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theuniversitychallengereview · 3 years ago

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UC 51.03 - London Business School vs Hertford, Oxford

Since it was introduced at the 1988 Olympics, every single Gold Medal in the Women’s Team event in the Archery has gone to South Korea. Including yesterday’s win that’s nine straight victories, and their period of unparalleled dominance continues. The men’s team have also won six of the nine they have contested, and a mixed team won the first staging of that event in Tokyo too. Adding their success in the individual events, South Korea have won 26 gold medals, and 42 in total, in the 43 archery events which have been thus far staged at the Olympic Games.

As Twitter’s own @tarequelaskar pointed out in the brilliant article which alerted me to this story, this is a perfect example of specialisation, an economic concept whereby countries or companies focus intensely on one particular aspect of a given industry and come to serve that niche in such a specialised fashion that they become the ultimate experts and nigh-on irreplaceable. This is done in government and business by providing companies with incentives to specialise, and supporting those who succeed at it.

With respect to Korean archery, similar forces are at play. There are a bunch of professional teams and leagues in the country, giving archers financial stability while they focus on their training, something not as common across the world. Said training involves such things as practicing in live baseball stadiums and replicas of the Olympic venues, to mimic first the atmosphere and then the conditions that will be present on the day of the actual tournament.

This philosophy of marginal gains - the same system used by Team Sky and Chris Froome to win multiple Tour De Frances on the trot - puts their preparation miles ahead of the competition, which goes some way to explaining their dominance. It is not the only reason. Before the fine-tuning of the elite shooters comes the discovery of the promising young ones, and the inspiring nature of past success (along with a historic national love of the sport) helps to create a virtuous cycle which give Korea a far larger number of archers to choose from than any other country. This greater choice means that there is a greater chance of finding the next Gold medallists.

Making the argument that professional footballers are at a higher level than other elite sportspeople, Michael Cox used this same argument in a recent article for The Athletic. To summarise, he stated that because there are a far higher number of people who wish to become professional footballers, that must mean that the ones who do make it are at a higher standard than those who make it in other sports. Initially, I was drawn in by the pure maths of this point, but having thought about it some more I’m no longer sure to what extent I agree.

Now, the fact that hundreds of millions more people play football than rugby, or basketball, will certainly confer some level of “eliteness”, but only up to a certain point. Because football has been so popular for so long, the general standard of the play, relative to what it used to be, has had longer to improve. In the same way that if you transplanted a 100m runner from the Olympic final in the early 20th century to now they probably wouldn’t even qualify for the games, a footballer from the 80s would stand less of a chance of making it were they playing today. Many other sports don’t have that level of natural progression, afforded by decades of technical and tactical advancement - at least not globally.

But the numbers argument only goes so far, as can be demonstrated by the Korean archers. Yes, there are more archers in Korea than anywhere else, relatively, giving them a higher chance of uncovering those with a natural aptitude, but the reason behind their bow and arrow dynasty is the specialisation. The hyper-detailed level of training and focus which allows them to be the best they can possible be.

Now, archery is unique in that there is a theoretical maximum score (I understand that this is to some extent arbitrary, and related to the rules of the game as defined by some human being, semi-randomly, but it works in terms of this argument, because it gives a percentage score of how good the archers are based on the agreed-upon parameters of the sport), which, at the Olympics, is 720. The Olympic record is 700 (held by Korean Kim Woo-jin, giving an implied “eliteness level” of 97.2%.

The best player in the history of football (don’t @ me) is Lionel Messi, and few would doubt that he operates at or above that level of perfection in his sport. But I also don’t think you could doubt that Novak Djokovic, or Serena Williams in her pomp, were similarly magnificent at tennis. Cyclists on the Tour De France put their bodies through more in three weeks than most people endure in a decade, and have every aspect of their training and diet strictly controlled so as to bring them as close to perfection as possible. There will certainly be a higher number of these elite performers in football, because there are a higher number of paying jobs for said elite performers, and because more people attempt to become elite performers, but I don’t think that it follows on from that that they are better at their sport than other elite athletes, all of whom have undergone years and years of specialised training to get them where they are.

