since most spells are incredibly expensive to cast. Plenty more research goes into combining spells, and getting a single spell to do as much as it possibly can, to get efficient use of mana. This is why Crow / Penny and Kayla summoned creatures and made deals with them, rather than trying to create fertilizer out of magic (which is a possibility).

Magic can do anything I can imagine, but most of the effects are practical, and are meant to enhance society. Healing is a difficult subset of magic to learn, even more complicated than enchanting, which make healers rare AND incredibly wanted. They are treated similarly to how doctors are treated in our world, but with far more reverence. It is also an expensive subset, so almost all healers are also rune casters AND enchanters.

Ritual Spellcasting

Ritual Spellcasting is done quite often by summoners and rune casters. It almost always involves the second type of magical circles. Intention has all the impact on the spell, and belief is a part of intention. if someone were to try and use the wrong ritual for a spell, it would succeed, but still take the normal amount of magic, which is basically like saying the spell circle didn’t accomplish its goal in reducing mana cost.

Necromancy

Since no one knows whether magic is arcane or divine, it’s hard to say one way or the other. That said, most necromancers are priests and acolytes, serving one temple or another. This is the only legal way to be a necromancer. Additionally, necromancy is almost strictly a ritual spell casting. This is hinted at when Kayla says that raising five skeletons is an exceedingly easy task (equivalent to lighting a candle); doing any sort of raising without a spell circle is considered insane, and powerful. That said, Johnathan did use a spell circle. Necromantic abilities are not inheritable, although mana is. Anyone who can use magic can raise the dead, but almost everyone avoids it, since it is not considered a good magic.

Most necromancers don’t actually control the undead, although they most certainly can. Instead, they provide the vital service of allowing the dead to speak to the living, and vice versa. These are used to say goodbye, to apologize for something, to find out the truth about a murder, to do historical research, and more. Often, however, such spells will render the body incapable of doing such spells more than once, making them carefully formatted events in which family gets first say.

Most magic users don’t feel one way or another about necromancers; at worst, they’re best likened to prostitutes in the current day, although they are legal. The general population feels a little more strongly about it; a neccessary service, but one capable of turning their loved ones bodies into weapons, something they are not fond of. There was only one instance where the corpses of the dead were used by a country in a war, and it was considered a massive gamble that backfired; the countries own people rose up against the country and brought it down in mere weeks when their loved ones were dishonored. Necromancers see the general population as customers in need of their service, and other casters as just more customers. Some view their own profession with disdain, some truly love it. Necromancers are not inherently evil, but they do tend to be more morose, depressed, and generally unpleasant to be around. They’re like a combination of modern day morticians, televangelists, and morgue workers.

There are necromancers in the traditional sense, but most are motivated for normal reasons, and just see necromancy as another magical tool, even if the public sees them differently. Still, such casters ARE outcasts, but they aren’t inherently evil either.

People can tell a necromancer from a normal mage, in that most are priests, and so there is a bit of a uniform (bland robes, usually of a specific god)

After Death Theories and Myths

While there are the temple Necromancers in this world, generally speaking there isn’t a widely held belief on the afterlife, specifically because ALL of the dead refuse to talk about it. Thus, there are as many theories as there are people and religions. It is also for this reason that those who are dead are always asked about what it’s like, and why there is always a government official recording anything about it, just in case, at each necromantic ritual. Whether there is a heaven or hell is hotly debated, even in religions who set out the specifics; the fact that the dead refuse to answer is often used as evidence supporting one idea or another.

As to what actually happens after death... well... that would be spoilers

Prophets, Prophecies, and Clairvoyants

Prophecies and prophets aren’t a thing in this universe, simply because seeing the future is impossible; while the past can be explored quite easily, the future is just too fluid.

Loss of Magical Abilities

Mana can be lost at the end of ones life; the loss of it usually signifies that death is literally happening within days, or even hours. It is always irreversible at this point, but it doesn’t tell the future. There are spells that can drain mana, but such mana must always be used immediately in some effect, else it just returns. There is nothing permanent, however, besides killing someone.

Burnout can occur, but it isn’t permanent; it’s more like straining a muscle. It doesn’t take long to come back though, usually between a few days and weeks. Meditation can help, but sleep and waiting are the best cures for it.

