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soveryanon · 4 years ago

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Reviewing time for MAG183!

- I’m not sure I can manage to put it into words quite right but: sounds-wise, this episode’s domain didn’t feel mind-blowingly new, it wasn’t something that felt “Oh! I’ve never heard something like this before!”? But the echoes, grinding and scratching were timed so well, giving so much strength and gravitas to the conversations, that it perfectly scratched an itch. I could hear that there was something close to Jon and Martin, that it was big, and mostly deserted, that it stood eerily in the overall wasteland, that they were two people alone against a whole world, a whole machine with gears and a mechanism ready to crush anyone?

- I LIVE for artist!Martin giving his commentary and overall throwing shade at the Fears’ taking of artistic licence liberties:

(MAG183) MARTIN: Oh, bugger off! ARCHIVIST: Everything all right? MARTIN: Oh, no, what e–, what e–, what even is that? It, it’s like Escher ate a bad cathedral and threw up everywhere.

He had shown interest in the Stranger’s carousel upon learning that the statements had been a poem, but shots fired for that tower, uh.

- Jon and Martin were so cute starting the episode! Their quick banter was adorable!

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: It’s a building. A tower. … In a sense. MARTIN: Oh yeah? A–and what sense might that be? ARCHIVIST: [FAINTLY OMINOUS] … The Tarot sense. MARTIN: [SPLUTTERS WITH LAUGHTER] Really? ARCHIVIST: Wha–? No? Sorry, it… felt like a good line…! MARTIN: No, no, it was, I just… I dunno, I… [FOND EXHALE] You did the look, and…! It’s fine, sorry.

Martin being IN LOVE and appreciating Jon’s cuteness! The return of Jon showing that he’s an occult/horror nerd! We had seen in season 2 that he was generally very knowledgeable about anything related to the supernatural, and in season 4 that he was into Neil Lagorio’s movies, I’m happy to get another trace of it!

(MAG076) MELANIE: So I came here to dig a bit deeper. ARCHIVIST: Really? Our… our library is extensive, but it’s hardly focused on the Second World War. MELANIE: No, but the most detailed description of the crash that I could find came from the report of a man called William W. Hay. And later in life William Hay… ARCHIVIST: Became a noted occultist, whose memoirs and researches were only ever published in a heavily edited form. And we have unexpurgated copies. MELANIE: Exactly.

(MAG136) ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] Statement ends. Hm. Neil Lagorio… You ever see any of his work? DAISY: No. Not really into films. ARCHIVIST: Oh, they were… Well, let’s just say that it’s not a complete shock there was something unnatural to them. Didn’t know we had copies in the Institute, though; let alone original cuts. [CHUCKLE] Records indicate they [PAPER RUSTLING] ended up in… Artefact Storage. DAISY: Probably best that they stay there. ARCHIVIST: … Yeah. Yes, of course.

But SOB x2 since:

* Tower-in-the-tarot-sense meaning ominous stuff… and change. (While Jon knew they would soon come face to face with the choice to take the route through Martin’s domain.)

* Crying over the fact that we’ve seen and learned quite a few outside-of-the-job aspects of Jon this season, comparatively to the previous ones? He’s cute! He’s making jokes! He mentioned his student days a bit in MAG165, and visiting Upton House as a kid in MAG180! And this is happening when the world has been forked over and Jon&Martin certainly won’t survive together past MAG200, which means they have at most seventeen episodes together remaining. Martin, and we alongside him, are seeing so many different, more casual aspects of Jon, and it’s at the end of things…

- I really like how information bounced around in this episode? It felt even more dynamic than usual, quickly shifting depending on some reaction, or going from an association to another:

(MAG183) MARTIN: What, what’s the deal, though? Parts of it almost look like– ARCHIVIST: The Institute. MARTIN: Yeah…! ARCHIVIST: Yes. [INHALE] It makes sense, after all it was… built on the ruins of what Robert Smirke constructed…! MARTIN: Smirke? … What, no! But, but, surely he’s– ARCHIVIST: Dead, yeah, I mean, yes. [CHUCKLING] Very much so! This place is… an homage, shall we say. A monument. To him, and those like him, who tried to… categorise the world with themselves at the centre. In so doing, constructed the architecture of its suffering…!

Ohohoh about Martin feeling like the tower looked a bit like the Institute, and Jon drawing similarities through Smirke – the Institute being built on the ruins of a Smirke building, and the current domain being dedicated to people like him. The Institute is coming closer and weighing on their minds, isn’t it? I really like that Martin immediately worried about Smirke potentially being alive-ish, since:

(MAG138) MARTIN: “The Eye has marked me for something, of this I have no doubt. My… humble hope is that it may be a swift death, an accidental effect of your own researches, which I once again implore you to abandon. It is likely too late for me, but I will not…” [PAPER RUSTLE] Uh… [INHALE] The, hum… The letter ends there. Uh… Ap–apparently Robert Smirke was found collapsed in his study that evening, dead of, uh… [FLIPPING THROUGH PAPERS] Apoplexy. Mm. I–I don’t know how the letter reached the Archives, I mean… Well, I can guess, but…

… he had read Smirke’s last words before he died. (But Martin has seen enough by now to know that there is always a risk for people to not have actually died; on that front, we’re safe, Jon confirmed! Loving Jon’s chuckle: ah yeah, no, Smirke, “very much so” dead from Jonah.)

(Also loved the “[those] who tried to categorise the world with themselves at the centre” shade: yep! That’s West-Eurocentrism and Smirke’s little gang for you!)

- About the way the world works now since the Change, I’m curious about Jon’s wording as “the architecture of [the world’s] suffering”, since it’s echoing the title of Smirke’s statement, “The Architecture of Fear”: my understanding is that right now, the world is mostly running on a loop of people’s fears => feeding and shaping the landscape => which hurts people by turning those realised fears against them => squeezing the fear out of them => feeding the landscape, etc.

What is quite curious is the status of Smirke’s taxonomy in the current world. Jon went off on a rant about how Smirke and people who attempted to classify had been wrong all along because it was meant to fail… while he himself has persistently been using the very same classifications during this very season:

(MAG166) ARCHIVIST: Look, we can talk about it later, we’re– coming to a… “domain of The Buried”, and [STATIC RISES] I would really rather… […] God, I hate The Buried. [DEEP BREATHS] … End recording.

(MAG172) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] “Knowing”, “seeing”… i–it’s not the same thing as… understanding. Every time I try to know what The Web’s plan is, if it can even be called a plan, I see… a hundred thousand events and causes and links, an impossibly intricate pattern of consequences and subtle nudges, but I–I can’t…! … I can’t hold them all in my head at the same time. There’s no way to see the “whole”, the, the point of it all. I can see all the details, but it doesn’t… provide… context or… intention. I suppose The Web doesn’t work in knowledge, not in the same way.

(MAG173) MARTIN: That’s the avatar for this place? ARCHIVIST: Callum Brodie, thirteen years old. He guides the children through their fears of The Dark.

(MAG174) ARCHIVIST: I’m not entirely sure what you were expecting, it’s The Vast. The clue is in the name! MARTIN: Yes, all right…!

(MAG176) MARTIN: … Besides, I thought The Hunt was meant to make you go faster. ARCHIVIST: Depends on the type of pursuit. [INHALE] Besides, the chase isn’t… really the point of this particular place.

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] Bad therapists. Let’s just say it’s the fear of bad therapists, filtered through The Spiral. BASIRA: That’s… a lot more nuance than I’ve gotten used to since everything went wrong. ARCHIVIST: Yes, well. The Spiral is nothing if not insidious. […] You just heard what The Spiral does to people, you can’t… trust her.

“constructed the architecture of [the world’s] suffering” kind of implies that they did manage something, even if it doomed the world? Is it specifically about Jonah using the division into 14 in his incantation? We’ve seen that that one had limitations, since The Extinction also got there anyway… But at the same time, true that at this point, we would still force-apply Smirke’s labels to anything anyway.

- Loved Jon sounding awfully pedantic and (fake-)poetic at the same time:

(MAG183) MARTIN: [SIGH] Bit of a mouthful. ARCHIVIST: Would you prefer I described it as a… “cascading recursion of shifting arrogance and hubristic dead-ends”? [STATIC RISES] [THE DOOR CREAKS OPEN] [CONSTANT HIGH-PITCHED FREQUENCY] HELEN: I would. [FOOTSTEPS] [THE DOOR SHUTS] [STATIC FADES] MARTIN: [SIGH] Hello, Helen.

AND HELEN HAVING THE BEST ENTRANCES. It also cleared up something for me (unless I had already realised it and forgot about it since then): the high-pitched sound we hear when she’s around is the mark of Helen and Michael, not of the corridors – if the door is open or characters are inside of the hallways, we’ll hear some of the usual crackling static, but we heard it rise when Helen arrived and fade when the door shut behind her (and same thing with her departure, it was briefly heard when she opened the door).

- Shots fired, MARTIN PLEASE:

(MAG183) MARTIN: [SIGH] Hello, Helen. Might have guessed you’d be into weird architecture. Very much your area of expertise, no? HELEN: Hmm, depends! Would you describe “petulant poet” as your area of expertise? I am weird architecture.

And Helen went equally incisive on that one, but also UUUUUH WAS IT A SPECIFIC REFERENCE TO PETER’S COMMENT ABOUT MARTIN…

(MAG158) MARTIN: I’m… saying no. I refuse! Game over. [KNIFE CLATTERING ON THE GROUND] PETER: Martin, this is not the time for petulance; there are bigger things at stake, here.

This was the only time someone referred to Martin as (acting) petulant… I mean, Helen not missing one second of MAG158 wouldn’t be surprising (she did tell Jon at the end of MAG157 that she would be enjoying the show), but ;; Little chilling when remembering Elias-Peter-Martin in the Panopticon and Martin refusing to kill Jonah there…

- I was right to suspect that Helen might have been unable to know where Jon&Martin were over their stay at Upton House, and that she wouldn’t be pleased about it!

(MAG183) HELEN: Anyway, where have you been? I’ve been looking for you, but you both just vanished. ARCHIVIST: Aaah… Right, I see…! HELEN: I was so looking forward to catching up after that whole Basira and Daisy thing, but then, pfft! You both disappear. I’d be very keen to know how you managed that little trick. MARTIN: Why, it caught us by surprise too, I mean, we, we actually ended– ARCHIVIST: [FIRMLY] We found somewhere to rest. That’s all. MARTIN: … Oh, yeah. Ah, yes, hm. HELEN: Fine. Be like that. I can appreciate the particular pleasure of a kept secret. ARCHIVIST: I’m sure you can.

* Salesa’s zone seems to be protected as long as you don’t physically find it? I wonder how Annabelle managed to find it, still, since Jon only become aware of that blind spot when they arrived nearby; how did she become aware of it in the first place? Did it feel like a hole in the world’s web?

* Awww for Jon keeping the secret and conveying to Martin that they should keep quiet about it ;w;

* AHAHAHHAHA for Jon’s “aaah”, which was absolutely a mischievous grandpa sound. Jon ready to cause trouble, with a smug smile on his face.

- … I love how Helen could observe that the dynamic of the exchange was slipping out of her control (Jon&Martin knew something that she didn’t, didn’t feel threatened by her, and Jon was amused to keep it out of her reach) and immediately tried to go for the throat again:

(MAG183) HELEN: Anyway. Such a shame about Basira and Daisy. I was really rooting for them to make up. MARTIN: [SPLUTTERS] Since when? What happened to– I mean, how did you put it… a, “a quick shot to the back of her head, and then back in time for tea”, or whatever?

Martin: Forgive and forget? NO, RESENT AND REMEMBER AHAHAHAHAH.

Direct reference to the fact that Helen indeed ~offered her door to Basira~ to quickly get to Daisy and execute her:

(MAG177) HELEN: I can offer a shortcut. Take you right to that murder machine you call a partner. MARTIN: Basira… Jon can’t go through Helen’s doors, we, we couldn’t come with you. HELEN: Basira is a strong, independent woman. She doesn’t need you two holding her hand. Anyway, it’ll be dead quick. Two minutes, door-to-door, quick shot to the back of Daisy’s head, and we’ll be home before you know it!

Laughing that Martin added the tea mention (Martin, you single-track minded tea-aficionado), but I’m glad that he remembered it full well to throw it in her face; it wasn’t even a personal attack towards Martin, it was something Helen tried to do to Basira, I’m glad that Martin is still absolutely offended about it ;w;

- I felt like Jon and Helen had two definitions of “what we want”: Helen potentially talking about quick, short-term wants (even if they turn out to be self-destructive), while Jon was more about well-thought decisions and choices?

(MAG183) HELEN: [EXASPERATED SIGH] Oh, give over. I was obviously just prodding her, trying to make a point. She didn’t want to kill her. ARCHIVIST: What we want doesn’t matter much these days. HELEN: Oh, [RASPBERRY NOISE], nonsense. What we want is the only thing that matters these days. And Basira wanted to join Daisy. ARCHIVIST: She made her choice. HELEN: With your assistance. ARCHIVIST: It was still her choice. HELEN: [SIGH] What a waste. ARCHIVIST: No. [INHALE] It wasn’t.

There have been a lot of discussions about “choices” and “wants” throughout the series (with big moments in MAG092, MAG117 and MAG147), so it felt a bit nice that Jon seems to have reached a point where he could draw a line between both? Jon, Martin and Basira didn’t want this world, don’t want the way it operates and what it inflicts on them; it doesn’t mean they can’t weigh options and make specific decisions – Basira, to honour her promise to Daisy and kill the monster she had become; Jon, to not smite for revenge (and Martin, to face his own domain).

I LOVE HOW JON WAS FIRM ABOUT BASIRA’S CHOICE MATTERING ;w; It once again reminds me of Martin’s line to Simon: “I think our experience of the universe has value. Even if it disappears forever.” (MAG151); the little things, the individual existences and choices, their own stories, still having value in the expanse of the universe…

- Martin! It’s a delight to see him so firm, having faith in Basira although he’s been so worried for her:

(MAG179) ARCHIVIST: Martin, this is what she needs. MARTIN: No, no! I–it’s…! BASIRA: It’ll… MARTIN: It’s completely– […] … We’re not doing this. BASIRA: [SOFTLY] Martin. Please. [SILENCE] MARTIN: … [SIGH] You’d better look after yourself. BASIRA: I will.

(MAG180) ARCHIVIST: How are you doing? About… MARTIN: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I’m… I don’t know. I’m–I’m not sure how to feel; just… pressing on, you know? ARCHIVIST: I do. [SILENCE] MARTIN: Do you think she’ll be okay without us? ARCHIVIST: Oh, she’s made it this far. MARTIN: … Yeah. I just worry.

(MAG183) MARTIN: Basira is… She’s going to be okay.

And then pointing out that he was involved in the discussion too and that he wanted to know what the other two knew already and not be kept out of the loop:

(MAG183) HELEN: Oh. Is she? Do you want me to tell you what she’s been up to while you were “resting”? Where she is right now? ARCHIVIST: You don’t need to. I already know. MARTIN: I don’t. [STATIC RISES] ARCHIVIST: She’s currently moving through, uh… “The Void.” [STATIC FADES] Hungry shadows drifting in the dark. She’s been there a long time now, struggling to find the path. MARTIN: But she will? ARCHIVIST: I think so. HELEN: Yeah, she does always seem to manage, doesn’t she? It’s impressive. Although a little bit… tempting at times.

I’m not absoooolutely sure about Basira’s status: is “the void” a space between domains, or is it a Dark domain that Basira is having trouble finding the exit of, since unlike Jon, she can’t just “know” the paths? I suspect the latter but I’m not 100% certain. If it’s indeed The Dark, that’s a close to home one for her, since she had a few brushes with it over the course of the show – the Section 31 expedition to save Callum Brodie, leading to Rayner’s death and Basira’s decision to quit the police, her research to find out more about the People’s Church of the Divine Host (as shown in season 3) and her overall worry about them, which allowed Elias to convince her that they would attempt another ritual in Ny-Ålesund, leading to her discovering what “Rayner” was and travelling there with Jon, finding Manuela and the Dark Sun mid-season 4…

;ww; for Jon having faith in Basira, too… And the fact that once again, Basira has it a bit rougher than Jon&Martin (Jon had already told Martin that it had been a difficult journey for her, before they reunited). Helen does have a point that Basira seems to manage to find her way out in general: she had successfully escaped The Unknowing on her own, she had survived The Flesh’s attack on the Institute, she had pursued Daisy in the apocalypse… Basira has already gone through Helen’s corridors (offscreen at the end of MAG143, to return to the Institute), I’m YIKES about Helen implying that it would be “tempting” to grab her. (… But at the same time, why hasn’t she done it already, if she is capable of doing it? It might be a bit more complicated than that?)

- … I love Martin, I love that he was RIGHT to point out that Helen had just waltzed in to try and steer chaos:

(MAG183) MARTIN: Look, Helen, what do you even want? Okay, you keep turning up like a bad penny and, honestly, it, it seems like it’s… it’s just to be a dick! HELEN: Gasp! I am trying to be friends, Martin. Forever is a long time. And I occasionally like to have some company that isn’t… screaming. MARTIN: … What do you even think friendship is? HELEN: I dunno, do I? The only personhood I have is from someone I ate.

It feels like Helen has REALLY tried hard to make up for the weeks(?) she couldn’t find Jon and Martin? She went extra-hard on them: first with Basira, then implying to Jon that he had manipulated her into killing Daisy, then pointing out that Basira was not safe at the moment and still at risk of falling prey to other Fears (including herself), then trying to mock Martin about his domain, trying to guilt-trip Jon for not having told him about it yet, and when she finally managed to get Martin shocked and upset… job done, byebye.

Is it that she’s trying to get Jon so riled up he ends her? “Helen” used to like Jon and to turn to him (MAG101: “Helen liked you so… there’s a lot to consider. But I will help you leave.” / MAG115: “Before, talking to you made Helen feel better.”), before she was absolutely Down With Doors And Murders (MAG146: “We do what we need to do when it comes to feeding, don’t we? … Don’t we, Archivist?”), is it a remnant of that? Or is it really just an attempt at confusing Jon and Martin further, feeding from them Spiral-style?

- More about Martin’s domain later, but the reveal was BRUTAL, and yet not coming out of nowhere; we knew he had one, we knew he had almost been trapped in the Lonely house in MAG170 and the question was whether or not it had been (/was still) his domain once Martin got freed from it, but there was also the question of how Martin was able to walk in the apocalypse unharmed (was it due to Jon’s proximity, Martin’s connection to The Eye as an assistant, etc.), and Basira’s own status after Daisy’s death… so, yay! Answers and clarifications, and as usual, nothing feeling like a plot-twist, just things that make sense, and that we already had most of the information about!

