#I mean that his concepts and early design did more to allude to what kind of person he is

[silna-pdf]

Birkin

[quibbs126]

Aight then, so this is the kid I alluded to in my last post for @arson-cookie, this is Marble Choco Cookie

Admittedly, her name didn’t originally come from a specific type of chocolate since well, there’s only so many kinds of chocolate out there. Her name mainly came from the fact that I was thinking of a way to combine dark chocolate and white chocolate (since I assume that’s the specific kind of chocolate Pink Choco is, given her similarities to White Choco), and o was thinking of marble cake, so I thought, “why not Marble Choco?”. Though I did look it up and it seems to be an actual thing, even if granted it just seems to be used by one brand as a flavor, so yeah it works

Marble chocolate:

I will admit however, that her design isn’t one I feel particularly proud of. Like yeah, it looks fine, but I feel like I just slapped something together. I had ideas, namely of her wielding a scythe and her having a love themed magical girl look, but when it came to actual execution I think I kind of just went with whatever. I think the main reasons for this were because firstly I made up her whole concept late last night, but by the time I wanted to draw her, it was close to midnight, and I try to not stay up much longer past that time, namely because I wake up early in the morning and I don’t want to be sleep deprived. So I had to wait until the next morning to draw her, when that fervor was mostly lost. I mean it was still there, but not as intense, and that may have affected things. The other reason is probably what I was doing while drawing her. See, I don’t like just drawing in silence, so usually I’ll have either music playing (usually when I’m out somewhere), or I’ll be watching videos in the background. With her, I was watching a YouTuber I like doing these multiple hour long reviews of books he reads, usually bad ones (the books, not the reviews). Thing is, there’s like, no ambience and the videos are really long, they’re just his extensive thoughts on the book as we go through them. They aren’t bad by any means, there’s a reason I watch them despite their length, but this also kind of puts me in a more dull mood, if that makes any sense. I’m just listening to a guy talking for 2 hours, and as such I’m not thinking too creatively. Does that make sense? Also the fact that I’m home for Easter weekend and as said before, I’m not as creative here

But anyways I do want to get into the process of me coming up with her as well. So basically we were driving home from my college, around an hour and a half drive, and I decided to spend that time coming up with ideas for fankids, since I hadn’t really done any this week, and I did come up with a few (that I’ll do later). I got to Marble Choco and was thinking of things for her, and I changed the music to Scanty and Kneesock’s theme from Panty and Stocking (I watched the show a very long time ago because I thought the animation was pretty. Didn’t understand the jokes at the time but I rediscovered the soundtrack a couple years ago and it’s honestly pretty good), and then my mind went “why do I want to base her off of Panty and Stocking?” I sort of filed that away but the idea stuck with me, which evolved into me making her a sort of magical girl, which I also feel is a not too ludicrous leap for these two characters. I gave her a scythe because I was trying to come up with ideas and I decided to look up Scanty and Kneesock’s weapons and saw Kneesock had dual scythes, so I decided to give her a singular scythe. Note that Marble Choco’s a lot more family friendly than this show, she doesn’t do the whole innuendos or anything, it’s just that they were the origins of her concept

But getting into my things with the design, I feel like I may have leaned too much into the Pink Choco and all the pinks, not too much Dark Choco

Anyways, so now let’s get into her herself. So like I said, she’s a magical girl that’s love themed, with the drawing here of her in that form. I imagine if she were in Ovenbreak, her skill would be like Hero or Kumiho in which she’d transform into this form and do things, not sure what though other than attacking things. Basically she’s supposed to have found a magical heart shaped gem (unrelated to Soul Jam) that gives her the power to transform into this state and then turns into her scythe. In normal form, it’s supposed to be a small hair clip like I showed in the sketch (which was basically supposed to be a rough draft for her civilian outfit. I had no actual ideas for what it looked like so I just have her a black jacket). The gem has no actual explanation for what it is, since I feel like that’s something that could happen in Cookie Run, like Snow Sugar’s wand and for all intents and purposes, the Strawberry Jam Sword. It’s just a thing she found that gives her magic powers

But basically her whole deal is that she’s a magical girl that fights against people without love in their hearts. I had this idea to call her the Love Reaper, you know because of the scythe. How her scythe is supposed to work is that the less love someone has in their heart for others, the more powerful the scythe is against them. If you have a lot of it, it will barely affect you, but if you have no love then it’s practically deadly. To reflect this I was considering making the blade holographic, but I decided against it. It’s sort of like what I think KARMA in Undertale is supposed to be like, where it’s more effective the worse you are, at least in theory.

Now that love doesn’t have to just be romantic, it could be platonic or familial or just a general love for others, or most likely a combination of all those. It doesn’t include self love though, since I imagine that’d skew things quite a bit. For example, Dark Choco seems like at his core, he genuinely cares about other cookies, but his self love is probably in the negatives, and that’s not really an accurate reflection of what the point is. Also it seems kinda wrong to punish someone because they don’t love themselves. That’s why I specified “love for others”. Though I haven’t quite figured out where obsessive love falls into this, as it is love, but it’s at an unhealthy level. I dunno. But against things like just animals/creatures, things without a real concept of love, it’s probably as effective as a normal scythe

As for her herself, well first off I imagine she’s pretty tall, getting that from her father’s side. Not really relevant to her personality but I thought I should mention. I imagine her to be a relatively serious person, but not particularly stoic, she’s generally pretty easygoing once you get to know her. I imagine her and the other 4 from this request are all friends, and she’s the cool dependable one they all go to. Also the one they go to if they need someone beat up since she’s the physical powerhouse

Honestly I’m debating making her a completely original Cookie Run character, since I went pretty in depth with the whole concept of her powers and they don’t need to be tied to being a fankid, she could probably stand on her own as a character with very minimal changes

But yeah, I think that’s everything about her, I hope you like her!

[felassan]

Jon Renish (Foundation Technical Director @ BioWare, working on DA4) recently did a Twitch stream where he played through some DAO. Although he works on DA, this is his first time playing through DAO. He’s playing through it looking at random details from a dev perspective as he’s currently working on DA4 and therefore wants to know more about the previous games.

On the stream he mentioned some tidbits on the development of DA4. There were also some insights and anecdotes about the development of DAO and similar. It’s a 3 hour stream so I collected them here in case that’s of use to anyone (for example not everyone can watch streams which don’t have subtitles/captions). The stream is a fun/interesting watch though, so if you’re curious or able to watch I recc doing so. 😊 The rest of this post is under a cut for length.

Please note that there’s some paraphrasing on my part, this is not a transcript.  There are also some additions from another dev who featured on the stream to give some commentary. The stream also contains more snippets that at times I couldn’t make out (I tried my best!).

(There is a mention of Cullen’s VA in the text below.)

DA4

Jon said he can talk about things about DA4 that aren’t “consumer-facing”, but he can’t say anything about the game that would be consumer-facing but which isn’t already publicly available. There are several reasons for this. One, that’s not his job, there are people whose job this is and they let each other do their respective roles. Two, BW are a publicly-traded company, so if he said something that could affect that that would be insider trading. Three, they’re not done making DA4 yet, so if he said that they have added [x] to the game and people got all excited about that or pre-ordered on that basis, but [x] ended up being cut, people would be like ‘BioWare lied to us’, when it’s just that things changed during the course of development, as is often the case

He’s glad that fans are excited for the game but notes that fan expectations are always double-edged. It can be really tough as some people started ‘playing’ the game in their heads as soon as they heard of it. That’s fine, he loves that, but he hopes that peoples’ expectations don’t turn into requirements. Clearly BW have alluded to certain characters, like Solas, being in the game, but some fans say things like “If [say] Morrigan isn’t in the game, then, rahhh!” Y’know, there’s a lot of talk about how certain characters have to be in the game, and yeah.

On characters which are quantum (i.e. characters which can die or which can have similar end-states as death in previous games): their being quantum makes it really hard for the devs to work with those characters in subsequent games. The devs naturally aren’t going to put as much effort into characters which could have died previously. A character can have had an amazing appearance throughout/role in a previous game, but if there is a risk of something happening to them and of them being removed [effectively] from the plot, it just doesn’t make sense to have them as a major character in a subsequent game. If a character can, say, sacrifice themselves in some glorious ending, the devs have to make sure that if they use them again, in worldstates where the character didn’t do that, the character is kind of ‘muted’, as the devs don’t want to disrespect the players who made a different choice

A comment in chat expressed a wish for Shale in DA4. Jon’s response is that he has no idea on that front

Bugs don’t come out of crunch, they come out of development in general. Crunch does impact on the quality of a game though. In recent years BW are always really trying to reduce crunch, they’re currently working really hard to bring it down. The best way of doing that is by controlling scope. As creatives it’s tough to balance wanting to make great stuff and be industry-leading with the desire to constantly do extra passes over things they’ve created like the audio, art etc. Their biggest enemy is time, other ways of reducing crunch or time spent in general include iterating tools to make often-repeated processes as time-efficient as possible

I think the following was an observation on the industry in general as opposed to a BW-specific/-exclusive comment: he thinks that as a result of this sort of thing [working to reduce crunch], a lot of games are going to have to be smaller and a lot more focused in scope i.e. the devs will have to focus on hitting the key selling points of that particular game/series as hard as they can, and cut down on branching out sideways/wide on a bunch of random other stuff

Jon doesn’t personally engage in character creators in games, but he knows that for some players that expression is worth a lot of time and focus. BW want to be industry-leading in this kind of stuff as it’s something which is interesting/key/integral to their games

In a way BW have made their own nest of problems what with every DA game being so different to the previous one. Still, he notes that each game has a staunch fanbase that says that their particular favorite game is the best one in the series

He doesn’t want people who think that DA4 isn’t what they want to buy it and be upset - there are so many other great games out there! BW are going to make the game they’re going to make - if some people like it, that’s great, and if some people don’t, that’s cool. Sometimes waiting until reviews are out and/or really seeing beforehand if a game is something that you want [has things/features in it that you want] prior to getting it - as opposed to jumping right in or pre-ordering - is a good idea. Fans don’t always know what they want, but they do know what they like - these are 2 different things

He hopes that whatever they ship for DA4, people go “I enjoyed this experience”, and that then, if there’s additional content for it down the road, people can decide, “do I want this further content?”

On hair: BW are using the new hair technology in the latest version of the Frostbite engine, so they’ll see what they can do! This was said in response to a comment about the hair in the latest FIFA games (as EA make FIFA)

A comment in chat asked about a flying mechanic (griffons). Jon’s response is that flying is such a heavy gameplay mechanic that you can’t put it in a game without everything in the game being built about it (see Anthem)

Relating to the above comment, in DA4 mounted combat would be cool but then they’d have to make the game ‘around’ mounted combat and make the mounted combat feature meaningful

On the underwater concept art: it should not be interpreted as a promise of gameplay. BW have amazing artists who sit down for a couple weeks while they’re in early production and just draw loads and loads of all kinds of stuff. Concept art is like a moodboard or Pinterest board. Elsewhere in the stream he advised, take all the concept art together like a mosaic and ask, ‘what is the overall theme[s] here?’, and to zoom out from individual details. [This stuff echoes PW’s word on concept art]

BW don’t generally write things or the choices as bleak as the choices in DAO were anymore. This is a conscious choice on their part, they want their game to be fun [note: this was said when the side quest in Orzammar where the Warden has the option of convincing a dwarven mother to abandon her young baby to die was being played through. It seems to refer to intensively grimdark choices/beats of this kind]

I think this was more of a general comment on games: SSDs (solid state drives) mean that players will see shorter elevator rides (Mass Effect - was this a reference to the remaster?) and fewer switchback corridors (those are actually loading zones). Generally, these are going to change mechanically the time it takes to do stuff in games

The devs have lots of features on their backlog that they’d like to offer players but each will ofc involve implementation and subsequent maintenance, and each one that is chosen to add is being chosen over something else. And sometimes, it’s hard for them to tell if [x] feature or [y] feature would be better to add to the game

They’re about to work on a giant feature (a pure tooling feature, something that isn’t consumer-facing) that is probably going to take ~2 staff years of effort [I think “staff effort” includes multiple staff working concurrently, so 2 years of staff effort doesn’t = 2 years of time chronologically] to get done in the next few months. They’re investing all this effort across the people working on it because they don’t want their artists and designers etc to have to deal with the problem that it’s going to solve anymore. I’m not sure what this feature is but elsewhere in the stream they referred to tooling and automation and gave the example of, the better your tooling is, the fewer times you have to manually set the camera for a human vs elf vs dwarf position, for dynamically-generated [cinematic?] content and for the first pass to be automated (if this is the case, less time is spent/wasted on redoing it and manually touching it up) [see last bullet point in this section]

He doesn’t know how big DA4 is going to be but said “let’s ballpark and say like most games it’ll be somewhere between 70 and 100 GB”

If we kept our Wardens as the PC throughout all 3 games, at the end they would be so powerful that it’d be a bit like “Let’s just do [thing], I’ve killed gods before, whatever”. He thinks it’s good that they have fresh characters each time in DA in order to reset that power level. Some people want more Commander Shepard in the next Mass Effect and he feels like, ‘what else could you possibly want / what else could that character possibly do after 3 games?’

When asked how much freedom he/they have now to focus on next gen, he said that there’s actually almost no difference on that front. The problems never change. They now have better renderers, better ray-tracing, better graphics cards etc, but they have always made DA games for high- and low-spec PCs, so it’s actually about gameplay systems. The freedom isn’t power-based and them getting access to more cores and more RAM generally isn’t going to change how the games are played. The games still have to be made for hard drives on PC. Dev creativity matters more than power here. The challenge of building a BW game is more about/from managing loads of different plotstates, loads of different art pieces, etc

On the title situation (two): names are the last thing they worry about because names have to go through legal before being approved. Every name, including character names, has to be checked in case it’s a famous person, or associated with something bad, or offensive in a different language due to localization etc

They don’t do face scans of people with big beards

There was also a bit about changes/developments to/in the cinematic design process and associated tooling [?] but I found it too hard to follow sorry >< This bit of commentary begins at timestamp ~ 1:52:45 and continues til ~ 2:00:05 [keep listening through the bit where they pause for a cutscene]

General BW

There’s currently ~350 staff in Edmonton, ~200 in Austin and more elsewhere

He notes that DA games sell pretty well, but relative to EA games in general, they’re a drop in the bucket compared to FIFA

DAI

5% of players of DAI never created a character [Q: does this refer to people who just used the default appearances/presets with no editing, or people who only played multiplayer?]

The mounts don’t actually go faster than running, this is an illusion

I think they said it has 55,000 lines of dialogue. [I’m pretty sure I remember devs elsewhere saying it has 80,000 lines of dialogue]

One of the companions had to have their name changed during development because of legal/translation reasons. It sounds like the original name sounded too close to something offensive

DA2

Back when DA2 was internally code-named “Nug Storm”: this was at the beginning when it was pitched to the team on a set of slides. The image on the slide for that pitch had devil horns, a metal hand and no flesh, it was just made out of fire and flames

DAO

The engine DAO is made on is the third engine that they tried for it during development. [David Gaider has gone into the DAO engine stuff some on Summerfall’s series of DAO playthrough streams]

The cracks on the cracked eluvian asset are modelled after the crack on the Tardis in Doctor Who from around that time, as at the time some devs had been talking about Doctor Who a lot. A dev actually added this factoid to DAO’s entry on TV Tropes but someone else (evidently not a DA dev) came by and deleted it saying that it was too much of a stretch x)

Before the game had its name there was an HTML script that randomly generated possible titles for consideration, it adds verbs and nouns together e.g. “Grim Dark”. One of the craziest possibilities that it once generated that the devs always remember is "Bone Wind”

One of the portraits that’s used for decoration around the world in-game (it’s of a bearded human man) is actually of a specific BW staff member

He played through Stone Prisoner, where Wilhelm’s son Matthias gives exposition in the cellar. Matthias is voiced by GE and this had been pointed out to Jon earlier on. Jon: “I don’t think that character’s voice acting was super strong there”

On the in-game area towards the end of Stone Prisoner: Outdoor areas in games are large and one of the things needed for them is streaming, so different chunks can be ��streamed in’. There’s a tower [?], and technically the top of the tower was made an outdoor level so that sky stuff could be there, though it didn’t really need to be. The person that made it an outdoor level chose the very smallest chunk size for the terrain mesh, which determines how fine of a streaming they do. So when playing, every time you moved like 4 meters, the game would stream out 50-100 chunks behind you and the same in front of you (this is the bubble around the player of what actually exists). Because it was so small, it was constantly thrashing the CPU and disc to do all the loading. The devs were like “this isn’t going to work”, but they barely had any time. The solution: they made a new level that was outdoor and copied all the sunlight and other settings, but with the largest chunk size. They copy-pasted the entire level from one to the other. The problem with that many chunks then is that there was a giant expanse of flat terrain sticking out of the middle of the tower. They didn’t know if the story was going to involve shots of the outside of the tower for this sequence or not, so they took the terrain deformation tool and bundled all the terrain vertices at the bottom of the tower in a giant clump. So to this day there’s a mess of vertices and twisted terrain at the bottom of the final level that probably no-one has ever seen [not sure though if this anecdote is in reference to a place in that DLC or somewhere elsewhere in the game?]

There were also some tidbits on Anthem, however I didn’t note them down (sorry).

If you think I misheard or misunderstood anything from this stream please let me know and I will edit/fix it. :) 

(Thankyou to some of my friends who explained a tech detail from this to me.)