Magical Integration

Magical users are rare enough that there would not be entire divisions of them, especially considering most aren’t strong enough for the sort of work an army would need. Thus, amgical users are treated more like support staff, or in the case of strong casters, like commandos, or black ops units. The only magic barred from use is necromancy. Otherwise, anything goes.

The most powerful of magic usually isn’t the offensive kinds, but rather the supporting kinds, and illusions, as well as anything that counters these, as well as healing. Rune Casters make up the backbone of an armies support staff, and are treated well.

Magic is the technology in this universe, practically speaking. In all cases, magic is more powerful, but technology is often used together with magic to create a greater effect. There will come a day when magic is used to get to space and the moon, but that day is a long ways off for this universe.

Elemental Magic

Elemental magic is each a different ‘engine’. In current terms, it could be likened to each one being a different programming code or operating system for a computer. The elements are: Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Lightning. Each break down further. Earth breaks down into Iron, Magma, Structural, Protection, and Farming magic. Water breaks down into Ice, Blood, Healing, Weather, and Tide magic. Air breaks down into Void, Spirit, Work, Speed, and Weather magic. Fire breaks down into Emotion, Life, Battle, Smithing, and Destruction magic. Lightning breaks down into Enchantment, Power, Nature, Speed, and Glass magic. Naturally, all of these have some overlap, some types are outside the elemental system, some types are a mixture of elements, and some are similar in end result but different in mechanic.

None are associated with a color, as color is determined by ones soul. None are associated with specific personality traits, but specific personality traits associate themselves with an element. (Not all fire users are pyromaniacs, but all pyromaniacs who can use magic use fire magic) None of them are debated, and new ones are being discovered. There are some weaknesses, but they generally follow the natural laws. (Fire turns water to steam, water puts fire out, lightning is attracted to water, but can’t pass through pure water, water turns earth to mud, but mud cna just dry out again and become water, etc) The weaknesses are more in ones creativity, rather than any actual laws or rules of magic. Magic is hard to learn by default, and learning specific elements (and their subtypes) are also difficult. Each are common in their own way, however. Earth mages are most common near mountains and plains, as well as in fields. Fire mages are common in cities, as are lightning mages. Air mages prefer farms to cities, but can be found in both quite readily. Water mages are common anywhere there is water. This isn’t because of any particular desire to segregate themselves so much as a desire to put their skills to use where they are needed. All magic could be done from one element, if one is creative enough; fire could be the basis for healing magic, for instance.

Summoning

Summoning is done with a spell circle more often than not, but every summoning is different. When the user casts the spell, they must keep an image in mind of what and who they want to summon for the effects they want. The creature closest to what they imagine is what is summoned. Once summoned, the creature usually asks what is to be done if it isn’t clear, which can range from fighting for the caster to creating fertile fields. All summoned creatures have a price they demand. Why they demand it is unknown; some require sacrifices, some require certain things to be done, some require that their name is spread around so they are summoned more often. Some refuse to make demands, but won’t work until something is offered that they want. Summons are purely magical in nature, created by mana. That they have intelligence and sentience suggests that mana itself has sentience, and many scholars argue about the ethics of summoning. That summons appear to have a life beyond when they are summoned, (but which seems to be spent in waiting of a summon) is concrete information that no one doubts.

A single circle can be used to continue summoning creatures for as long as mana is put into it. That said, the creatures must fit within the circle to be summoned, or else the summoning fails. Very little mana is spent in summoning the creature; instead, mana is used at the END of the summoning spell, when the deal is struck and agreed upon, usually an amount to pay for their time and the services. Long term deals can be quite expensive, and is not something a circle can really subsidize easily, unless the rune caster somehow forsee’s all possible requirements by the summoned creature.

Summoning without a physical spell circle is difficult, and expensive; normal casters could not do such a thing. With it though, it’s quite a bit easier

It is possible to summon ‘demons’, but generally speaking, they aren’t any different from a normal summon; their prices are just a little more expensive, and a little more exotic. They are often used for combat, but a few are used to gather information, and a few for more personal reasons.

#Magic #World Building #Creative Writing #Background

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damnthatnoise · 8 years ago

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Independent Or In Deep Water | Article

- Written By: Robert Timothy -

The picture above sparked a series of tweets from El-P about how fans of Run the Jewels should show their support, and it got me thinking about the genre of music that I love so much.