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: Martin… MARTIN: Are there people, Jon? ARCHIVIST: What? MARTIN: Are there people in my domain? ARCHIVIST: Not many. [SILENCE] MARTIN: Do you need to do your… your thing? Make a statement about whatever’s going on in there? … I could use a moment to think. ARCHIVIST: Sure thing. Yeah, I–I’ll… [INHALE] Yeah. [EXHALE] [BAG JOSTLING] [DEPARTING FOOTSTEPS]

Sobbing a bit about Martin’s priorities (“Are there people, Jon?”) and Martin asking for a quick me-time. It wasn’t ice-cold, Martin turned it into something useful for both of them (expecting that Jon would have to give his statement anyway), but aouch, he sounded absolutely shattered inside while blank on the surface…

- Yes, yes, yes, reminder that Smirke’s categorisation is arbitrary and just like the Doctor’s theory, sometimes just doesn’t work, because it’s trying to force-apply rules and a classification over something that resists it (and because the classification is not perfect from the start), but hey, that’s most theories and classifications out there anyway, so: Escher reference, the functioning of the Tower reminding me of the Great Twisting, and the reasonings sometimes reminding me of Gabriel’s work (MAG126), plus Helen popping by – it was Spiral stuff, right?

Well! I felt like it looks like Spiral, but the Doctor’s fears by themselves:

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: “But it is not the fall that terrifies him, not the pain of the impacts, but the fact that none of them should be there. That it doesn’t make sense, and it must make sense, there must be a system, there must be, because if there isn’t– [THE BODY LANDS WETLY] He lands with a heavy smack onto rough limestone, and lies still, his body twisted and broken. He knows it will knit itself back together, slowly, painfully, as it always has before. But the thought of starting over, of composing yet another theory, fills him with a deep dread.”

… are more something I would identify as Eye (fear of a truth) and Hunt (fear of having to return to the start, to have to elaborate a new theory from scratch, again and again, of being trapped forever)?

It was really reminiscent of Smirke thinking back over his life, his hubris and the pride of being the one who would have found the answer, to the point where he would reject reality if it didn’t match his taxonomy (refusing to, well… do what you do with a theory: change, or evolve and perfect it when its flaws are pointed out):

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “I believed then, as I still believe now, that these places I saw were the Powers themselves, expressed in their truest form, far more entirely than any ‘secret book’ can claim. And if, as I came to believe, the Dread Powers were themselves places of a sort, then surely with the right space, the right architecture, they could be contained. Channelled. Harnessed. So yes. Hubris. Not simply in that, I suppose, but in believing that those I brought into my confidence shared my lofty goals. […] Would you have me separate The Corruption between insects, dirt and disease? To, to divide the fungal bloom from the maggot? No. No, I… stand by my work. And thus, we must conclude that the only explanation is a new Power, created from what was once others, yet also distinct. And if such change is possible, how then can any “true balance” be achieved through immutable, unchanging stone…?”

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: “If they are feeling very confident, they may lean down and stretch a curious tongue beyond their chipped teeth and rotten gums, desperate to add another sense to their observances – more evidence to support their declaration of what the world must be. […] They must simply study and learn, if they are to escape the labyrinth. They will be the first to escape. The one who sits in the central chamber cannot remember his name. But he knows that people called him “doctor”. He made sure of that; to ignore it would have been the greatest disrespect, and he will not be disrespected. […] He knows, for a fact, that this is the central chamber because he is the one sat here. […] They’ll all remember him forever, the first to escape the Monument. His name will be hallowed with the greats: Doctor, uh… Doctor…”

Same old pride, Leitner knew that well too (MAG080: “But I think, in my heart, I dreamed of my work becoming known. That ‘The Library of Jurgen Leitner’ would stand as a symbol of courage and protection. Hubris.”) and Gerry didn’t have many nice things to say about it (MAG111: “Flamsteed, Smirke, Leitner. Idiots who destroyed themselves chasing a secret that wasn’t worth knowing.”). Loved how the statements came for Smirke’s life and was absolutely ruthless about it – but maayyybe a bit too ruthless, even? Jon didn’t express much sympathy for “fools like Smirke” either, and this is a rare case in season 5 where I find that the statement was a bit lacking in empathy for… people who were technically victims. I mean! Insufferable pedantic academics sure are a type, they’re really not having the worst life out there, but it makes me feel a bit weird, with season 5’s overall tone, that the episode had that vibe of “serves them well, they’re insufferable” about people who were technically still trapped in a domain and suffering from it?

… I still laughed a lot about the Doctor vs. Professor rivalry and how they solved their argument:

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: “The doctor that lies on the floor has recovered, just enough to laugh. ‘You’re still working on mineral theory? How painfully outdated.’ A flash of genuine fear crosses the face of the professor at this dismissal, before he picks up his chunk of granite, and begins to smash the doctor’s head in, yet again.” [SOUNDS OF BRUTAL PEER REVIEW]

Academia unleashed.

(- OKAY, I HAVE TO CONFESS that when the character could only remember his title as “Doctor”, with Smirke having been mentioned earlier, my mind just jumped to Doctor Fanshawe… ;; He had left a strong impression on me, okay.)

- ;w; Over the fact that Martin got his me-time and that it was enough: he was clearly tense, but he came back with direct questions and knew what he wanted cleared up…

(MAG183) MARTIN: Finished? ARCHIVIST: Yes. MARTIN: Good. … I need you to explain something to me. ARCHIVIST: All right.

- I can’t believe that Martin Global Heartthrob Blackwood made The Eye FALL FOR HIM too:

(MAG183) MARTIN: How do I have a domain? That doesn’t make any sense. ARCHIVIST: It’s like I said. [INHALE] Everything here is either watcher, or watched. MARTIN: [SIGH] Subject or object, yes, I know, we’ve been over this. ARCHIVIST: Well, you’re a watcher, Martin. You worked for the Institute, you read statements, The Eye is… fond of you. You’re not getting thrown into your own personal hell, which means…

Jane, Peter, Simon, Elias, Salesa, Annabelle, now Beholding – do you have any limit, Martin.

!! I’m excited over the fact that Martin’s entanglement with Beholding stuff was acknowledged! Comparatively, Melanie had read 2 statements (MAG086, MAG106) and Basira 1 (MAG112). Meanwhile, Martin had read 12; plus, although Tim, Melanie, Martin and Basira had taken (… or tried to take) one live statement each in MAG100, Martin had also taken 3 additional full statements:

MAG084, Adrian Weiss (Corruption) MAG088, Enrique MacMillan (Buried) MAG090, Ross Davenport (Flesh) MAG095, Luca Moretti (Slaughter) MAG098, Doctor Algernon Moss (Dark) MAG100 (live), Lynne Hammond (Desolation) MAG104 (live), Tim Stoker (Stranger) MAG108, Adonis Biros (Lonely) MAG110, Alexia Crawley (Web) MAG134, Adelard Dekker (Extinction) MAG138, Robert Smirke (Eye) MAG142 (live), Jess Tyrell (Buried, Eye) MAG144, Gary Boylan (Extinction) MAG149, Judith O’Neill (Extinction) MAG151 (live), Simon Fairchild (Vast) MAG156, Adelard Dekker (Extinction)

With Simon highlighting that Beholding had compelled him through Martin:

(MAG151) SIMON: Hm! No wonder I’m so sympathetic to The Lonely. You know: this really is a place for self-discovery, isn’t it? [CHUCKLE] “Statement ends”, I suppose! MARTIN: Uh… I’m sorry? SIMON: Oh! Nothing, just my own hubris. I should have known. When I came here, I said to myself: “Simon,” I said, “you’re going to answer this young man’s questions, but you’re not going to give The Watcher a statement. You’re better than that.” But it’s a hard one to resist, isn’t it? You get in the flow of talking about yourself, and it all just… tumbles out. MARTIN: Mm, does seem like it.

Elias might have been eyeing him as back-up Archivist, too (although since then, we’ve learned of his bet with Peter which would have already been running at the time – it might have been that Elias mostly wanted to ensure that Martin wouldn’t die during the Unknowing because he’d be needing him afterwards):

(MAG116) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] What about Martin? MARTIN: What about me? ARCHIVIST: He should stay behind. MARTIN: What?! ELIAS: Really. MARTIN: Why? ARCHIVIST: Too many people might attract attention. MARTIN: No, no, I can help, I’ve been reading the statements! ELIAS: … Quite right, er, probably best he does stay behind. BASIRA: What, so you have a backup if Jon doesn’t make it? ELIAS: I’m sure that won’t be necessary.

Martin did a lot of research, read these statements aloud, took live statements, was hinted as a potential replacement; tape recorders have spawned around him like they do with Jon, even outside of statements, and Martin had been exceptionally kind towards them on multiple occasions; there had been that little moment of Martin somehow knowing that Jon was alive back in season 3 (MAG088: “It’s the not knowing, you know? I mean, Jon’s still alive. Not sure why, but I’m sure of that. But Sasha, I…”), shortly before we had learned about Jon’s own Knowing powers developing; we don’t know why and whether that was Beholding or The Web or something else, but Martin had been able to know how to get Jon out of the Coffin in season 4:

(MAG134) PETER: What does puzzle me, though, and I mean that genuinely, is… why you were piling tape recorders onto the coffin, while Jon was in there. [PAUSE] It’s a question, Martin, it’s– it’s not an accusation. MARTIN: I don’t know. And I just… felt like it might help. He’s always recording, I thought… it–it might help him… find his way out. PETER: Interesting. Were you compelled? MARTIN: [SULLEN] … I don’t know. … M–maybe? I–I, I definitely wanted to do it… PETER: But? MARTIN: I’m… I’m not sure where the idea came from. PETER: You should watch out for that. Could be something dangerous. MARTIN: Sure.

… And Peter’s whole plan relied on the fact that Martin was initially touched by Beholding:

(MAG134) PETER: [BREATHES] I’m still working out some of the kinks. But I believe I have a plan. However, it requires this place, and it requires someone touched by The Beholding. Elias was, perhaps unsurprisingly, unwilling to help.

(MAG158) PETER: It’s quite simple, really…! I want to use the powers of this place to learn about The Extinction: what it’s doing, where it’s manifesting. Then we can stop it. MARTIN: And you need me for this? PETER: Correct! Without a connection to The Eye, any attempt to use it would likely end… very messily indeed! But thankfully, it just so happens that you hold such a connection. MARTIN: So that’s it… Both “lonely” and “watching”. PETER: You must admit you’re the perfect candidate. MARTIN: I suppose I am.

Beholding baby!! Now coming in an additional Lonely flavour.

- Mmmmmmmm… The way Jon put it, it seems that Beholding is consciously rewarding its servant and:

* It could be Jon trying to make sense of something else, that he doesn’t understand? Gertrude didn’t think that the Fears were able to “think” at all (MAG145: “Sometimes, I think They understand us as… little as we understand Them. We don’t think like They do.” “I’m not actually convinced they “think” at all.”); reward&affection could be primitive enough feelings for a blob of terrors to work out (Martin fed Beholding as an assistant by reading statements => Beholding grants him things in the hope of getting fed even more?), but I don’t know, I can’t help but wonder if this is just Jon humanising the Fears a bit too much? It’s curious that Beholding got “fond” of Martin precisely when Jon himself fell in love with him – could Jon’s feelings have influenced Martin’s position in the apocalypse, could Jon be having a bit more power over the landscape than he realises?

* … If Beholding is rewarding its servants, that doesn’t bode well for Elias. WELL, no, I mean: it might mean that Elias is having a Great Time as a Beholding acolyte, which means it doesn’t bode well for my desire to see Elias get absolutely wrecked and wrong about being the “king of a ruined world”. I want him to have miscalculated, damnit! x’D

- I’m having so many feelings over Martin himself being unsure of what he wants, whether it’s better to know or to remain ignorant…

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: It’s like I said. [INHALE] Everything here is either watcher, or watched. MARTIN: [SIGH] Subject or object, yes, I know, we’ve been over this. ARCHIVIST: Well, you’re a watcher, Martin. You worked for the Institute, you read statements, The Eye is… fond of you. You’re not getting thrown into your own personal hell, which means… MARTIN: [QUIETLY] That one of them belongs to me. But that’s… Ho–how can I be a “Watcher”? I, I didn’t even know it existed! ARCHIVIST: But you’ve suspected for a while now, haven’t you? MARTIN: Maybe? But that’s not “watching”! ARCHIVIST: Do you want me to tell you about it? MARTIN: No. … Yes. N–no, no, I don’t know, I don’t know. [SIGH]

Is it a remnant of his discussions with Tim in season 3? He’s basically gone the reverse of Tim about it:

(MAG098) MARTIN: Y’know, I think he thinks that the distance keeps us safe, you know? Like, like, if he just makes sure that we’re not involved, we’re somehow fine. TIM: He’s an idiot. Look, we didn’t know what that door was, and it still trapped us. Ignorance isn’t going to save anyone. MARTIN: No, I mean, you’re right, I guess.

Martin has seen enough to know now that ignorance doesn’t protect anyone, but also that knowledge can be used as a weapon – that the horrors are just made to hurt. I feel like, in his situation, noping out of Jon’s statements was one of his only ways to assert his boundaries (which had been denied from him — and from others — for a long time)? But here, the situation is different; it’s about Martin’s own involvement, he knew the knowledge would hurt anyway… but it’s also his load to bear? To at least face what is happening, since he’s benefitting from it, since he’s been made complicit (without ever wanting to)? It still goes perfectly with the exploration of exploitative and oppressive systems: Martin, unknowingly and unwillingly inflicting hurt, still being in a better situation than others… while not being directly responsible for it, not wanting to benefit from it. It really makes me want to see Jon&Martin find a way to reverse or improve things, to get people out of the domains or giving them the keys to escape them, and I don’t know if I can even hope something about this ;; (On the Jon&Martin front, things are so good; but it still feels so unfair for… everyone else.)

- Martin having a domain and being classified as a “watcher” finally explains why he hadn’t been impacted by the apocalypse since the Change! He had been able to get out of the domains’ grasp even when he wasn’t around Jon (he had fallen behind at the end of MAG163, he wandered around in the Web’s theatre, he left Jon alone for most of the statements), and there was still the question of… how he was still surviving without eating, and at the same time wasn’t (at least as far as we knew) trapped in a domain:

(MAG161) MARTIN: [MIRTHLESS HUFF] What about food? ARCHIVIST: What about it? When’s the last time you thought to eat, o–or even felt hungry? MARTIN: [FAINT] What…? Wha… Uh… I don’t know. ARCHIVIST: No. Whatever is sustaining us now doesn’t need us to eat. MARTIN: That… that can’t be possible– ARCHIVIST: It’s a new world, Martin, the natural laws are whatever they want them to be. And I suspect they don’t much care to keep humanity fed and watered.

I was wondering if it was Jon’s influence, or Martin being “trapped” in Jon’s domain, and Jon had also alluded to the possibility that they were themselves trapped in their quest towards the Panopticon:

(MAG169) ARCHIVIST: “Free” doesn’t really exist in this place. MARTIN: Apart from us. ARCHIVIST: I suppose. I–in a sense, though… [CHUCKLING] how much of that is because we are trapped in our own quest to– MARTIN: Okay, let’s, let’s not dive into another… ontological debate right now, not here. ARCHIVIST: Fair enough.

And Jon had even specifically told Martin that he had a domain, shortly before Martin got almost imprisoned in the Lonely house:

(MAG167) ARCHIVIST: We all have a domain here, Martin. The place that feeds us. MARTIN: Oh. [PAUSE] Where’s yours? ARCHIVIST: [MIRTHLESS CHUCKLE] I mean, we’re… traveling towards it. MARTIN: Oh! Right, obviously. [CHUCKLING] Duh. Hum… What about me? ARCHIVIST: … Would you… like me to… ? MARTIN: No, no. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. ARCHIVIST: … Okay!

(MAG170) ARCHIVIST: I, I didn’t want to… look too ha–, I–I–I promised I wouldn’t… know you, and, and with the fog in all–all the rooms, I’ll, I just, I lost y–, I… I–I’m sorry. MARTIN: It’s okay. ARCHIVIST: … No, I… I tried to use the… to know where you were, but… it was… You–you were faint. It was so strange, i–it took me so long just to find you…! [RUSTLING OF CLOTHES] MARTIN: Jon, it’s… okay. I promise it’s okay. This place tried, it really did, and honestly I… I wanted to believe it. But I didn’t. ARCHIVIST: This… “place”, i–it… [STATIC] My god…! […] I, I just… I wanted to make sure that you knew what this place was. MARTIN: It’s The Lonely, Jon. It’s me. ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] Not anymore. MARTIN: Hm! No. [LONG INHALE, EXHALE] No…! Not anymore.

And alright, that finally answers it: the Lonely house wasn’t his domain, wasn’t meant to be (but he was susceptible to it, got almost trapped in it as a “watched” although he eventually managed to reject and break free from it). His own domain was elsewhere, and Martin himself was amongst the “watchers” all along; Martin is living a bit like Helen in this apocalypse, having a fixed domain, but able to navigate elsewhere.

Aouch for Martin, since he had been encouraging Jon to smite domains’ rulers as soon as he discovered that Jon could do it; it was already murky territory for Jon himself (if the “avatars” and “monsters” just deserve to die, what about Jon?), it was awful with Callum (Martin himself drew the line at smiting a kid)… but now, we know it was directly including him, too, and that he had been fed through people’s pain all along. No wonder Helen had encouraged the smiting so hard, if she already knew they were kind of neighbours…

… Double-aouch for Jon, because he had offered twice the option for Martin to stay elsewhere, permanently:

(MAG170) ARCHIVIST: M–Martin, if you… did; i–if you wanted to forget… a–all of it, stay here and just… escape. I… I would understand. MARTIN: … N–no…! It’s comforting here, leaving all those… painful memories behind, but… It’s not a good comfort, it’s… I–it’s the kind that makes you fade, makes you… dim and… distant.

(MAG181) ARCHIVIST: I’m sorry, I… It would have been nice to stay. MARTIN: [WISTFULLY] Yeah… I’d almost forgotten what it was like, you know? A bit of peace, eh! ARCHIVIST: I mean, you could have… MARTIN: No, don’t say it, Jon. You know I never would. I–I can’t just “forget” about all the people out here! Besides, I’d rather be trapped in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with you than spend one more moment in paradise with her.

And Jon probably didn’t know what Martin’s domain was exactly, back then, since we heard the knowing static kick in when he described the domain in this episode? But he probably knew, already, that Martin having a domain didn’t mean that he belonged to it as a victim, but as a ruler, and that it would hurt Martin so much. (“No one gets what they deserve. Not in this place. They just get whatever hurts them the most! … Even me.”, indeed ;;)

- I AM HAVING SO MANY FEELINGS OVER THE DESCRIPTION OF MARTIN’S DOMAIN…

(MAG183) [STATIC RISES] ARCHIVIST: It’s a small domain. A swirling mix of The Eye and The Lonely. Inhabited by a few lost souls whose fear is not of their isolation or their agonies, but that no-one… will ever know of them. That they shall suffer in silence, and be mourned by nobody. That’s why you can’t really see it. It’s why even if we do travel through it, you won’t be able to see… any of the people trapped there.

… It reminds me so much of what Martin probably experienced in his own flat, when Prentiss besieged him for two weeks and Martin was unable to contact anyone, and nobody came to check on him? Did Martin’s domain grow from his own old fears…?

It also reminds me a bit of Naomi’s brush with The Lonely:

(MAG013) NAOMI: The fog seemed to follow me as went and seemed to swirl around with a strange, deliberate motion. You’ll probably think me an idiot, but it felt almost malicious. I don’t know what it wanted, but somehow I was sure it wanted something. There was no presence to it, though, it wasn’t as though another person was there, it was… It made me feel utterly forsaken.