[source]  <-- current rewatch link

[bookcoversalt]

Have you noticed the latest edition of Charlie Bowater can only draw one (1) face? She did The Princess Will Save You and Cast In Firelight both YA Fantasy set to be released this year. And they are how you say... the same fucking cover

Ah yes so you saw the same tweet I did

I know I literally just posted that we cannot outlaw book covers from looking like each other, but ! Oof!

The only thing that softens the blow here is that Charlie has improved at representing nonwhite features such that characters look like POC rather than tan white people, although,, that bar was low. Anybody remember the ACOTAR coloring book.

(Would you have guessed that 2/3 of these people are nonwhite? Or even that they’re supposed to be three different men? I guess all the men in Prythian have the same haircut?)

But that minor victory is mostly lost in the quagmires of the fact that Charlie’s style is to give everyone instagram face:

I wouldn’t even call this “Sameface” necessarily: that implies limitation, that an artist is only capable of drawing a single facial structure competently. Bowater is incredibly technically talented, she just chooses to give everyone catlike fae eyes and the cheekbones of a starving nymph. (My previous post on this here.)

But I don’t really blame her for that, or for these hilariously identical, nearly devoid of personality covers. Artists are allowed to do whatever they want. Artists who make art for covers are being art directed by designers and marketing teams who bear responsibility for how the finished pieces turn out.

No, this is our fault, as a community and an industry and..... society, kind of, for valuing character portraits that are “pretty” (“pretty” being an extremely loaded, culturally subjective concept) over art that actually Says Something About The Story. Bowater’s style happens to dovetail perfectly with what we currently collectively find pretty, and so we’ve put her art on a pedestal at the cost of everything else art can or should do for our stories.

And this is understandable: in contemporary western culture, pretty is a value unto itself. Seeing our characters portrayed as pretty denotes them as special, as smart, as powerful. It’s almost impossible to de-program ourselves from that reaction. There are approximately five kajillion studies on how beautiful people are at personal and professional advantages; how they’re perceived to be happier, healthier, more successful, and how those perceptions can translate into realities. (Nevermind how thinness and whiteness enter that equation, see above note about “pretty”.) I would love to see more “average” or weird- looking characters abound (and be accurately visually represented) in the YA/ Genre lit sphere, but for now... everyone is pretty.

Which sometimes means everyone is pretty boring.

But that’s just the specific, "What’s the deal with Bowater’s success in book circles and her style and all the sameiness” part of this equation. What if we backed up and asked: why character art at all? Beyond a question of “pretty”-ness (and general obvious Artistic Quality), why do we gravitate towards it, what's the purpose of it, how does it fall flat in a general sense, and how can it be utilized more effectively?

This is something I think about all the time. I follow writers on social media (because..... I am a writer on social media, regrettably), and we have an enormous collective boner for character art. “Getting fanart [of the characters]” is one of the achievement pinnacles constantly cited when people get or want to get published. Commissioning character art is something we reward ourselves with, or save up for (WHICH IS GOOD AND CORRECT. FREE ART IS GREAT BUT DO NOT SOLICIT IT. PAY YOUR ARTISTS). And like???? Same????? We love our stories because we’re invested in our characters. Most humans, even prose writers, are visual creatures to some extent, and no matter how happy we are with our text-based art, it’s exciting to see our creations exist in that form. So we turn that art into promo material and we advocate for it on our covers-- because it’s so meaningful to us! It goes with the story perfectly!! Look at my dumb beautiful children!!!!!

But on an emotional level, it’s hard to grasp that it only means something to us. Particularly when you take into account the aforementioned vast landscape of beautiful visual blandness of many characters (in the YA/ genre lit sphere, that’s pretty much all I’m ever talking about), character art can be like baby photos. If you know the baby, if that baby is your new niece or your friend’s kid, if you’ve held them and their parent texts you updates when they do cute shit, you’re probably excited to see that baby photo. But unless it’s exceptionally cute, a random stranger’s baby photo isn’t likely to invoke an emotional reaction other than “this is why I don’t get on facebook.”

Seeing art of characters they don’t know might intrigue a reader, but especially if the characters or art are unremarkable-looking, it’s doing a hell of a lot more for the people who already have an emotional attachment to that character than anybody else. And that’s fine. Art for a small, invested audience is incredibly rewarding. But like the parent who cannot see why you don’t think their baby is THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BABY IN THE WORLD???? I think we have trouble divesting our emotional reaction to character art from its actual marketing value, which.... is often pretty minimal. This is my hill to die on #143:

Character portraits, even beautiful ones, are meaningless as a marketing tool without additional context or imagery. 

I love character art! I’m not saying it should not exist or that it’s worthless! Even art that appeals to only the one single person who made it has value and the right to exist. And part of this conversation is how important for POC to see themselves on covers, whether illustrations or stock imagery, particularly in YA/kidlit. I’m not saying character portrait covers are “bad”. 

I am saying that I have seen dozens and dozens of sets of character art for characters who look interchangeable, and it has never driven me to preorder a book. (Also one character portrait for a high-profile 2019 debut that was clearly just a painting of Amanda Seyfriend. You know the one. There’s nothing wrong with faceclaims but lmfao, girl,,,,)

I’m sure that’s not true for everyone! I am incredibly picky about art. It’s my job. There’s nothing wrong with your card deck of cell-shaded boys of ambiguous age and ethnicity who all have the same button nose and smirk if it Sparks Joy for you.

But if your goal is not only to delight yourself, but to sell books, it’s in your best interest to remember that art, like writing, is a form of communication. The publishing industry runs on pitches: querys, blurbs, proposals, self-promo tweets. What if we applied that logic to our visuals? How can we utilize our character design and art to communicate as much about our stories as possible, in the most enticing way?

Social media has already driven the embrace of this concept in a very general sense. Authors are now supposed to have ~ aesthetics. “Picspams” or graphics, modular collages that function as mini moodboards, are commonplace. But the labor intensity and relative scarcity of character art visible in bookish circles, even on covers, means that application of marketing sensibility to it is less intuitive than throwing together a pinterest board.

Since we were talking about it earlier, WICKED SAINTS, as a case study of a recent “successful” fantasy YA debut, arguably owed a lot of its early social media momentum to fanart.

(Early fanart by @warickaart)

The most frequently drawn character, Malachiasz, has long hair, claws, and distinctive face tattoos. WS has a strong aesthetic in general, but those features clearly marked his fanart as him in a way even someone unfamiliar with the book could clearly track across different styles. Different interpretations of his tattoos from different artists even became a point of interest.

(Art by Jaria Rambaran, also super early days of WS Being A Thing)

Aside from distinctiveness, it's a clear visual representation of his history as a cult member, his monstrous powers, and the story’s dark, medieval tone. The above image is also a great example of character interaction, something missing from straightforward portraits, that communicates a dynamic. Character dynamics draw people into stories: enemies-to-lovers, friends-to-lovers, childhood rivals, platonic life partners, love triangles, devoted siblings, exes who still carry the flame-- there’s a reason we codify these into tropes, and integrate that language and shared knowledge into our marketing. For another example in that vein, I really love this art by @MabyMin, commissioned by Gina Chen:

The wrist grip! The fancy outfits! These are two nobles who hate each other and want to bone and I am sold. 

In terms of true portraits, the best recent example I can think of is the set @NicoleDeal did for Roshani Chokshi’s GILDED WOLVES (I believe as a preorder incentive of some kind?): 

They showcase settings, props, and poses that all communicate the characters’ interests, skills, and personality, as well as the glamorous, elaborate aesthetic of the overall story. Even elements in the gold borders change, alluding to other plot points and symbology.

For painterly accuracy in character portraits on covers, I love SPIN THE DAWN. The heroine looks like a beautiful badass, yes, but the thoughtful, detailed rendering of every element, soft textures, and dynamic, fluid composition form a really cohesive, stunning illustration that presents an intriguing collection of story elements.

The devil isn’t always in the details, though: stark, moody, highly stylized or graphic art with an emphasis on textural contrast and bold color and shape rather than representational accuracy can communicate a lot (emotionally and tonally) while pretty much foregoing realism.

The new Lunar Chronicles covers are actually the best examples I found of this (Trying to stay within the realm of existing bookish art rather than branch into All Art Of Human Figures Forever):

Taking cues from styles more typical of the comics and video game industries.  (Games and comics, as visual mediums, are sources of incredible character art and I highly recommend following artists in those industries if you want to See More Cool Art On Your Timeline.)

TL;DR: Character art and design, as a marketing tool (even an incidental one) should be as unique to your story and your characters as possible, and tell us about the story in ways that make us want to read it. I tried to give examples because there are so many ways to do this, and so many different kinds of art, and I could give many more! But I’m bored now. So to circle all the way back:

These are not just bad because they look like each other, although that is embarrassing and illuminating. These are bad covers (although,,,,, PRINCESS is the far worse offender, at least FIRELIGHT suggests a thoughtful cultural analogue) because a desire for Pretty Character Art overrode the basic cover function to tell us about the story. We get no sense of who these people are, what their relationships are, what these books are about beyond the most general genre, or why we might care. The expressions are vague, the characters generic-looking, the compositions uninteresting and the colors failing to be indicative of anything in particular. 

They’re somebody else’s baby pictures.

(And yes, that’s the CRUEL PRINCE font on PRINCESS. I better not have to do a roundup post but it’s on thin fucking ice.)

[thelonguepuree]

Dickinson’s “items” have been successively and carefully framed to give the impression that something, or someone, is missing. While the recovery of Dickinson’s manuscripts may be supposed to have depended on the death of the subject, on the person who had, by accident or design, composed the scene, the repeated belated “discovery” that her work is yet in need of sorting (and of reading) may also depend upon the absence of the objects that composed it. These objects themselves mark not only the absence of the person who touched them but the presence of what touched that person: of the stationer that made the paper, of the manufacturer and printer and corporation that issued guarantees and advertisements and of the money that changed hands, of the butcher who wrapped the parcel, of the manuals and primers and copybooks that composed individual literacy, of the expanding postal service, of the modern railroad, of modern journalism, of the nineteenth-century taste for continental literary imports. All of these things are the sorts of things left out of a book, since the stories to be told about them open out away from [a] narrative of individual creation or individual reception … This is to say that what is so often said of the grammatical and rhetorical structure of Dickinson’s poems—that, as critics have variously put it, the poetry is “sceneless,” is “a set of riddles” revolving around an “omitted center,” is a poetry of “revoked . . . referentiality”—can more aptly be said of the representation of the poems as such. Once gathered as the previously ungathered, reclaimed as the abandoned, given the recognition they so long awaited, the poems in bound volumes appear both redeemed and revoked from their scenes or referents, from the history that the book, as book, omits. … The argument of Dickinson’s Misery is that the century and a half that spans the circulation of Dickinson’s work as poetry chronicles rather exactly the emergence of the lyric genre as a modern mode of literary interpretation. To put briefly what I will unfold at length in the pages that follow: from the mid-nineteenth through the beginning of the twenty-first century, to be lyric is to be read as lyric—and to be read as a lyric is to be printed and framed as a lyric. While it is beyond the scope of this book to trace the lyricization of poetry that began in the eighteenth century, the exemplary story of the composition, recovery, and publication of Dickinson’s writing begins one chapter, at least, in what is so far a largely unwritten history. As we have already begun to see, Dickinson’s enduring role in that history depends on the ephemeral quality of the texts she left behind. By a modern lyric logic that will become familiar in the pages that follow, the (only) apparently contextless or sceneless, even evanescent nature of Dickinson’s writing attracted an increasingly professionalized attempt to secure and contextualize it as a certain kind (or genre) of literature—as what we might call, after Charles Taylor, a lyric social imaginary. Think of the modern imaginary construction of the lyric as what allows the term to move from adjectival to nominal status and back again. Whereas other poetic genres (epic, poems on affairs of state, georgic, pastoral, verse epistle, epitaph, elegy, satire) may remain embedded in specific historical occasions or narratives, and thus depend upon some description of those occasions and narratives for their interpretation (it is hard to understand “The Dunciad,” for example, if one does not know the characters involved or have access to lots of handy footnotes), the poetry that comes to be understood as lyric after the eighteenth century is thought to require as its context only the occasion of its reading. This is not to say that there were not ancient Greek and Roman, Anglo-Saxon, medieval, Provençal, Renaissance, metaphysical, Colonial, Republican, Augustan—even romantic and modern!—lyrics. It is simply to propose that the riddles, papyrae, epigrams, songs, sonnets, blasons, Lieder, elegies, dialogues, conceits, ballads, hymns and odes considered lyrical in the Western tradition before the early nineteenth century were lyric in a very different sense than was or will be the poetry that the mediating hands of editors, reviewers, critics, teachers, and poets have rendered as lyric in the last century and a half. As my syntax indicates, that shift in genre definition is primarily a shift in temporality; as variously mimetic poetic subgenres collapsed into the expressive romantic lyric of the nineteenth century, the various modes of poetic circulation—scrolls, manuscript books, song cycles, miscellanies, broadsides, hornbooks, libretti, quartos, chapbooks, recitation manuals, annuals, gift books, newspapers, anthologies—tended to disappear behind an idealized scene of reading progressively identified with an idealized moment of expression. While other modes—dramatic genres, the essay, the novel—may have been seen to be historically contingent, the lyric emerged as the one genre indisputably literary and independent of social contingency, perhaps not intended for public reading at all. By the early nineteenth century, poetry had never before been so dependent on the mediating hands of the editors and reviewers who managed the print public sphere, yet in this period an idea of the lyric as ideally unmediated by those hands or those readers began to emerge and is still very much with us. Susan Stewart has dubbed the late eighteenth century’s highly mediated manufacture of the illusion of unmediated genres a case of “distressed genres,” or “new antiques.” Her terms allude to modern print culture’s attempts “to author a context as well as an artifact,” and thus to imitate older forms—such as the epic, the fable, the proverb, the ballad—while creating the impression that our access to those forms is as immediate as it was in the imaginary modern versions of oral and collective culture to which those forms originally belonged. Stewart does not include the lyric as a “distressed genre,” but her suggestion that old genres were made in new ways could be extended to include the idea that the lyric is— or was—a genre in the first place. As Gérard Genette has argued, “the relatively recent theory of the ‘three major genres’ not only lays claim to ancientness, and thus to an appearance or presumption of being eternal and therefore self-evident,” but is itself the effect of “projecting onto the founding text of classical poetics a fundamental tenet of ‘modern’ poetics (which actually . . . means romantic poetics).” Yet even if the lyric (especially in its broadly defined difference from narrative and drama) is a larger version of the new antique, a retroprojection of modernity, a new concept artificially treated to appear old, the fact that it is a figment of modern poetics does not prevent it from becoming a creature of modern poetry. The interesting part of the story lies in the twists and turns of the plot through which the lyric imaginary takes historical form. But what plot is that? My argument here is that the lyric takes form through the development of reading practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that become the practice of literary criticism. As Mark Jeffreys eloquently describes the process I am calling lyricization, “lyric did not conquer poetry: poetry was reduced to lyric. Lyric became the dominant form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped margins of culture.” This is to say that the notion of lyric enlarged in direct proportion to the diminution of the varieties of poetry—or at least that became the ratio as the idea of the lyric was itself produced by a critical culture that imagined itself on the definitive margins of culture. Thus by the early twenty-first century it became possible for Mary Poovey to describe “the lyricization of literary criticism” as the dependence of all postromantic professional literary reading on “the genre of the romantic lyric.” The conceptual problem is that if the lyric is the creation of print and critical mediation, and if that creation then produces the very versions of interpretive mediation that in turn produce it, any attempt to trace the historical situation of the lyric will end in tautology. Or that might be the critical predicament if the retrospective definition and inflation of the lyric were either as historically linear or as hermeneutically circular as much recent criticism, whether historicist or formalist, would lead us to believe. What has been left out of most thinking about the process of lyricization is that it is an uneven series of negotiations of many different forms of circulation and address. To take one prominent example, the preface to Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) describes the “ancient foliums in the Editor’s possession,” claims to have subjected the excerpts from these manuscripts to the judgment of “several learned and ingenious friends” as well as to the approval of “the author of The Rambler and the late Mr. Shenstone,” and concludes that “the names of so many men of learning and character the Editor hopes will serve as amulet, to guard him from every unfavourable censure for having bestowed any attention on a parcel of Old Ballads.” Not only does Percy not claim that historical genres of verse are directly addressed to contemporary readers (and each of his “relics” is prefaced by a historical sketch and description of its manuscript context in order to emphasize the excerpt’s distance from the reader), but he also acknowledges the role of the critical climate to which the poems in his edition were addressed. Yet by 1833, John Stuart Mill, in what has become the most influentially misread essay in the history of Anglo-American poetics, could write that “the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.” As Anne Janowitz has written, “in Mill’s theory . . . the social setting is benignly severed from poetic intentions.” What happened between 1765 and 1833 was not that editors and printers and critics lost influence over how poetry was presented to the public; on the contrary, as Matthew Rowlinson has remarked, in the nineteenth century “lyric appears as a genre newly totalized in print.” And it is also not true that the social setting of the lyric is less important in the nineteenth than it was in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, because of the explosion of popular print, by the early nineteenth century in England, as Stuart Curran has put it, “the most eccentric feature of [the] entire culture [was] that it was simply mad for poetry”—and as Janowitz has trenchantly argued, such madness extended from the public poetry of the eighteenth century through an enormously popular range of individualist, socialist, and variously political and personal poems. In nineteenth-century U.S. culture, the circulation of many poetic genres in newspapers and the popular press and the crucial significance of political and public poetry to the culture as a whole is yet to be appreciated in later criticism (or, if it is, it is likely to be given as the reason that so little enduring poetry was produced in the United States in the nineteenth century, with the routine exception of Whitman and Dickinson, who are also routinely mischaracterized as unrecognized by their own century). At the risk of making a long story short, it is fair to say that the progressive idealization of what was a much livelier, more explicitly mediated, historically contingent and public context for many varieties of poetry had culminated by the middle of the twentieth century (around the time Dickinson began to be published in “complete” editions) in an idea of the lyric as temporally self-present or unmediated. This is the idea aptly expressed in the first edition of Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry in 1938: “classifications such as ‘lyrics of meditation,’ and ‘religious lyrics,’ and ‘poems of patriotism,’ or ‘the sonnet,’ ‘the Ode,’ ‘the song,’ etc.” are, according to the editors, “arbitrary and irrational classifications” that should give way to a present-tense presentation of “poetry as a thing in itself worthy of study.” Not accidentally, as we shall see, the shift in definition accompanied the migration of lyric from the popular press to the classroom—but for now we should note that by the time that Emily Dickinson’s poetry became available in scholarly editions and university anthologies, the history of various genres of poetry was read as simply lyric, and lyrics were read as poems one could understand without reference to that history or those genres.

Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005)

[4seasonswithiu]

[TRANS] 190711 OnlyU-IU China share fun moments they had with IU and her team on the set of Hotel Del Luna

Our staff members double checked the items before the departure with an anxious heart. Fortunately, we were able to reach the set on time despite the heavy traffic. The food truck, tent, tables and banners were all set up when we arrived at the set. Then, it took us another 40 minutes to prepare all the gifts by putting them carefully in each paper bag and stacking them up on the table beside the buffet tent.

Not too long after we were done with the gift preparations, manager Hanteo approached us, gave us his warm greetings before checking out the buffet tent. As the weather was pretty hot, Hanteo jokingly told us that he would ‘drink’ all the (Ghana) chocolates within the gift bag right away. When going through the other gifts, we especially pointed out that the Voluspa aromatherapy candles were for IU Team, so Hanteo thanked us in Mandarin, saying “xie xie!” as well.

He reminded us that since we would have to wait a little longer, so stay away from the sun in some shade. He also passed on the gifts to director Oh, actor Yeo Jin Goo and IU Team. Later, PD told us we could pass the gift to IU in person in a while.

We gave the staff of Hotel Del Luna the gifts we prepared as they passed by from time to time. During dinner time, some staff came to collect their gifts and we got the HDL team PD to pass on the remaining gifts to other busy staff on the set. 

Around 8PM, IU finally appeared in her pony tail, white loose t-shirt and pants. Since the coffee truck was right beside the entrance, so she took lots of proof photos with the help of Hyesun and the new manager (Moon Ji Hwan) first. After greeting us, she expressed her gratitude for the gifts and meal that we prepared, telling us that she would enjoy the meal and asking whether we were hungry as well or not. We still managed to answer her that we were ‘hungry’ though our mind went completely blank at that moment as we were softened by her sweet tender eyes. IU then invited us to join her for dinner.

The HDL team PD also encouraged us to sit beside IU for dinner. Together, we also had Hanteo, Hyeseon and the new manager (Ji Hwan) with us in one table, and thankfully all of them ate a lot. IU seemed to have noticed how nervous we were, so she kept initiating conversation with us. She said, “we (IU Team) are usually quiet whenever we eat, and given the hot weather and packed filming schedules today, so everyone’s still in a daze. Did all of you travel all the way from China? It must have been hard for you guys to be here given the scorching hot weather.” When she was told that some of us would have to catch the early morning flight in a bit, she frowned as pain and sadness clouded her features.

When eating, director Oh came by so IU introduced him to us and we quickly bowed to him. Director Oh was pretty adorable and not all that serious or solemn as he greeted us enthusiastically and expressed his gratitude for our support. He kept the Hotel Del Luna customised towel around his neck all the time, even when he was having his meal.

Seeing how most of them were almost done with eating, we brought out the gifts and explained to them about the Diptyque’s limited edition ‘The Legend of the North’ series’ candles first. IU was touched upon knowing that we chose the candles because it suited Man Wol’s mysterious aura, saying “ah~ because it suits Man Wol!”. She also let out a tiny ‘wow’ when we told her we bought GUCCI’s A Kiss from Violet perfumed oil for her because its violet scented (IU’s favourite). We also let IU have a look at our charity/ donation certificate, telling her that hundreds of Uaenas participated in this donation and some of us visited the institute with some necessities and played with the kids there to which IU replied ‘aigoo’ tsunderely/ proudly and dearly. She also asked about the details and complimented us ‘Hen BBang!’ (so amazing) in Mandarin since one of us personally went to the welfare institute. IU gave us a big thumbs up, saying ‘Zzen Bbang! Xie xie!’ (really amazing! thank you!) when we mentioned about the necessities that we have donated. One of us caught on the right timing of the atmosphere and started applauding, to which IU joined her right away, followed by Hyeseon, Hanteo and all HDL staff from other tables who had no idea of what’s going on. It suddenly turned into an ocean of harmony 😂.

Click here for more details of IU’s birthday gifts (candles and perfumes), fan donation and fansupport by OnlyIUcn.

We also told IU about her super topic ‘#IU’ that has accumulated over 10 billion reads on Weibo recently and she was ultimately shocked. Since she’s not familiar with how weibo functions, so we explained to her that the hashtag is sort of a community on weibo where people could leave their posts, comments, votes and screenshots there to support her. She seemed to have grasped on the super topic concept after going through some of our posts in the hashtag section and showed off the milestone achievement to people around her. 

IU: Hey, I achieved 10 billion reads! Hanteo and Hyeseon: As expected from the scale of mainland China, they don’t just simply go with (small numbers like) ten thousands when it comes to calculations.

We passed the <10 Years of Flower Road> book to IU, sharing with her that C-Uaenas designed, edited and compiled everything about her within this book in celebration of her 10th anniversary. We also tried to find the best printing manufacturer that we could to bring out the best quality of it. As soon as she got the book on hands, she kept gasping in admiration, saying “wow this is truly amazing. This is impressive, OnlyIU’s scale is no joke” as she flipped through the pages slowly. She especially stopped at one of the pages which contained IU Team’s photo, too bad the whole book was written in Chinese so the staff unnie tried to cheer her up by telling her that they could translate right away using mobile apps. All of them joked a few times about looking for someone who knows Mandarin and asked everyone to hurry up and learn the language too.

Click here for some details of the book

IU really likes the calligraphy gift that we gave her so she took a special proof shot with it. Since it’s written in Chinese, she asked us about the meaning of the poem. We were still in a daze at that time so we only explained briefly that it’s a poem about the moon. IU said she would try to look for a professional to interpret it.

Poem: The Moon Festival by Su Shi

When will the moon be clear and bright? With a cup of wine in my hand, I ask the blue sky. I don’t know what season it would be in the heavens on this night. I’d like to ride the wind to fly home. Yet I fear the crystal and jade mansions are much too high and cold for me. Dancing with my moon-lit shadow, It does not seem like the human world. The moon rounds the red mansion stoops to silk-pad doors, Shines upon the sleepless Bearing no grudge, Why does the moon tend to be full when people are apart? People may have sorrow or joy, be near or far apart, The moon may be dim or bright, wax or wane, This has been going on since the beginning of time. May we all be blessed with longevity though far apart, We are still able to share the beauty of the moon together.

Even though we are thousands of miles and oceans (Yellow Sea) apart, nothing can stop us from surrendering our hearts to the full moon (Man Wol) C-Uaenas present president Jang Man Wol this poem And may the opening of Hotel Del Luna blossom 

*Yellow Sea is a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean located between mainland China and the Korean Peninsula. *Full Moon is pronounced the same way as Man Wol in both Chinese and Korean.

밝은 달은 어느 때나 떠오를지 술잔을 잡고 하늘에 물어본다. 달 속에 있는 궁궐은 오늘밤은 어느 해인지 모르겠구나. 나는 바람을 타고 돌아가고자 하니 달 속의 궁궐이 높은 곳이라 추위를 견디지 못할까 두려워라. 일어나 춤추니 그림자도 따라 도는데 어찌 인간 세계와 비길 수가 있으랴 달그림자가 붉은 누각 빙 돌며 곱게 조각한 창문에 드리우니 달빛에 비추어져 잠을 이룰 수 없네. 더 이상 번뇌가 있을 수 없는데 무슨 일로 오래도록 이별할 때에 이렇게 둥근가? 인간에겐 슬픔과 기쁨, 이별과 만남이 있고 달은 흐리고 맑고, 둥글고 이지러짐이 있으니 이런 일은 예전부터 완전하기가 어려워라. 다만 바라기는 멀리 떨어져 있는 이가 오래 살아서 천 리 밖에서도 이 밝은 달을 함께 구경했으면.

Note: This is a famous Mid-Autumn lyric written by Sushi(a poet in Song Dynasty) for his brother Zi-you(1039-1112) when the poet was away from the imperial court. According to some commentators, “the palace on high” might allude to the imperial palace and therefore, after reading this lyric, Emperor Song Shen Zong said that Su Shi was loyal.

When IU was giving us her signature as acknowledgement (of the fan support), we noticed that IU’s mandarin pinyin skills were remarkably impressive, she came up with most of the pinyin (as shown in the picture) and kept seeking confirmation from us (just incase she made a mistake). She wanted to write 시원한 여름 (a cool and refreshing summer) so badly because it kind of means “watching horror movies” in Korea too (납량). She wanted to write “we will see each other very soon” so she added “see you soon” in English too. It was obvious that IU urged to write using lots of pinyin but she didn’t have much time since the drama team was rushing to another filming venue already. Nevertheless, she drew a big thumbs up and yummy bowl of rice for us and was eventually made fun by IU Team. They jokingly asked her “what are those?”, making IU shooting daggers at them keke.

“Dear. OnlyU-IU China ♥   Thank you all!! Well done!! 👍 Yummy 🍚💕 Miss you guys…♥ I love you guys! Stay healthy! - from IU” 

“Dear C-uaenas ♥ I miss you all very much See U soon! Don’t fall sick...☆ Thank you! 😊 - from IU”

Lastly, we told IU that we would enjoy watching the drama to which she replied “please do enjoy (watch) the show (properly), it’s very interesting.” She kept thanking us a few times in Mandarin after bidding farewell to us too.

The PD came by after that and took the huge IU (with her head facing down) photo away, explaining that he would hang it in the waiting room. We weren’t sure whose waiting room he was referring to since we didn’t dare to question more, so we could only pray and hope earnestly that he’s taking it to IU’s room TT.

Then we sent off the coffee truck & buffet tent owners and bid farewell to the entire crew on the set before leaving. We lost count of how many times we went around the set to bow (give greetings) to make sure we didn’t miss any corner of it.

Despite being short of hands due to some of our members who couldn’t make it last minute, but we are very happy to have completed the fan support, passed IU her gift in person and relayed her greetings and thanks to C-Uaenas safely. We are fully aware that IU made lots of adorable facial expressions and kept a smile on her face all the time because she wanted to express her gratitude towards Uaenas who worked hard together to bring up the fan support to her on the set. Once again, we thank Uaenas who contributed in this fan support. We will continue to give IU the best fan support!

Source: OnlyU-IU 中国���站 @ Weibo  Translated by IUteamstarcandy

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Z 166

Cell Games Saga!    This is probably my all-time favorite part of DBZ.   I have a hard time deciding between this and the Perfect Cell Saga that preceded it.   This is probably because it was the Perfect Cell arc where I finally got hooked on DBZ, and the Cell Games was the payoff to the cliffhanger.   

Here’s the thing: Cell has already won.    Twice, really.    He was the last warrior standing in the post-apocalyptic future he came from, then he went back in time to this era to fulfill the true purpose of his design.    Actually absorbing 17 and 18 to become his final form involved a lot of extra battles that he didn’t have to fight in his own time, but like he told Piccolo in his debut, he was created to do it.    He had to do it.   

I suppose that’s the core concept of Cell as a character.  Winning alone isn’t enough for him.  He enjoys winning, but he wants it to be on his own terms.    Dare I say it, he wants his victory to be perfect.     So moping around in his native era, a world where the androids and Z-Figthers have all been killed, held no satisfaction for him.    The Imperfect and Perfect Cell Sagas were his chance at a do-over.   You’d think beating Piccolo, 16, Tien, Vegeta, and Trunks to reach his perfect form would be enough for him, but it’s not.    And so he spared Trunks, and promised to arrange a tournament where they could fight all over again.  

The other thing to keep in mind about Cell is that he only seems to enjoy winning for its own sake.    Reaching his perfect form seems to have been his only major objective.   In the last episode, he admitted to Trunks that he’s really only out to enjoy himself now.    He was created to kill Goku, but that no longer holds any particular interest for him.   He wants to fight Goku, but that’s probably because Goku’s the only major player he hasn’t beaten yet.   But Goku’s probably not going to offer much more sport than the other Super Saiyans he’s fought, so that’s why he’s planning a tournament, so he can fight all his enemies in one go.  

Except, that’s kind of what he just did in the last 17 episodes.   It says a lot about Cell that he won that gauntlet, and all he knows to do with himself is to clap his hands and say “Again!”.    Team Four Star observed that Cell is only six years old, which sounds about right.    For all his power and intellect, Cell lacks emotional maturity in a lot of ways.    All he knows is fighting, but he has no interest in conquest or spoils.   There’s no raddish farm Cell can go to between battles.  

So this leaves the Z-Fighters in the awkward position of losing a battle for the fate of the world, but still being alive to deal with the consequences.   Vegeta and Krillin meet up with Trunks, and he fills them in.   Vegeta scolds Trunks for trying to fight Perfect Cell alone and this just might be peak Vegeta right here.    Does he even listen to himself?  

Krillin tries to put Geets in his place by revealing that Trunks surpassed him, but Trunks shushes him.   When I first saw this episode, I thought maybe Trunks was still trying to protect his father’s pride, but over the years I’ve realized that Trunks was just trying to spare himself the embarrassment.   He had thought he had surpassed Vegeta, but his increased strength was illusory, and it’s just as well that Vegeta never knew about it, since he would have dismissed it as such.  

Actually, that’s kind of the tragedy of the time these two spent in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.   They had to share the room, but they clearly spent very little time working together, or Trunks could have shown Vegeta his Dummy Thicc form, and Vegeta would have told him why it was a blind alley.  To be sure, Vegeta probably wouldn’t have been very kind about it, but it would have been less painful than learning the lesson from Cell.   

In contrast, we saw Goku and Gohan have that exact conversation in the previous episode, and it was pretty early on during their time in the HTC.   Gohan was all “This will work”, and Goku was like “No, it can’t.    We need to try something else.”     Vegeta and Trunks could have shared that same exchange of ideas, but they didn’t because Vegeta insisted on training alone.  

From the Lookout, Piccolo starts planning his own session in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.    You’d think this would do the trick, since he was much, much stronger than Goku or Vegeta before they went in.    In theory, a year to train would push Piccolo over the top, but it never actually works out that way.   

Likewise, Trunks and Vegeta decide to do the same thing.    Krillin was pretty upset to hear about Cell’s tournament, because who could even enter the thing after Cell beat everyone?   But Piccolo and the Saiyans are game for one more round.    After all, they still have the time chamber, and this was what Cell was counting on, even though he doesn’t know about the chamber specifically.    He saw for himself that Vegeta and Trunks improved very dramatically, and apparently Goku’s doing something similar, so he’s hoping that if he gives them ten days, they’ll be even better opponents.   

Android 16 also wants in the tournament, and he steps forward to ask the Z-Fighters to take him in for repairs so he can fight on their side.    Trunks hates that idea, because he still regards the androids as enemies of the Earth, but Krillin agrees to help, because he believes 16 isn’t really a bad guy.   He doesn’t understand why the androids are worse in Trunks’ world, but in this world they all share a common enemy in Cell, and that’s good enough to help 16.

Hyperbolic Time Chamber Update: Goku tries to put Gohan in bed for the night, but Gohan wakes up and apologizes for passing out during their training.    Goku wants him to rest, but Gohan pleads to keep training with Goku, so Goku decides he’s going to turn in for the night as well, if only to convince Gohan to get the rest he needs.  

At Capsule Corp., everyone meets up to discuss the situation.    Trunks explains Cell’s tournament, and Yamcha gets all nostalgic for the Tenkaichi Budokai.  Oolong reminds him that he lost the first round of every tourney he entered.   Well, let’s see how that compares to Oolong’s win-loss record, which currently stands at oh wait Oolong never fought in any tournaments because he’s just a one-off gag villain who never did anything useful after that one time he wished for panties.   It’s almost like Oolong is a perverted jackass who needs to shut his mouth and stay in his own damn lane.  At least Yamcha shows up for these kinds of things, and he accomplishes his own personal growth, even if it doesn’t actually turn the tide of the battles.   What’s Oolong ever done for the world except drool and support the child-size suspender industry?   

On the other hand, Yamcha’s been in exactly zero suitcases full of panties, so I guess Oolong has him beat there.    In case you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic.    Fuck you, Oolong.    