Does any of this matter, in terms of how each sport should be enjoyed? Probably not, but its interesting to think about, and kind of awe-inspiring to try and appreciate just how good those at the top of their respective games are. And if there is some discrepancy in the level of eliteness between the different sports it doesn’t detract from the fact that they would handily dispatch any civilian challengers without breaking a sweat. The joy comes from watching people who are good at stuff doing that stuff - and, as evidenced by the crowds which gather for non-league football, it doesn’t matter whether or not they are at the absolute pinnacle of said stuff. They’re still going to be much better than the rest of us.

Competitive quizzing is different from the activities previously mentioned in that any normal person can have a guess at pretty much any question, with a chance that they’ll get it right. What sets the contestants apart on shows like University Challenge is the speed of their recall under pressure - the quickness of their knowledge as well as the knowledge itself. But there are plenty of armchair quizzers who think they could wipe the floor on the show, so just how good are the actual contestants? (Compared to an elite footballer or archer on an imaginary scale that accounts for relative skill in all disciplines?). I don’t know (and in case you hadn’t noticed by now I’m just fascinated by people who are really good at anything, and wanted to share some of that fascination with you all), but I’ll try and have a go at answering it anyway.

So, the World Quizzing Championships have been dominated by British and Irish quizzers since its inception in 2003, with 16 of the 18 winners coming from either Britain or the Republic of Ireland (who have four wins courtesy of The Egghead Pat Gibson). This, in my mind, makes this neck of the woods comparable to South Korean archery. It is a hotbed of talent, and the infrastructure is in place to encourage and aid talent maximalisation. Indeed, if you scroll down the list of highest ranking players at the WQC in any given year you can see a significant cohort of UC alums, so clearly there are a number of elite quizzers who have passed through the show.

This specialisation can be seen in microcosm with the preponderance of top-level quizzers produced by Oxford and Cambridge, who both have a long-standing culture of competitive quizzing far beyond other Universities. The debate is there to be had on the fairness of each institution having so many teams, but clearly they produce enough elite players to compete with far bigger Unis when entering as (sometimes tiny) colleges.

In conclusion, I think it is pretty obvious that UC is a breeding ground for world-class quizzers, and though no one has won a World title straight off the bat after appearing on the show, there are top-50 and top 100 finishes abound, which is still greatly impressive, and helps to give an idea of just how good these students really are.

Hoping to justify the 1000 words I’ve just written about their exceptional talents are two teams from the London Business School and Hertford College, Oxford. The Oxford side have never made it beyond the second round, but LBS reached the semi-finals in 2006, their only previous appearance on the show. Anyway, there is quite literally no time for me to recite the rules; here’s your first starter for ten...

Paxman mentions that LBS were in the show in 2006, but doesn’t mention that they reached the semi final, which is lazy imo. A bunch of them are studying for MBAs, which makes sense. He doesn’t mention Hertford’s previous appearances either, but that’s more understandable.

Hertford’s Hitchens takes the first starter with Kennedy, and the Oxonians added a full set of bonuses on words made up by authors - including a couple of educated guesses. LBS hit back with the next question, but can only manage one bonus on famous scientists. One of the two they miss is Rosalind Franklin, and Paxman teases them for not spotting an apparently obvious clue within the question.

The first picture round is on national emblems, and LBS are first to recognise that of Vietnam for the starter. They don’t know Laos or Belarus, but do know that Mozambique has a machine gun on its one. Butterworth then jumps the gun with argon on the next starter, giving his answer just as Paxman says it in the question. Butterworth makes up for it with the music starter, recognising Fat Boy Slim before anyone else, and LBS know Primal Scream and Wu Tang Clan too. They’re still fifty points behind though, and will need a big second half to turn things around.