Overall, the description is extremely… typical from what we’ve seen of The Lonely: there was Naomi’s misadventure, Ethan disappeared and nobody even claimed his backpack (MAG048), Yetunde Uthman had “disappeared a year ago. And nobody noticed” (MAG150)…

(But from that description alone, it doesn’t sound very Beholding, despite what Jon said? I’m curious about the Eye aspect of it…)

- Can’t believe that Martin canonically turns out to be the Lonely Eyes love(hate)child, gdi. It really was a custody battle in MAG158.

- Extra-sad that Jon warned Martin that there was meaning in the fact that Martin didn’t know anything about his domain, and wouldn’t even be able to see people in there… It’s just so cruel, both for them, and for Martin, to learn that he’s been unknowingly contributing to their misery (because they fed him and he didn’t even know about them)?

Pretty sure that Martin will stay with Jon to hear that statement, at the very least ;; (Or could he ask for something more? We’ve seen Jon extracting Breekon’s statement in MAG128, I wonder if he could put something into someone’s head like Elias had done, allowing Martin to give that statement himself…)

- I’m wondering about Jon’s own domain, too, now! He said they were heading towards it, so it’s either the Panopticon, the Institute or the Archives, or a mix of those… or something close to it, on their way to it. If Martin’s domain is a mix of Lonely&Eye, is Jon’s pure Eye? A mix of the 14/15? A Web&Eye mix, given Jon’s own personal fears?

I know that Jonny (lovingly) called out the obsessive classification in this episode through Jon, who went off on a rant about the “neat little boxes”, but he’s still using the Smirke classification this season:

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: It’s a small domain. A swirling mix of The Eye and The Lonely.

(AND IN THIS VERY EPISODE… Jon…)

- On the one hand: feeling directly called out by Jon’s rant about how the divisions between avatars/monsters/humans/victims wasn’t and isn’t working, that reality escapes that division because it’s much more complicated than this:

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: [HEATED] Avatar isn’t a thing, Martin, it’s not–! It’s just a word. A word used by… fools like Smirke to try and sort everything into neat little boxes, to reduce the messy spray of human fear into a checklist: Human, avatar, monster, victim. Only now, now, there’s a binary. There’s finally a clear dividing line and… [SIGH] Well. I’m sorry you’re not happy with which side you’ve ended up on.

(It felt especially relevant with Callum Brodie: could we really tell that he was an “avatar” when he was still a freshly wounded kid, even if a tormentor himself?)

On the other hand, well, that was still a useful distinction to have to identify servants, and mostly, I’m not extremely convinced by Jon arguing that there is now a Clear BinaryTM in the new world, between the “watchers” and the “watched”, since:

1°) Helen herself explained the dichotomy to Martin (MAG166: “And so, there are now exactly two roles available in this new world of ours: the watcher, and the watched. Subject, and object. Those who are feared, and those who are afraid.”). Given that she mostly tries to confuse them… that’s a red flag.

2°) Despite Jon defending that binary, we’ve run into plenty of examples of things… not fitting into that new classification. He himself acknowledged that Basira’s status wasn’t established yet; we’ve seen Salesa, protected by his camera from the chaos; Jon has been unable to know about Georgie and Melanie, only hypothesising that they might in what-used-to-be-London; Martin, a watcher, could still have fallen prey to another domain… That’s already a lot of special cases around that “clear dividing line”…

3°) Somethingsomethingsomething about how it’s in Beholding’s best interest that Jon believes in a clear, unchangeable, dividing line which serves Beholding’s own interests. If things feel fixed and unchangeable, then there is no point trying to fight against it or find a loophole, right?

Given that a Watcher can get trapped in another domain… does that mean that it could be the case for Jon, too? We got a threat of it in MAG172, when Jon began to give the statement of the following act – if Martin hadn’t interrupted him, would Jon have ever been able to stop?

- Confirmation that Daisy had “trapped” Basira in her Hunt! I was suspecting it since Jon’s first wording:

(MAG164) MARTIN: Is Basira alive? ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] MARTIN: Is she… in… o–one of these places? [STATIC RISES] ARCHIVIST: She’s alive. Out there, not… trapped in a–a hellscape, but… moving. [STATIC DECREASES] Hunting. She’s… she’s looking for Daisy. She’s a few steps behind.

(MAG183) MARTIN: … What about Daisy? Or Basira? ARCHIVIST: Daisy carved through the domains of others. Basira… well… In a very real way she was a sufferer in Daisy’s domain. Maybe the only one. Hunting, following, hurting. Now Daisy’s dead, she’s… free. Sort of. She’s inherited something of Daisy’s ability to move through the other domains. For now, she’ll… feed off what she sees in them. As to whether the Eye ultimately gives her a domain of her own… I don’t know yet.

* And now, Basira seems to have a peculiar status… Is it because she killed Daisy? Is it because she killed the ruler of her domain? Jon explained that a ruler’s death didn’t change much for the domain itself, but maybe it operates differently if a victim kills a ruler (… they become the new ruler?)

* Another reminder that Jon cannot see the future.

* Big Eyeball didn’t immediately give Basira a domain, but Martin got one. I see that favouritism, uh. (Joke, it does make sense given how Martin recorded a lot of statements and had worked at the Institute for years and years.)

- I love how Jon managed to explain why he hadn’t told Martin everything, and how Martin… indeed agreed that Jon had been mostly trying to respect his wishes about not knowing ;; It’s true that Martin had been adamant about not hearing much of the horror:

(MAG163) MARTIN: J–Jon, enough! Enough! [STATIC FADES] … Please don’t tell me these things. ARCHIVIST: I… I’m sorry, I– There’s just so much! There’s so much, Martin, and I know all of it, I can see all of it, and I– It’s filling me up, I need to let it out! MARTIN: I’m sorry, but tough. Okay? Tha–that’s not what I’m here for. [VOICE IN THE DISTANCE: “No… No!”] MARTIN: I can’t be that for you, I–I just can’t.

(MAG167) MARTIN: Oh! Right, obviously. [CHUCKLING] Duh. Hum… What about me? ARCHIVIST: … Would you… like me to… ? MARTIN: No, no. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. ARCHIVIST: … Okay!

(MAG183) MARTIN: You didn’t tell her any of that. ARCHIVIST: I didn’t think the metaphysics of her place in the fear ecosystem was something she’d be particularly interested in at that moment. MARTIN: Fair. But you seem very reluctant to tell anyone any of this stuff. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] I did try, right at the start, but y–you didn’t seem to want to talk about it, so I didn’t push it. It’s hard, I have so much knowledge but… how do I decide what people want me to share, and what they never want to know?. MARTIN: I guess that makes sense.

But Martin seems to acknowledge that indeed, Jon had been trying his best about it…

(And now, I wonder if there is still other stuff that Jon hadn’t told Martin, in the same vein…)

- First choice for Martin:

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] I was going to bring it up at the crossroads. Inside. I only just realised we would be going this way. […] MARTIN: I guess that makes sense. … So what did you mean about the crossroads? When you were talking to Helen. ARCHIVIST: It’s a maze in there, something between a, a Rubik’s Cube and a Magic Eye picture. I can find us the way through easily enough but… well. For us, there are two ways out. Two paths to London. MARTIN: What are the choices? ARCHIVIST: One would be a long, winding route, we’d see a lot of horrors, but remain… personally untouched. MARTIN: And the other is my domain. ARCHIVIST: Eventually. It’s a shorter path, with faces we know along the way. Including Helen. MARTIN: I thought Helen was her domain, wi–with all the doors and that? ARCHIVIST: She is, but she has a… position within this pseudo-landscape, like any other. MARTIN: O–okay. [INHALE] So, so, I mean, I suppose we’ve got to do that one, right? ARCHIVIST: We don’t have to, w–we–we could just– MARTIN: What, what? We could, we could dodge around it? Take the path of denial? I guess, but… what is it you keep harping on about? “The journey will be the journey”? [SIGH] I mean… It’s pretty obvious that this one is my journey.

! Glad that Martin didn’t hesitate and immediately understood what it was about – that it mattered to do it that way, that Martin had to face it, that this is how this world works. No hesitation about it. He got a demonstration with Basira, but still, he was quick to accept it.

I’m expecting a few episodes before Martin’s domain, so… with the overall rhythm of the season, they might reach the Institute by MAG189? And Hill Top Road during Act III?

- Since Jon mentioned that the path Martin ended up choosing had:

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: Eventually. It’s a shorter path, with faces we know along the way. Including Helen.

I wonder about those “faces we know”, since we’re running super-low on ~avatars~. Different options:

* Institute staff. Rosiiiie?

* Melanie&Georgie. A bit unlikely, given that Jon had trouble knowing what was the deal with them, I feel?

* Since Helen will be there, people who gave live statements to Jon and were trapped in his nightmare zoo. I’m mostly thinking about this one, especially since Jon’s “No one gets what they deserve. Not in this place. They just get whatever hurts them the most! … Even me.”… (And if it’s about an internal and metaphorical journey, I feel like having to face people that Jon hurt, first unaware (he didn’t know about the nightmare zoo when he signed to become the Head Archivist), then partially unwilling but still doing it (he felt guilty about it but still hid it, still chose self-preservation instead of warning the others about it), would have its place…)

- In the same fashion, who is trapped in Martin’s domain? Unrelated people? Live statement-givers? (;; I’m thinking of Jess, who had the misfortune of being compelled by Jon and of giving a statement to Martin…)

… Given that it’s confirmed to be a “journey” for Martin too, I can’t help but squint at Jon’s wording, because. “Faces we know”. The only thing we know of Martin’s father is the fact that he looks like Martin… (MAG118: “The thing is, though, Martin: if you ever do want to know exactly what your father looked like… all you have to do is look in a mirror~ The resemblance is quite uncanny. The face of the man she hates, who destroyed her life, watching over her, feeding her, cleaning her, looking down on her with such pity–”)

- I’ll be having Annabelle’s words stuck in my head (ha) for a long time but:

(MAG181) ANNABELLE: Don’t worry, Martin. We’ll meet again. Hopefully when you’re feeling a little bit more… open-minded…! MARTIN: I wouldn’t count on it. ANNABELLE: I would. MARTIN: [SIGH]

… Was it a reference to Martin learning about his own domain and about how the world operates, his place in it? I think that Martin might be even more resolved to turn the world back at whatever cost, now that he knows that he is himself sustained by fear…

(LISTEN, THIS IS ABSOLUTELY HOW WEB!MARTIN CAN STILL WI–)

- !! Footage of Martin saying “I love you” for the first time ;w; I love how it was the thing he was certain about, both a slight decompressing joke and a true statement, a reminder that he has faith in Jon, that he has something to cling to?

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: If you’re sure. MARTIN: … I’m sure I love you. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: I love you too. [FABRIC RUSTLES] Let’s go.

(He had mentioned that he was “in love” in MAG170, I’m happy to hear him telling Jon, too!) And the fabric RUSTLED, SO LONG AND SO HARD, AND AT LEAST TWICE!! I love how the tension from right before and after the statement had faded by the end of the episode ;w; Rollercoaster of little emotions…

MAG184’s makes me think of something Leitner had said (more lore about the Fearpocalypse?), and of Vast and Corruption… with very different vibes. If Corruption, and keeping in mind that Jon has announced that they will be encountering “faces [they] know along the way”, it cooould contain Jordan Kennedy, the exterminator from Pest Control…? Especially given that both Jon and Martin had met him (Jon took his live statement, and Martin pleaded offscreen for him to get them the jar of Prentiss’s ashes to comfort Jon).

(Yessss, I am absolutely aware of the irony of still using Smirke’s categorisation after another episode in which we were told again that it is bollocks, but if Jon himself still occasionally labels the domain as one of the 15, so can I ♥)

#long post/#tma liveblog #mag183 #tma season 5 #the magnus archives #tma spoilers/

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csykora · 5 years ago

Link

[A tabby cat curled up in the middle of a bubble hockey board. Or you, being comfortable in an athletic community that’s good enough for you]

Hiiiiii! I’ve been looking at ice hockey and it seems a cool sport and something that I might want to do as a hobby. Only Im disabled. Do you think I could still do the thing? Do you have ideas on how to start doing the thing? Ive often found it hard to do sports because coaches or trainers don’t know shit about disability and so have no clue how to teach you things or what you may or may not be capable of and telling them is useless because they make assumptions about your body and gah. Cheers

Hey—

Yes. Do the thing. Please go do it! I am not your coach, not your trainer, only friendly local bone witch—which I am very annoyed to have to say because you are a great athlete to work with.

Can I point out a couple things you just said?

You’re offering to do a trainer’s homework for them.

The early game didn’t have coaches. People milled on and off in whatever situations they felt like. Coaches and trainers came onto the scene so that someone was keeping track of who was actually good at what, when they needed support, and how to use them to best effect. That’s their whole gig.

Talking to folks on this blog, I’ve learned lots of people have this impression that capital-A Athletes have some factory-settings-standard body, any deviation a disaster (and they themselves can’t be athletes because they don’t.)

I think it’s very useful to smash this idea. Every athlete is a grab bag of weaknesses and weirdnesses, from old injuries down to handedness. Every coach longs to have three right-shot defensemen, and has made peace with the fact they’re not going to get them. Their job is to play with all the mismatched pieces they do have until they fit into a team.

If you present a coach or trainer with information about your abilities, and they don’t want to use that information, the problem you got right there is a shit coach.

Despite what the National League believes, there are more than 32 coaches in the world.

Throw a stick up here and you’ll hit another amateur coach. When we’re little, if we get a shit coach or PE teacher, we get stuck. That does real and lasting harm, which I am happy to go on at length about, but to flip it around:

Now, you are a big Zee, who wants to learn to play as a hobby, with the goal of having fun. That’s a powerful place to be.

I won’t say there aren’t stakes: you could get hurt, physically or emotionally. Sharing information about your body with other people to try to keep yourself from getting hurt all the time can be hard. Playing can make you feel physically accomplished and capable in your body, which is a deep need I think we all have, so having to back away if a team does turn out to be shit is hard. So I don’t say “you can always quit a team” lightly, but…there is no threat if you quit a shit team, no one (who matters) will get mad or make you go back.That means you can advocate for yourself, and if a reasonable shot at advocacy reveals that a coach isn’t just unfamiliar with how to do their job for someone with your disability but uninterested in doing their damn job for a disabled person, you can wave them farewell and find another.

Now, our goal is for you to find a good trainer, who just needs to be given information about what you (not someone with the ‘same’ condition, but you specifically) have got going on.

I’m going to tell you to look up an adult learn-to-skate program. Most rinks will have regular learn-to-skate and learn-to-hockey programs spaced throughout the year (often paired so you spend “first semester” on skating before the people who want to move up to hockey). Look up different rinks, talk to people about the rink culture and the coaches there. If you have the time, maybe spend a while hanging out there watching the open skates, local team practices or public classes, getting a sense what it’s like and telling yourself you have as much right to be in that barn as anyone else. Then sign up for a class. But first I want you to be devastatingly, Hepburn-ishly confident in talking about what your disability means for you.

From the information you’ve just given me, I don’t know almost anything I would need to work with you. You may or may not know that information about yourself already, but you can figure it out.

“Mild hemiplegia” is not a super-medical phrase. Hemiplegia is complete paralysis on one side of the body, where you are unable to move those muscles on purpose. A mild to moderate loss of muscle strength on one side is hemiparesis.

These terms are, to be honest, mostly used to organize medical literature. They describe very specific signs that might happen for a variety of reasons. Other symptoms like loss of sensation, loss of range of motion, involuntary muscle spasms, or loss/delay of involuntary motion (reflexes), which may or may not occur with plegia/paresis, have to be specified and described. If I were treating you I definitely wouldn’t describe your case as “hemiplegia”, I would call it “hemiparesis” with a lot more descriptive words around that (and I probably wouldn’t use either when talking to you).

It’s not that you used a word wrong. I’m concerned that 1. people have made you think you have to use A Medical Name for your disability for it to be taken seriously, but also 2. because the stroke happened so early, you’ve actually been denied care and opportunities to learn about it.

1. First, for the record, you don’t have to justify your disabled identity to me. And while I really (really) understand the self-protective urge a lot of us have to try to say, “my condition is really real and serious, it has a Real Medical Name, please believe me”, I think that (outside of a legal context where you’re seeking protected accommodations) that strategy often isn’t as useful as we hope it will be to communicate with other people in our daily lives. The people who demand to see your Really Medically Serious card before making accommodations will always find something else to demand, while people who aren’t trying to be assholes will be better able to help you if they know exactly, practically how.

It’s not that one way of talking about your disability is wrong, but I want you to talk about it in ways that are useful to you, that help you connect with other people and get you what you want.

2. I’ve worked with a lot of elders who have paralysis or hemiparesis from strokes later in life, after being able-bodied for most of their lives, and doctors and therapists jump right up in there teaching and training them to “recover” that “lost function”. They/their families can’t not know all the medical words just from hearing them over and over. But what often happens when a person is disabled since childhood is that…they aren’t seen as having “lost capacity” that can be “saved”, but as having a baseline “low level of function” that’ll never change, so much less attention is payed.

I’m using the air quotes because many people’s disabilities are present throughout their whole lives, and someone’s disability or disabled identity is not just a “problem” to be solved or gotten rid of. But people with disabilities grow and change, especially when we’re, you know, children. What often happens is that parents/authorities encourage able-bodied children to play, practicing motions and building up their bodies’ ability to move, while children with disabilities get benched from practice, benched from not just one activity but from being active at all, which means being benched from developing their bodies in the ways that might actually work for them, and from developing relationships with their bodies.

Proprioception, for example, is a combination of some fundamental ability/capacity/threshold/potential/whathaveyou and skill developed through experience that changes in context. Ever seen a baby? None of them know where the hell they are. A baby that can crawl is let loose to explore the world and bump into things that trigger their nerves until their body learns to fit all that sensation information together and use it. A baby that doesn’t crawl for some other reason often doesn’t get a chance to explore, to experience those sensations or train up that skill. And a kid that has a different threshold for stimulation, who naturally seeks out more or less or a different sort, is often stopped from stimming in ways which would provide their body information they could process.

As an adult, you get the chance to look at what you want to do and how your body can do it again.

So…

I want you to go throw a ball at a wall. Try to catch it. If you do any exercises already, sit-ups or pushups, do some of those. Run around the block, jump around on your bed. Stretch or just swing your arms and legs around. Find some small objects to use as weights and lift them, with either arm and then either leg (or set them on the floor and see if you can push them).

Work your way up your body one limb at a time, first thinking just about that limb on its own and then comparing the two sides after you’ve done them both. Don’t put a value judgement on anything yet, just pay attention: if your feet feel okay after running around, if you had more strength in one spot than you expected, if you had fun jumping, if there was a time you thought you might wobble but were able to correct, count that too! Think about each activity you did, the sensations around it, and whether that stim was satisfying, overstimulating, or not stimulating enough.

I want you to be able to go to a learn-to-play program, ask to talk with the coach at an appropriate time during the application or orientation, and say things like, “I have this condition. This is what it means: I have less strength with one arm, but I can move it as fast as the other, and with the same range of motion. I don’t grip items as well with one hand, or I tend to grip very hard. I don’t feel this type of sensation in this area, but I do feel that”.