Vegeta, Trunks, and Bulma’s parents have never heard of the Tenkaichi Budokai, so Roshi explains it to them, while also noting that he was a former champion.   Puar’s all “Wait, when did you win the Tenkaichi Budokai?”    So I guess Roshi’s secret identity as Jackie Chun is still in effect?   I feel like there was some point where it was implied that the others knew the truth.    Or maybe I just thought that because Roshi keeps alluding to his Jackie Chun work without actually spelling it out.  

Vegeta mocks the tournament, which seems pretty stupid, since it was a long time ago, back when everyone was weaker.    I mean, he calls them “lower-level fights”, but by that logic, the scrap with the Ginyu Force was a lower level fight, and everyon in this room could kick Recoome’s ass today.   Except Oolong, he’d get killed in seconds.    Puar would shapeshift into a bug and burrow into his brain through his eyes and kill him that way.    Puar doesn’t mess around.   

According to Roshi, they stopped holding the tournament after Piccolo and Goku’s match destroyed the “fighting ring”.   I find that weird, because it buries the lead.    Piccolo destroyed the whole city the tournament was held in.   Of course, we would later learn that a 24th Budokai was held without the Z-Fighters’ knowledge, but we’ll get to that later.   

By the time Roshi finishes his story, everyone but Dr. Brief has left the room.    I kind of like this gag, because Roshi sort of got lost in his own exposition.   Most of the characters already knew what the Budokai was, and the ones who didn’t were only interested in how it relates to Cell’s version, which Roshi doesn’t know yet.  

Outside, Vegeta insists that the human fighters won’t matter in Cell’s tournament.   That’s kind of B.S., because when I first watched these episodes, I really thought they were going to do some sort of thing where Cell would fight each good guy one-on-one, and by the time he got to Krillin he’d be pretty tired, to the point where Krillin would have a real chance of making a difference.  I mean, 16′s no match for Perfect Cell either, but they’re still taking the time to repair him.    The more guys they bring to this party, the better their chances.   

Chi-Chi, for one, is relieved to hear about the tournament, because Cell will finally have to follow some rules, even if they’re rules he made up himself.   Killing your opponent was illegal in the Tenkaichi Budokai, and so she’s expecting a similar no-killing rule at the Cell Games.   

That being the case, she refuses to allow Gohan to participate in the tournment, because in her mind it’s voluntary, as opposed to the previous crisis, where the androids and Cell went around attacking everyone.  

Here’s a cute picture of baby Gohan, from a flashback to where Chi-Chi first declared that Gohan wouldn’t become a martial artist.    When he was born, the world as at peace, so Chi-Chi believed it would be a waste for Gohan to learn martial arts.    The last 166 episodes o this show suggest otherwise, but Chi-Chi’s sticking to her guns.  

Then she tells the others that she doesn’t want Gohan to become a delinquent like all of them, and they take offense to that.    Okay, from left to right:

Yamcha was a literal bandit.  

Chiaotzu grifted yokels for free corn.   He also cheats at things.

Krillin destroyed the remote, thereby allowing Cell to become perfect.   

Master Roshi belongs in jail.  

Oolong grifted yokels for free child brides.   

I mean, the shoe fits.  

On the other hand, let’s check in on Cell, who is literally murdering a guy so he can flatten his property and build a tournament ring over it.   I love Chi-Chi, but she’s like every overwrought crusader on the internet.     Cell’s out here dumping toxic waste into the ocean, and she’s calling out Krillin for using a plastic straw.   

This whole scene is bad ass.   Cell lifts a hill out of the ground with telekinesis, sort of like how Frieza did on Namek, except he carves it into a stone block, then slices it into tiles, and arranges them into a larger replica of the Tenkaichi Budokai stage.   This event hasn’t even started yet, and it’s already way better than those piece of shit Frieza Games from a few years ago.    Two hundred bucks a seat, and you get there and Frieza just sits in his stupid hoverchair and chatters while Zarbon and Dodoria fight people for him.   For six hours.  

A lot of this episode was a waste of time, because Cell pretty well explained the tournament idea to Trunks in the previous episode, and he’s going to announce the full details in the next episode.   So there’s not much point in having a bunch of good guys talk about it here.    This was probably just an excuse to do a flashback to some of the old Budokai episodes, but I still like this one because of Cell making the ring, and the gang chilling out on Bulma’s balcony.    Good times.  

[morethanonepage]

thoughts on Keanu Reeves Constantine?

y’know this is an interesting question bc i actually have a lot of….if not affection for the movie, at least respect for some of the adaptation choices made. Like the most common line in re: film!Constantine is that it’s a good movie but it’s not a good Hellblazer movie and in a sense that’s right, it’s not – but it’s interesting. A noble failure, definitely.

What I think it hinges on is that it’s an American setting so they went full blown American with it – which is a mistake in my mind bc the point of Hellblazer is that it’s a quintessentially English story, and that’s why every run with an American writer in the comics is meh for me – but in the sense of “American AU Constantine” I think there were some really interesting/clever choices made.

Like starting with their John – Keanu is all wrong for original brand Constantine. His John is broody, he’s brunet, he’s Good At Magic. And comics!John is the opposite of all those things. And while comics!John can be broody, the important thing is the comics themselves tend to undercut that – there’s a lot of kind of snarky takes about John being in a sulk for whatever reason, some of it even from John himself. You get very little of that in the movie, and the movie itself is very TAKE THIS MAN’S PAIN SERIOUSLY about it, so. BUT in a sense that loner self flagellating thing is an American Male Archetype the way comic John has a very English & self deprecating sense of humor, so: ok, I can kinda see it, more as a translation (to American audiences) than an adaptation. 

[READ MORE BC OMG WHY DID I CARE SO MUCH???]

They make John Catholic in the movie, which is another kind of interesting choice – in the comics he’s not anything specifically though I would imagine he would’ve been raised Church of England as likely as anything else. But they kind of commit to John’s Catholicism in the movie, most likely because it has more ~mysticism~ (and the association with exorcism in general) behind it. But it also kind of sets John up as An Other, because it’s the religion of a lot of the second class immigrants (like, the Irish initially, then Latinx Americans, etc). White Catholics have a bit of a different rep, but given that the film is set in LA in the late 20th century, for me it set up more of those associations than anything else. It’s also so much more about the SUFFERING and the MARTYRDOM and the REDEMPTION NARRATIVE, which is not so much a thing in the comics (where John often does/tries to do good things but usually NOT for the explicit purpose of ~cleansing his soul~, so it’s kind of notable/interesting that both American-based adaptations [TV and Movie] focus on that a lot more. It’s may also make more sense as an arc for the medium but y’know) but IS notably a big thing in the movie. 

And the thing about John, even in the comics, is that he’s an Other but Normal Passing – with comics he presents in a very Proper English Man (which is why it’s SO IMPORTANT for me that he starts off on his adventures with his shirt properly done up and his tie right, and then as the day/his bullshit unfurls he gets sloppier) way, he’s white, he’s blond, he’s handsome etc, but he’s also a bisexual mess/working class disaster mage with a progressive bent, and in the movie he’s kind of a traditional American anti hero but also has his own stuff going on. It’s not as well executed as it could be – there’s not a lot of subversion in the film version, which is kind of the point of John – but at least you get hints of his potential sexuality and they go into his mental health issues (suicide attempt, etc) and his smoking, etc. 

So John is an interesting translation – not perfect, but interesting. I would even argue that he’s the weakest point in the movie as a translation-not-adaptation (tho lol baby bear Chas Kramer is up there), bc he’s very basic supernatural protagonist with no flourish. Which is not the case for the rest of the film, which COMMITS to the genre it is and does it honestly very well.

For instance I love their conception of Ravenscar, the mental hospital John has A Bad History with – in the comics it’s got an old, spooky, mad house aesthetic from the 19th century, which fits the comics and John’s history and vibe really well. The movie version goes what I feel is a very modern American direction with it: one of the 20th century industrial monsters, a huge grey building, with the fear of mental health coming from that very specific post-war fear of anything ABNORMAL (including sexuality but y’know). 

The setting of LA is great – a couple of (American) comic writers have given John’s arcs there, probably for the irony of CITY OF ANGELS etc, but I think it’s a really interesting choice/contrast to everything London (where John’s mostly based in comics, tho he does sometimes roam the countryside fucking things up) represents: superficial, modern, bright days, beauty, opulence vs the grey gritty grunginess of John’s London life, etc. So for that to be movie!John’s homebase is kinda neat, frankly, esp because of the cases John gets to work on there. The set design is also great – very colorful, very willing to pull in the florescent glare of a modern city, with the Latinx Catholic touches on the streets (look the votive candles and shrines are SUCH an easy go to for ~creepy urban flavor~ and it’s probably at least a little problematic for this film featuring some other really questionable racial choices I will get to later, but) in general it LOOKS great. Their conception of hell is also fascinating and very well executed imo. 

I also think there’s ONE (1) thing I think the movie does better than the tv show: the setting is WAY more dug into the working class/legit poverty of LA behind the shiny surface Hollywood stuff. The show really only hit that point in the New Orleans ep and even then….didn’t fully commit to it, but it’s SUCH a key part of the comic universe. Like Chas himself (in the show) is pitch perfect but in the ep about his family they’re LIVING IN A BROOKLYN BROWNSTONE which, real talk, is worth millions of dollars. Literally millions. On a cab driver’s salary???? Ridic. Still mad about it w/e w/e. Baby Bear Chas Kramer with his shitty cab and probably shitty apartment, following John around like a stunned duckling, is way more comics canon accurate, probably. 

Rachel Weiz’s character has a lot of potential – they make her Catholic too, to have some sort of connection with John, which is eh, and they also make her a twin, whose sister kills herself at Ravenscar. Given how much John’s early backstory issue are focused around HIM being a twin (whose birth killed both his mother and his (theoretically stronger) brother) that could’ve been a cool thing to allude to, but they don’t touch on it. And Angela (ANOTHER ANGEL THING) is p cool as a character – she’s unconvinced about the ~spooky shit~ stuff until she sees evidence of it, and then believes it, as a normal average human likely would. She’s brave, she asks questions, etc. She’s not just Love Interest tho there’s a bit of that. And anyway I love Rachel Weiz generally, she’s great, could’ve had more to do though.

Tilda Swinton shows up a lot in the gifs and it was a cool choice to cast her as Gabriel – they play up the androgyny and make her less obvious of a dick than comics Gabriel is (though she ends up being…probably more of one, or at least more effective). I think their Lucifer is good too – oily and weird and creepily gentle at times. He also doesn’t get a lot to do, but he doesn’t need to – he doesn’t in the comics, usually, either. 

BUT the racial stuff – the supernatural macguffin that’s supposed to bring about the end of the world is found IN A MEXICAN DESERT and then SMUGGLED OVER THE BORDER to LA to bring about the end of the world, like, who wrote this, Donald J. Trump?? – is generally #bad. But this is something it shares with the show (GOD THOSE MEXICO EPS, I LEGIT ALMOST QUIT THE SHOW BC OF IT), tho at least they had an actual Mexican actress to temper that nonsense. NO SUCH LUCK from the movie – just lots of creepy zombish brown people trying to bring around an apocalypse, super cool.

And not only is meh as a metaphor, to impute such a conservative metaphor into a the Hellblazer Verse, with its infamous/classic DEMON YUPPIES FROM HELL and in general tips toward the progressive/pro immigrant ethos, is BAFFLING to me. I mean maybe more in tune with American sentiments about everything, which I have argued above is an interesting choice, but still, boooo.

Also the fact that John quits smoking at the end of the movie is such Hollywood garbage it almost outweighs the positives. I mostly imagine he and Angela date for like a month, he’s such a bitch when going through withdrawal that she dumps his ass, and then he goes back to smoking/sulking around LA doing bad exorcisms. That’s the real John Constantine, babey!!!

[46ten]

Masculinity and dueling, effeminacy and homoeroticism

Continued from part 1

The homoerotic account of the Hamilton-Burr duel has earned a lot of eye rolls and laughs, but the ties between dueling and effeminacy are a real thing for scholars. Dueling in the early modern period was a test of one’s manhood. As such, the act of the duel and the consequences also had gender/sex overtones. 

Both the physical stance of the duelers, and what happened to the body of the defeated, is tied into how the male/female body was viewed (please see my post on the one-sex model for background, as it’s crucial to understand that man/woman gender has been hypothesized to be on a vertical axis that one could move up and down - not as opposites as in the current two-sex model). One could “lessen” the dominant male body by making it akin to the subordinate female body through penetration. Since dueling was usually a male-male activity*, it therefore had notable homoerotic overtones. Critical to this is the understanding that male-male penetrative sex for men of the same status was generally condemned, from the classical era through the 18th century. 

First, let’s start with how dueling began to define how male/female physical space should be defined. From Low: “A gentleman’s understanding of spatiality derived in part from training in the use of the rapier, which influenced him to develop a sense of extended personal space that eventually becomes a visible sign of gentle birth. Such elements as the positive value of flexibility and the broadening of one’s personal space distinguish the gentleman’s sense of space from that of lower-ranked men.  In “Of Education, Especially of Young Gentlemen” (1673), Obadiah Walker notes that men should aspire to the following in their physicality and presence: “a certain mime and motion of the body, and its parts, both in acting and speaking, which is very graceful and pleasing.”

Women, on the other hand, should “be still from the clamours and turbulent insults of the World; still from the mutinous motions and innovations of the flesh”, (from “The English Gentlewoman”, Braithwait, 1613). Women were trained to stand composedly with feet together, avoiding unnecessary bodily movement. Their physical space was limited to their actual physical bodies. They were also to accept the approach of others into their physical space - their own bodies - without hesitancy or flinching. Several of the English slang words for penetrative intercourse in the 17th and 18th centuries focuses on this entering of the female space.

The functions of the female body were used to argue for its inferiority to the male form. Uncontrollably, women seemed to effuse bodily fluids - menstruation, lactation, during childbirth. Women in the early modern period were also still thought of in terms of their matriarchal figurehead of Eve - persons of unrestrained lust that required outside forces to keep them in check. (The “women are naturally chaste and virtuous” belief is a later development.) 

Men do not uncontrollably emit bodily fluids; and when they do, it is in a controlled manner that reinforces their superiority to women. They may weep, but as this is done until their control, it is a further display of their perfect form (ability to unite the feminine and masculine). Seminal fluid is released, but such activity is only supposed to happen under defined occasions. Additionally, seminal fluid was thought to be the highest form of fluid in the body, consisting of blood that had been purified through several stages.  Especially in Anglo/Anglo-American society of this period, men who are highly sexual are viewed with suspicion - these men cannot control themselves and their bodily emissions. (One of the objections of the English to opera’s castrati was that these effeminate men must have sex drives that were out of control.) Excessive orgasms dry a man out, making him effeminate. The prime model of a virile man is one who confines his sexual activity to his marriage bed and moderates the uncontrollable sexual appetite of his wife.

In a duel, the penetration of one man into another’s personal space makes the latter subordinate, and, if successful, makes him bleed involuntarily - like a menstruating woman. Thus, only one person leaves the duel as a man.

Or as Gail Kern Paster states, “Man is naturally whole, closed, opaque, self-contained. To be otherwise is both shameful and feminizing...The male body, opened and bleeding, can assume the shameful attributes of the incontinent female body as both cause of and justification for its evidence vulnerability and defeat.” 

Low points out that being penetrated could be perceived not only as feminine, but as a sign of immature masculinity. She argues, “Immaturity and the passive role in homosexual intercourse had been linked in the minds of early modern gentlemen since the resurgence of interest in Greek texts. In classical Athens, the passive partner in male/male intercourse was generally either a slave, or an adolescent boy who permitted the practice as a favor to an older man, as he expected it would be permitted to him once he attained full maturity (Dover, Greek Homosexuality). Penetrating a slave simply supported the foundations of the Greek patriarchal master/slave system; penetrating a boy of good family reinforced the rigid social hierarchy that designated physical immaturity in males as a specific social category distinct from that of other kinds of males....Man/boy practices were accepted in Greece (they tended to be overlooked in early modern England); consensual man/man sex in either culture was generally censured, reciprocal desire between men of the same age and status was virtually unknown.”

As Laqueur argues: “the issue is not the identity of sex but the difference in status between partners and precisely what was done to whom.  It was the weak, womanly male partner who was deeply flawed, medically and morally. His very countenance proclaimed his nature: pathicus, the one being penetrated; cinaedus, the one who engages in unnatural lust; mollis, the passive, effeminate one.” 

Gender studies historian Alan Bray (Homosexuality in Renaissance England) offers a detailed analysis of several social contexts in early modern England in which male/male sexual contact, while censured, was nonetheless accepted. These contexts include: the household, the educational system, homosexual prostitution and the like. As Bray points out, “so long as homosexual activity did not disturb the peace or the social order, and in particular so long as it was consistent with patriarchal mores, it was largely in practice ignored.” What violated these mores was in fact sex between adult men, which was taken much more seriously than relations between a man and a boy. James I’s relationship with Buckingham involved a significant difference in status that both parties acknowledged, and was reinforced by referring to one another in correspondence as “dad” and “dear child.” 

In the 18th century, male homosexual activity in both England and the English North American colonies starts to be considered differently: suddenly, the male “homosexual” as a person enters the picture, and is treated with scorn and eventually outright condemnation in the 19th century. 