This task gets more difficult for them, as Hitchens takes another starter. Lloyd adds a second in a row for Oxford and they are nearly one hundred points clear. LBS really need to get some points on the board, and Ruess duly obliges, knowing that there is a massive sculpture of a spider called Maman, which sounds needlessly scary, to the extent that I’m not even going to google it.

The comeback is ended before its even begun as Oswald takes a starter for Hertford, which gives them the picture bonuses - the starter having been dropped by both teams. Lloyd produces another excellent guess of Reuben, demonstrating how useful it is to have vague knowledge as well as specific knowledge. This is one of probably five questions he has answered in a throwaway manner, but which turned out to be correct.

By this point LBS seem to have accepted defeat. Ruess takes another starter, but there is little to no urgency on the bonus questions. They’re right, granted, to have none, they have no chance of winning, but if they gave it a go they might scrape a high scoring loser spot. Ruess is the only one who seems bothered, and bags himself ten more points. They have an amusing discussion about methods of poisoning in Agatha Christie novels (’it was used as a curry ingredient?’, Ruess wondered aloud, trying to figure out which spices could be poisonous, before Butterworth pointed out that it wasn’t something commonly used as a curry ingredient, prompting respectful mirth from the audience) on the bonuses, but still languish miles behind.

Lloyd grabs the last starter of the night for Hertford, who win by eighty at the gong.

Final Score: London Business School 100 - 180 Hertford, Oxford

At the end, Paxman mentions Hertford’s stellar guesswork, which means I wasn’t chatting nonsense (at least on that front, the jury is out on the rest of it), and says that they’ve done a really good job. Incredibly effusive praise for a score of 180. He really is going soft in his old age.

Phew, that was a long one. If you made it through the intro you deserve a prize. And that prize is that you get to come back next week for the next episode of this blog!! Woop woop!

And if this wasn’t quite enough UC content for you then you can subscribe for extra blogs on my Patreon, which features Retro Reviews from the 2015/16 series of the show. Ta x

#london business school #hertford #oxford #bbc2 #quizzy mondays #jeremy paxman

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nissakii · 3 years ago

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Manga or Anime, which one is better?

How many of you did ask themselves or maybe discussed with others which one was better: the anime or manga?

And often there is a distinctive winner and at other times you just simply cannot decide.

Why is that?

Why can we sometimes not decide what is the better option?

While everyone has their preferences there are a section of three people: the ones who only watch the anime and therefore reject reading the manga (whatever the reason is), the ones reading the manga and prefer it over all costs, and last but not least the good middle who may prefer one side but also favor the other at times.

In this blogpost we will discuss the big question: Which one is better, Anime or Manga? as we delve into the topic of what makes both amazing in their own ways but also their shortcomings, seeing which one is better in the end, also considering the three types of people.

Anime

Probably most of you started their journey into the world of Anime and Manga through the former rather than the latter.

Usually it’s even the case that some people watch only anime while others who may have liked the anime so much would consider reading the Manga afterwards.

Yet what makes anime so distinctive and wonderful?

What aspects catch our eyes and would let you choose it over manga?

There are many things that you can only enjoy when you watch the visualization of a series you enjoy, whether you have been a Manga reader who waited for an animation of the so-desired series or a newcomer who never had something to do with the series yet get caught up in it.

In comparison to the Manga who may have visual aspects as well when speaking about panels, Anime gives us the ease of not having to put up together movements such as fights, escapes or other scenes by ourselves but we get to see them right in front of use without using much of our brain.

While in Manga one attack can stretch over several panels and even pages, we get to see that in one smooth movement on the screen and not only that is an aspect that stands out on top of that the same scene we can read silently is now connected to auditory feedback as well.

Characters having a voice, sound effects being represented with actual sound rather than writing a word to make the readers imagine the sound themselves and even background music known as OSTs do give the scene a whole atmosphere for itself.