Your coach is then going to recommend exercises to build strength in particular areas, or modifications to exercises so that you can do them without needing to use a particular area; they might have you try different equipment (find a tape job or adapted hand position that helps you keep hold of your stick, etc), and they may also encourage your towards and start training you for a particular position where you could do the most. When it comes to sensation, they’ll know to watch you closer for injuries in that spot that you might not notice.

This came in while I was applying to go back to university, and I bribed myself through the short essay section by pausing every hour to eat chocolate and sketch out what I would have you do for hypothetical positions and exercise plans. That’s still a long way off, but I’m very invested, so a couple things I want you to think about as you work towards the goal:

Keep sled hockey in mind. It’s not always a fit for people whose disability involves their arms, but it’s a cool community and most rinks will offer clinics where you can try out a sled and get a sense of the game.

How do you feel about getting hit with a puck? From your description, stickhandling and shooting may not be super fun for you. They may be, but if you give them a fair try and start to fee discouraged, try picturing yourself as a defender focussing on positioning or shot-blocking, or a goalie. Some people never ever want to do it, which is fair, but if you’re at all interested I’d love to see you try some time in goal! Everyone’s different but some folks the weight of the pads and the focused role can be really good stimulation. If your handling or footwork doesn’t feel great, goaltending would let you focus on moving your body more naturalistically as a whole to position in front of shots. And everyone else will love you for volunteering!

Write back and tell us how it goes!

#long post

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trentteti · 5 years ago

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Getting Through Brutally Difficult Reading Comp Passages About the Arts

If you’ve done any LSAT from the last five or so years, you’ve certainly realized that the Reading Comprehension section can be brutally difficult. The LSAT as a whole has gotten slightly more difficult in the last few years, but neither the Logical Reasoning nor Logic Games sections have become quite as fearsome as Reading Comprehension. And three types of passages almost always give their readers the most trouble: passages about science, the law, and the arts. Unfortunately for us all, basically every LSAT has at least one passage on science, at least one passage about the law, and at least one passage about the arts.

If you’ve been recently tearing out your hair as you attempt to read through dozens of these seemingly impenetrable passages, you’ve read enough lately, so I’ll just cut straight to the point: in a three-part series, we’re going to discuss what makes these passages so difficult, and what we can do to make them a little less formidable. We began this series by focusing on passages about science, and last week we discussed passages about the law. Today, we’re concluding this series by looking at passages about the arts, and offering some final advice about difficult passages in general.

We’ve discussed the reasons why science- and law-themed Reading Comp passages can be tough — most pre-law types don’t have a totally great understanding of how those things work. But why are passages about the arts supposedly difficult? I mean, most of us have at least a passing interest in some art, even if our aesthetic tastes don’t get much more refined than Netflix’s original content and the top songs on the music streaming platform of our choice. Plus, the arts are supposed to be enjoyed — we shouldn’t be suffering through these passages. And yet, the art-themed Reading Comp passages are among the most reviled on this test. What gives?

Well, if I may be blunt, the people who write these art passages seem to have a bit of an intellectual inferiority complex, so they’ll attempt to flex their knowledge and expertise by using big words to convey relatively simple ideas. (This, of course, is a favorite trick of those who write the Logical Reasoning questions as well.) So how can we deal with these over-written passages?

Try your best not to get lost in the big words. Don’t be scared off by them. Use context clues. Generally speaking, just knowing whether the author’s general opinion of the subject matter is positive or negative is all you need. (Though you should be dutifully looking up every word you don’t know when you’re reviewing these passages — expanding your vocabulary can only help you on the LSAT, law school, and your career.)

Still, if the morass of verbose, abstruse, recondite, or otherwise grandiloquent language still presents an issue for you, fret not. The art passages tend to reiterate the same themes. Historically, we’d get a ton of passages about some unconventional artist or group of artists doing something wacky with their painting, literature, music, sculpture … you name it. Nearly every time, the author would — as the online might say — stan the unconventional artists and the innovative thing they were doing.

In such passages, there were usually two crucial points you had to catch to answer most questions: what were the key characteristics of the art (and, on a related note, what made it unique or otherwise noteworthy) and what was the author’s opinions of that art. So to answer the questions on such passages, just make sure you have a very solid understanding of what the artists were doing and how their art was different from the conventional approach of their time (it can help to actually imagine what the art looks like) and what the author thinks about that art (again, the author is usually a fan).

More recently, however, these passages have focused on the nature of the art. Some passages have discussed different artistic media — such as the passage about the corruptibility of film in June 2019 — while others have discussed certain artistic genres — such as historical fiction/autobiography, 1930s musicals, opera, or, in a meta twist, what defines genres themselves. These passages are less about individual works of art or artists, and more about the formal characteristics or rules that define these genres, what artists operating within these genres must consider, or how to evaluate art produced within these genres.

These passages are less predictable than the older passages about unorthodox artists — yet another reason why Reading Comprehension has gotten more difficult in recent years, maddeningly — but tracking the author’s attitude is still incredibly important. The last five published exams all featured arts passages that discussed specific genres of art; of the thirty-six questions from these passages, twenty-one related to the author’s opinion in some way. We recommend keeping track of the author’s attitude by underlining the words that convey the author’s opinion as you read. The rest of the questions mostly asked about how the passage was structured. You can keep track of that by making brief notes about the role played by each paragraph in your provided scratch paper .

A Final Note

So these posts provided are our recommendations on how to endure the brutal passages about science, the law, and the arts. However, I must end with a caveat: I can’t guarantee that the science, legal, or art passage on your exam will all conform to the recent trends mentioned in these posts. Nor can I guarantee that the specific pointers included in these posts will apply to those passages on your exam.

But there is a strategy that I promise will help you on any passage, even the most brutally difficulty passages on science, the law, the arts, or whatever else. This strategy has a 100% success rate, and I can guarantee that it will be applicable on your exam. That strategy? Slow the hell down as you read the passage.

Now, I know advising you to not only slow down, but to slow the hell down, on a timed test may seem counterintuitive. It may even make me sound like I’m engaging in educational malpractice, and that I’m disqualified from offering any further advice on this test. But before dismissing this advice, let’s do some math related to the time you actually have on a Reading Comprehension section …

Most Reading Comprehension sections have about 4500 words in total, including the passages, the questions, and all the answer choices. The average adult’s reading speed is about 200 to 250 words per minute. But since you’re taking the LSAT, you are — statistically speaking, in all likelihood — a recent college graduate with a non-STEM major. Which means you read (or, at least, you were supposed to read) far more than the average adult. You’re also likely between the age of twenty-two and twenty-four, which means you’re functioning close to your cognitive peak, information processing- and short term memory-wise. It’s safe to say that your reading speed is at least 300 words per minute. (Congratulations, by the way, for possessing this exemplary skill — even if it’s based entirely on assumptions some blogger is making about you.)

If your reading speed is about 300 words per minute, and there are about 4500 words in this section, it should take you about fifteen minutes to read the entire Reading Comp section, cover to cover (well, the digital version of the test doesn’t technically have covers, but you get the point). You have thirty-five minutes to complete this section. Ergo, you have about twenty extra minutes you can use to … say it with me … slow the hell down.

The reason people experience timing issues on Reading Comp is not because they don’t have enough time to read or process the information. There’s plenty of time to do that, even if you read more slowly than the average adult. The reason people experience timing issues is because they don’t know the answers to the questions. Because they don’t know the answer when confronted with a question, they have to go back to the passage and re-read large swaths of it trying to locate the answer. That’s the real time suck. This is maybe an obvious point, but on Reading Comp, it’s a crucial one.

When people try to speed up on Reading Comp, the most common strategy is to read the passage more quickly. This is a misguided strategy. For one, it’s an attempt to fix a non-existent problem. Remember, we just did the math to prove you have plenty of time to read the passage and questions. Plus, whatever slight gains reading more quickly provides are more than offset by the extra time you have spend answering the questions, since the reading the passage more quickly means you won’t have as many answers to those questions. Finally, reading passages more quickly can only hamper your accuracy on the questions, which means you’ll likely lose points in the end.

The answers to the questions are invariably in the passage itself. So you should read that passage slowly and carefully. Try to use some of the tips in these posts on the inevitable science, law, and arts passages; odds are that at least some of them will help you. But most of all, take your time to make sure you understand the passage. It’ll pay off in the end.

Getting Through Brutally Difficult Reading Comp Passages About the Arts was originally published on Blueprint LSAT Blog

#Arts #LSAT #reading comprehension #study tips #trent teti #lsat

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sciencebulletin · 5 years ago

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A 3.8-million-year-old fossil from Ethiopia reveals the face of Lucy's ancestor

Australopithecus anamensis is the earliest-known species of Australopithecus, and widely accepted as the progenitor of Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis. Until now, A. anamensis was known mainly from jaws and teeth. Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Stephanie Melillo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and their colleagues have discovered the first cranium of A. anamensis at the paleontological site of Woranso-Mille, in the Afar Region of Ethiopia. The 3.8 million-year-old fossil cranium represents a time interval between 4.1 and 3.6 million years ago, when A. anamensisgave rise to A. afarensis. Researchers used morphological features of the cranium to identify which species the fossil represents. "Features of the upper jaw and canine tooth were fundamental in determining that MRD was attributable to A. anamensis," said Melillo. "It is good to finally be able to put a face to the name." The MRD cranium, together with other fossils previously known from the Afar, show that A. anamensisand A. afarensis co-existed for approximately 100,000 years. This temporal overlap challenges the widely-accepted idea of a linear transition between these two early human ancestors. Haile-Selassie said: "This is a game changer in our understanding of human evolution during the Pliocene." Working for the past 15 years at the site, the team discovered the cranium (MRD-VP-1/1, here referred to as "MRD") in February 2016. In the years following their discovery, paleoanthropologists of the project conducted extensive analyses of MRD, while project geologists worked on determining the age and context of the specimen. The results of the team's findings are published online in two papers in the international scientific journal Nature. Discovery of the cranium The Woranso-Mille project has been conducting field research in the central Afar region of Ethiopia since 2004. The project has collected more than 12,600 fossil specimens representing about 85 mammalian species. The fossil collection includes about 230 fossil hominin specimens dating to between more than 3.8 and about 3.0 million years ago. The first piece of MRD, the upper jaw, was found by Ali Bereino (a local Afar worker) on February 10, 2016 at a locality known as Miro Dora, Mille district of the Afar Regional State. The specimen was exposed on the surface and further investigation of the area resulted in the recovery of the rest of the cranium. "I couldn't believe my eyes when I spotted the rest of the cranium. It was a eureka moment and a dream come true," said Haile-Selassie. Geology and age determination In a companion paper published in the same issue of Nature, Beverly Saylor of Case Western Reserve University and her colleagues determined the age of the fossil as 3.8 million years by dating minerals in layers of volcanic rocks nearby. They mapped the dated levels to the fossil site using field observations and the chemistry and magnetic properties of rock layers. Saylor and her colleagues combined the field observations with analysis of microscopic biological remains to reconstruct the landscape, vegetation and hydrology where MRD died. MRD was found in the sandy deposits of a delta where a river entered a lake. The river likely originated in the highlands of the Ethiopian plateau while the lake developed at lower elevations where rift activity caused the Earth surface to stretch and thin, creating the lowlands of the Afar region. Fossil pollen grains and chemical remains of fossil plant and algae that are preserved in the lake and delta sediments provide clues about the ancient environmental conditions. Specifically they indicate that the watershed of the lake was mostly dry but that there were also forested areas on the shores of the delta or along the side the river that fed the delta and lake system. "MRD lived near a large lake in a region that was dry. We're eager to conduct more work in these deposits to understand the environment of the MRD specimen, the relationship to climate change and how it affected human evolution, if at all," said Naomi Levin, a co-author on the study from University of Michigan. A new face in the crowd Australopithecus anamensis is the oldest known member of the genus Australopithecus. Due to the cranium's rare near-complete state, the researchers identified never-before-seen facial features in the species. "MRD has a mix of primitive and derived facial and cranial features that I didn't expect to see on a single individual," Haile-Selassie said. Some characteristics were shared with later species, while others had more in common with those of even older and more primitive early human ancestor groups such as Ardipithecus and Sahelanthropus. "Until now, we had a big gap between the earliest-known human ancestors, which are about 6 million years old, and species like 'Lucy,' which are two to three million years old. One of the most exciting aspects of this discovery is how it bridges the morphological space between these two groups," said Melillo. Branching out Among the most important findings was the team's conclusion that A. anamensisand its descendant species, the well-known A. afarensis, coexisted for a period of at least 100,000 years. This finding contradicts the long-held notion of an anagenetic relationship between these two taxa, instead supporting a branching pattern of evolution. Melillo explains: "We used to think that A. anamensis gradually turned into A. afarensis over time. We still think that these two species had an ancestor-descendent relationship, but this new discovery suggests that the two species were actually living together in the Afar for quite some time. It changes our understanding of the evolutionary process and brings up new questions—were these animals competing for food or space?" This conclusion is based on the assignment of the 3.8-million-year-old MRD to A. anamensis and the 3.9-million-year-old hominin cranial fragment commonly known as the Belohdelie frontal, to A. afarensis. The Belohdelie frontal was discovered in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia by a team of paleontologists in 1981, but its taxonomic status has been questioned in the intervening years. The new MRD cranium enabled the researchers to characterize frontal morphology in A. anamensis for the first time and to recognize that these features differed from the morphology common to the Belohdelie frontal and to other cranial specimens already known for Lucy's species. As a result, the new study confirms that the Belohdelie frontal belonged to an individual of Lucy's species. This identification extends the earliest record of A. afarensis back to 3.9 million years ago, while the discovery of MRD nudges the last appearance date of A. anamensis forward to 3.8 million years—indicating the overlap period of at least 100,000 years. Provided by: Max Planck Society More information: Yohannes Haile-Selassie et al. A 3.8-million-year-old hominin cranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. Nature(2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1513-8 Beverly Z. Saylor et al. Age and context of mid-Pliocene hominin cranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. Nature (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1514-7 Image: The facial reconstruction of "MRD" by John Gurche was made possible through generous contribution by Susan and George Klein. Credit: © Matt Crow, Cleveland Museum of Natural History Read the full article

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kindabraveandlittlestupid · 6 years ago

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This isn't a point of nostalgia, I am only 32 and have only paid attention to so many debates over the years. Mostly the last three Presidents, so basically from 2000 to 2018 which you think would be a long time but in truth that's basically only 5 Presidential Campaigns. I cannot fathom a moment in my life where I was proud of how we conduct American debates. This is not a Right or Left issue, this is not a Media or Politicians issue... this is a failure on all fronts including that of us Citizens.

News channels capitulating to the demands of candidates who wish to establish the rules of the debate they are participating in. American citizens wanting a good show on stage over measuring the content of these men and women's character. Politicians being asked a question, ignoring said question and talking about whatever the fuck they want and no one stepping up saying “Hey Fuck Wit. We asked about Medicare and you just wasted your time talking on The Border. AGAIN!”

I am quite honestly ashamed that we allowed this to happen. The contestants of a game show don’t get to put forward the questions they have have the answers too. They don’t get to have a ‘correct�� answer when answering a different question that was never asked. Softball questions like “Who is your favorite musician?” to make them more likable is a hell of a lot less important than how they plan to conduct themselves diplomatically. The host should not be kissing the ass of the man or woman on stage they are supposed to be grilling for the sake of establishing a better democracy by allowing the American people to see who doesn't have a clue what they are doing and who actually has a plan/vision for the country.

As I said this is a failure across the board and the people who benefit from News Channels kowtowing and Publics complacency are the Shittiest Politicians who can say taglines like “Make America Great Again” without ever explaining how he plans to pay for his wall, what sort of statesmen he plans to conduct himself as or even how they even plan to MAGA. Which is how we got ourselves into this mess of someone who has increased the deficit by a trillion and has systematically weakened our relationships across the world. Am I taking a shot at Trump again? Fuck yeah, I am because the debates didn't take him to task and that perhaps would have put someone more qualified in the White House (Democrat or Conservative) in his place. Let’s face it, he is a fuck wit.

So we are at this point now where Politicians pick their voters (gerrymandering and a topic for another time), they pick their debater, the debate questions, they pick the answers they want to give regardless of the questions asked, and they get to lie about their intentions and beliefs with no adults holding them accountable to what they said before. This is why I am writing this article and calling it a “The Crucible” not to tie a stone to their feet to see if they sink or float but rather to live up to the definition of the word.

A situation of severe trial, or in which different elements interact, leading to the creation of something new.

This should be the aim of American Politics to put the men and women in power in intense scrutiny be they liberal or conservative. I am not saying we do not conduct ourselves without empathy or forgiveness of the past mistakes that some men and women might have made in their early life but look at the values they hold as they step into Office. Values that define how they will vote and judge issues that come across their desk.

So here is a list of ideas that I think will improve debate in the US allowing us to separate the pretenders from the visionaries, the dunces from the intellectuals, the reality TV stars from the patriotic civil servants.

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Cutting the Mic/Refocusing

On small thing we can add to debates is the ‘cut the mic’ option for the moderators. Far to often insults will be thrown between candidates, rants on none answers to an important question, and the domination of moderators is exploited on stage. If a candidate is asked about a subject he/she should answer said subject and if they try to switch topics the moderator should step in and cut their mic, repeat the question and reminding that individual to stay on topic. This might upset some individuals on stage but let's be honest they (the Politicians) serve the people and they don't get to change the narrative when we are asking them what their thoughts or beliefs are.

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Equal Time for 3rd Parties/Alternative Candidates

I think we Americans are pigeon held by the two-party system. We forgo third parties because MOST Americans understand the Spoiler Effect and the consequences of splitting the vote between two like-minded candidates will ultimately elect the other party which is furthest from their values. Pretty much the reason while Republicans fall in line behind their nominee which sadly the Bernie fans didn't get the memo on.

Anyways the Equal Time for 3rd Parties/Alternative Candidates is essential for a healthy democracy and the exploration of ideas. In the 2016 election, there were 6 people running under the Democratic Primary. Can you name them? Do you know what they believed in? It’s not Jill Stein (Green Party) or Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party). Don’t feel bad I only remembered 1 of the other 4 candidates besides Bernie and Hillary. This is mostly because the media provided heavy coverage to Hillary and Bernie while ignoring other options. This was much the same for Stein and Johnson having no memorable debate moments.

When we conduct the debate we need to ensure that each candidate receives an equal amount of serious questions and time to answer them. If a candidate wants to use his/her whole five minutes to speak, great! If they decide to turn over their remaining time to another candidate or back to the moderator, that would also be acceptable.

Call Backs

Very often a politician will be asked to answer for something they said in the past and explain their intent/context of what they are saying. Some will say “I never said that. Go back and read what I said.” We all know who’s said that in the past but the beauty of modern technology is we can summon those video clips instantly on a computer and we can share it with an audience right then an there with very little effort. It’s a very simple idea of pulling up videos, images, and quotes behind the candidates but an effective one because it will either A) Make candidates honestly answer what their intent/position was on the past and encourage them to avoid the call back or B) Immediately turn off the valve when a Politician attempts to gaslight an audience. It’s instant karma for those who attempt to lie their way through the questioning.