Please note: by current American legal and social interpretations, condoned male homosexual behavior in both the ancient world and early modern England would be defined by us now as nonconsensual. These were interactions that depended on an imbalance in the power dynamic - that’s why they were considered licit.

I hope I have established here that dueling in the early modern era involved a different definition of manhood and masculinity than today’s conceptions. Indeed, there were multiple definitions of manhood and masculinity that I’ve alluded and that I will probably touch on briefly in future posts.

*Low has a chapter on female dueling that also has some analysis on females becoming masculine. It’s good work, but not really the subject of these posts. I also don’t mean to pretend that female homosexuality in the classical or early modern era was non-existent, but it’s not what I write about on this blog. 

[anarchistbanjo]

The Kali Yuga

I would like to begin this chapter with an excerpt about the Kali Yuga from the book "The yoga of power; Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way" by Julius Evola. It will serve as an introduction to some of the concepts that I would like to address later in this post.This excerpt also proves that Organic Gnosticism has been known all through the ages but kept secret.

"The intent was to convey the idea that Tantrism presents an extension or a further development of those traditional teachings originally found in the Vedas and later articulated in the Brahmanans, the Upanishads, and the Puranas. That is why the Tantras have claimed for themselves the dignity befitting a fifth Veda, that is, a further revelation beyond what is found in the traditional four Vedas. To this they added a reference to the doctrine of the four ages (Yugas) of the world. It is claimed that the teachings, writings, and disciplines that would have been viable in the first age (the Krita or Satya Yuga, the equivalent of Hesiod's golden age) are no longer fit for people living in the following ages, especially in the last age, the dark age (Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, the age of the wolf in the Edda). Mankind in these later ages may find knowledge, a worldview, rituals, and adequate practices for elevating humans over and beyond their conditions and for overcoming death (mrityun javate), not in the Vedas and in other strictly traditional texts, but rather in the Tantras and in the Agamas. It is stated therefore that only Tantric practices based on Shakti (Shakti –sadhana) are suitable and efficious in our contemporary age. All others are considered to be as powerless as a snake deprived of its poison.

Although Tantrism is far from rejecting ancient wisdom, it is characterized by a reaction against (1) a hollow and stereotypical ritualism, (2) mere speculation or contemplation, and (3) any aceticism of a unilateral, mortifying, and penitential nature. It opposes to contemplation a path of action, of practical realization, and of direct experience. Its password is practice (sadhana,abhyasa). This runs on the lines of what may be designated the dry way, resembling the original Buddhist doctrine of the awakening, with its reaction against a degenerated Brahmanism and its dislike of speculations and hollow ritualism. One among the many Tantric texts remarks rather significantly:

It is a womanly thing to establish superiority through convincing arguments; it is a manly thing to conquer the world through one's power. Reasoning, argument, and inference may be the work of other schools [shastras]; but the work of the tantra is to accomplish superhuman and divine events through the force of their own words of power [mantras]. And also:

A special virtue of the tantras lies in its mode of Sadhana. It is neither mere worship [upasana] nor prayer. It is not limiting or contemplaation or repentance before the deity. It is the Sadhana which is the union of Purusha and Prakrti; the Sadhana which joins the male principal and the mother element within the body, and strives to make the attributed attribute less… This Sadhana is to be performed through the awakening of the forces within the body… This is not mere philosophy, a mere attempt to ponder upon the husks of words, but something which is to be done in a thoroughly practical manner. The tantras say: begin practicing under the guidance of a good guru; if you did not obtain favorable results immediately, you can freely give it up.

Thus tantras often employ an analogy taken from medicine: the efficacy of the doctrine, like a drug, is proved by the results it produces, and in this particular case, by the siddhis, or powers, that it grants. Another text says: 'Yoga siddhis are not obtained by wearing yoga garments or by conversation about yoga, but only through tireless practice. This is the secret of success. There is no doubt about it.'

In the previous quotation referring to the body, another important point was alluded to. The analysis of the last age, the dark age or Kali Yuga, brings to light two essential features. The first is that mankind living in this age is strictly connected to the body and cannot precind from it; therefore, the only way open is not that of pure detachment (as in early Buddhism and in the many varieties of yoga) but rather that of knowledge, awakening, and mastery over secret energies trapped in the body. The second characteristic is that of the dissolution typical of this age. During the Kali Yuga, the bull of Dharma stands on only one foot (it lost the other three during the previous three ages). This means that the traditional law (Dharma) is wavering, is reduced to a shadow of its former self, and seems to be almost succumbing. During Kali Yuga, however, the goddess Kali, who was asleep in the previous ages, is now fully awake. I will write at greater length about Kali, a prominent Tantric goddess, in the following pages; for now, let us say that this symbolism implies that during the last stage elementary, infernal, and even abyssal forces are untrammeled. The immediate task consist in facing and absorbing these forces, in taking the risk of 'riding the Tiger', to use a Chinese expression that may best describe the situation, or to 'transform the poison into medicine', according to a Tantric expression. Hence the rituals and special practices of what has been named left-hand tantra, or the path of the left hand (Vama-marga), which despite some problematic aspects (orgies, use of sex, etc.) represents one of the most interesting forms within the trend analyzed in this study.

It is therefore stated – and this is significant – that considering the situation of the Kali Yuga, teachings that were previously kept secret may now be revealed in different degrees, though a word of caution is issued concerning the danger they may represent for those who are not initiated. Hence what we have so far mentioned: the emergence, in Tantrism, of esoteric and initiatory teaching.

A third point must be emphasized. In tantrism the passage from the ideal of liberation to that of freedom marks an essential change in the ideals and ethics of Hinduism. It is true that even previously the ideal of the jivanmukta had been known. The word means one who is freed, that is, the one who has achieved the unconditioned, the sahaja, while alive, in his own body. Tantrism introduces a specification, however: to the existential condition of mankind living in the last age. It relates the overcoming of the anti-thesis between enjoyment of the world and the ascesis, or yoga, which is spiritual aimed at liberation. In the other schools – thus claim the Tantras – one excludes the other, but in the path we follow these opposites meet. In other words, a discipline is developed that allows one to be free and invulnerable even while enjoying the world, or anything the world may offer. In the meantime, the world ceases to be seen in terms of Maya – that is, pure appearance, illusion, or mirage – as is the case in Vedantic philosophy. The world is not Maya but power. This paradoxical existence of freedom, or of the dimension of transcendence in oneself, and enjoyment of the world, freely experimenting with the world's pleasures, carries the strictest relation with Tantrism's formula and main goal: the union of the impassive Shiva with the ardent Shakti in one's being and at all levels of reality.

This leads us to consider a further fundamental element of Tantrism, namely, shaktism. In the complex movement called Tantrism, the central role was played by the emergence and predominance of the figure and of the symbol of the goddess or divine woman, Shakti, in its various epiphanies (especially under the forms of Kali and Durga). She may be either portrayed by herself, as the supreme principle of the universe, or reproduced under the species of multiple Shakti's, that is, female divinities who accompany male Hindu gods (who had enjoyed a greater autonomy in the previous era), and even various Buddhas and bodhisattvas of late Buddhism. This marked the emergence in a thousand forms of the motif of divine couples, in which the feminine, Shaktic element enjoys a great role, to the point of becoming the predominant element in some of its currents."

I could not have described the power and practice of Organic Gnosticism more clearly than the above words about Tantrism by Julius Evola. The Kali Yuga is an age and according to ancient texts it is considered the last age of a great cycle. Tantrism is a specialized sacred practice of soul development and spirituality during this last age. In fact, it is believed that no other spiritual or religious doctrines or practices are effective during this time. In fact, all the others are considered to be as powerless as a snake deprived of its poison. This is a very strong statement to make and should be considered carefully. It is against superficial and empty religious practices, against speculation, meditation, and suffering or penitence of any kind.

This practice involves the joining of male and female energies within the body and is not theoretical, but eminently practical and giving immediate results. Again these are strong words to be considered carefully. Tantrism and Organic Gnosticism is clearly a path of action.

Another final point is made. Tantrism is so powerful and dangerous it is to be kept secret in all the other ages and only made available during the Kali Yuga.

This brings up the main question, is the current age which we are living in representative of the Kali Yuga? It also brings up a second question, if so, why are the secret teachings of Tantrism not widely known in today's world?

This knowledge has always been known and I call it Organic Gnosticism!

It is accepted that approximately every 2000 years a new and higher vibrational energy is introduced into our world. We speak of this happening with the change from one sign of the zodiac to another. We have just left the age of Pisces and entered the age of Aquarius. A great cycle is considered one complete trip around the zodiac.

What is not so widely known is that each age brings in a totally new energy and causes the activation of that energy center or chakra within the human body. The last 2000 years has been dominated by concrete spiritual energy, archetypal thinking, Christianity, Christ consciousness and the development of the third eye. The cycle previous to the last one was dominated by abstract mental energy, philosophy, logic and reason, reading and writing, development of the soul or Observer self and the throat chakra.

With the advent of each new age the energies of the old age are always considered evil and corrupt. They are considered satanic. Followers of the old energies have always been persecuted. During the last age or Christian era it was faith that was most important, not scientific or logical proof. Hairsplitting dialectic arguments were frowned upon as making a mockery of spiritual truths. Both the Jews and Irish at various points in their history were highly literate and suffered greatly because of it. The power of the last age was not in mental creations but in spiritual creations.

The current age, the age of Aquarius, brings in a completely new energy that is higher and more powerful than that of the last age, the Christian age. This is the energy and vibration of unity, the level at which all things merge into spiritual light. It is also the nuclear threshold because mass and energy can be converted for peace or destruction. This is the level of the crown chakra and at this level are opposites are resolved and duality no longer exists. So the next 2000 years will be dominated by the powerful energies of unity and the crown chakra.

Unfortunately, these energies are not accessible to very many life forms. In fact these energies are not accessible to very many humans! So there seems to be a great discrepancy here. What do the energies of Christianity, the third eye and spiritual faith have to do with the Kali Yuga? The last age? More importantly, what do the energies of unity and the crown chakra have to do with the Kali Yuga? It seems that the energies of the Kali Yuga are the lowest possible energies and not the highest possible energies! Aren't we heading toward a golden age and not a dark age?!

There is also the question of Gaia's Ascension. How is it that Gaia can ascend on the energies of unity and the crown chakra? The lower life forms on Gaia's's surface have no access to such high vibratory energies. How can this mystery be resolved?

The answer lies in the cosmic keyboard itself. There are two types of energies that are active and dominate this new age! They are harmonics and octaves of each other and vibrate in unison as one single energy. They are the highest and the lowest energies possible! The other energy is a vital organic energy of life itself, sexual orgasm energy and it is utilized by all life forms. This energy is the garden of Eden energy and the energy that fuels Gaia's Ascension. It manifests through the DNA and cellular life of evolving things. Those life forms that cannot access the unity and crown chakra energies have free access to the lower and more primitive vital life force energy! It is abundantly available to all living things. This is sexual orgasm energy! This is Tantric energy! This is the energy of the male and female combined! This is the energy of divine counterparts!

Suddenly things have changed. For those accustomed to the spiritual energies of the third eye and Christianity, or even to the lower mental energies of the throat chakra, the logic and reason in philosophical speculations, these Tantric energies seem of no consequence and unimportant. They are not taken seriously. They should be! These old eon high-level head tripping energies are no longer effective in developing the soul or raising the human condition. They are no longer useful for true empowerment! For those unable to access the unity energies of the crown chakra the next 2000 years is the dark age, the Kali Yuga, the age of dissolution. The only path available for the development of the soul is Tantrism or Organic Gnosticism! For those that can do this earth will become the new garden of Eden's!

This is the age when gods and goddesses will once more walk upon the earth and mingle with ordinary mortals! These gods and goddesses will be divine counterparts whose individual awarenesses will span the full spectrum of existence, the highest and the lost energies and reveal the complete mysteries of love and sexuality!

[parapluiepliant]

The 100 Season 5 - Title spec and thoughts

So, it's time!

Yesterday marked the start of filming season 5 and we got another title for the first three episodes (the first two confirmed by Isaiah Washington).

This also means, it's spec time! And I want to contribute my thoughts to it – bulletpoint style.

Assuming that those titles are legit, it becomes more and more clear that season 5 will be the creation myth for the generations to come. This idea is supported by Madi's way of telling the delinquents' journey like a fairy tale in the sizzle reel.

Their story will become a fairy tale, a myth, a legend. Or as Galadriel in Lord of the Rings said “History became legend. Legend became myth.“ So it comes not as a surprise that the episode titles allude to fairy tales and myths; either taking themes or (perverted) names of said stories (in the broadest sense) to achieve that effect.

More thoughts under the cut.

Tagging for a start @head-and-heart @insufficient-earth-skills @forgivenessishardforus @adamantinesky @sometimesrosy and everyone who might be interested or has some other ideas to add. :)

5x01 Eden:

recalls the creation myth of Adam and Eve and them being cast out of paradise

Eden was a garden, a paradise, pretty similar to the current patch of green Clarke and Madi live on

we know that there will be a fight for that patch of green (see Jason's interview from SDCC 2017), probably between Eligius and the post-apocalypse survivors; maybe there will be mutants as well [some people who somehow survived the apocalypse without the luxury of a safe bunker or nightblood]

a serpent (also the symbol for a liar) made Adam and Eve eat an apple and tasting the forbidden fruit was the reason they were cast out

not only did Kane make a reference to Adam and Eve in S1, he also said in 4x01 hat “the youth inherited the earth“, thus marking the beginning of a new generation that will save (dare I say recreate?) the world

Will the miners try to chase Clarke and Madi away? Will they try to trick Clarke by making false promises by offering “and apple“ which will ban her from the patch of green?

5x02 Red Queen:

Is it Clarke with her res streak of hair, the ruler of Eden one could say.

Is it one of the new characters from Eligius? So far, we don't know what kind of ruling system or government they have.

The first thing that came to my mind though was Alie due to her red dress and there might still be a chance that a remnant of her is on the Go-Sci ring (or somewhere else)

Becca → the red hazmat suit; being the first commander/queen of the survivors/first Grounders; also the red 'sash' as a regal symbol

which brings me to Octavia the Red Queen similar to the queen in Alice in Wonderland; she rules through fear and beheads those who she doesn't like (also: JR and Marie said at SDCC that Octavia will have a darker turn)

Other interesting Red Queen connotations (taken from Wikipedia):

"Isaac Asimov used it in his short story "The Red Queen's Race" to illustrate the concept of predestination paradox. // The term predestination paradox is used in the Star Trek franchise to mean "a time loop in which a time traveler who has gone into the past causes an event that ultimately causes the original future version of the person to go back into the past."

As much sci-fi as we have it's rather unlikely; maybe this falls more under 'history repeats itself' which the end of season 4 and parts of the sizzle reel suggest

“The Red Queen's race is an incident that appears in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and involves the Red Queen, a representation of a Queen in chess, and Alice constantly running but remaining in the same spot“

This might allude again at the stagnant behaviour of humankind; no matter how hard you try you will be stuck, nothing changes, history is repeated again; it is also pretty similar to some actions that happened in season 4 in terms of taling action (running) but not going anywhere (finding a solution)

“Vernor Vinge uses it in his novel Rainbows End to illustrate the struggle between encouraging technological advancement and protecting the world from new weapons technologies“

Maybe Eligius brings a new form of technology/diferent technology which might be even considered as dangerous and those from the bunker don't want it therefore trying to protect Eden?

“In evolutionary biology, to illustrate that sexual reproduction and the resulting genetic recombination may be just enough to allow individuals of a certain species to adapt to changes in their environment—see Red Queen hypothesis.“ → do we see the first 'problems' for children that were born in the bunker? Parents being immune to radiation and their children, only used to safe bunker air will have problems to adapt to the 'new' outside environment?

“An alternative name for the Black Queen in chess“ Some chess people here to help me out?

5x03 Sleeping Giants:

A hybrid between Sleeping Beauty and Jack and the Giants? But who is sleeping and who are the giants?

Sleeping Beauty slept for a hundred years. The delinquents landed 97 years after the first apocalypse. Now, with the second apocalyspe, it's about 103-4 years later. Have other “sleeping“ bunker people emerged? If there was Mount Weather, are there still others in diffferent areas maybe even on another continent?

As far as I know, Jack steals the most valuable things of the Giants. They chase him to retreat their treasure and Jack cuts the beanstalk. The Giants fall and die.   

Will Eligius (those from above) steal something of valuable of the survivors or will they steal something from the miners?

A Giant as a superior being? Maybe Cadogan is still somewhere around and is about to awake from his cryo sleep?

From Wikipedia:

“Greek mythology: Various locations associated with the Giants and the Gigantomachy were areas of volcanic and seismic activity [...] were said to be buried under volcanos, and their subterranean movements were said to be the cause of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes."

Are the Miners the Giants? They have the technology to mine. Will they dig too deep, steering earthquakes and volcanos? Or are those in the bunker finally freed from being buried alive, starting a new war ('earthquake') in the process?

The Sleeping Giant is also the name of a mountain in Hawaii. The mountain resembles a sleeping figure who went to rest after eating too much.

“Riese [ˈʁiːzə] (German for "giant") is the code name for a construction project of Nazi Germany in 1943–1945, consisting of seven underground structures [...]“

Are there other bunkers left and people that survived the first apocalypse finally emerge? Rememeber Mount Weather. Maybe there are others all over the world who were only able to come out now.