I might not be the oldest Hip-Hop head on the block, but now that I make a living, I do everything that I can to support the artists that I love (that includes buying albums, merchandise and concert tickets); furthermore, I would never tell anyone that they shouldn’t buy an album to support an artist – just because they had the option of getting it for free. Unlike popular Rap and Hip-Hop, Independent Hip-Hop artists (except for say a Chance the Rapper) depend on the die-hard fans that dig to find new artists and explore new sounds; these are the fans that buy anything and everything they can to show love. After UGHH.com closed, Blueprint stated in a very poignant tweet, “For many artists, labels, & websites, trying to build a financially viable career is like trying to build a house on swampland”. I completely agree with Print, and I feel like the declining state of independent Hip-Hop can be attributed to the digital music era, the popularity of playlist listening and the current generation’s sense of entitlement and instant gratification.

Music is universally accessible in just about any form imaginable, but the digital era has had a profound and undeniable effect on the music industry. When websites like UGHH.com start closing, it can only mean one thing: the market for hard copies of records and merchandise is drastically down. I had Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony, E. 1999 Eternal in second grade. Back in fourth grade, I’ll never forget harassing my dad so that he’d take me to buy a copy of Ready to Die (“Mo Money, Mo Problems” was the jam). I’ll certainly never forget September 11th, 2001; yes, the Twin Towers went down and forever changed the lives of Americans forever, but Jay-Z also dropped The Blueprint on the same day. I went to Best Buy right after school that day and picked up a copy of the CD. Remember when Jay-Z dropped his “swan song” – The Black Album – back in 2003? Yep, me too; I also copped that on the day that it released. I still regularly go to my local record store and pre-order tangible copies of records because I thoroughly enjoy perusing the liner notes. Ever since I got an iPhone two years ago; however, I’ve been pre-ordering and purchasing albums from the iTunes store regularly because of sheer convenience. Just last year, I easily bought fifty to sixty albums on iTunes; that’s not including physical copies of albums I bought. I have always found a great deal of joy in picking up a record on the day of release and fully taking it in. Not all music fans are like me, though. P2P programs and torrents have created a “black market” for listeners to pirate gigabytes of music in minutes. Unless you’re a household name like Drake, Jay-Z, or even Jadakiss, illegal downloading will no doubt affect your bottom dollar. Even though torrent sites like The Pirate Bay constantly get taken down, it seems like they always find ways to cleverly circumvent the law of the internets. Even sites like SoundCloud and YouTube have loopholes; there are now applications that make it possible to rip YouTube videos and SoundCloud playlists. With the advances is digital technology and apps for smartphones, services like Pandora, Spotify and Tidal are migrating a new generation of listeners towards playlist preferred listening.

Even though Pandora, Spotify and Tidal are much better mediums for music consumption than illegal downloading, they still only pay artists fractions of a cent per stream. It should also be mentioned that these services only truly benefit artists that are popular by culture’s standards; the only way to truly be profitable from a streaming based is to generate millions – even billions – of song streams. Part of me feels like the generation that grew up on full-length albums is fading away; music fanatics such as myself enjoy listening to classic albums like Liquid Swords, The Infamous or The Low-End Theory in their entirety. The new generation of music listener – for the most part – only wants the newest Ri-Ri single or whatever “banger” Nicki Minaj just made with Drake. They only want the singles and top 40 hits; they don’t give a shit about the other fourteen songs on the album. I openly admit that I subscribe to Spotify Premium, but it’s only used to decide if I like an album enough to buy it. If I dig the album, even a little bit, I will go to the iTunes or my local record store to purchase the full-length project to support the artist. It’s truly impossible for many independent artists to survive from revenue that is generated via stream based services. When listeners are faced with the option of paying $9.99 for one full length album on iTunes, or paying $9.99 per month to listen to unlimited music, most will choose the latter. In 2007, Radiohead shifted the paradigm of releasing music when they gave fans the option to “pay what you want” for their album, In Rainbows; this, in my opinion, has created a sense of entitlement in the listening community, and when it’s coupled with the need for instant gratification, it only causes the fire to spread faster.