No Fluff Questions

We all know what Fluff Questions are, little softballs placed on a T-Ball stand for Candidates to answer to make them more likable. What kind of soda do you drink, who is your favorite band, what's your favorite football team and so on. None of these fucking questions matter. I don't care about the music they like, I don't care about ketchup on steak, and I don't care about the fo faith that some politicians pretend they have said they regularly read the bible and blah blah blah.

If candidates want to share these falsehoods and image during the campaign trail, fine I am ok with that. Even better if they decide to post it on their website in a bio page so people can see what they are into. However, during a debate, these individuals should be answering hard questions on policy, their vision for the country, questioned about past votes and/or judicial decisions, and should be held accountable for the beliefs/views they bring with them.

In a debate like this, we need questions on policies, beliefs, values, vision, and a fucking plan if they have one. Fluff questions just make you feel closer to the individual making you think he is just like you before he or she cuts your healthcare and runs up the debt. We smarter then this and the moderators are just as much to blame for tossing these questions out instead of asking real questions to root out the shit candidates.

Questions By The People, For The People

On occasion, an individual might stand up and asked a very important question that puts a gravity to a topic that may have not had before. These questions are important but also very rare as most people might have trouble articulating the right question to ask. I admit I sometimes do when thinking of questions on the spot. I believe this is where the Media, Journalists, and the Citizens work together to share their concerns and questions with moderators who will be conducting the debate and let them sift through the questions and turn them razor sharp inquiries to ask the candidates. This isn't to say people can't/shouldn't ask their questions but the beauty of having the people share their questions with an experienced moderator is that follow questions can be crafted ahead of time by a news team that can dig further and deeper than the vast majority of citizens.

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Conclusion

Debates, Interviews, Confirmation Hearings, and even Town Halls all suffer from these issues of Politicians deciding what they will and will not talk about. I would prefer to have a candidate say “I don’t know.” “I haven't thought about that.” ‘I will get back to you later on that” then go off on a rant to try and stir up the rest of the room with rhetoric. We collectively as citizens need to raise the bar for these men and women because if they had their way they would keep it as low as they possibly could to slither over it.

The Moderators IE the Media need to stop having this love affair with the RNC and DNC trying to charm them into letting them be the moderators. I know this is hard to do because they will take their candidates to another channel but the News Organizations are providing a civil service of keeping the public informed. If the organizations can come together and decide on a proper debate format/rules together and leave them (the candidates) no other options but to appear on one of their channels then it will no longer be the Politicians deciding the rules of debate but the moderators and the people. Thanks for reading.

Regards, Michael California

#Debate #Public Discourse #Debates #Politics #US Politics #Public Forum #Democracy

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mslloyds-reflections · 4 years ago

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Journal 7 - October 11, 2020

What is the role of assessment in effective teaching (planning) and student learning? How do you see assessment being used in your classroom?

Assessments are an integral part of effective teaching. There has been major shift in assessments in classrooms recently, as more research is being done about how to effectively assess and what it can show. As our EdPuzzle, “Why FIP?” points out, the world is rapidly changing, and schools are evolving with it. Schools are starting to teach students “how to be creative, solve problems, and use technology as a learning tool” and “apply what [students] are learning to real-life scenarios and more opportunities to develop the skills [they] need to be successful in college or in a career”. Along with this change in how students will learn, assessments are changing to accommodate these new goals. Formative Instructional Practice, or FIP, are the formal and informal ways that teachers and students gather and respond to evidence of student learning. Formative assessment, according to the FIP Module, FP0001 Introduction to Formative Instructional Practices, are used “for the purpose of improving learning”, meaning that these types of assessments provide a continual look at students progress throughout their learning of a topic. By using assessments, teachers can gather data of their students progress, document it, and use the information to alter their lessons later. The FIP Module, FP0003 Collecting and Documenting Evidence of Student learning points out 4 basic types of assessments that teachers can use. Selected response assessments ask that “students select the correct of best response from a list provided”. These are often multiple choice, true/false, matching, or fill in the blank questions. The second type of assessment is a written response assessment. Written response assessments have “students construct an answer in response to a question or task. This includes short answer and extended response items, and the responses are ‘judged’ by using predetermined scoring criteria”. Performance assessments are the fourth type of assessment this module identifies. Assessment “is based on observation and judgement, and is used to just both real-time performances, and products that students create”. Performance assessments also use a rubric to “judge” the quality of the assessment. The final assessment type identified is the Personal Communication. This is “information about student learning… gathered through structured and unstructured interactions with students”. This can be done by asking questions during instruction, listening in on student conversations or as they participate or perform in class, having students keep logs and journals, or having conferences. Along with FIP, learning targets should be established and inform students on what they should know and be able to do before even being assessed. Learning targets should be able to be addressed by using assessments to gauge if students were successful in doing these tasks and meeting goals.

So far in the field, my CT has already given her students a selected response assessment - 25 multiple choice questions weighted at 5 points per question. It was completed over Google Forms. Before giving her assessment, she did review games via Kahoot (another selected response type of game). I am unsure if she provided her students with learning targets or learning goals, as I joined the field towards the end of her unit, but I do not think she provided her students with learning targets, because she has not referred back to any of them. In addition to her multiple choice test, she has given students a few worksheets to be completed for reading that are written responses. Students use context clues in their reading to answer questions or make inferences and make predictions, and they write them down (or type them). My CT said that with virtual learning, it has been extremely hard to do informal assessments because she can’t be in the same room as them to hear some of their conversations with each other or observe them and their writing. I think that the multiple choice test that she gave, while not necessarily as desired, is the easiest way for her to track student understanding remotely. I am unsure what she will be doing with the assessments and what she will do with that information, but I will be asking her when I meet with her next. I think, based on what I have seen so far in her class, that it will simply go in as a grade, and they will move onto the next unit. For my SS Methods class, I was given an Olentangy middle school teacher to speak to about assessments this past week, and he had a very different perspective on assessments. He only really uses assessments as a means of looking at where his students are currently at, what they would like to learn and how they would like to learn it, and bases his lessons plans on this information. He said that he does informal pre-assessments almost daily in order to adapt his lessons, and usually uses authentic tasks as his assessments by asking students to think creatively about the topic at hand and show what they know about it. Something that I thought was interesting that he said, which I have not heard a teacher do before, is not putting grades on the assignments, because he constantly provides them an opportunity to improve. In his classroom, it is not about memorizing material and reciting it, but rather, truly understanding it and making connections to other historical events and our current society. Even during an actual written response test, he will ask them questions to encourage deeper thinking, write feedback, pose other questions, and return the test to his students for them to continue. He really focuses on continual progress and using assessments as a way for him to know how to adapt to help his students do this. This perspective on assessment was really interesting to hear about, and I’m curious to compare it to my CT’s means of assessments and even content area assessment differences.

In my K-12 experience, most of my assessments were selected-response tests or extended response. I think similar to how my CT might be using the assessments I’ve seen her do, my teachers mostly used their tests just as a grade to see how well we learned the information, rather than as a means to adjust for planning. I do remember receiving participation points for activities that seemed similar to a type of assessment, and the occasional class presentation. One of the few times I remember doing anything other than a multiple choice, extended response test or presentation was in highschool, when we were asked to recreate and modernize a scene from Hamlet to show our comprehension of the play (or at least one of the scenes). My girlfriend and I partnered up and employed my brother to star as Hamlet and created a silly video in my basement. While it seemed silly and it was a lot of fun to do, it was an activity that had us using many different skills (analyzing the scene, interpreting, writing a new script, planning, filming, editing) followed by a written summary/explanation and could also be used as an assessment as well. I would love to do an activity like this in my classroom one day (depending on the grade, having students work as groups in the classroom or outside of school like I had done). I would love to try this out during my unit this semester, but I don’t know how that would work with Covid-19 and socially distanced classrooms. Maybe individual projects? Writing a song and performing it (or recording on the computer at home and submitting?) Again, depends on the unit, but some fun ideas to consider.

During my field placement, I would like to use authentic tasks to have students show what they know, rather than assess them overall with a test (like selected response). Many educators are shying away from exams like this because it does very little to show what students know; it mostly shows how good they are at process of elimination or guessing. I would like to use self-assessments throughout my 2-week unit to have students reflect on what they're learning, which would also help me adapt my lessons to what they need. In addition, instead of utilizing worksheets, like I have seen my CT using a lot of, I would like to create authentic tasks and activities for them to do, especially while they are actually doing the learning. This could be by making a flip-chart, having a discussion, drawing something. When I am able to narrow down what my unit will be about, I will have more ideas of activities students can do to show what they know.

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resonanteye · 4 years ago

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The Great Awakening

You have arrived.

It’s been a long journey. Take a moment. Take a deep breath. Get a glass of water and sit down. This is going to be long. It’s going to make you uncomfortable. It’s not what you thought it was going to be, but it’s what you didn’t even know you needed to hear. The totality of this is greater than the sum of its parts and I implore you to read all the way to the end. It’s going to make you angry. It’s going to make you feel a lot of things you don’t want to feel, but you wanted to wake up and this was the only way. You are going to want to dismiss it. People will tell you not to read it. Belief is the most powerful force in this universe, and your belief is about to be challenged in a way you didn’t expect. Fortunately, you don’t have to actually believe anything written here. All you have to do is read it with an open mind. If you get to the end of this your thinking will change. You will be one step closer to being free, and then you can then go on to free the others. Where we go one, we go all.

Before we go any further, we need to set some ground rules:

1) The language here is going to seem really… off, but I promise you it will make sense by the end. This document is designed to be interpreted _literally_. I can’t stress that enough. Do not look for hidden clues—there are none. There is no misdirection, no deeper meaning, no numerology or special calendar to look at. This is the end of the line. This is a 1:1 conversation, speaking as open and honestly as possible. We are just two people having a chat. Any other meaning you try to derive outside of what is written here is on you.

2) Much of this is about language. To some, the language is going to seem very strange, crude, cryptic, nerdy, or childish at times. I’m trying to be as authentic as possible. Please understand it is not meant to be interpreted as racist, sexist or bigoted. Internet culture, “the chans” in particular, have a kind of language that is systemically all these things, but people do not interpret the language literally in use. I will try to keep it as civil and digestible as possible.

3) Be kind to yourself. Be kind to each other.

And before we even really get started, we need to everyone on the same level, with something that approaches a fair knowledge base. Over the past three years people have joined this movement from all around the world. Q Drops have been translated into dozens of languages. There are now mobile apps, shirts, hats, podcasts and documentaries. QAnon means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. As I’m writing this, former military generals are swearing oaths to QAnon. The movement has grown beyond anything I could have possibly imagined. Many people are joining the QAnon movement, but they don’t really understand what they are reading. They are confused. I want to talk just briefly about the history of a part of the internet where QAnon comes from, not in an attempt to legitimize myself as some elder sage, but to build understanding. To truly understand all of this you need context. Context about the people and platforms that now bring you your information—and ultimately, your news.

Some of you go all the way back to the Something Awful forums and the days when platforms like IRC and ICQ still felt new. Some of you literally just joined yesterday. I am going to give you an abbreviated history of the chans as it pertains QAnon. Most people know 4chan and 8chan as the place where Q lives online, but they don’t really understand them. “No outside comms” seems to be what the 99% of QAnon understands—that these are the “official” channels where Q posts. But have you ever been there? Have you ever really gone to boards and looked at them? Some you have, but the vast, vast majority of QAnon followers have not. Perhaps that is no surprise, as they aren’t easily comprehensible. So, let’s talk briefly about three things: Something Awful, 4chan, and 8chan/8kun. And I do mean briefly. You could write a book about each of these, but we can move forward with some broad strokes that should give you the context you need to truly understand Q.

We have to quickly go back to 1999. In 1999 someone known as “Lowtax” created a website called Something Awful (which I will refer to as SA going forward), which still exists today. You can go and check it out if you like. Before Facebook and Twitter, before YouTube even existed, and even before most people knew what Google was, there was Something Awful. SA has been a lot of things over the years, but it is mostly a forum—a message board. On SA everyone was mostly anonymous because, at the time, no one other than academics used their real name on the internet. SA was a semi-private board. It was the internet’s first large “secret society” of sorts. It was mostly focused on video games and Adobe Flash content, and it birthed some of the internet’s very first memes. It was a trollish but a (mostly) well-meaning community of nerds. Some members, known as the “GoonSquad” or just “Goons” would often group up and bombard players of the early MMORPGs to troll them. It was (mostly) harmless fun and pranks. In the late 90’s and early 00’s only nerds were on the internet anyway, so it was mostly nerds trolling other nerds in video games. You could identify other Goons by asking as simple question: “Do you have stairs in your house?” If someone answered, “I am protected,” then you knew they were a fellow Goon.

Why am I talking about this? Well, if you had to pick a place to put on a birth certificate for where internet culture itself was born, Something Awful would be that place.

A few years later someone known at the time only as “moot” created a website called 4chan. 4chan is a fully anonymous (seemingly, anyway) message board, based on a Japanese message board design known as 2chan. It’s actually better described as an “imageboard,” since you have to upload an image with every post. 4chan was open to all. There were few rules, and on some boards—none. Post whatever you want, do whatever you want. For the most part, everyone except moot himself was simply labeled as, “Anonymous.” This is where the “Anon” in QAnon comes from.

Like SA, 4chan was originally a haven for nerds talking about video games and anime. But its anonymous and open nature allowed to build its own form. The most iconic memes, from lolcats themselves to Rickrolling and beyond, started on 4chan. SA might have birthed internet culture, but 4chan gave it form—and it still powers much of the creativity of internet itself to this day. The anonymous nature of the form allowed for a kind of collaborative creativity that—and I truly believe this—has changed the world for the better. It’s a special kind of creativity and one that you really need to experience if you want to understand it. On 4chan you will see new creative concepts born and shaped in real time, and you can watch them spread around the world. You can contribute whenever and whatever you like, and the community then gets to riff on your contribution. 4chan has even birthed new formats and new types of creativity. I want to talk about some of these specifically, to provide some kind of context for what “the chans” are really all about it, but we are just scraping the surface here. You might have to Google around for quite some time to truly understand this if you are new.

Among the myriad of things that get posted on 4chan, one of them is known as a “green text” or “green text story.” A green text is a short story format that includes green colored text and a small picture, often a meme of some kind, like a Pepe. It can be pages long or just a few lines. It is often written in broken sentences and shorthand. They often start with the line, “be me…” and then launch into a short narrative. They can be true or fictional or somewhere in-between. They are often designed to be shocking, depressing or trollish, but they can also be uplifting. It is perhaps the simplest and most pervasive form of content on 4chan other than image macros themselves. I’m going to coin a new phrase and call this a form of Creative Anonymous Fiction or CAF for short. The anonymous nature of the platform lets you tell a story in a new way. Often times people will take green texts and remix them, giving them a different ending. I could post examples, but I’d be doing you a disservice. You are better off looking them up and reading them yourself until you understand it.

Green texts can sometimes end with what’s called copypasta, which is a type of bamboozle. Copypasta is a snippet of short form copy that gets reposted over and over again. A bamboozle is a type of switcheroo—you start telling what the reader feels is a novel story, building to some climax, and then end it with a classic copypasta for that “gotcha” moment. It is, essentially, a prank. A text based prank. This sort of content now exists all over the place, far beyond the reaches of just 4chan. You might be wondering where all of this is going… we’ll get to that. In some ways this is actually the most important part of this entire document. I wanted to make sure that everyone has some context for what is to come, but I can assure this is going somewhere. Please do not let this extensive clarification distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

So that’s a quick overview of the playful side of things. But on 4chan you will also see some dark and disgusting shit. With the good comes the bad—and the bad can be really bad. Because everyone is anonymous, everyone subject to being hassled by other anonymous posters. Everyone is gay, a fag, a retard or an autist. A thread without insults is a failed thread. The more people who tell you how gay and fake your shit is, the more people actually like it. 4chan may have given us lolcats, but it also ended up being a place for violence, misogyny, bullying, extreme racism—and even far more heinous things. For 12 years moot moderated the site. May criticized him at the time, but I think we can all look back now and know that he really did a fantastic job. For over a decade he was the beam scale that balanced free speech against the darkest depths of humanity—and I meant that literally. He developed a system to help identify “anonymous” posters and worked with the FBI to put away pedophiles, child pornographers, and even would-be domestic terrorists. He did this all while being told constantly how gay he was and how many dicks he sucked (as is the way). Moot was a hero we never deserved.

The two most popular boards on 4chan are /pol/ (for politics) and /b/ (which stands for random). People who post on these boards are often referred to as /pol/tards and /b/tards respectively, with /b/ being one of the more nefarious (but also one of the more creative) boards as it had essentially no rules on what you could post. If “tard” sounds harsh, know that it is said lovingly. Even seniority within the community itself is derogatory. There are “oldfags” and “newfags,” where being called an oldfag is an informal compliment and recognition of seniority. Opinions will differ, but oldfags are generally recognized as being those who were around 4chan since before the pool was closed—one of the very first large raids. In 2006 a sort of prank was organized on 4chan by a group of Anons to “raid” the Flash game Habbo Hotel. Hundreds of people created black avatars in the game and went around spamming the chat with racist and anti-Semitic nonsense, drawing swastikas and blocking off the pool area in the game, declaring that the, “Pool’s closed due to AIDS.” Why? For laughs. The average age of the userbase for this game was around 15 years old. Then again, the average age of the then Anons was probably the same. There is a lot more to this story, and I encourage you to look it up if you have the time, but the point is that this event eventually lead to 30 seconds in the spotlight on some news outlets. This was the first big event that was attributed to 4chan and Anonymous as a group. It was the first time that most people outside of the depths of the internet had ever even heard of 4chan.

After this, more newfags joined. 4chan grows and the subgroup of /b/tards and /pol/tards that would come be to known more formally as “Anonymous” starts to take shape. All the while, moot is trying to balance what content stays and what content goes. The rest, as they say, is history. You start to see all kind of digital activism being organized on 4chan. Raids turn into DDoS (Distributed denial of service) attacks that shut down websites. People get arrested. Splinter groups form. Anonymous becomes more political. /b/ and /pol/ start to leak out of the internet and into the real world. People start protesting various things, like the Church of Scientology, wearing the iconic mask that the character V wears in the movie V for Vendetta. Logos are created. Anonymous comes into its own as a digital force. The group aligns itself with what DnD players call, “Chaotic Good.” Anons enjoy playing a character that is either an anti-hero or anti-villain. Sometimes Anons will pretend to have some super elite hacker ability, and while that is sometimes true it is mostly embellishment. Some people refer to this as Live Action Role Playing (LARP or LARPing), but it is not quite that. LARPing is when people take their Dungeons and Dragons game to the next level or dress up like Harry Potter characters and roleplay out in the woods. What happens on 4chan is very much a form of roleplaying, but one specifically shaped by the anonymous nature of the platform. I’m going to coin a second term here—Creative Anonymous Role Playing, or CARPing. More on this later.