Despite watching something absent-minded or subconsciously our brain intakes all the information we get on the screen and proceeds with voices especially the character becomes more real as he/she becomes more distinctive through voice and movement that most of the people use to distinguish between others next to facial features and appearance.

But there are always the negative aspects that come along, especially if you fall into the category of being a Manga reader that waited for the anime’s airing, usually our brain automatically fills in holes of information which means voices that didn’t exist for a reader may have been chosen differently than expected, which distorts the image of the character that was built up through reading and filling the hole.

In some cases the anime even derives from the original plot and doesn’t go along with the manga storyline anymore, for the better and in sadly most series for the worse. Also since the episode count is already determined many scenes get left out due to the lack of time that the episode has in store or some of the most relative scenes get shortened to an extent that if not for the Manga some watchers would be utterly confused about what is happening on the screen context-wise. One good example would be the latter seasons of Tokyo Ghoul.

But what if you are not necessarily someone who doesn’t know a thing about the manga and the series is completely new to you?

There are stories which take a while to unfold their full potential and become therefore much more interesting towards the middle, yet if you don’t know what motivates you to watch until that point?

If it wouldn’t be for recommendation or people who are a bit familiar with the plotline some might even drop some anime due to the frustration of a slow plot development which might be worth the wait, yet could stay unknown therefore being a Manga reader or at least knowing people who did could give you that safety net of not wasting your time on a bad plot under the condition the Anime sticks to the manga for the better.

Manga

Next to games, light novels and webtoons usually Mangas get adapted a lot, therefore they are valuable source which make it possible to derive amazing anime from it as we see that anime with no adaption source usually don’t get as much recognition or don’t have a thought-through plotline (or at least it seems like that).

Usually the Manga covers much more scenarios than the anime and is in some cases even completed while the anime is still airing or almost finished airing. Other ones are still on-going because they are much more extensive than the anime.

Now what are the perks of reading the manga?

Since the series from a reader’s perspective

starts much earlier prior the anime release it feels like you are bonding with the manga much more before the release comes out, it gives you the feeling of being early and already much familiar with the series.

Do you know the feeling of reading a manga for years and then suddenly seeing the anime adapting that very gem you are reading? The excitement and anxiety of how the studio will implement all of the details or what they might leave out?

It creates a kind of longing but also the feeling of nostalgia as you remember “ah yes that very scene, I have read it in the manga it was so good.”

With some manga even updating weekly or others with more pages but monthly, as a manga reader you have much more content you can look forward to over a certain period of time, not only that but you get a lot of details along with it.

Scenes which usually take a lot of time to understand and rewinding it many times on the screen can seem much more comprehensive in the manga when seeing the things step by step, usually we also get insight of other people’s thoughts through thought bubbles which were left out in the anime or even little details far in the background of the panel that are something like an easter egg provided by the author.

On top of that you get to see little extra comics of some of your favourite characters or a little talk from the author who might from time to time drop some old concepts or original plot ideas that were discarded for the later chapter releases.

Since the manga basically is only visuals with no voices or sounds, for people who might lack a bit of imagination it might be quite tiresome to fill the holes of not having that provided or is bland, yet for other people it gives them the advantage of imagining the characters having the voices how they want them to sound.

Unlike the anime the manga also needs a bit more attention and therefore usually we tend to be a bit more aware or focussed on other things in the manga then in the anime, of course only generally speaking since there are other anime where you are supposed to constantly think along such as Danganronpa or Steins Gate.

There also characters which are manga-only meaning that the character is either not introduced at all as if they never existed or they come in so late that many people won’t even know about them who only watched the anime, in Ouran Highschool Host Club for example we have another Love interest for one of the host boys who was never introduced in the anime but plays a role in the manga, since we are also talking about Ouran, the ending of the anime heavily derives from the manga plot as there was no such scene which means a major change occurred to get a got final episode.