Our country is clearly rampant with the need for instant gratification; look at Amazon and their business model for shipping. They are now making two-day shipping standard, and in some cities, they have same-day delivery. People want things, and they want them now. So, when an artist gives someone the ability to obtain a piece of their art without having to spend money, it creates the mentality of, “If I don’t have to pay, why should I?” Now, I’m not generalizing and saying that everybody thinks this way, but there is a sizeable chunk of the population with this mentality. Killer Mike and El-P gave away Run the Jewels 3 for free (they did this with their previous releases as well), and they ended up garnering twenty-three thousand unit sales and over eight million streams. Mike and El realize that they have a fan base that consists of two generations: the generation that I grew up in, that regularly buys music and appreciates the art of the full album (those that have been following both artists from the beginning), and the new generation that wants things cheap and now (those that have just found out about RTJ). Clearly these two have mastered the art of releasing music in today’s atmosphere, but imagine if even a fraction of a percent of the total streams went to purchases.

It’s no wonder that more blue collar emcees – rappers that have a full-time job – like Ka are emerging in Hip-Hop. Because he has a full-time job as a firefighter, he doesn’t have to rely on music to make a living. Even though there are more ways than ever to discover new artists and listen to music, it’s harder than ever for independent artists to stay afloat in an already oversaturated market. As the music industry keeps evolving with technology and listening preferences, it’s more important than ever for artists to build a loyal and supportive fan base; if they aren’t able to do so, they could sink to the bottom of the murky and overcrowded swamp that is the music industry.

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anneedmonsonus · 5 years ago

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A House Decorated by Marketplace – and Tips for Thrifting

Of all the bad things to come out of Facebook – the creepy harvesting of our online data, a rise in loneliness, infidelities kindled from long-lost acquaintances, the erosion of individual self-worth through unfavourable comparison, to name just a few – there are also a lot of good things. For example, I re-met my now-husband through Facebook… something I like to remind him of every so often, that lucky guy. And I’m also going to add that the fairly recent invention of Marketplace is another one of those good things to come out of Facebook.

Furniture, homewares, rugs, plants and art… these are the kinds of things being sold on Facebook Marketplace that are often super CHEAP, my friends. Often it’s sold by people who just want to be rid of it, fast, and sometimes they don’t have a true understanding of the worth of what they are offering (I remember seeing a designer-name vintage sideboard marketed as “brown cupboard”).

Another bonus is that when you buy from a person on Facebook Marketplace, you can also see if you have mutual friends in common, thus reducing your chances (hopefully) of being murdered (“Yes, he has a teardrop tattoo and he’s holding a chainsaw in his profile pic, but he’s also friends with Julie from Baskin-Robbins”). In fact Marketplace has so many good things about it that I feel jealous of people moving house or getting a new place, like my sister, because they get to furnish and style their house in the Marketplace era. Like, I remember moving to this house, and looking at ads for secondhand dining tables after going to the newsagent and buying The QUOKKA. Yes, a physical copy of a classifieds ad newspaper, with tiny, succinctly written ads and no pictures, woaaah. Furnishing a home now that there is Marketplace is kind of like getting married but before there was Pinterest and after there was Pinterest, but better than that. I say this after spending pretty much TWO DAYS of my life making little white and milk chocolate milk balls with carefully affixed, painstakingly handmade customised chocolate wax seals for bonbonnieres, simply because I had seen a picture of them on Pinterest and I HAD TO RECREATE THEM, and I don’t think a single person at my wedding appreciated the sheer effort that had gone into these chocolate wax seal balls except my best friend from high school who had flown in for our wedding from London, saw the different-coloured chocolate balls and shrieked, “Does no-one notice that these chocolates have RACIAL CONNOTATIONS.” (This is why we are friends).

Anyway, many of my friends share my Marketplace and thrifting love – but I don’t know anyone more enthusiastic about it than my friend Nelly Reffet of Twinkle and Whistle Interior Design. (In fact, we put together this post on our fave Marketplace finds a while back). Recently Nelly shared photos of this Perth house with me – one I instantly dubbed The Marketplace House, because she and the owners styled it to sell using a LOT of thrifted Marketplace finds. And look how inviting it looks!

RUG LOVING: The rug in the living area is a beautiful Persian-like wool rug, 3m x 2m. “It’s super plush and soft, in pristine condition and it cost $250 – normally it would retail in the thousands,” says Nelly. “It took forever to get though, as the seller was difficult to reach and spoke little English. But it made the purchase almost… exotic!”