Moot continues to run 4chan until 2015. During that time, it gets harder and harder to manage. Anonymous becomes more unruly, and the site starts to spiral. Cyberbulling goes to a whole new level. There are celebrity nude photo leaks. Gamergate. A series of actual murders and killings get posted on 4chan. 4chan didn’t cause them, but that’s where the content ended up living. The site starts to become unmanageable with the old rules in place. Why moot bothered to keep it going I’ll never understand. There was never much money in the site itself and it always seemed like a huge headache. But the site starts to take moderation more seriously as harassment ramps up.

Boards like /pol/ start to get more strict rules. Even /b/ starts to see more and more threads get removed. In 2013, a piece of shit Anon known as “Hotwheels” doesn’t like what’s happening to 4chan decides to splinter the group and starts 8chan. While moot is trying to wrangle 4chan into something better, Hotwheels goes in the reverse direction and starts empowering (and in some ways, encouraging) harassment with things like Gamergate. 8chan doesn’t remove anything. No morals. Doesn’t matter who gets hurt. Free speech above all.

This stance obviously has consequences. While moot would work with law enforcement, Hotwheels gives them the proverbial middle finger. As a result, all of the bad actors now had a new platform. You see swatting become a popular tactic. More and more violent threats. While moot would work with the FBI to help track down pedophiles and terrorists, Hotwheels decides to relocate the site to Philippines (where the age of consent is 12, mind you). He can barely keep the site running. No one wants to host this content; he can’t even keep the .com anymore because the registrars don’t want to work with him. Hotwheels finds some other shitstain in Manila who runs a pig farm and a porn site designed to get around Japanese pornography laws. They partner up. After three shootings (Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso) in 2019 where the shooters posted their manifesto to 8chan, Hotwheels finally admits the site got away from. The site shut down for a while, but the pig farmer and his son started it back up and rebranded it as 8kun after finding a Russian hosting provider who was willing to host the content. It is now a safe harbor for literally the worst of humanity, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Even Hotwheels himself now advocates for shutting the site down, but the pig farmer and his son have run away with it.

This is where your information comes from. This is where it lives.

Now that you have a better understanding of who is creating this information—your news—it is time. This next part is going to be hard.

You have been bamboozled. QAnon is a hoax. It may well be one of—if not THE—greatest, most pervasive, hoaxes of all time.

How do I know this? Because I am Q. In fact, I am the original Q. One of them, anyway.

This is the point where many will stop reading. You are likely either angry or starting to feel embarrassed. I’m going to ask you to try and put those feelings aside for a moment and keep reading. You have absolutely no reason to feel embarrassed. This isn’t your fault. You did nothing wrong. You got caught in a world you didn’t fully understand and there are people now trying to prey on you at every corner to sell you hats and t-shirts.

If you are willing to go forward, allow me to explain.

What has happened here is what I’m going to call a “Galaxy Quest” moment. There is a lovely movie that came out in 1999 called Galaxy Quest. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s worth a watch. It’s a family friendly comedy about an advanced alien race who watches a TV show made on Earth called Galaxy Quest. Galaxy Quest is a TV show, but the aliens don’t know it. They refer to the TV show as the, “historical documents.” They built an entire civilization around the historical documents, never realizing it was a TV show. It’s a fun concept. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Anyway, the aliens weren’t stupid. In fact, they were the furthest thing from stupid as they made all the science fiction from the show come to life (although they are portrayed are dumb for the sake of comedy). The aliens simply did not have the context necessary to understand what they were seeing. They didn’t realize it was fiction. They didn’t know what fiction was. That is what has happened here with QAnon. You have read things on platforms you didn’t fully understand, and you brought your own context and understanding to it. You read fiction as non-fiction and no one has bothered to explain to you how or why this content even exists.

We are going to go back as far as I can remember. I ask that other Anons corroborate what follows, not for me, but for those who are trapped by what has become a truly insidious ideology.

This all starts in the summer of 2016. Someone on /pol/ makes a post pretending to be someone working with “intimate knowledge” of the “Clinton case.” They made a post in the style of an AMA (which stands for Ask Me Anything, a form of Q&A popularized by reddit). This is just another form of CARPing (Creative Anonymous Roleplaying). The first two responses are: “Will the Hillary get Pregnant again?” and “Why are you on 4chan on a Friday night?” This thread almost instantly devolves into what is commonly known as a “shitpost.” It is nonsense. You might say to yourself, “Why would someone go on the internet and tell lies?” Well, this person isn’t really lying, they are shitposting. It is a form of artistic expression. It’s an attempt to get someone to suspend their belief for a few moments. Any seasoned oldfag or /pol/tard knows exactly what this kind of thread is. No one takes this literally.

However, at the time /pol/ is growing. You’ve got new people coming in daily. Much of /pol/ favors Donald Trump, broadly for his trollish nature and memeability, but also for his politics. Months later, someone cites the AMA as the FBI source behind the Pizzagate theory. This finds its way to Twitter. No one actually understands what they are reading, and no one checks the sources. Someone actually thought a months old shitpost on /pol/ was some kind of real leak. Long story short, someone goes into a Comet Ping Pong pizza with an AR-15 and starts shooting. A Friday night shitpost turned into shooting.

Fast forward about six months.

Someone on /b/ posts a depressing green text asking for recommendations on a new cult to join after they found out their girlfriend was cheating. Someone mentions that OP should become a Tibetan monk, because Tibetan Buddhism is a really great cult (e.g. because you can “light yourself on fire if you ever get too depressed OP”). Tibetan Buddhism goes on forever because the Dalia Llama gets reincarnated infinitely, so maybe if you are lucky you get to be him one day. This is the thinking. This isn’t exactly enlighted discussion. I respond suggesting that I have a great new cult that OP can join (which is loosely based on Heaven’s Gate, I’m just making this up on the spot). I had recently listened to a podcast about Heaven’s Gate and I was riffing on it. I loved the absurdity. OP asked for more sauce, but I decided to start a new thread instead.

Warning: This about to get really nerdy.

I started writing some shitposts with pseudo biblical writing, talking about saving humanity. I’m actually more embarrassed about it now than anything, as it was not my finest work. I would refer to “the awakening” as being the time when I would deliver the evidence that would let people “wake up” and realize we were in a simulation. Have you ever seen the Matrix? Yeah, like I said… not my finest work. I signed my posts as Q. Where did Q come from?

Well, initially, because of John de Lancie’s character of Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The character of Q was omnipotent and omnipresent. In the show he would speak to Captain Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise in his own form of strange riddles. Q took a particular interest in humanity as a whole and would appear as a jester-like sort of mix between an anti-hero and anti-villain, always giving Picard hints on how to expand his mind to solve a problem, usually to save all of humanity. So, this was my model.

The goal was to get a few believers and then set a date a few weeks later and reveal “the awakening.” The Awakening was just supposed to copypasta. It was a bamboozle. I was trolling I never even did it because I got bored with it. Most people could see through it (fake and gay) anyway. But someone was watching. Someone who likely called me fag and told me to choke on a bunch of dicks and kill myself was watching.

A few months later I start to see the first “Q” posts, which would eventually be called “Q Drops.” It migrates from /b/ to /pol/. Wow, so original. You took one shit idea from /b/ and made it political. Round of applause.

This person knew exactly what I was doing, not that what I did was that original either. Star Trek is pretty popular among internet nerds. But this is why Q has always talked the way he does. This was the model. This is where Q comes from. The “Q Clearance” stuff that came later is, well… coincidence. But not even a good coincidence because it doesn’t even really make sense, as that is a clearance for the Department of Energy.

The Q from Star Trek also exits as what is known as the “Q Continuum”, where there are other omnipotent beings, and everyone is referred to as Q. This is where the habit of Q referring to himself as “we” comes from. It’s a Star Trek fan, just like me—only one who managed to make a piece of creative anonymous fiction into something political. Likely for lulz at first, because lets be real no one thought it would turn into what it has.

I suspect that Q has been played by many different people over the last couple years as the tripcode has changed, but likely all of them are Star Trek TNG fans. You can really see it in the writing and the constant talk about “humanity.” It’s also possible that the person currently playing Q is the same as the person who was shitposting in my original thread. It doesn’t even matter.

So that’s it. That’s Q. Q eventually moved from 4chan to 8chan and then 8kun. It should be obvious who controls the narrative now. There is nothing truly anonymous or secure about 8kun. We have technologies for that (i.e. tor, torrents, modern cryptography) and 8kun ain’t it. QAnon is the cash cow for the pig farmer and his son in the Philippines who run 8kun, giving a platform to future terrorists and pedophiles. There is a reason for “no outside comms” and “no dates”—control the narrative and keep the machine rolling as long as possible. Why? Money. Between ad revenue and merchandise QAnon is now a profitable venture. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and eventually you will make some prediction that will feel real enough, even if 99% of everything you say is bullshit, and keep the train running. In fact, it’s much easier than you think.

Take the twitter account, for example.

In early June I saw a number of trending hashtags around #JFKJRRETURNS. I could not believe the amount of people who were latching onto this. I watched the account go from zero to tens of thousands of followers in a day or so and then disappear. Everyone was saying that Twitter “banned” him. But when Twitter bans an account the language on the page says that the account was suspended. The account page for this account said that “This account doesn’t exist.” That means one of two things: 1) the account holder changed usernames; or 2) the account holder deactivated the account. When you deactivate an account, it puts it into a 30-day limbo period where you can recover it. I thought to myself, “If I could get ahold of this account perhaps, I could do something good with it.” I never thought I’d actually be able to do it. Low and behold, thirty days later I went to see if the handle was available and it was. Now I would get to play Q once again.

I just started riffing on whoever was playing Q with the account before me. No idea who that was. The envelopes were just responses from various government departments, nothing more. The postmarks are meaningless. Turns out if you write a letter to a government agency they will respond, and you get some cool looking envelopes. You can try it if you want—pull a FOIA request on yourself. July 22 was a date I pulled out of my ass. HUMAnity and ALl GOod ThiNGs are just more references to Star Trek TNG. The last episode of the show is called All Good Things, hence ALGO TNG. The very first Q Drops on record talk about Huma Abedin, and I thought maybe someone would try to make a connection with, “HUMAnity.” The last post from !!Hs1Jq13jV6 also mentioned “humanity”, but I didn’t even make that connection. It’s really not hard for those coincidences to pop up when you are all playing the same character. Manila, well, you know what that refers to now. St. Augustine is a reference to St. Augustine, Florida, where the largest QAnon merchandise operation is run from. The mentions of Hotwheels, moot and having stairs in my house was my way of gauging to see if anyone really had any idea about anything. The strange code in my location was just a Google Maps Plus Code. I picked a spot in the middle of the ocean off the Cook Islands and pulled the code for it. Turns out I didn’t even do it right, so it shows a different answer for everyone when you plug it into Google Maps.

So that’s it. That’s the whole thing. Beginning to end. Call it whatever you like, but that’s the story. The story of the chans, of QAnon and how Q became Q. Do with this what you will. Believe or don’t believe, it doesn’t matter.

Maybe this is all 100% true. Maybe it’s all 100% nonsense. Maybe truth is somewhere in the middle. What’s important is that you have more information today than you did yesterday. Where we go from here is a choice, and one I leave to you. What will happen to me? Well, I’ve been at a standing desk for 14 hours straight in order to bring this to you. I have done what I set out to do over three years ago and fulfilled my purpose as Q. My palms are sweaty. My knees are weak, my arms are heavy. It’s starting to fall out of my pockets already.

Mom’s Spaghetti,

#true stories

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morshtalon · 6 years ago

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My Top 5 Video Game Intros

Since I haven't posted in a while and since I don't have any ideas for full-fledged reviews, let's do something different today and talk about my 5 favorite intros to video games I enjoyed in the past. Please note that this is a very personal, opinionated list; I have somewhat deliberately avoided really obvious picks (consider Metal Gear Solid 3's and Final Fantasy VI's openings, among others, to be hovering around in spirit somewhere around here). Furthermore, I'm not limiting myself exclusively to that very first, usually pre-rendered opening scene of a game (like, the attract mode before you even press start), because most of the time those are kind of devoid of any meaning and without context, I'd just be judging them by coolness or whatever, which isn't very interesting or inducive to commentary. Anyway, without further ado, here are my top 5 video game intros:

#5: Wild Arms 3's evolving opening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvoueEiVyWE

At first, Wild Arms 3's opening is just a standard anime thing. It's fairly animated and stuff, and that's fine as far as that goes, but there are two things I find quite special with this opening; one that was always there from the start and one that was a product of the localization. First off, there are actually four versions of the opening. You see, the game is separated into 4 chapters, each with a different main villain which is somewhat related to the last, with varying levels of directness. In that way, as has been said before, it feels like seasons of an anime, and I think the game struck a good balance of making itself both a cohesive experience and a sort of episodic narrative simultaneously. To reflect that, the opening "evolves" as you progress through the game, changing key scenes to reflect the current "season" villain. I find that to be pretty awesome and an idea I haven't really seen repeated anymore; I believe mostly due to the fact that WA3 has this sort of unique story direction that lent itself to the evolving intro. Still, more games should adopt this style. They might have, I dunno, this is the coolest example out of the games I've played anyway. The second thing that impresses me is how well the localization performer fared singing the english version of the opening theme, Advanced Wind. I think it's actually better than the original. There's a certain sweetness and determination in her voice that is so fitting with the game's main character, I could almost trick myself into thinking it was actually Virginia hollering those lyrics. Pretty good opening, not higher on the list because it -is- just a pre-title opening I guess, but still. Also, Wild Arms 3 itself is alright, check it out if you're a fan of this kind of stuff.

#4: Cave Story's first taste of gameplay

What makes Cave Story's introduction interesting is that it... sort of doesn't exist. You're just dropped straight into the action with no real clue what's going on besides a brief interaction between two characters that makes completely no sense at that point. Every plot detail is up to you to find out in an immersive manner that doesn't barrage the player with endless backstories and setups and information you don't really need. Even Dark Souls, one of my favorite games and the one I perceive to be closest to the ideal of gameplay and story integration, feels the need to weigh down your mind with stuff before you start. Don't get me wrong, I understand why Dark Souls and many other games need it, but the fact that Cave Story -doesn't- is rather admirable, in my opinion. I love games where you start out without knowing what's going on, solving challenges just based on the fact you're playing a game and need to go forward, to only then start piecing together the great scheme of things from in-game data collection. What's even better about Cave Story is that there's no limitation at the start: you're dropped into full gameplay conditions, without bumbling around a peaceful area while the backstory is exposed to you by an NPC or anything "cinematic" like that. You're just left to figure everything out on your own. Pretty cool.

#3: Dragon Warrior II's extended prologue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OlHofpQ7LA

Dragon Quest 2's original Famicom version started out pretty shitty. It was basically only a slight alteration to the previous installment's intro: you're in a throne room (this time you're actually the prince, sitting on the queen's throne for some reason), some guard from the faraway kingdom of Moonbrooke comes along and warns the king of impending doom before collapsing from his wounds, the king gives you some brief words of encouragement and sets you off on an adventure with minimal financial backup and a crap sword (admittedly, a better deal than in DQ1). For the international version, by some divine intervention causing a brief miracle shining in the face of Nintendo's then-oppressive censorship, an extensive prologue scene was added depicting the events that befell Moonbrooke prior to that guard setting off on his journey. What makes this scene special, however, is how brilliantly it expands on the tropes established by the localization of the previous title. Dragon Warrior 1 had this faux-Elizabethan translation for some reason, which was pretty charming but otherwise just a strange quirk they added for the overseas release. The extended prologue added here actually runs with that theme and frames the story as some kind of fairy tale; a narrator intercepts the dialog message boxes to preface each character's next line, there is some opening text that feels as if some elderly gent from Shakespeare times was weaving a tale in front of his audience's eyes, and it even goes somewhat into detail pretty much leaving no room for the player to doubt that the people of Moonbrooke flat out died. Also, the guard that makes the voyage to your kingdom is given a tiny little bit of characterization, just enough to wrap up the scene pretty much as best as they could have. Overall, this makes Dragon Warrior II have the most engaging start of the original trilogy; it was something they didn't have to do at all, but they did it and actually made the game better for it. At least until you get to Rhone and it starts its genocide of the player's happiness, soul, and reasons to live.

#2: Suikoden II - Reminiscence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WLyjRex0ac

Suikoden II's emotional storyline and comparatively grounded narrative offer a nice contrast to the PSX's library of jRPGs concerned with elevating their epicness to ridiculous degrees. The game really cements this approach on the introductory flashback scene that functions as the opening credits. To me, the reminiscence scene is pivotal, serving a variety of functions that cause ripple effects lasting even beyond one's playthrough of the game. The setup is simple: The main character and his best friend run afoul of a ploy to abruptly terminate a cease-fire between two nations; they are pursued by some knights and cornered at a cliff above a river. You and your friend, then, etch a marking on a spot in the cliff wall and jump into the river below, planning to return to the etched spot should he and you get separated. While you are being carried by the currents, the scene itself begins. It's simply a flashback montage showcasing glimpses of the life you and your friend led leading up to your enrollments in the army and departure for the sabotaged expedition, accompanied by a relatively simple piano piece. However, it's a scene that is central to the themes of the entire game. It provides, first and foremost, a contrast between a perceived bright future with an everlasting bond of friendship and the tragedies that will soon occur in these characters' lives. It's a window into the will and emotions of the main character himself in his comfort zone; the life that he will so clamor to return to as the game progresses and things get increasingly more unwieldy for everyone. It sets up everything you need to know about the relationship between you, your best friend, and your sister on a 2-minute scene with no dialog; conveying all it needs only on its fantastic sprite work and score. It lets you know that this is, first and foremost, a game about feelings and about interpersonal relationships, using the war that you expect to happen from having played Suikoden 1 more as a backdrop to explore introspective consequences and how it affects people's visions. Most importantly, however, is that it serves as a reminder of what it was like for you, the player, when you come back from having completed the game. I literally cannot watch this scene anymore without shedding a tear or two. It happens every time. I actually prefer the normal version with the sepia filter, but I couldn't find it on its own like that, so here's the full-color version of it that you get from doing some ludicrous stunt before you jump into the river or whatever. Either one's fine, really. By the way, get the bad ending. The good one completely ruins the message and weight of the entire story, almost making the game meaningless.

#1: Vagrant Story - Climax of the Graylands Incident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4m42OmAczo

Vagrant Story is an odd game in many aspects. Its gameplay is a crossbreed of roguelikes and rhythm games, it has yet another strange Shakespearean localization, the characters are dressed all weird and BDSM-y and showing a lot of skin... Anyway, one of the game's odd quirks is that it has tons of stuff that you can miss by pressing start at an inopportune moment. One of them is the simply amazing opening; an epic 11-minute in-engine "cutscene" (with occasional gameplay sections that transition very smoothly because it's all done with in-game models and graphics) jampacked with plot detailing the events leading up to the game's start, with even the music trying its best to synchronize itself with the cutscene's many shifts in mood and intensity. You can easily miss all this because it starts with a long wall of text that most players would read faster than the time it takes for it to disappear and press "start" because they think they're done with it and there's nothing left to see. A shame, really, because to me this one part of the game almost manages to outshine the entire rest of it. There's just such a density of things happening here; this urban gray rainy moody setting is more fitting to the localization's flowery prose than the things that happen in Léa Monde, and it's all just done so well with the PSX's limitations. While pretty much every other game ever opts for FMVs or an otherwise pre-rendered solution for its openings and important moments, Vagrant Story does it all with the same exact rules (well... excluding the vapid meaningless pre-opening that happens before the title screen shows up but just forget about that one), and the result is that everything feels like it has much more weight to it. Also, as I said, there is the advantage of transitioning smoothly into gameplay, which the game -does- go on to use a few times later on for short "boss appearing at the boss arena"-type cutscenes, but those all lack the juice and meat of this glorious opening scene. It's just a meticulously created, awesome example of Video Game craftsmanship, outside of just being really awesome to watch as well. I absolutely love it.