“The Sleeping Beauty transposon system is a synthetic DNA transposon designed to introduce precisely defined DNA sequences into the chromosomes of vertebrate animals for the purposes of introducing new traits and to discover new genes and their functions.

Will nightblood again come into play? Do the miners have other solutions to make earth habitable again? Or will the children from those in the bunker need some modified genes to survive on the ground because they weren't exposed to radiation (due to filters and recycling systems) in contrast to their parents?

What shouldn't be forgotten either with all the spec is “who is telling the story“?

Obviously, Madi is.

So who will she consider a queen or a giant, assuming a certain knowledge about tales and myths?

Eden: 

Madi lives in a paradise. Patch of green with food and trink. She is, along with Clarke, the only inhabitants of Eden similar to Adam and Eve and thus not alone. We can assume that they had peace which is disturbed by Eligius.

Red Queen: 

For Madi this might be someone who rules and might have red as a trademark colour. She hasn't witnessed Clarke in her early days on the ground (as a leader, as the “princess“) so it is likely that she sees the leader of Eligius as such (in case it's a woman). If that's not the case and Eligius agrees to help freeing the bunker people, it is likely that Madi might see Octavia as the Red Queen (given that she is still the leader of those trapped underground).

Sleeping Giants: 

Who will be a Giant in Madi's eyes? The delinquents in space, not only living above the clouds but also non-responding (sleeping if you will) since forever. Maybe they are finally coming down, those mysterious creature from the stories Clarke told her? Or the survivors in the bunker, also “sleeping“ and upon awakening bringing metaphorical earthquakes and volcano erruptions, destroying the peace by destructive behaviour.

[murasaki-murasame]

Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 5 [Chapter 2 - Daily Life]

Thoughts under the cut.

I knew I said before that I expected Ryoma to die, but I’m kinda sad that it happened so soon. Though in hindsight it makes sense, since he got a lot of focus up to this point. Honestly I was bracing myself for it to be Kaito, since basically everything about him in this chapter thus far feels like death flags galore. It’s kinda the main reason why I’m immediately suspecting him to be the killer, even though it doesn’t really make sense in terms of his personality and his whole attitude about the killing game.

Before I say anything else, I just wanna say that this whole part nearly took me five hours and to be honest I think about an hour of that was probably me just doing stuff at the new casino the game opened up. It’s kinda addictive. I at least got some new skills out of it. Mainly the ones that max out my influence and focus, which will be appreciated in the next trial. I got closer to losing the first trial than I was expecting, so any extra bit helps. I think I got one or two other ones, but I can’t remember. I at least didn’t have any room to equip anything other than the first two. In addition to the skills I had previously, that is.

If I keep using the casino, I think I’ll probably just work toward getting skills and stuff, before getting any cosmetics. We’ll see. The casino is surprisingly fun, so I might do a session of it once per chapter.

Anyway, moving onto this chapter’s story itself, I like it a lot thus far. Though before I forget, I just want to say that that beginning scene is super incredibly suspicious, and makes me feel like we might even be setting up for some kind of ‘they’re all in purgatory’ twist or something. Who knows. My guess as to what this game’s overarching story is going to be in the end kinda got thrown off in general in this part, mostly with how the game decided to spell out at least part of the whole Ultimate Hunt thing. Thus far it’s as I suspected, more or less. There was some sort of social push against the Ultimates that lead to all this. I wasn’t expecting them to already explain the whole thing of everyone being hooked up to machines, though. So they all decided to voluntarily wipe their memories in order to avoid prosecution. I vaguely remember that in the ‘first loop’ before the game properly began, nobody knew they even had talents, so that makes sense. I can’t help but be suspicious of all this since we’re being told it so early in the game. Especially since they’re being really vague on the details, and so many little parts of the game keep alluding to the idea that none of this is real somehow. The whole ‘I want to die with everyone’ line also makes me lean toward this being some sorta purgatory, but that feels almost too obvious.

The transition into Shuichi being the new protagonist is going pretty well. I still really like him as a character, especially with the character development he’s undergoing. I like that he’s still understandably depressed about things, but is still moving forward in his own small ways. I feel like his design is sort of incomplete without his hat, but I appreciate the idea behind him abandoning it.

His new-found friendship with Kaito is also a big reason why I like how this is going. It just feels kinda refreshing and unique to have another character be the more pushy, outgoing one who sees the protagonist as their sidekick. I really hope that Kaito can at least survive past this chapter, so that we can see this dynamic play out for a good while. It’d also feel a little . . . predictable and depressing if Shuichi goes from trusting one person who immediately dies to trusting ANOTHER person who immediately dies. We’ll see.

I liked Kaito before, but this chapter’s making me really like him, especially since I got to do his first free time event [it was the only one I did, since my other two were spent unsuccessfully talking to Kaito, and unsuccessfully talking to Keebo]. He’s just a really good dude, even if he doesn’t go about everything well. But he’s still trying to keep everyone happy and confident, especially Shuichi. At least someone’s trying to reach out to him. I already kinda ship them. It was also a good thing I did his first free time event, since it helps establish how hard-working and educated he is. Which we kinda knew before, but this helped contextualize it a bit.

I should probably just keep talking about the characters before I get into stuff with the motive and murder and my vague preliminary speculation.

To be honest, I still don’t know if I like Kokichi that much. He’s definitely a good character, and he’s really central to the group dynamic and whatnot, but I just can’t help but be kinda annoyed at his chronic lying and overall attitude. I’m aware that it’s probably covering up some kind of tragic backstory, but still. I’m pretty sure that he’s a fan favourite, considering how many twitter/tumblr icons I’ve seen of him, but he hasn’t fully warmed on me yet. I don’t exactly hate him, I just think he’s a bit annoying. He’s also really creepy at times in ways that I was not expecting. On top of that one goddamn disturbing expression from the last trial, I think he did a variation of it with a creepy black/white filter, so that was kinda terrifying. Not to mention that part where we get a really zoomed-in close-up CG of his face when Shuichi wakes up in Gonta’s lab. Though while I’m talking about him, I just wanna say that even though it’s unlikely, I’m pretty heavily speculating that he’s actually lying about what his talent is. Considering how much of a compulsive liar he is, it’s incredibly hard to trust his absurd claims about being an evil supreme leader. It also feels like he makes smaller lies every time he says that, to make the basic concept seem more realistic in comparison. I feel like this might be easily verifiable though, especially when we see his lab, so I’m not entirely sure about this. [On that note, if we eventually find Rantarou’s lab, I wonder if it’ll reveal anything about his talent]

I really like how much this chapter’s giving screen-time and development to Tenko, Himiko, and Angie. They’re a trio I wasn’t quite expecting to see form, especially in the exact way it’s playing out here. I think I said before that Tenko was my least favourite character, but she’s really growing on me. I can’t quite pinpoint why, since she hasn’t exactly changed, but still. I at least like seeing her be so incredibly awkward and blatant about her crush on Himiko, and her contrast between believing in Himiko’s magic while being skeptical of Angie’s belief in Atua.

And on that note, I wasn’t expecting to see Himiko become converted to Angie’s religion like that. But it makes sense. She’s obviously struggling a lot with stress and anxiety and fear, but Tenko isn’t really doing a whole lot to help, in spite of her crush on her, which is also clearly making Himiko uncomfortable. So it makes sense that she’d turn to someone else for comfort. Considering that Himiko is probably going to be a huge suspect in this chapter, I wonder how Tenko will be during the trial.

Angie still disturbs me a little, honestly. It’s just getting creepy how little she seems to care about the idea of people dying, and how if anything she seems to enjoy the prospect of it. In general her eternally upbeat and smiley attitude is the sort of thing that just feels unpleasant in this sort of situation.

Gonta is still precious and I adore him. It’s kinda sad how he’s just constantly being lied to and kept at arm’s length by everyone. Especially since chances are he’s gonna die sooner or later. Maybe not. We’ll see.

I’m pretty intrigued by Maki during this chapter. She’s certainly being suspicious. But since she’s so suspicious I at least doubt that she’s the killer. I want to try and have a free time event with her next chapter, if I can. I wonder what the deal is with her being so defensive about her lab. It’s hard to tell what’s up with her in general. 

Keebo still feels a little odd to me as a character, so I dunno what to say about him. I did feel pretty bad seeing him get tossed into the water tank though, and it was cool seeing him get his moment to shine and derail Kokichi’s plans.

I hope that Tsumugi, Kiyo, Kirumi, and to a lesser degree Miu get some focus soon. I mean, at least Miu got a bit of focus in chapter one, but the other three definitely feel like the least important people thus far.

I kinda want to do everyone’s free time events, just to learn more about them, but you really don’t get much time to talk to people. Oh well. I’m pretty sure that there’s a bonus mode you get after beating the main game that lets you do everyone’s routes really easily. I never really looked into the ones for the past two games though, so I forget how they work exactly. But I’ve heard that some sort of mode like that exists in this game. I think it’s literally called Dating Sim Mode, which is kinda hilariously on the nose. Though I wonder, would Kaede be the protagonist in it, or Shuichi? I guess if it plays out like an alternate timeline where no murders happen, it’d logically be Kaede. But it’d be amusing if you could at least choose to play as Shuichi for it.

And on the note of free time events and stuff, it’s hard to tell, but I THINK that the number of friendship fragments you had technically stays the same? I’m not sure. It said I had one fragment in my skill screen. But I don’t think I had an option to look at Rantarou’s detailed info screen. Oh well. It’s not a big deal, so nobody needs to tell me. But the way chapter one played out makes me think that I should have just tried to fit in two sessions with Rantarou, since talking to Shuichi was kinda pointless.

Speaking of Rantarou, this chapter’s making me wonder if instead of gaining the memories of his talent, he gained the memories of the Ultimate Hunt that we saw everyone else get here. He at least knew enough to know the name. I’m getting more and more curious about him. Especially since we still don’t know exactly what his plan was when he went to the basement.

To bridge over to discussing the murder, I should say that I still really like Ryoma as a character, and I wish I could have talked to him more before he died. But there were other characters I was prioritizing over him. I just really like his whole grizzled, realistic, but self-deprecating attitude. I wasn’t really expecting him to feel like such a big voice of reason, but he really was.

Though before I talk about his death specifically, I want to talk about the motive this time around. I really like how it’s technically the same motive as the first one in DR1, but it plays out really differently because everyone’s motives got mixed up. Which is why it’s going to be REALLY interesting to see how the hell someone got motivated to kill Ryoma if they got somebody else’s motive. It’s a really simple twist on the idea, but it does a whole lot to change the situation and make the motive less clear.

I feel like there was probably some tablet-swapping going on in the background that we didn’t get to see, even counting for how Kokichi’s plan for doing one big binge-watching party failed. The fact that he spent some amount of time alone with Gonta, and that he got caught up in some unexplained event while he was getting the tablets, is making me really suspicious about what’s going on. Maybe someone just managed to find and view their own motive and decided to kill, but that seems a little . . . simple. I wonder if the exact situation of who got which person’s motive will play into the logic of solving this case. Other than Shuichi having Kaito’s motive, all we know is that everyone had a different person’s motive, and that Gonta had Tsumugi’s. And I guess we also know that Maki never looked at whichever one she got. The fact that we got Kaito’s motive is really interesting to me, since it seems like it was done to make him less suspicious, since we as the player would know that Kaito never saw his motive, and so we’d assume that he had no motive to kill. But it still felt like this chapter was signalling his death in an almost Stephen King sort of way. I hope not.

As for the murder itself, it definitely seems that the issue will be more to do with figuring out how Ryoma’s body got into the water tank, than how he actually died. It’s fairly obvious that he died sometime during the night, or right before the magic show, and was drowned in the pool. The game just about spells that out though, with how Shuichi immediately guesses that the time of death being hidden meant that he probably died elsewhere. I mean I guess it could be, like, a double subversion, but I doubt it.

I feel like anyone who was present at the magic show is probably largely free of suspicion since I’m not sure exactly how anyone could have moved his body into the tank if they were standing elsewhere in the room. Since we saw the contents of the tank before the curtains got drawn over them, he had to have been actively moved into the tank during that one-minute time frame.

From what I remember, the characters not present at the magic show, excluding the currently dead people, were Kokichi, Maki, and Kaito, from what I remember, so those three are pretty suspicious, but Kaito seems like the only one of those three who probably did it, in a metagaming sense. I just can’t see Kokichi dying so soon, and Maki’s being set up as a suspicious character, so by process of elimination Kaito seems like the most suspicious of the group. I feel like it’d lead to a more interesting mystery if the killer was someone physically present in the room during the magic show, though. It almost feels too easy to suspect the people who weren’t there. And honestly I almost feel like them not being in the room at the time would have made it harder rather than easier to set the body where it ended up.

At least in terms of the people in the magic show, Himiko is obviously really suspicious. Funnily enough, Kokichi even spelled out the whole ‘she seems suspicious, which almost makes her seem NOT suspicious, but maybe that’s what she WANTS us to think’ thought process that I had in mind. It’s really easy to fall into that sort of loop, especially when you try and metagame it. Realistically speaking, she obviously had the best ability to physically set up the body, since she was in the tank at the time, but I doubt that she’d try and murder someone in a way where it’d be so easy to pin it on her.

Obviously a major part of the mystery here is going to involve her being stubbornly silent about explaining how the escape trick worked because she wants to tell us that magic did it, and so it’ll be hard to figure out the mechanics of how a body could have been moved there.

Though, wait, I guess it’s actually pretty easy to guess that Ryoma might have been hidden inside the small piranha tank, and got dropped into the water tank along with them. I’m not sure how they would have kept him from being eaten before the drop happened, but still, it’d be a convenient way for him to have gotten into the tank, especially since, as a timer-based mechanism, the killer didn’t need to be the one to, like, drag him into the tank. In which case literally anyone could be a suspect, whether they were in the room at the time or not, but I guess a big question then is figuring out how someone got the body there in the first place, especially if they weren’t involved in the preparation of the magic show.

I wish I could remember where Ryoma would have been during the night and morning before he died, and who would have had alibis and whatnot. Although, come to think of it, since even touching the pool water during night-time is forbidden, then if he was drowned in the pool I guess it must have been during the morning, since he would have died via the Exisals if he’d broken a rule. Which narrows down the time-frame to between 8am and whenever the magic show happened, which I think was very soon after that.

I wonder how much of a puzzle there’ll be to figuring out the exact mechanics of how he got drowned, though. The pool’s overall layout, and the detail put into describing the exact dimensions of the pool itself, and the detail about it being only half-full, make it seem like there must have been something more to it than just ‘someone dragged him there and shoved his face under the water until he died’.

If it’s Kaito, then it almost feels too easy, in a way. Especially with how I think he didn’t do a training session with Shuichi the night before the murder, and how he wasn’t there at the magic show. And as I said, the thing with Shuichi getting his motive feels like it might be a way to mislead the player from guessing that he did it. It really would confuse me if he did it though, since he didn’t see his motive. Unless Monodam actually gave everyone their correct tablets when he returned them all. We’ll see.

I think my main issue is just that I have no real idea who ELSE could have done it. Nobody else seems genuinely suspicious. I haven’t done the investigation yet, but as of now, we mostly just have a few characters who are being immediately framed as suspicious people, which feels like shorthand for ‘they didn’t do it’ at this point, and a whole bunch of people who have the same amount of evidence pointing at them. Kaito’s the only one who has any amount of signs pointing at him, though a lot of that’s me using a metagaming perspective, since I have no clue why he’d do such a thing.

I guess the only other particularly suspicious people would be, I dunno . . . Angie and Kirumi? Since Angie was working with Himiko on the magic show, and Kirumi helped with the curtains. That’s about it. I’m curious to see if my guesses might change once we have actual evidence. I hope it’s not quite as simple as that. I know that there’s no real chance of it being as much of a mindfuck as the first case, but it’d be lame to go right from that to a case where I immediately guess it correctly.

Oh, and before I forget, I have no goddamn clue what’s going on with that writing Gonta found. I just can’t even begin to formulate a guess about that. I don’t even know if it’ll be relevant to this case, or if it’s a hint toward a future plot point.

I think that’s about everything worth going over. Judging by how chapter one went, I might do the same thing and play both the investigation and the trial tomorrow [with a break in-between to write about the investigation before I do the trial], but I might take a break tomorrow and do it the day after since I have something else I need to do sometime over the next few days. It might work better to take a break after the end of this chapter, though. We’ll see.

[swipestream]

An Interview with Brian Niemeier, Part I

Brian Niemeier is a best-selling science fiction author and a John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer finalist. His second book, Souldancer, won the first ever Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel. He chose to pursue a writing career despite formal training in history and theology. His journey toward publication began at the behest of his long-suffering gaming group, who tactfully pointed out that he seemed to enjoy telling stories more than planning and adjudicating games.

Released this week, Brian’s newest book, The Ophian Rising, concludes his groundbreaking Soul Cycle series. Recently, I sat down with Brian to discuss The Ophian Rising, the rest of the Soul Cycle, and more. Part I focuses on the Soul Cycle.

*     *     *      *      *

You’ve mentioned on your blog that the Soul Cycle has been a passion project for you. What about it made it so riveting as a story to explore?

It’s kind of like trying to quantify love. Forgive me for going John C. Wright for a moment, but you kind of just asked me, “why do you love your favorite child?” I could point to how pleased I am with how the characterization has turned out and I could probably point to a few sequences in each book that I’m particularly proud of. It’s just in my wheelhouse. It’s the kind of project that I find esthetically pleasing. Like a lot of writers say, the Soul Cycle is the kind of sci-fi fantasy series that I always wanted to read but could never find, so I had to write it myself.