Nelly met owners Mark and Jasmin back in 2009, when they first asked Nelly for design help. Mark and Jasmin had recently bought their first home together, an ’80s house in East Cannington in need of a revamp. “Even back in those days, I loved their appetite for non-beigey interiors, and the low budget considerations made me tap into some small but efficient creative tricks to make their house shine without blowing the budget,” says Nelly.

After a full reno and a fair bit of styling, Mark and Jasmin enjoyed many years of happy memories in their sweet light-filled home. However the desire to live closer to the ocean, so the kids (and the dogs!) could roam free on sandy beaches and everyone could enjoy cooler summers, led them to move out of their first home a few years ago.

Nelly’s daughter playing with Mark and Jasmin’s kids, now her friends.

“What was their sanctuary became a rental property, and with that came a few years of sometimes neglectful tenants and inevitable house mishaps,” says Nelly. “In order to simplify their life, Jasmin and Mark decided recently it was time to sell their beloved first home, but unfortunately, the property was not quite ready for it. A fair bit of work was required before the property could be advertised, and with a pretty gloomy-looking market in Perth, they decided to furnish and style the property to maximise its overall attractiveness.”

That was when Mark and Jasmin called Nelly to the rescue again. With a budget worn thin by essential maintenance and repair work, they could not quite invest in buying or hiring new furniture. “Instead, we decided to go in full shoestring mode and source pre-loved furniture and homeware to make their house shine again,” says Nelly. “With the exception of most linen pieces, which were purchased in store, and of some of the decorative items, which are from Mark and Jasmin’s personal collection, almost everything was gathered through Facebook Marketplace, and occasionally from the verge.”

I know some people will ask, why bother furnishing and styling the home at all? – and it’s not an unreasonable question. Well, home styling, or staging, as it’s called for the real estate market, is about presenting a home to its best – showing people how a house can be lived in; and trying to get them to form an emotional attachment to a home, ideally leading to a sale. Staged homes tend to sell faster (frequently in half the average time) – and for an estimated 7 to 12 percent more than unstyled homes, so the financial benefits can be worth the work and monetary investment put into the styling. And contrary to popular notion, good home staging doesn’t have to be expensive, or just for high-end homes – which is why Perth has seen a big boom in the past ten years in property staging businesses as well as interior designers that offer staging as a service.

Nelly says Jasmin and Mark wanted their house to stand out from an already saturated property market, and colour was one of the ways to go.

“In a very competitive market, we didn’t want another grey-on-grey-on-pastel-colours house,” she says.

“We wanted a place that would be warm and personal enough to feel like a home, but not too individual, as so not to be too personal.

“Many blogs out there and real estate agents too will advise you to remove all personal belongings and to go as neutral as possible to appeal to a wider audience. I beg to disagree with that, at least partially. If you keep a mostly neutral palette on your walls and floors (so potential buyers don’t have to do any work when they move in), you can still have a little bit of fun when styling by using bright or bolder removable items, such as soft furnishings and art.” And the scouring of Marketplace began, to give this modest yet pretty home a facelift.

LIVING ROOM: The yellow sofa and its matching ottoman were $250. “These were the first pieces we bought, and they became the driving factor for the living room design,” says Nelly. “The colour was a bold choice, but the shape is not bulky so the colour doesn’t overpower the room. All other pieces were picked with that yellow couch in mind, i.e. we wanted them to tone it down and let it shine at the same time: we didn’t want strong contrasting colours or too much harsh black or white. The neutrals soften it up, while the rug – because of its texture but also style and colour, grounds the room.”

NEW BED: “The upholstered queen bed in the master bedroom was totally brand new and sold at $250!” says Nelly.

Using Marketplace to style a house often means you need to allow a bit more time to put together than a traditional styling job would, says Nelly. “As you rely on what people put up for sale, it’s not as easy as driving to a showroom and helping yourself to what you like. You have to be patient to find the right piece, quick to contact the seller, and willing, sometimes, to travel a fair distance to collect your goods. You also don’t quite know the actual condition of the item until you see it, unless there are plenty of photos.”

Each item was carefully selected so it would fit the space well, both from a layout and a style perspective. As things tend to sell quickly on Marketplace, it was sometimes frustrating to miss out on a ‘perfect’ item. “But with the high turnover of the platform, we found alternatives within days, and sometimes hours,” says Nelly.