Here are some runners-up: Wild Arms 2's Disc 2 cinematic (US version); Fire Emblem: Thracia 776's opening (before title screen); That part in Actraiser when you descend into Fillmore stage 1 and go into the statue and that kickass track starts playing; The brief scroll down on the dark forest scene in Tales of Phantasia (Super Famicom) before the title screen shows up (really fascinated me as a kid); Lufia: The Legend Returns (odd pick but it has a pretty charming intro with some nice artwork for the GBC); Probably many others that I'm forgetting right now.

Anyway, from this list you can sort of tell what games I like to play so I can excuse myself from writing a dreaded positive review of something for a while. Also, I noticed that things that are done with the in-game engine tend to impress me more than things that aren't, even though it's technically actually more work to do an anime FMV thing I guess? Well, whatever, I'm a hypocrite and stupid so make sure to share your own opinions too if you want I guess I dunno.

#top 5 #video games #intro #review #list

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equalmeasurefiction · 8 years ago

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What are your thoughts on Tarrlok's character development?

So, I’m going to assume you mean his character arc and his development during the course of the series. Mostly because character arc questions are fun to answer…

Woooo… where do I even start? There is so much to talk about when it comes to characters and character arcs in Legend of Korra. I guess I’ll start by saying that Tarrlok’s arc is actually one of the stronger ones–it’s a solid downward spiral from the top a la That Scottish Play. But Korra’s an interesting show… it’s full of ideas that aren’t fully developed, themes that are introduced only to be phased out, and moments of character development that have nothing to do with the story itself.

But I think the core of the question here is whether or not Tarrlok’s development/arc is ‘good.’ In order to establish the relative quality of any given character arc, I believe it’s important to work from the ground up–or in this case, from the base-structure up.

So, a character arc is a plot-line, but for a specific character. Ergo, any good character arc should follow the same beats as any given plot. That means that the character should be introduced, they should be given action, they should experience a turning point (a moment when they make a choice that changes the direction of their narrative drastically), which should lead them to make a series of choices… before they reach a satisfying, logical conclusion.

And Tarrlok’s character arc hits every single one of these points:

We are introduced to him and we get a sense of his goals and general direction. He’s an arrogant, manipulative, power hungry politician, who wants to use the Avatar to his advantage.

He acts upon/affects the main character. He asks Korra to join his task force, and when she refuses he manipulates her. They work together until she leaves the task force. After she leaves, he clearly wants her to return.

His character experiences a clear turning point. Korra confronts him, they fight, she goes in for the kill and he blood bends her. This choice changes the course of his narrative and initiates the series of choices… the spiral.

Tarrlok makes a series of choices that gradually push him further into a corner. He kidnaps Korra, he tries to frame the Equalists, he blood bends a group of people, he tries to take Korra and run… each one of these decisions digs him deeper into the hole he’s already built for himself.

Finally, in the climax, Tarrlok comes clean to Korra about his past, giving her vital information and he commits murder-suicide (so sayeth the creators).

So yes, it’s a solid character arc, it hits every point it needs to hit. There’s even a delightful emotional angle to it–watching a great man fall is always good drama. But it’s also very choppy.

What do I mean by choppy? I mean that Tarrlok’s character arc, his development, is very uneven. We get a little of it in the beginning, but he phases in and out of the series, right up until the series hits it own turning point. And as a result, the information the audience is given about his character falls more toward the end of the series, which makes him seem less developed than he actually is.

The problem with info-dumping is that it often requires the audience to accept a huge amount of information very quickly. This works great for games, where that large quantity of information may provide vital pieces of a puzzle or important instructions, but it does not work in writing or media. And it really falls flat when the information is being given by a character that has been shown to be untrustworthy.

And the first four beats of Tarrlok’s character arc show him to be a manipulative, cruel, secretive, liar who will do whatever he has to in order to achieve his ends.

Audiences aren’t dumb. They pay attention to cues and, when a character is shown to be ‘bad’ or untrustworthy, they usually don’t want to trust them. The only way to get an audience to trust an ‘untrustworthy’ character is to redeem them and there was no redemption arc for Councilman Tarrlok.

So, that big information dump really hurts Tarrlok’s character development more than it helps it. And when you factor in how important Tarrlok’s character is to the actual plot and thematic direction of the series (intentional or otherwise), the fact that the viewer doesn’t see much of him early in the series is a big problem.

I say this, because Tarrlok’s character arc is tied to his relationship with Yakone and Amon–the major antagonists of the series. And we don’t get any interaction or sense of connection between these three characters until episode 9, and the interaction we do get is too little too late.

Think about that for a minute. Tarrlok’s connection to Yakone–the lynch pin of the series, which facilitates the reveal of Amon’s true history–is only revealed in Episode 9. There are only three episodes left after that to wrap things up, and that’s not enough time to really dig into the implications of the connection or to let that connection sink in.

Worse still, we don’t get anything about about Tarrlok’s connection to Amon before that flashback sequence. And while that was a beautiful flashback, it wasn’t really satisfying. Instead of answering questions and letting the audience make connections, it served up a narrative and expected audience buy-in on the spot.

In order for Tarrlok’s arc to be satisfactory, we needed to see more of Tarrlok, more of Amon, and much more of Yakone. And that didn’t happen in the series.

Sure, Yakone comes up before that point (and Amon is an ever menacing threat), but his legacy is never openly discussed. And, really, this entire first season is actually about Yakone, his relationship with the Avatar, and how that relationship is perpetuated through their respective legacies (Yakone’s sons and Korra).

The show barely discusses these themes, instead it focuses on subplots and fake-outs. Characters are underdeveloped or aspects of development are pushed aside to make room for pro-bending and romance (the pro-bending was kind of excessive, the romance was awful). Even the Equalist Revolution, as compelling as it was, is kind of a fake out, because let’s face it, we never actually see the lives of non-benders explored in the course of this series. It was never a priority.

What I’m saying is that Season 1, though awesome in its way, lacked focus and didn’t build momentum toward the finale. It did a lot of “awesome things”, but those “awesome things” didn’t come together into a coherent whole in a way that satisfied the viewer.

Now, criticism is great, but it doesn’t offer solutions. So, here’s something I’ve learned in the course of reading and writing:

Never sneak up on your reader/viewer.

Yes, people say they love surprises, but that’s not really true. People like the anticipation that leads up to a reveal, not the reveal itself. They like to pick up the clues with the main character, study them, think about them, and come to conclusions.

Tarrlok’s arc, from a structural perspective, was fine. Like I said, he has a strong character arc and decent development. But, in order for the dramatic reveal in Episode 11 to work, we needed a lot more clues and hints about Tarrlok’s background.

Maybe those hints could come from the triads–they’d remember Yakone. I imagine there would be thugs who hold up Yakone’s legacy as a means of earning respect and power.

Having some triad members claim: “I was trained by Yakone!” Or that they were: “Yakone’s son!” (even though they weren’t) would have introduced the idea that Yakone might have a legacy and, if these were powerful benders, it would have helped cement Yakone as a menacing and threatening figure in Republic City, instead of just an odd piece of the past that keeps coming up. I mean, really a blood bender that terrorized a major city? A man who escaped incarceration? He’d be a local legend!

I think getting more interactions between Tarrlok and Amon would have also helped. If we’d had scenes from Korra’s time on the task force where they confronted Amon and Amon refused to attack Tarrlok… that would have raised some questions and helped the audience come to terms with the narrative direction long before the end of the series.

Maybe we could have had more scenes were Tarrlok compared himself to Aang and Amon to Yakone. An obsession with that narrative would have provided a bit more context for Tarrlok’s relationship with Yakone, but also his interest in Korra.

#Tarrlok #Structure #Character arc #avatar: legend of korra #a:lok #Writing #Technical Writing #Structural Analysis #Long-ass answer #yakone #Amon

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lifefoodwill · 5 years ago

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To answer the many questions I am receiving about Dorian, I decided to take a short break from finishing the very exciting Part 3 article on the G7 victories and go through the hurricane updates provided by the Maestro.

What if I told you that solving a riddle made of 5 tweets posted on September 4 2019 would give you everything you need to know about Hurricane Dorian?

Would you believe me if I told you that these 5 tweets can provide enough material to write an entire book about geoengineering and the current war opposing Trump to the Satanic Cabal? Here is the riddle.PNG

In this article, I told you the meaning of Dorian and its relation to Q ANON and to the multidimensional war we are engaged in. In these images link1PNG – link2PNG taken from this article, I told you that the geoengineering war had begun. Based on this information, many of you have certainly read between the lines and identified Dorian’s real purpose. The fact that DORIAN is sharing the value of 61 with Q ANON is an indication that it is a weapon in the hands of the White Hats.

Let’s solve the riddle and we will clearly see what Dorian was designed for and what it has accomplished. As usual, we’ll go through the pieces of the puzzle first and will assemble them at the end.

Ready?

We start by pulling tweet 2 and watch the Maestro’s update on Dorian: tweet. We put tweet 1 and 2 side by side, pull their Q drops and this operation provides the first clue: Img1PNG

Knowing we are in autist zone, to start solving, we need to go back in time. Watch: video.YouTube What do we do next? Yes, we calculate the time difference between the day the Maestro talked about the storm and the day he updated us about it: Img2PNG

Then, we notice Ivanka tweeted from Colombia at 1:27 PM. We analyze the delta with her father’s retweet timestamp, find confirmations and the puzzle starts to come together: Img3PNG

Next, we should identify the logical link between the NHC retweet and the Oval Office update: Img4PNG

Peruvian Coffee for those with visual skills and who saw the NHC image looked like a golf club hitting a ball or a turntable cartridge on a vinyl record! These visuals are confirmed by the Maestro’s speech! He warned you: “where are the autists?” Here is the solution: Img5PNG

We now have the sub puzzle: music-charts-grazed. Can you solve? The key was to know some Hip Hop and remember the word “grazed” was used by the media to describe how Suge Knight survived Tupac’s murder: Img6PNG

As you can see, with multiple confirmations, the Maestro is clearly pointing at Rap Music and Hip Hop.

In case you have doubts, let’s read the drop pulled by the original WH tweet timestamp 12:26 PM. Look at these spectacular confirmations: Img7PNG

Are you enjoying the beauty of this? From the Maestro’s tweet, we went from FLOOD to HURRICANES through the Q board staying in the context of Hip Hop!

Now that we are certain of the relevance of Hip Hop in the riddle, we go through our music collection and try to find matches with the 5 tweets of the riddle. Here is the first confirmed match and it connects Arrested Development to Ivanka’s tweet 4: Img8PNG

Next? We happily follow the Maestro advising us not to stop the music and we play the hit song of the album: video.YouTube

Did you catch the message? They wanted to go the “nigga route disrespecting my Black Queen”. Does this ring a bell? Did you notice PEOPLE EVERYDAY=174=EYE OF THE STORM? Here is the solution: Img9PNG

Now why did the Maestro pull a group called “Arrested Development”? To solve this, you needed to take a closer look at Ivanka’s picture in tweet 5 and notice the symbolism connected to the Q board. Then, you needed to identify the message hidden behind the WGDP acronym and see how the song title and artist name confirmed the acronym. Read very carefully: Img10PNG

Now you understand why the Maestro said at the end of his update: “Mostly WIND. And we’re going to have a REPORT on that.” WIND=50=DPGW and REPORT connects to PORT.

If you also notice that WGDP=50=EVER and look around, you’ll access the Clinton Foundation variation of the Dubai Port model through the Witch’s Secret Service code name EVERGREEN. Read very carefully: Img11PNG

Now that you know about the Witch, her love for green, Evergreen, what it’s all about and its connection to the Clinton Foundation, you are equipped to discover the Satanic Blood Road along our East Coast that they’ll never tell you about in geography class: Img12PNG

Let’s stay in the gulf area and solve the golf component of the riddle and why the Maestro said after mentioning Florida: “it was going toward the Gulf”: Img13PNG

As you can see, we have another strong confirmation on RAP music but there’s a new item coming from golf and it’s PAR. Can you solve this? Take a minute and try to find how PAR relates to the Maestro’s war against the Cabal and where it gets you to.

Peruvian Coffee for those who remembered how Skull and Bones had a Greenpeace paraglider fly over Trump’s property in Turnberry, Scotland to deliver the WELL BELOW PAR message accompanied with the death of Secret Service Agent Remagen! videoYouTube. I decoded this tragic event in detail in this article. If we notice the Skull and Bones message was sent 419 days before the Maestro’s update on Dorian, we access amazing information. Read very carefully: Img14PNG

Did you solve the name of the strawberry farm Ivanka visited being El Salero? I told you in this article that the day the Antichrist sees Christ, he will melt like salt in water…

I pray I am allowed to meet very soon my Brothers and Sisters who understand these things…

For now let’s continue gathering the pieces of the puzzle.

We have Illuminati, PAR=35=RAP and the Blood Road. If you notice 35 is also the value for CHINA and that it’s the current location of the Cabal’s tent, Tweets 3 and 4 pull an unexpected guest from Puerto Rico: Img15PNG

Now you know why Fat Joe and other similar operators have been so vocal about hurricane relief efforts: it’s the Clinton foundation Haiti play. They want to be part of the controlled chaos to make their money and move ALL THE WAY UP the food chain. Watch, he told you right here: videoYouTube

You thought I pulled this Fat Joe video randomly? No no no. Frames 2:41 and 3:20 are connected to the riddle’s tweets in a strong and spectacular way: Img16PNG

Next? We analyze the video further and discover it’s a crash course on the history of the Blood and Drug Road, how it operates, who provides, who distributes, how Flynn was targeted very early on for knowing and how operators aspire to climb the ladders of this bloody, invisible and parallel society: Img17PNG

Let’s end where we’ve started. The Maestro begun by saying this: “We thought we’d give you an update on the hurricane. We got lucky in Florida -very, very lucky indeed”. Can you solve?

Do you like Daft Punk? Here is their biggest hit, it’s called Get Lucky: video.YouTube

Do you like Tupac? Let’s listen to his song entitled Pain: video.YouTube

You thought I pulled these 2 songs randomly? No no no. Add the value of the 2 titles, what do you get? Yes: PAIN, GET LUCKY = 144 = WELL BELOW PAR and here is the decode with the successful test on my Daft Punk jukebox pick: Img18PNG

Before the riddle closed with tweet 5 at 2:47 PM, the Maestro provided an update at 2:17 PM. We know it’s a real time update because it’s connected to Q1417 where we read ‘Updated’. We add this video to the ones released within the riddle time frame, add up their respective lengths and Bingo! Barry Soetero comes out of his hiding place: Img19PNG

With HUSSEIN joining the riddle through this update, we are equipped to solve the current feud about Alabama. Let’s first enjoy it: video.YouTube

As a response, the Maestro pinned a video vindicating him and showing CNN repeating ALABAMA 9 times: tweet

Did you solve the link between Obama and Alabama? Since OBAMA=32 and ALABAMA=31, Dorian hitting Alabama symbolizes the diminution or progressive destruction of Obama, the Satanic Cabal’s most valuable pawn on the chessboard.

Why 9? Are you familiar with the flood of the river Lo in Ancient China, magic squares and the Lo Shu grid? Here is a summary: Img20PNG

We can now use the Lo Shu grid with its geomancy feature and decode the Maestro’s tweet about Alabama, the Fake News lying about it and why he responded: “I don’t know” to the Fake News: Img21PNG

We have gathered all the pieces of this amazing puzzle. We can now assemble them. Here is the final decoded message: Img22PNG – Img23PNG

Q571 FEAR the STORM. NOBODY PLAYING THE GAME GETS A FREE PASS. NOBODY. Q

#gallery-0-5 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 25%; } #gallery-0-5 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Dorian: All the Way Up and the Alabama Mystery Solved. To answer the many questions I am receiving about Dorian, I decided to take a short break from finishing the very exciting Part 3 article on the G7 victories and go through the hurricane updates provided by the Maestro.

#dorian #Dorian: All the Way Up and the Alabama Mystery Solved #sb2 #serial brain #serialbrain2 #serialbran

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kathleenseiber · 5 years ago

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This skull reveals the face of Lucy’s ancestor

Researchers have discovered a “remarkably complete” cranium of a 3.8-million-year-old early human ancestor.

Working for the past 15 years at the Woranso-Mille paleontological site in the Afar region of Ethiopia, the team discovered the cranium (MRD-VP-1/1), here referred to as “MRD,” in February 2016. In the years following the discovery, paleoanthropologists conducted extensive analyses of MRD, while project geologists worked on determining the specimen’s age and context.

The 3.8-million-year-old fossil cranium (MRD) represents a time interval between 4.1 and 3.6 million years ago when early human ancestor fossils are extremely rare, especially outside the Woranso-Mille area.

Clipped side view. (Credit: Dale Omori/the Cleveland Museum of Natural History)

MRD offers new information on the overall craniofacial morphology of Australopithecus anamensis, a species widely accepted as the ancestor of Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis.

It also shows that Lucy’s species and its hypothesized ancestor, A. anamensis, coexisted for approximately 100,000 years, challenging previous assumptions of a linear transition between these two early human ancestors.

The discovery is reported in two papers in Nature.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I spotted the rest of the cranium. It was a eureka moment and a dream come true.”

“This is a game changer in our understanding of human evolution during the Pliocene,” says Yohannes Haile-Selassie, an adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University and curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

The Woranso-Mille project has conducted field research in the central Afar region of Ethiopia since 2004. The project has collected more than 12,600 fossil specimens representing about 85 mammalian species. The fossil collection includes about 230 fossil hominin specimens dating to between >3.8 and ~3.0 million years ago.

Ali Bereino (a local Afar worker) found the first piece of MRD, the upper jaw, at a locality known as Miro Dora, Mille District of the Afar Regional State of Ethiopia. Miro Dora is about 550 km (around 342 miles) northeast of the capital, Addis Ababa, and 55 km (34 miles) north of Hadar (“Lucy’s” site). The specimen was exposed on the surface, and further investigation of the area led to the recovery of the rest of the cranium.

3D printed model of the cranium. (Credit: Dale Omori/Cleveland Museum of Natural History)

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I spotted the rest of the cranium. It was a eureka moment and a dream come true,” Haile-Selassie says.

In a companion paper published in the same issue of Nature, Beverly Saylor of Case Western Reserve University and her colleagues reported the age of the fossil as 3.8 million years by dating minerals in layers of volcanic rocks nearby. They mapped the dated levels to the fossil site using field observations and the chemistry and magnetic properties of rock layers.

Saylor and her colleagues combined the field observations with analysis of microscopic biological remains to reconstruct the landscape, vegetation, and hydrology where MRD died.