For those new to the series, could you take a moment to describe the Soul Cycle? What they can expect?

The unexpected. The Soul Cycle came out of this mélange of my earlier influences. Everything from 90s anime space operas, to Dune to Star Wars. There’s some Golden Age JRPG–16-bit and 32-bit era–role-playing games in there. It’s been described as a kitchen sink series, but that’s not to say that it’s incoherent. I miraculously managed to weave an internally self-consistent narrative through the whole thing and now it’s done.

You mentioned some influences on the Soul Cycle. Was there a moment that inspired it? Can you remember where the idea came together to start writing?

This is going to sound weird, but bear with me. As a kid and even up through college, I would occasionally amuse myself with amateur model building. I put together some commercially produced kits but quite often I’d just find stuff around the house and just hot glue stuff together into a shape that I thought looked cool.

So one day I was sitting down, and I had all of these used plastic frames from old Warhammer 40k figures. You know, the actual parts that aren’t even punched out. So I just had these slender plastic almost girder looking pieces and I though I’d see what I could build with them. I started forming the skeleton of a spaceship. I was just sitting there at my card table with some sort of cable movie the week on to the background and it just started taking shape into this big severe angular brutal looking behemoth thing that I ended up painting glossy black. It had this one gold rimmed emerald green eye in the center of the bow. Then I just did what sci-fi authors do–I asked, “what if?”

Who made this thing? Where did it come from? What is it? I actually took a page from “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by thinking, “what if this ship is powered by the torment of a child?” Immediately the idea for the entire character of Elena Braun popped into my head. Elena just kind of stepped out of my subconscious like Athena sprouting from Zeus’s forehead and introduced herself to me. I just took it from there and curiosity did the rest.

I’m looking at the Nethereal cover right now. Is that anything like that ship that you kitbashed?

It’s close. That is my artist Marcelo Orsi Blanco’s interpretation of the ship I kitbashed. I’ve actually got pictures of the model.

During the Puppy of the Month readthrough of Nethereal, I noticed that the Great Chain of Being was a big part of the world building. But the full implications didn’t hit me until I was reading Secret Kings yesterday. It made perfect sense that the fire souldancer would be the one to redeem the universe because fire is the element closest to the divine. What other mythologies or stories influenced the world building of the Soul Cycle?

Primarily the Christian Manichean heresy. I set out specifically to design a Manichean cosmos, partially in an effort to disprove it. I’ve read a lot of Augustine of Hippo. He’s one of my favorite authors. He’s right on the edge of antiquity and the Middle Ages, he’s been called the Last Ancient Man and the First Medieval Man, and his writings always really resonated with me. He made that journey personally from paganism to Manicheanism and finally to Orthodox Christianity. One of his arguments against the Manichean order–I suppose I should define what I mean.

The Manicheans believed that there were two gods, the god of Good and the god of Evil. That was sort their way around theodicy, or the problem of evil. By saying the good god created only what was good and everything that is good and evil comes from the evil god, that’s how they thought to get around it. The problem with that is, if evil has substance of its own and its own order of being, then it’s really just another good. There really is no evil because there’s no cogent argument for not choosing the evil getting the “evil” god’s order over the good god’s. You inevitably end up in moral relativism. So I tried to depict that in the work, especially in the climax of Souldancer like you’re alluding to.

There’s been some debate on where new readers should start the Soul Cycle. Jon Mollison and many others have said Souldancer. I loved Nethereal. I love what you’ve been doing since then but to me it’s still my favorite. Where would you recommend that the reader starts and why?

First of all, thank you for that glowing praise.

That is a question that I’ve debated myself and I’ve spoken with others about that. Listen to your readers, you always want to try to write to market. There have been a few who said start with Souldancer because it hits the ground running more. They find some of the concepts tend to be clearer, but the majority side with you. They say start with Nethereal and read in order.

The order of release is my preferred order. Actually, I ended up doing what Nick Cole and Jason Anspach just did with Galaxy’s Edge, where they actually wrote the second book first and then went back and wrote Legionnaire. I wrote Souldancer first and then I thought, you know there’s a lot of background here that needs to be covered. For example, how did the Cataclysm happen? Who are Thera and Shaiel? Why should we care about them? Where does the  name “souldancer” come from? I went back and wrote Nethereal to fill in the back story, so I think the most logical progression is to start with Nethereal.

With The Ophian Rising newly released, could you set the stage for the readers?

How about we start with just the general background of this novel as it relates to the others?

What I can tell you is if you’ve read The Secret Kings then you know that–spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read it yet–the good guys had their climactic and decisive final battle with Shaiel, with Vaun Mordecai, that’s been brewing since the first book. In The Secret Kings, I largely wrapped up the main through-line that started with Nethereal, which is you know these two beings who are vying for godhood. They each get half of the pie. So Elena as Thera’s soul inherits the power of the White Well which is the opposite of her birthright. Vaun kind of stole her birthright and ended up as Shaiel, the new god of the void. That conflict has resolved. Shaiel’s attempt to dominate the entire cosmos and turn it into one giant undead Void full of undead damned creatures serving him was thwarted. So really what you’ve got at the end of The Secret Kings is the last of the old pantheon that used to rule the cosmos being overthrown and this new group of misfits that we’ve been bringing together since Nethereal rise to become the new royal family of the whole Soul Cycle universe. Really only Zadok in the form of Szodrin is left, but he’s kind of the watchmaker god. He just likes to step back and see how things play out like a model train enthusiast.

So people said, “Well, The Secret Kings seems to come to a satisfying resolution. Why do we need another book?”

It’s because whereas The Secret Kings might have resolved the main plot or the first three books to the Soul Cycle, my work isn’t done until I’ve tied up all the themes. There’s at least one major theme that was left dangling, one major question that a lot of my readers have asked about and you just asked about earlier. Which is, so we’ve shown as early as Souldancer, that the basic moral underpinning Zadok tried to build with his cosmos doesn’t work. There is no guarantee of right and wrong. There’s really no way to avoid moral relativism except by Zadok saying “Because I said so.” So readers have been asking me if there is any point to it. Is there any clear right and wrong? Is there any clear definition of villainy or heroism? Any reason to hope and not despair? Any reason to choose love over apathy? So that is what The Ophian Rising primarily addresses.

I do show what the ultimate source of morality is and the ultimate reason for hope–but also fear. Realizing there are moral absolutes can be quite scary when you realize there is a standard that everyone is held to.

I definitely agree that the first three books have a satisfying arc. There’s still the judgment of Zadok over Astlin from the end of Souldancer.

You’re very close and it’s interesting that you honed in correctly on the character of Astlin. She’s another character who just one day showed up and knocked on my door and introduced herself. I haven’t had to do any nuts and bolts work on that character. She was fully formed from the first moment I met her. She wanted me to tell her story.

That’s a very keen insight that, in the order of this cosmos, the Fire Stratum, composed of elemental fire, is just one step down from the White Well, which is the closest that this cosmos has to the divine. So if you look at her powers, her elemental fire is able to harm demons. A spoiler alert for Souldancer, she’s able to harm Hazeroth with her molten brass blood and with the fire she can release from her soul. Fire doesn’t normally hurt those creatures, because being demons from hell, they’re used to the flames of hell. It is that residual spark of the Divine in it that can harm them.

She’s got this redemption arc where she begins as, you can argue, a villain, but certainly an antagonist. Through love, through someone telling her, “You are lovable. You do have dignity. You are worthy of redemption,” she gets her act together big time and turns her life around. It turns out that, as Sulaiman says, she may be the chosen one. Because, you know, tropes work because they’re tropes. So most science fiction and fantasy lately, and for quite a while, have had the promised one, the chosen one, the hero of legend. The Soul Cycle is no different, but it’s not really front and center. The references are in there. Sulaiman makes reference to one with the heart of a star who will make the final decision for good or evil before the gods on behalf of mankind.

Wow, I read Souldancer close but I missed that. Just how layered the Soul Cycle is still surprises me.

Let me get around to full answering your question. Sorry to go all fire hose on you. For that scene, go back to Souldancer, right after Hazeroth’s defeat when Sulaiman and Tefler and Cook find Astlin passed out after their battle. Sulaiman thinks to himself, “well, is this what’s going on? Is she the one the Burned Book talked about?” But then at the end of the book, Xander makes a deal.

First of all, he points out–and it’s hinted under divine inspiration, like these aren’t his words, they were they were given him by someone else–he points out the flaw to Zadok. He says that “Your test was faulty from the beginning because it’s lopsided in favor of evil. So the Zadokim are knocking to get in. Let them in to balance the scale and make it a level playing field.” That is when Zadok agrees to let Astlin, the first Zadokim, in.

So she then says, “We’ve got to help make others like us. We’ve got to help others escape and get back to the light. We’ve got to save these shards of Zadok that have the potential to become real people.” So that’s what she wants.

Interestingly, it in Zadok’s judgment of her, where Xander begs Zadok for her life, where Zadok says, “No. You know her crimes convict her,” and cuts her silver cord, which allows her to escape and receive a real soul and then return.

*     *     *      *      *

Get the final book of the award-winning Soul Cycle today, and complete your collection by picking up the other captivating books in this supernatural space adventure series. And come back tomorrow for Part II of our interview, where Brian discusses editing, his favorite books, and his next project.

  An Interview with Brian Niemeier, Part I published first on http://ift.tt/2zdiasi

[roguenewsdao]

Citizen Sophia, Blockchain, and the CFR Convo

"Technology has always been a double-edged sword."  -- Ray Kurzweil, November 3, 2017.

During the last few days, we've been witnessing a shift of power in Saudi Arabia as a young heir proceeds to clad his power base in iron. However, only two weeks prior to the recent political purge in the Kingdom, another shift in power took place in the same land. But this time the shift came from the animatronic mouth of a pale-skinned, multi-color-eyed female Android named Sophia. The robot became the first of its kind to be granted actual citizenship.

The women of Saudi Arabia were not amused.

Admittedly, the granting of citizenship to a robot is a bit of a public relations stunt. Prince MBS put on a good show to express his seemingly sincere desire to pull Saudi out of the 7th century and attract investment of new technology into the Kingdom. Let us not forget the multi-billion-dollar data surveillance center that was launched earlier this year when President Trump joined King Salman and other visiting dignitaries at the "glowing orb" ceremony [linked here]. Would Riyadh like to become the desert version of Silicon Valley?

Sophia is the creation of Hanson Robotics, Inc., founded by Dr. David Hanson. She is futuristic in every sense of the word. Sophia is learning how to be human via her interactions with real people. This feature of AI is mentioned further down in this blog in the statements made by Ray Kurzweil. Robots are designed to somewhat mirror what they witness in real people, not unlike what a real child does as it matures to adulthood. Now, immediately, you can see what the dangers of that would be. Who gets to decide which humans the robot will study as its mentor? How will it know how to decide between Virtues and Vices? These are some of the challenges facing the AI engineers and topics that are regularly debated.

Another facet of Sophia's new life that should interest the regular readers of Rogue Money is that her artificial intelligence protocols were built on blockchain technology. According to Hanson's website:

Hanson Robotics is partnering with SingularityNET, a platform for the decentralized AI economy. SingularityNET is the first protocol for combining AI services with a global, blockchain-based market, and will soon be powering the minds of Hanson Robots. For more information please visit www.singularitynet.io.

SingularityNET bills itself as "a platform for the decentralized AI economy - the free and open market for AI technologies, built on smart contracts." The link between this coming transhumanist robot era and the nascent blockchain technology is very revealing.

As regular readers of Rogue Money know, our Mr. W. has been advising us that we are witnessing the systematic dismantling of the old Rockefeller PetroDollar Empire by that other great cabal, the Rothschild powers-that-be. Naturally, we all connect the Rothschilds to the international banking priesthood, and we connect banking with money and debt. This question has been rolling around in my mind, "What role is the Rothschild Empire playing in this coming cashless cyber age? Can it be that they are actually destroying money?"

The more I thought about it, the more it has occurred to me that what this banking priesthood is doing is what they and their predecessors have always done: create whatever tool is necessary in order to keep moving their transhumanist football down the field. For many centuries that tool has been monetized debt. But just as their forebears moved society from a system based on the exchange of precious metals by weight to a fiat, state-minted model, that priesthood of today can just as deftly move society from the fiat model to a cryptocurrency blockchain model.

In the excerpts of a recent conversation between Google engineer and "Singularity" dreamer, Ray Kurzweil, and members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), we are already getting hints that the #BigData and #4IR vision of the future is actually one where our current concept of "money" has become obsolete. It does appear to me that mankind's dependence on debt for his means of daily living is now being moved to a dependence on an ethereal super-network of universal intelligence.

Here is Kurzweil's conversation and a few of his statements that stood out to me.

"We Are Going to Merge with This Technology"

On November 3, 2017, Ray Kurzweil participated in a dialog and Q&A with members of the Council on Foreign Relations. A transcript of the hour-long conversation is available [linked here]. Below is the full video of the conference. 

Near the beginning of the episode, Kurzweil mentions a conversation he had recently with Christine Lagarde of the IMF. Lagarde was pointing out that AI is fun and wacky and all, but you can't eat it, can you? Kurzweil retorted politely that such a thing is coming. Once again, Kurzweil repeated the year 2029 several times in this video (a year that has its own roots in an Esoteric Hitler belief that Super Humans would make themselves known in 2029 to save the world. See also my Bee In Eden video at the end of this page.)

Here are Kurzweil's words with hints that the price of this technology will eventually be reduced to nearly Zero (making money obsolete?) In other words, today you can buy a smartphone for $75. A few years ago, it might have cost $1,000. So, today, the cost of that information technology is practically nothing. The same thing will happen in all areas of information technology, like, 3-D printing.

I’ll mention just one implication of the law of accelerating returns, because it has many ripple effects and it’s really behind this remarkable digital revolution we see, is the 50 percent deflation rate in information technologies....   Coexistence of free, open-source products—which are a great leveler—and proprietary products. We’ll print—we’ll be able to create food very inexpensively using 3-D—vertical agriculture, using hydroponic plants for fruits and vegetables, in-vitro cloning of muscle tissue for meat. The first hamburger to be produced this way has already been consumed.... 

That’s been a key prediction of mine. I’ve been consistent in saying 2029. In 1989, in the age of intelligent machines, I bounded that between early 2020s and late 2030s. And in the age of spiritual machines, in ’99, I said 2029. 

As you might imagine, many audience members asked questions about the safety of such a technology. How are we to prevent The Terminator from becoming reality? Even Kurzweil, for all his ubiquitous optimism, betrayed just a hint of trepidation. It wasn't really a fear, but an acknowledgement that, yes, we must tread carefully. 

Here is my collection of Kurzweil's statements that I found noteworthy:

Technology has always been a double-edged sword. Fire kept us warm, cooked our food, and burned down our houses. These technologies are much more powerful. It’s also a long discussion, but I think we should go through three phases, at least I did, in contemplating this. First is delight at the opportunity to overcome age-old afflictions—poverty, disease, and so on. Then alarm, that these technologies can be destructive and cause even existential risks....

And finally, I think where we need to come out is an appreciation that we have a moral imperative to continue progress in these technologies, because despite the progress we’ve made—and that’s a whole other issue. People think things are getting worse, but they’re actually getting better and we can talk about that. But there’s still a lot of human suffering to be overcome. It’s only continued progress, particularly in AI, that’s going to enable us to continue overcoming poverty and disease and environmental degradation, while we attend to the peril. And there’s a good framework for doing that....

The number of people who have been harmed either accidentally or intentionally by abuse of biotechnology so far has been zero.... 

But when you have so much power, even with good intentions, there can be abuses. These technologies are very powerful. And so I do worry about that, even though I’m an optimist. And I’m optimistic that we’ll make it through. I’m not as optimistic that there won’t be difficult episodes. World War II, 50 million people died. And that was certainty exacerbated by the power of technology at that time.... 

This is the most peaceful time in human history....

My view is not that AI is going to displace us. It’s going to enhance us.

An audience member named Alana Ackerson asked how this new technology affects us as spiritual beings, how it affects our "lens" on what it means to be human. Kurzweil went on to say:

You can say that Evolution is a spiritual process, bringing us closer to God. 

And the other implication that spiritual—and really where that title, “Age of Spiritual Machines” comes from—is what is this—what is spiritual? It’s really a word for consciousness. Our whole moral system, our sense of values is that consciousness is the precious thing. That’s the sort of underlying debate in animal rights. Conscious entities are what’s important. Non-conscious entities are only important insofar as they affect the conscious experience of conscious entities. So who and what are conscious is a key question. And that’s the underlying question in animal rights. That’ll be the question when it comes to the AI.

Kurzweil then went on to express his beliefs that human beings have already left their biological nature behind:

So I alluded to earlier, we are going to merge with this technology. I’d say we already have done that to some extent. Medical nanorobots will go inside our brain, connect our neocortex to the cloud. So your smartphone, even though it is itself a billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer I used when I was an undergraduate at MIT, it multiplies itself again a millionfold by connecting to millions of computers in the cloud. We can’t do that directly from our neocortex. We do it indirectly through these devices. We’ll do it directly in the 2030s. And not just to do things like search and translation directly from our brains, although we’ll do that, but to actually connect to more neocortex.