So is it all worth the effort and the risk? Mark and Jasmin felt the cost of the styling to be worth it. “They ended up spending just under $2,000 for styling their three bedroom house – a fraction of the cost of what new furniture would have been,” says Nelly. “Their biggest (unexpected) splurge was a $150 throw bought at Adairs, which was incorrectly placed on a “Sale” shelf… they only found that out at the time of paying, and by then, they liked the throw too much to put it back!” The house sold for $20k over the agent’s initial expectations, after only eight weeks on the market – which Mark and Jasmin considered a win in their suburb and in the current market.

At this point you might be thinking, ‘Ok, so they bought a lot of furniture and then what? They sell the house and they’re stuck with a bunch of stuff they don’t need?’ Two things. One, Mark and Jasmin bought things that they either hoped to use in their new home, or that they could easily re-sell, if required.

Their biggest win: a beautifully soft and plush large Persian rug in as new condition bought from Marketplace for $250. “It would retail at around $1000 at least new in-store,” says Nelly. “Jasmin is looking forward for the house to sell, so she can bring the rug to their home pronto.

“That is one of the advantages of buying second-hand items instead of hiring furniture: the items belong to you! You are free to do what you want with them once the house has sold: sell them again or bring them home.

“Similarly, if the house doesn’t sell in the expected timeframe, you don’t need to extend a hiring contract and incur additional expenses either. It’s maximum flexibility at a limited cost.”

MORE MARKETPLACE: The grey couch was only $180, and was from just around the corner.

BEFORE. The dining room got a small facelift with a light change.

AFTER

So, if you are thinking of selling your house soon – or even if you just want to revamp your home a little – don’t hesitate to explore Marketplace instead of hitting the shops, advises Nelly. “It can be a fun and rewarding ‘hunting and gathering’ experience, it treads lightly on our planet’s resources, you can find some unique pieces, and save some significant cash in the process. What’s not to love about that?” Maya x

NELLY’S TIPS FOR MARKETPLACE SUCCESS

1. Be reactive. If you see something you like, initiate contact with the seller fast! You can still sort out the logistics a little later. Great scores get snapped up very quickly on Marketplace so the faster you react, the more chances you have to secure the deal. Special brownie points if you offer to pick up immediately or on the day.

2. Be polite and personal. To make the buying process easier, Facebook has come up with default questions and messages you can send the sellers as a first contact. If you’re really keen on something, try not to use them. Even when communication is digital, being polite and addressing people personally often goes a long way. That doesn’t mean you have to tell your life story though, but starting your message with “Hi” and using the seller’s name may make you stand out in a sea of “Is it available?”

3. Read the ad in full. As a seller, it is infuriating to receive messages like “where are you located?” when the Marketplace ad clearly says so. Do you have time to answer questions that have already been addressed? I don’t. Most people don’t. Some ads are pretty short (or quasi-inexistent) and others more descriptive. The least you can do if you see an item you like is to read the ad in full and only ask questions that are essential and not already covered. Common sense, huh? But you’d be surprised how many people don’t go past the photo and headline!

4. Don’t mess with collection. Once again, speed is key on Marketplace. I do not encourage you to go beyond speed limits on the freeway to pick up your bargain, but you don’t want to mess around with collection. Ask the seller when it’s best for them or suggest a day and time, and stick to what’s agreed. If you don’t have a suitable car and struggle to ask a friend for their trailer or ute, hiring one is often inexpensive and fast. Or you could hire an Airtasker or other individuals who hustle as delivery drivers to do the heavy lifting for you.

5. Be open-minded and patient. The more specific you are, the more narrow your pool will be. So identify your essential criteria (for furniture, measurements are crucial!), and keep some flexibility for the rest, being brand or style, colours or materials.

6. Be patient! The beauty of Marketplace is that it is a big cycle that moves fast. People buy and sell all the time. You just have to be there when opportunity knocks at your digital door.

7. Be safe. Give someone the details of where you are going and when, and ideally bring a friend or your partner to do pick up with you if you’re feeling unsure, especially at night.

You can follow Nelly’s thrifting adventures on Instagram @nelly_reffet or visit her site at Twinkle and Whistle.

The post A House Decorated by Marketplace – and Tips for Thrifting appeared first on House Nerd.

from Home Improvement https://house-nerd.com/2020/01/23/the-marketplace-house/

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