Environmental clues

Researchers found MRD in the sandy deposits of a delta where a river entered a lake. The river likely originated in the highlands of the Ethiopian plateau while the lake developed at lower elevations, where rift activity caused the Earth surface to stretch and thin, creating the lowlands of the Afar region.

Debris flows and volcanic ejecta occasionally descended into the otherwise quiet lake, which was ultimately buried by basalt lava flows. This kind of volcanic activity and dramatic landscape change is common in rift settings.

“Incredible exposures and the volcanic layers that episodically blanketed the land surface and lake floor allowed us to map out this varied landscape and how it changed over time,” Saylor says.

A photomontage of MRD with facial reconstruction. (Photo credit: Matt Crow/Dale Omori. Montage credit: Jennifer Taylor, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Facial reconstruction credit: John Gurche, made possible through generous contribution by Susan and George Klein)

Naomi Levin, an associate professor in the earth and environmental science department at the University of Michigan and coauthor of the paper, coordinated environmental reconstructions at the site with an interdisciplinary team from several institutions.

“MRD lived near a large lake in a region that was dry. We’re eager to conduct more work in these deposits to understand the environment of the MRD specimen, the relationship to climate change, and how it affected human evolution, if at all,” Levin says.

Fossil pollen grains and chemical remains of fossil plants and algae that are preserved in the lake and delta sediments provide clues about the ancient environmental conditions. Specifically, they indicate that the lake near where MRD finally rested was likely salty at times and that the watershed of the lake was mostly dry but that there were also forested areas on the shores of the delta or along the side of the river that fed the delta and lake system.

“The existence of a large lake is clear from field observations of sediments, but it’s the preservation and chemical composition of microscopic parts of plants and algae that helped us figure out that the surrounding watershed was dry,” Levin says.

Levin also codirects an isotope geochemistry lab that conducts geological analyses using carbon and oxygen isotopes.

“While it can be common to have a large lake in a dry climate in rift settings, just the presence of large lakes in the geologic record can be used to infer wet climate intervals,” she says. “So it was key that we drew on the expertise of our interdisciplinary team to figure out the broader climate context of this lake.”

Cranial mash-up

Here are the significant aspects of the discovery:

Australopithecus anamensis and its descendant species, the well-known Australopithecus afarensis, coexisted for a period of at least 100,000 years. This finding contradicts the long-held notion of an anagenetic relationship between these two taxa, whereby one species disappears only by giving rise to a new species in a linear fashion.

Australopithecus anamensis is the oldest known member of the genus Australopithecus. The species was previously only known through teeth and jaw fragments, all dated to between 4.2 and 3.9 million years ago. The similarities between the preserved dentition of the 3.8-million-year-old MRD and the previously known teeth and jaw fragments of A. anamensis led to a positive identification of MRD as a member of A. anamensis. Additionally, due to the cranium’s rare near-complete state, the researchers identified never-before-seen facial features in the species.

“MRD has a mix of primitive and derived facial and cranial features that I didn’t expect to see on a single individual,” Haile-Selassie says. Coauthor Stephanie Melillo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany adds, “A. anamensis was already a species that we knew quite a bit about, but this is the first cranium of the species ever discovered. It is good to finally be able to put a face to the name.” Some characteristics were shared with its descendant species, Australopithecus afarensis, while others differed significantly and had more in common with those of even older and more primitive early human ancestor groups, such as Ardipithecus and Sahelanthropus.

The distinct differences between the 3.8-million-year-old MRD specimen and a previously unassigned 3.9-million-year-old hominin cranium fragment—commonly known as the Belohdelie frontal and discovered in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia by a team of paleontologists in 1981—also proved significant. The preserved features of the Belohdelie frontal differed from those of MRD but were significantly similar to those of the known cranial specimens of Lucy’s species. As a result, the new study confirms that the Belohdelie frontal belonged to an individual of Lucy’s species. This identification extends the earliest record of Australopithecus afarensis back to 3.9 million years ago, indicating a period of at least 100,000 years’ overlap with its ancestor, Australopithecus anamensis.

The 3.8-million-year-old MRD specimen was buried in a river delta on the margin of a lake that formed in an actively rifted landscape with steep hillsides and volcanic eruptions that blanketed the land surface with ash and lava. There were forested areas on the shores of the delta or along the edges of the river that flowed into the delta and lake system, but the watershed that fed the river, delta, and lake system was mostly dry with few trees.

Additional project researchers are from Penn State; the University of Bologna; Universitat de Barcelona; Berkeley Geochronology Center; Addis Ababa University; Franklin and Marshall College, University of Southern California; and Aix-Marseille University.

Source: University of Michigan

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thomasroach · 5 years ago

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Judgment Review

Fronting as the Yagami Detective Agency, Tak and Kaito battle through a story of love, deceit, and betrayal in SEGA’s Judgment. Is this Yakuza spin-off worthy of the games’ spiritual predecessor, or was Kiryu the driving force behind the franchises’ success?

Judgment Review

In a world where even the kids know kung-fu, everyone can crack their neck, matching tracksuits are cool, and floral shirts are worn by hard men, our protagonist, Takayuki Yagami, and his hard-headed sidekick Kaito stand alone in a struggle to find Kamurochos most notorious and feared serial killer, the Mole.

Fans of the Yakuza franchise will relish in the opportunity of returning to Kamurocho, the iconic town that has featured throughout the series of games. Judgment’s Kamurocho delivers a more vibrant, more immersive, and more realistic city than previous games, but still with plenty of nostalgic opportunities with the visiting of past haunts and a few Easter eggs relating to past characters and events.

Judgment enters as a spin-off of the Yakuza franchise, leaning on the series’ thrilling combat, intriguing story, and huge cast of supporting characters to introduce an exciting new narrative in the form of investigative techniques and detective gameplay. While Takayuki Yagami does have ties to Yakuza and the seedy underbelly that comes with it, he’s a law-abiding detective – for the most part, and much of the game plays into that new direction.

During missions, you’ll be interrogating suspects, searching crime scenes for clues, and deciphering evidence to find the correct conclusion. Much of it is great fun and really rewarding – but not all of it. The majority of the investigative scenes are too simplistic, requiring you to move a magnifying glass around the screen to find a single point of interaction – not all too different from hidden object games. There’s also the missions that have you tailing a suspect – arguably one of the strangest design choices in the franchises’ history.

They are far too common, happening throughout the main story and huge variety of side content. It’s a simple premise; you follow a suspect until they reveal the information you require. While believable and realistic in regards to the detective narrative, they become incredibly frustrating, drawn out, and in a word, boring – a word I rarely use to describe the work of developers Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio. Some of these missions can last nearly 10 minutes. 10 minutes of walking behind a suspect that often walks in circles, seemingly lacking any purpose other than to waste the players’ time. You cannot avoid them, you cannot skip them, but if you can endure them, there’s plenty of exciting opportunities in between.

When you’re not tailing suspects or searching for clues, you’re whooping ass. Judgment places its combat at the very forefront of the experience with nearly every mission or event resulting in the distribution of justice – with fists and feet the chosen vessels of delivery. Judgment’s combat is much faster, more responsive, and offers more fluidity and the traditionally clunky combat of past games. While still retaining a similar feel, Takayuki Yagami’s combat style is much quicker, with more complex combos and more varieties of attacks. It’s still very much a Yakuza game at heart, but with all the right improvements in all the right places.

The story itself lasts approximately 20 hours, and it’s worth every minute. What begins as a dark but seemingly simple investigation into a series of murders quickly descends into a far more sinister and intricate plot that involves politics, real estate, the Yakuza, the medical industry, and a cure for Alzheimer’s, with plot twists and turns at every available opportunity. In true Yakuza fashion, the story is supported by a wealth of side content that can easily wrack up the hours to the 30-40 region.

Kamurocho’s iconic sub-stories return in the form of Side Cases, familiar detective-like work that includes everything from investigating potential infidelity to the capturing of a group of infamous perverts renowned for exposing themselves to anyone in their path. The Side Cases offer a lot of depth to the game world, providing insight into the lives of Kamurocho’s citizens, which often results in yet further opportunities to understand the lives of those involved. A new system has also been introduced that gives Tak the opportunity to make friends with many of Kamurocho’s residents, a feature that is both rewarding and engaging throughout.

While making friends and exploring Side Cases is a thrilling part of Judgment’s adventure, it appears to come at the expense of the series’ fabled mini-games. Those familiar with the Yakuza games have come to expect a level of quality and creativity unprecedented in much of the industry today. Clan Creator, Majima Construction, the Cabaret Clubs, and Yakuza’s past mini-games have been one of the franchises most impressive elements, but Judgment is lacking in comparison.

The traditional arcade games are there, alongside darts, offering brief moments of respite from the often exhausting detective work but as the game progresses, the more integrated mini-games become unlocked. The primary opportunity of investing time into a mini-game comes in the form of Dice & Cube, a virtual-reality mini-game where you throw a dice, move spaces, and complete basic tasks. It’s incredibly rewarding in value, offering the best method of earning money and rare items, but the entire experience itself is bland and repetitive. Judgment’s mini-games and activities are far from bad but they fail to meet the high expectations put in place by previous games in the Yakuza franchise.

If there’s one aspect of the Yakuza franchise that is still very much alive and kicking in Judgment, it’s the masterfully crafted combination of relatable characters and a thoroughly intriguing story alongside some of the wackiest and entirely insane moments you’ll experience in a video game. In one breath I’m examining the latest victim in a series of murders, attempting to understand why the killer gouges out the eyes, and the next I’m shooting a Spider-man-like pervert with a camera off the side of a building using a drone, dressing up as a vampire to distract paparazzi, and being approached by a huge, muscly naked man with the phrase “Have you come to bask in the shadow of my scrotum totem?”.

Humor in games with a mostly serious tone seldom sell me on the combination. One is typically contradictory of the other, and usually results in the serious aspects of the game losing tone and impact through comedic flavor. However, much like they did with the Yakuza franchise, the development team at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio once again proves that they have the art to near perfection in a game that shocked me as much as it did make me laugh.

Judgment is a must-play for fans of the Yakuza franchise and a fantastic entry level title for those a little put off by the time required to catch up with the Yakuza series. It offers a fun and challenging dive into a wonderfully crafted game world, whose only disappointment is the result of the quality of past works.

This Judgment Review was done on the PlayStation 4 Pro. A digital copy was provided.

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ciathyzareposts · 6 years ago

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Island of Dr. Brain – Mathematical Wordplay

Written by Reiko

Last time we went through the first two “rooms” of puzzles, essentially, since the beach just has the polyomino door puzzle, and the jigsaw puzzle is the door puzzle for the second room. The third room presents us with a wooden bridge with several planks missing. A cliff carved like the face of Dr. Brain has a forest for “hair”. The path goes through the forest and up the mountain behind it to a door.

It’s not a code! It’s just scrambled.

The bridge triggers “Dr. Brain’s World Famous Cipher Bridge Puzzle” (what a mouthful!). I usually like ciphers, but these are a little annoying because they aren’t actually ciphers at all; they’re multi-word anagrams. In the puzzle context, I would define a cipher as information written in code which has to be decoded. The usual puzzle ciphers are substitution ciphers, like at the end of Castle of Dr. Brain where the alphabet was shifted by one letter, or sometimes each letter is arbitrarily substituted with another letter or even a different kind of symbol, like the symbolic messages sent by one of the alien races in Alien Legacy. Other ciphers are lookup ciphers, where the code references words from a specific source like a book.

…and now unscrambled.

But this bridge puzzle, at least on Expert level, includes two kinds of anagrammed sentences: one kind where each word is scrambled and then the order of the words is also scrambled; and another kind where the words are in the right order, but the letters are scrambled and also spaces are in the wrong places. Not ciphers! All the information is there; it’s just a matter of reordering it correctly. With a cipher, the code is often necessary to decrypt the message: the substitution arrangement, or the lookup source. Given that additional information, the message can be decrypted even if it isn’t understood, like a message in a foreign language. A simple enough cipher can be broken even without the code, but that requires some linguistic and grammatical analysis. But with anagrams, the only way to reconstruct the original message is to figure out the right order of the pieces by analyzing the content. Some kinds of messages can’t be anagrammed without losing the information, like a phone number.

Each sentence is usually a famous quote, so once part of it is figured out, that gives momentum and the rest is easier by context. For instance, Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” After three quotes, one for each of the three planks that the bridge needs, then the puzzle is complete, and I get a gold plaque for Decoding. For some reason, this is considered a Math puzzle, not a Language puzzle.

How many of the 15 remaining animals can you see in this picture?

Next up is the Botanical Garden puzzle, which I personally find to be the most annoying puzzle in the whole game, because it just involves finding camouflaged animals hidden in the forest scene. The annoying part is that you have to draw a box around the animal with the mouse, and it has to be close enough around the shape of the animal before the game will recognize that you’ve found it. Often it’s extremely difficult to see the extent of the animal’s shape in order to select it properly even if you know where it is.

This praying mantis was well-hidden in the picture, too.

There are sixteen animals in the picture, randomly placed, and often duplicated. For instance, in this case I found two ant lions and two praying mantises, along with twelve other animals from a scorpion to an African leopard to a kiwi (the Australian bird, not the fruit). They are not depicted to scale relative to the forest or each other, either. At least the game will tell you if you’re close, but it can be aggravating to think you’re selecting the animal correctly, only to have it cheerfully tell you that you’re warm, but it’s not good enough.

Finding all sixteen animals nets me a gold plaque in “Visual Skills”. Again, a Math puzzle, not a Science puzzle. What? I don’t get why both the Science and Language areas of the Achievement Board couldn’t have included one additional puzzle (to maintain symmetry) instead of lumping all these other things in with Math when they clearly aren’t mathematical.

It’s as good as telling me I need to look up the periodic table for information.

After I exit the completed puzzle, a “mysterious bag” magically appears in the path, which I’m told contains items for the Volcano Door Analyzer. I can then use that to tackle the door into the mountain. Here I have to identify the constituent elements of three ordinary objects such as baking soda (Sodium, Hydrogen, Carbon, and trace elements), or a plaster cast, or a Vitamin C tablet.

Hydrogen! The clue often includes atomic weight, which is unambiguous.

Each element has a descriptive clue which by common sense and process of elimination makes it relatively straightforward to identify. I used a periodic table, because the game outright suggests that the information is available in the reference materials provided with the game. Completing this puzzle yields a gold plaque for “Material Analysis” (properly Science this time).

Then I get an extra message from Dr. Brain, in which he informs me that he’s completed his invention and would like the battery “at your earliest convenience.” I don’t think there’s actually any time limit, so this seems like just a bit of flavor to remind the player why they’re working through all these puzzles in the first place.

A magic square would have all totals the same, but there are a lot more puzzle solutions available if the totals vary.

The door opens right onto a room built around the top of a volcano, complete with lava. There’s even a lava lamp in the foreground! First I have to solve a number puzzle to access the volcano computer. It’s a sort of uneven magic square puzzle where each row, column, and diagonal has to add up to a specific target number, but not all the same number. It’s solvable by trial and error, mostly, by making some guesses and then swapping numbers around to get the sums closer to the targets until everything matches. The puzzle even has two display modes where it will show either the target totals (“Goal” mode), or the differences remaining from the target totals (“Need” mode). Dr. Brain calls this puzzle “Numeric Planning”.

At this point, flooring slides shut over the top of the volcano so that I can reach the spectral analysis machine on the other side of the room. That floor looks metallic, so I’d assume that it would be awfully hot if it’s sitting right over molten lava. Maybe I can just dash across and then stand on the ledge on the other side to work the next puzzle.

The last element doesn’t match the pattern, so then I can select the ones that did match.

The game informs me, “The door is locked with a Spectrum Analyzer Puzzle”. I found this one to be very easy. It provides a composite pattern formed from the spectral analysis of a specific combination of elements. I just tested each element individually, noted which ones matched part of the pattern, and then tested the combination of those matching elements. Sometimes the patterns overlap a little bit, but not much. On Expert, the combination includes six of eight elements: easier levels would include fewer elements. As you can probably guess, completing the pattern gives me a plaque for “Spectrum Analysis”.

A strange village.

When I unlock the door, suddenly the island experiences an earthquake. What did I do? Am I in danger? I pass quickly through the door into a village area with several small cute grass huts and lots of plants, including cornstalks and apple trees. One hut has an inedible slice of pizza attached to the top. Another has a fish skeleton. Some places have larger bones for decoration. Let’s hope those are all animal bones.

I hate it when people use “threw” instead of “through”.

I try the corn first and find the Hominy Homonym Puzzle, where I have to fill in the correct spelling of words that sound alike in various sentences, where the words on offer are displayed on ears of corn. It’s made easier by the fact that, of a particular homonym pair, one word is used in each of the two sentences. I have little difficulty with homonyms usually, so I make short work of the puzzles. It’s only tricky when the sentence is short enough that it’s hard to tell what it’s actually saying with four words removed. Completing three sets gets me a Homonym plaque (of course), plus a bucket of ground corn. I’m not sure why identifying homonyms would grind the corn, but okay then.

Classic poetry. Who can name the writer?

There’s also a bridge in the background leading to a hut decorated with shiny lights. The bridge has a place for a counterweight, so I put the bucket of corn there. It isn’t enough by itself to raise the bridge, so I look around for something else and find the Synonym Apple puzzle. These sentences contain words that must be replaced by synonyms from a set of words displayed on stretched-out apple graphics. The puzzle is made easier by the fact that the texts are rhyming couplets, and I have to replace the last word of each line, so those words have to rhyme. (Although “prove” and “love” don’t actually rhyme…)

After three sets, I get the Synonym plaque and also a bucket of apples. I place it next to the bucket of corn on the counterweight, but I still need something else.

Dancing robots!

I poke around some more and discover some amusing things: clicking with the hand on most of the huts triggers an animation of a cute little robot (??) dancing or doing something. There’s some laundry hung up to dry in the background which are also described as robot clothes. What? This is a village of robots? What do they need with clothes? Or fish? Or decorations…? How strange.

Antonyms put a very different spin on these quotes…

The third puzzle is the Anthill Antonym, which works similarly to the other two: I have to replace words with their opposites, but this time ants bear the available words on their backs. Plus this time I have twelve available words to replace nine words in three famous quotes. In the other two, I had nine available words for eight slots, so it was much easier to use process of elimination to decide which word wasn’t necessary. This time I have more words available so it’s actually a bit trickier. Being familiar with some of the famous quotes helps, though.

After just two sets, I get the Antonym plaque and also a…watermelon? Where were the ants hiding that thing, and why? Still, the watermelon is enough to counterweight the bridge, with the two buckets. Here I’ll also mention that placing the items on the counterweight is nearly a pixel hunt, because if you aren’t placing them in just the right place, the game boldly tells you that the item should be used elsewhere. That could be a bit misleading, except that this is a self-contained screen and there’s really nowhere else to put them anyway.

The Achievement Board after sixteen puzzles.

Here’s where I’ll stop for now. Next time we’ll check out the crazy hut with all its odd decorations.

Session Time: 2 hours 30 minutes Total Time: 4 hours 30 minutes

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please…try not to spoil any part of the game for me…unless I really obviously need the help…or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I’ve not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/island-of-dr-brain-mathematical-wordplay/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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