So people say, oh, we’re going to lose our humanity. Well, if you define human as being necessarily purely biological, I think we’re already not purely human anymore, because we’re not purely biological anymore. And we’re going to become increasingly nonbiological. But that’s who we are. I mean, that is the definition of a human, the species that changes itself, it creates tools, it goes beyond our limitations.

Kurzweil then went on to mention the word "de-bias," as in, we will need to teach the robot to rid itself of bias and prejudice even as it's learning to create its own behavior by observing other humans.

There’s a major effort in the field—it’s going on in all the major companies and in open-source research as well-to debias AI, because it’s going to pick up biases from people if it’s learning from people. And people have biases. And so to overcome gender bias and other types of—racial bias, that can actually be a goal. As humans, we pick up biases from all of the things we’ve seen, a lot of it’s subconscious. We then learn, as educated humans, to recognize bias and try to overcome it. 

Near the end of the conference, people were wondering how do robots fit into the world of nation-states. Perhaps the audience was already thinking about Sophia's newly granted citizenship status. Kurzweil dropped a big hint on where Transhumanism is taking mankind in that area. Now you can see how this fits into my idea that this revolution may be rendering money obsolete. That is, if individual national sovereignties no longer dominate mankind's social order, then certainly all authority structures under that level have also lost their importance.

People really are increasingly identifying as citizens of the world. And I think over time nation-states will becomes less influential. I mean, I think we’re on that path.

At the end of the Q&A session, Kurzweil left the audience with these closing remarks:

But intelligence is inherently uncontrollable. 

You know, if there’s some entity that’s more powerful than you and I and it’s out for our destruction, the best strategy is not to get in that situation in the first place. And failing that, the best next strategy would be to get some other AI that’s even more intelligent than the one that’s out for you on your side. 

[AI] is emerging from our civilization today. It’s going to be an enhancement of who we are. And so if we’re practicing the kind of values we cherish in our world today, that’s the best strategy to have for a world in the future that embodies those values.  

Ray Kurzweil certainly gives us a unique view of the future. "Unique" is an understatement. His statement like "today is the most peaceful time in human history" might cause some readers to do a double-take. However, observations like that tend to reinforce what we have already seen about these Elites who rule over us: they are simply not touched by the Matrix that is imposed on the rest of us. We've seen this over and over again with other areas of our accepted way of life: Banksters, Military Contractors, Big Pharma, and now, Big Data. These are the puppet masters not the puppets. Individuals within their ranks might come and go. But, overall, those sectors are not subject to the same Law and Government, nor are they effectively touched by the whims of economic highs and lows, as are the rest of us. The pitfalls that touch us never touches them because they exist on a plane above that daily din.

And yet, even above those four sectors flows those pervasive, ancient religious beliefs about attaining ultimate creative power and universal mastery. I had to smile that the citizen robot was named Sophia. I haven't really seen an official explanation of how she got that name. So, in conclusion, I will close with these thoughts from the article on "Gnostic Sophia" in Wikipedia. I'd like to think that this is the reason.

Gnostic Sophia

Per some very general statements on the tenets of Gnosticism, this article [linked here] says this about "Sophia":

Almost all Gnostic systems of the Syrian or Egyptian type taught that the universe began with an original, unknowable God, referred to as the Parent or Bythos. According to some Gnostic texts, the crisis occurs as a result of Sophia trying to emanate without her syzygy or, in another tradition, because she tries to breach the barrier between herself and the unknowable Bythos. 

After cataclysmically falling from the Pleroma, Sophia's fear and anguish of losing her life (just as she lost the light of the One) causes confusion and longing to return to it. Because of these longings, matter and soul accidentally come into existence. 

The creation of the Demiurge is also a mistake made during this exile. The Demiurge proceeds to create the physical world in which we live, ignorant of Sophia, who nevertheless manages to infuse some spiritual spark or pneuma into his creation.

It would appear that the Transhumanist movement is indeed trying to bring mankind back full circle to the ancient understandings of the source of Matter and Soul, all mixed in with this idea that mankind really has been his own creator from the beginning. Looking at AI from that vantage point, it makes sense that Citizen Sophia has returned to her roots in Saudi Arabia, midway between Egypt and Syria.

My contact information with link to my Karatbars portal are found at my billboard page of SlayTheBankster.com. Listen to my radio show, Bee In Eden, on Youtube via my show blog at SedonaDeb.wordpress.com.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: An Experimental Book Tests Our Ability to Perceive Multiple Mediums Simultaneously

Pages from Nicolas Jaar’s Network (courtesy Nicolas Jaar/Printed Matter)

Living up to its name, the book Network, a project by Chilean electronic musician Nicolas Jaar co-published by Printed Matter and Other People, can be opened at pretty much any point and read — if reading is even what you call it. Upon opening the book I saw a series of onomatopoeias, several pages featuring blocky text about wealth, a full-page spread of two hand-drawn Xs, some already filled out crosswords, multiple internet windows, and words arranged like numbers on a spreadsheet. Whatever you want call this, reading with Jaar is more akin to a cross between an art experience and solving a book of logic puzzles. Or seeing, hearing and reading simultaneously.

Or failing to do so entirely.

That failure defines the central structure of the book, which is a series of experiments that test our ability to simultaneously perceive more than one medium, or to interpret more than one ambiguous image. In addition to the hundreds of pages of free-verse text, Jaar includes black-and-white posters advertising shows from his series of semi-fictional online radio stations along with three short, text-based works from graphic designer Linda van Deursen, artist and provocateur Lydia Lunch, and the musician himself.

Together, the puzzles, rhythms, and words of Network read as a meditation on the success and failure of our current social, political, and economic structures. How Jaar got to that point, though, involves a bit of backstory. Jaar began the project as a radio play for a BBC commission, but when the play turned into an experiment making alien sound energy for a fake DJ, the network jumped ship. Jaar decided to finish the project on his own; in the end, it took the form of a book and a website hosting 111 radio stations with fixed loops of his own DJing and mock talk radio. Graphic designers Jena Myung and Maziyar Pahlevan worked with Jaar to draw text from show transcripts and use it in the book.

The result feels a bit like browsing an analog Internet, where memes mutate into free-verse poetry, while simultaneously channel-surfing noise radio stations. Catching a wave of thought can feel exhilarating and powerful, but just as often the organization of the book feels too chaotic to make sense of anything. It was several days before I even realized the three essays in the book were each only a few pages long, rather than making up entire sections.

As a reflection of the current mood, the book can feel eerily accurate. Columns and fonts of varying size and weight add a level of anxiety and confusion to even flipping through its pages. So do the anti-Trump, anti-income-inequality themes. In one spread, we see a play on the Trump/Pence “Make America Great Again” logo that transforms the words into the shape of a flag with the slogan “Jump the Fence.” Another consists of a list of billionaires that did not make the Forbes 100 list because their net worth was too low. Still another reads simply: “I feel a little helpless.”

As confusing as all this sounds, the book also offers ways to opt out of the culture. Don’t like what you see? There’s an “x” in the corner of some pages suggesting you can simply close the window. Or you can skip to another page. You won’t miss anything, and — unlike the Internet’s unreliable archives — the text will still be there when you return.

Pages fromNetwork (image courtesy Nicolas Jaar/Printed Matter)

For me, the most compelling aspects of the book were those that used optical illusions and text puns like the Trump/Pence logo. They read like the kind of secret messages people once thought you could find on records if you played them backwards. In one instance the words “Don’t you wish you could listen to both at the exact same time” alert the reader to a construction on the following page. That page consists of a poster, advertising one of Jaar’s radio stations, that features the stacked words “LIVE GAZA.” Each letter of the word is made by repeating the letter in the word above or beneath it, thus creating “GAZA LIVE.” As with the famous “vase or face” perception puzzle, it’s impossible to read “LIVE GAZA” and “GAZA LIVE” at the same time: the brain can see both, but it can’t process them simultaneously.

But “Don’t you wish you could listen to both at the exact same time?” also alludes to the radio station itself. When I visited the station online (#219), I found a series of short news items about a Gaza zoo that painted their donkeys to look like zebras after they died of neglect in the Israel/Palestine conflict. “Children treat the donkeys with less respect than an actual zebra,” reported one journalist. I switched channels.

Station #69. The sound of a flag in the wind. Station #153. Beatles songs, but with a LOL ticker running above. Station #93. A long documentary on how economy of “the self” lead to pervasive belief that satisfaction of our individual needs and desires should be our highest priority.

There’s a corresponding poster for each of these stations peppered throughout the book, but it remains unclear what text was drawn from which poster, and mapping that out seems beside the point. It’s just one piece of a network that doesn’t rely on any single page in order to work.

Even Jaar’s three-page essay midway through the book could have been removed, and the book would still stand on its own. It would have suffered without that essay, though, as it does the best job of expressing the book’s core concept. Jaar writes, “When and if human “x” looked into the eyes of human “y” then x with two eyes saw only one eye of y.”

The essay goes on to tie this relationship to rhythm, (and visual relationships), but the base point is this: we only have the ability to perceive one thing at a time — an idea significant enough that it’s repeated throughout Network and even gets a nod on the book’s cover (“IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII see eee eee too”). That phrase is drawn from text later in the essay and is part of a larger imagined conversation. “What if we just had one eye?” it reads, “It’s surely good to have two eyes. One eye says to the other: eye, I see too.” As I understand it, the message is an address from one eye to the other, informing it that there are two eyes seeing. Spoken, though, it could mean any number of things beyond the original reading. “Yes, I see two” or “Yes, I see too”, or “Eye, I see too.”

All this resembles wordplay, but for me, it illustrates how much more mutable words are when they are said aloud versus written down. In the context of business, this slippery definition might have me decide that written communication is more reliable. In the world of sound, I might conclude that there’s far more room for creativity. In the world of politics, it reads “Watch your back.”

Network doesn’t offer solutions for synthesizing these worlds, but it does suggest that we might be able to draw meaning from pre-existing relationships. For example, Linda van Deursen’s visual essay uses two side-by-side columns with images, captions, and text to focus on linguistic play as it pertains to agriculture, radio communication and its relationship to authoritarian rule. On one side, we read about how broadcasting is considered the most economical method of applying seed to large areas of land. On another we read about how, in the mid 1920s the USSR started producing street radio speakers that anyone could use for the purpose of broadcasting. Ideas need tending to grow.

As an exercise, van Deursen took enough pains to make sure her narratives never completed themselves too easily that I could write an entire piece on her essay alone. It was thoughtful.  Lydia Lunch, the book’s final contributor, did not manage this, offering only a long, stream-of-consciousness rant. Everything is terrible: the offense of Kim Kardashian’s selfies, the constant surveillance of citizens, an election that gave us no one to vote for last November because Hillary Clinton is friends with Henry Kissinger. Lunch’s tirade was clearly written prior to Trump’s inauguration, but it would have been just as unmoored then. Unlike Donald Trump, Clinton isn’t friends with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who continues to undermine the electoral process and destabilize the NATO alliance. But potato potahto, right?

Pages from Network (photo by Paddy Johnson for Hyperallergic)

Eh. I immediately worried that complaining about politics is petty in a book as thoughtful as Jaar’s. I didn’t need to go there. But, such is the nature of our present political climate, where no differing opinion goes unrefuted. No one is immune: not me, not Lydia Lunch, and not Jaar. And there are real reasons for this. Vast income inequality, widespread corruption, and weakened democracies threaten everyone’s well-being. We’re scared, we’re tired and we don’t have the patience to hear any more bad ideas. The book seems to implicitly acknowledge this unpleasant physiological peculiarity through pages of splintered text. “Listen. So many arguments not worth having,” reads a blurb of text early on — only to later have Lunch dive in. There’s always someone who can’t resist.

Which may be why the rant is followed by spreads of quietly undulating single-color pages. At first, this section seemed out of place and superfluous, but every time I needed a break, I’d end up back there. It’s the one place in the book where every sense a reader has isn’t being taxed, and it’s a relief. “I see a color or two,” I thought as I paged through the book. That felt like more than enough.

The post An Experimental Book Tests Our Ability to Perceive Multiple Mediums Simultaneously appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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What Do Andika, Aniessa Tell Us About Ourselves By : Johannes Nugroho | on 4:45 PM August 29, 2017 Category : Opinion, Commentary  http://jakartaglobe.id/opinion/johannes-nugroho-andika-aniessa-tell-us/

The public exposure of the fraud committed by the husband and wife owners of First Travel, Andika Surachman and Aniessa Hasibuan, caused quite a national stir. The media, both conventional and social, could not get enough of the scandal, with revelations of the lavish jet-setting lifestyle the couple led or the opulent home they held court, all supposedly from the money they had cheated from at least 35,000 umrah pilgrims.

Starting its umrah services in 2011, the company is alleged to have garnered pilgrim funds from 72,000 individuals, which translates to roughly 1 trillion rupiah ($80 million). Known for offering umrah packages at knock-down prices — some 30 percent cheaper than the normal rates — it became a prime choice for many would-be-pilgrims. While 14,000 pilgrims duly went to Mecca, the rest languished in uncertainty until the matter was brought to the attention of the Ministry of Religious Affairs earlier this year. Following an investigation, the company had its license revoked and was reported to the police.

Public condemnation of the couple is understandable. Nevertheless, in many ways their story and the public reactions following the exposure of their fraud offer us glimpses into our society's concepts of success and the way we view poverty.

News reports on the Andika-Aniessa fraud allude to the highly publicized umrah sponsorships of Indonesian entertainment celebrities by the company as a clever marketing ploy. The sponsored pilgrimages certainly added luster to the company's image but it is important to recognize that the lavish lifestyle of its bosses — now universally denounced after the couple's fall from grace — was the ultimate ticket to their bona fide status.

In retrospect, it is easy to dismiss their extravagant habits; round-the-clock bodyguard service, haute couture clothes, premium holidays and palatial residences, as follies of the nouveaux riches. However, the projected image of the superlatively successful business couple was no doubt a great success. The couple's humble beginnings and early struggles in the business world also garnished the rags-to-riches romance that proved to be equally beguiling.

The final polish was undoubtedly the visible piety of both husband and wife, the latter in particular. It was an advantageous coincidence that they ran an umrah agency. Making affordable pilgrimages available to the faithful, was, to many, further proof of their piety. Aniessa doubly clinched her reputation for pious living last year when she became the first fashion designer to showcase an all hijab collection at New York Fashion Week. The event was widely covered in the Indonesian press and no doubt helped her make it to the Forbes Indonesia's 2017 List of Inspiring Women, which is now rescinded in the aftermath of the scandal.

Back in 2016, some level-headed Indonesians, such as fellow fashion designer Marsha Siagian, were more cautious when commenting on Aniessa's participation in NYFW. While not ruling out that Aniessa may have been invited by the organizer, Siagian pointed out Aniessa could also have paid to be allowed a show. Unfortunately, voices like hers were overwhelmed by the pride many people chose to take in what seemed like a well-deserved triumph for a pious and successful businesswoman.

Many bought into the fairytale success story of the couple because they represented the dream most middle class Indonesians have of the future. Theirs was the Indonesian dream made real: a struggling couple who eventually made it to the top of their game: rich and glamorous and above all respectably pious. The image the couple had cultivated generated trust from clients, real business and admiration. It is the secret to their success in concealing their fraudulence for so many years.

The irony is that the couple's trappings of wealth, ostentatiously flaunted, mimicked the typical lifestyle of the rich portrayed in Indonesian soap opera, the sinetron. The main difference seemed to be that the pious and wealthy couple in the end effected a plot twist by becoming villains.

The success of the couple's front in fooling so many people suggests that the Indonesian dream is, contrary to the prevalent notion in most Western nations today, not an idealism purely built on meritocracy but also on religiosity. The concept is perhaps a reflection of the national cliché of obtaining success both "on earth and in the afterlife," an idea which was once popular in medieval Europe.

In the saga, the couple became the antithesis of poverty. This is important since we by large as a nation suffer from the fear of poverty. The over-the-top habits of the couple, such as Andika's insistence on arriving at the mosque in a chauffeur-driven Hummer even when it was a five-minute walk from his office, were rooted in this phenomenon.

A recent study also found Indonesians to be the least-inclined pedestrians in the world. While walking around a big city like Jakarta may pose security risks, many in the Indonesian middle classes equate walking — and indeed doing menial work of any kind — with being poor. Walking has become the activity of the poor — because they have no means of buying a vehicle — or the eccentric.

Perhaps we can take comfort in the research carried out by the author of "The Shame of Poverty," by Oxford professor Robert Walker, who contended that the phenomenon is worldwide. A Pakistani child told an interviewer, "I don't tell my friends my mother works as a maid" since menial workers are seen as poor.

Still the Indonesian fear of being seen as poor is, alas, perverse. Our government is famous for placing bulk orders for luxurious cars for international summits held in the country, as if their presence would dispel the idea that we are a nation where the majority are poor. Both Andika and Aniessa may have felt they had to do everything in style because they did not want to be reminded of the time they were poor, or heaven forbid, that they still look and behave like the poor.

So when we condemn the fraudulent couple, it is difficult to say which we hate most; that they broke trust of the many or that they dashed our dream in which fantastic rise in status and wealth is always attainable through work and piety. They may now be the most hated couple in the — and they deserve to be — but in introspection we should also see them as the tragicomedic monsters birthed by a society largely obsessed with superficial material and social progress; at the expense of learning, culture and decency.

Johannes Nugroho is a writer from Surabaya. He can be contacted at johannes@nonacris.com and on Twitter: @Johannes_nos