On top of that many backstories and secrets let’s take the former example, we have Tamaki’s, Kyoya’s and even the twins’ story revealed. Yes, you might say, wait, the Hitachin story was revealed in the anime? but many details and a lot of scenes that are relevant as to why they have become what they are, are left out.

Usually story-wise the plot gets deeper and much more complicated, to a point that the reader just cannot stop reading but sadly the anime only covers the inception of a much bigger problem that awaits the characters, but watchers only would never know about that another two examples would be Toiletbound Hanako and Gakuen Alice.

As Gakuen Alice might even come off as a children series if you start watching the anime the manga surely refutes that impression, the anime with 25 Episodes is something like a character introduction compared to the manga where the major events happen and you later on might ask yourself if not for the title and characters: is this the same series I watched on screen? That’s crazy.

So which one is better?

Now the question we have been waiting for after establishing pros and cons on both sides: Okay, I got it but which one is better?

Plottwist:

There is no universal answer to it.

You might take it as a joke or not, but it’s a preference thing yet I encountered many people who actually favoured the Manga due to the reasons stated.

Usually when the anime ends many fans, regular readers or first timers, tend to read the manga at some point because when does the sequel come?

Or will there be a sequel?

Maybe there was a scene that seemed lacking and you heard the manga outdid it.

Whatever the reason is most people tend to have at least a look or two into the manga.

Fans of Attack on Titan, Haikyuu or Jujutsu Kaisen for example just simply couldn’t wait for a sequel and went straight to the manga even though they hate reading in general, since the tension built up just wouldn’t fade away and sometimes that results in people suddenly liking manga more and becoming a regular reader.

Yet there are people who would rather wait for the next episodes and refuse to read from the adapted source, even in the case where the anime obviously is badly adapted or even altered to a point where the story is becoming confusing due to the plot holes that come from the many changes.

It all depends which type of person you are: Watch anime only, Manga over everything or the good mix of both?

Because in the end if you hate reading then the manga surely wouldn’t give you the same experience when you are also a fanatic of amazing soundtracks, animations and so on.

Which one is your preferable source: Manga or Anime?

Which type of people did you already meet?

Meanwhile as I await your comments let me see what the tea brings.

-Makii

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mydearjonah · 4 years ago

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jenni’s TMA fic recs

for Elena @wellbustmybuffers but also anyone who wants it.

i have spent a lot of time reading fanfiction, and i have read (at this point) almost everything that has piqued my interest in the tma ao3 tag from it’s inception to roughly july 18th, 2020. this is an absolutely non-exhaustive list of my all-time favorites. i tried to pick the things that stuck in my mind the best. it is also heavily skewed, naturally, by my own personal preferences.

to see all that i have bookmarked (as well as my own work), go here. i stand by all of these fics & only bookmark if i was really impressed with something.

i marked the ones that i rec the absolute STRONGEST with a star.

jonmartin

☆ A Measure Outside of the Lines by Rend_Herring; https://archiveofourown.org/works/22202806

imo i consider this to be THE scottish safehouse period fic. scottish safe-house period is a great sub-genre of jonmartin fic that i highly rec to you, elena, especially if you’re just coming off of 159, and this is my favorite and the one that i feel captures their personalities and dynamic the best. highly, highly recommend; one of my top three favorites in the whole fandom.

Yesterday is Here by CirrusGrey; https://archiveofourown.org/works/22230022/chapters/53078617

“Post-season-four Jon and Martin time travel back to the season one Archives.”

extremely well-written jonmartin timetravel shenanigans pining. really, really good jonmartin content. i would describe the genre as “time travel fix-it au romantic comedy.”

take sides in divided cells by bibliocratic; https://archiveofourown.org/works/22456720

“Martin's father comes back into his life.“

post-series 5 jonmartin happily ever after set-up that allows the author to delve deeply into martin’s psyche. fanfiction at it’s finest.

Dethroned by inkedinserendipity; https://archiveofourown.org/works/22342663

post-series take. warning for major character death. this is peak well-written yet sad & indulgent angst-y jonmartin.

Be Your Raincoat by free_smarcher; https://archiveofourown.org/works/23479480

“It's a rainy night at the tail end of 2013, and Arctic Monkeys' latest record is everywhere - including at the pub where a young Martin Blackwood is hung up on his coworker from the Institute.”

pre-series oneshot that i adore for three reasons. 1) the jonmartin pining is absolutely excellent, in-character, gorgeous, 2) the author has a very sharp grasp on martin blackwood specifically that i think is rare in the fandom and 3) the author PERFECTLY captured the late 2013 Arctic Monkeys perpetual AM album zeitgeist in a way that makes me specifically feel SUPER nostalgic.

The Watford Gap by chewsdaychillin; https://archiveofourown.org/works/24886216

“a Martin and his relationship w the og three study w class/accent discourse, pet names, slang, and tenderness. jonmartin north/south power couple“

pre-series oneshot jonmartin pining that i cannot recommend enough. author has an extremely good grasp on s1 characterization as well as british sociocultural realities. this fic makes me very emotional for a lot of reasons.

jonmartin but with heavy monster!jon (and written before s5 aired so speculative as to the endgame plot--still rec tho if you like monster!jon)

☆ ceylon, assam, and darjeeling by Sciosa; https://archiveofourown.org/works/20577347/chapters/48849719

“People do not bring Jonathon Sims tea. Martin Blackwood, newly-minted archival assistant, has apparently not received this memo.”

i absolutely cannot express how much i adore this fic. it’s a three-parter that follows the jm relationship as it develops through the lens of martin making jon tea. the final part is the real whammy. i have read this fic repeatedly and cried each time.

Fall into the night with you by ZaliaChimera; https://archiveofourown.org/works/19851157

“It's the end of the world, and Martin has one more thing to do before it is the end of him too. There is a calm wrapped thickly around the Institute, the eye of the storm, and Martin climbs.“

for me, this is the absolute peak monster!jon/martin. i will not lie, you gotta heed the warnings on this fic. but the end of this fic haunts me.

lonely eyes

a note: i LOVE lonely eyes but a lot of it is really smutty or slice of life. i tried to choose the fics that i thought captured both characters the best and were smart & intentional about the dynamic. elena, if u ever go down the lonely eyes road & are interested in other recs, please let me know!

☆ Luck Be A Lady Tonight by prodigy; https://archiveofourown.org/works/20257240

“In 2014, Elias Bouchard takes a rare trip outside of his comfort zone. Peter Lukas wastes a bunch of money. You'd be surprised how many things can go wrong for two beings of cosmic power.”

this is a black comedy casino episode lonely eyes take that is one of my favorite pieces of work in this fandom and also, honestly, one of my favorite pieces of fiction straight up that i have ever read. prodigy has an extremely sharp grasp on both peter and elias (but especially peter), and they breathe life into the world of mag in a way that is absolutely unparalleled, even at times by the original series imo.

walled up in your kingdom with radio wires by Ronabird; https://archiveofourown.org/works/24465679

so i’m not gonna lie i’ve never read His Dark Materials but this is a daemon au that i just can’t get enough of. it’s a short lonely eyes piece; the basic gist of it is that peter has lost a bet and now jonah gets to meet his daemon. this fic has everything that i want and rarely get in lonely eyes works: statements on both peter and jonah’s characters, and their dynamic sharply written. again, the last lines of this piece have stayed with me as well.

jonelias (i’m sorry...)

note: none of these are terribly explicit but instead largely it is about their dynamic.

a fish hook, an open eye by marrowbones; https://archiveofourown.org/works/22351618

“Jon and Martin take a surreal holiday after escaping the Lonely. Everything would be fine if only Jon's strange dreams of Jonah Magnus would stop.”

this is a jonmartin fic in equal turn. set during the scottish safehouse period. essentially, jon is trying to reconcile that fact that elias is jonah while also being visited by him in his dreams. this is one of the first jonelias fics written after the “elias is jonah magnus” reveal, and i think it is still one of the absolute best. the author does a phenomenal job capturing this looming, atmospheric sense of dread. they also totally nail jonah magnus and the jonelias dynamic.

thieves in the temple by havisham; https://archiveofourown.org/works/23287711

“Elias wins and takes Jon out on the town.“

very short; shares a lot of the same dna as a fish hook, an open eye. essentially a dream-state meeting between the two of them during early s5. “a perfect fic.”

Eye to Eye by Dribbledscribbles; https://archiveofourown.org/works/24194554

“In which Jonah Magnus attempts a post-apocalyptic pep talk.“

a s5 pep talk from jonah, who the author absolutely NAILS, to jon. this is not a fic with a happy ending so be warned. but it is a very satisfying read and the ending is... not quite a twist, but a really well done, dark reveal.

heterochromia by screechfox; https://archiveofourown.org/works/21186011

“After Jon drags Martin out of the Lonely, Jon and Elias trade an eye for an eye. Quite literally.“

post-ep 159. this is basically a jonmartinelias fic, honestly. i am adding this here because i love it SO MUCH but also it is so intensely up my particular alley. hurt/comfort/angst. also GORE AND BODY HORROR. but it wraps up to be weirdly sweet. i cry every time ngl i’ve read this fic a lot. it’s because i’m a monsterfucker i’m sorry.

a love that tastes like spring by sugarboat; https://archiveofourown.org/works/20189953

this is a comically well-written jonelias hanahaki fanfic. that’s it. that’s the plot. it’s amazing. it’s basically a shojo oneshot except with in-character jon and elias. this is one of the first fics i read in this fandom that totally blew me away.

stand-alones/gen/other

☆ The Timeline of the Theseus by Applea; https://archiveofourown.org/works/24018289/chapters/57784525

“Jon tries to force the Spiral to send him back, but the Sprial's corridors never twist things quite the way you want them to. Back in 1996, Elias has no idea why or how the Eye made such a powerful Avatar out of an 8 year old, especially when said 8 year old doesn't actually know he has any powers at all. Clearly such a child cannot be left outside the Institute's care.”

i absolutely cannot say enough about this fic. this is one of the few works of fiction i’ve read in my life that i was so obsessed with i genuinely ruined my sleep schedule to finish. this fic is absolutely HILARIOUS. essentially, jon is an extremely powerful 8 year old w/ no knowledge of who he is who is being raised by jonah, who is completely out of his depth. also has a nice touch of gertrudeagnes & the author really nails their dynamic/the tragedy of their relationship...

☆ Scarred Ground by DictionaryWrites; https://archiveofourown.org/works/21791737/chapters/51999124

this is a really interesting work of fiction just generally. it features a non-linear narrative, plays with a lot of unreality, and has a great deal of time wonkiness. i actually can’t explain the plot without giving it away, which i resolutely do not want to do because piecing together what is going on is a huge part of the fun. martin is the primary character, but everyone is featured. jonmartin and lonely eyes are the two ships. one of my favorite works in the fandom.

the last lines/final reveal absolutely tore me apart. i cried like a baby.

patterns by fadewords; https://archiveofourown.org/works/22015792

“Jon is ill and can't stop Knowing things. Daisy helps.“

long and worth it. very well-written. the author is very talented and essentially uses the world/set up of mag and the beholding to play. set during s4. everyone is extremely in character.

out in the drowning deep by Wildehack; https://archiveofourown.org/works/21473506

“Basira holds it together.”

basira-centric s5 speculative fic. it has since been jossed but that’s no matter. this is one of the best basira fics in the fandom imo, and honestly the only one that i’ve read that i feel really nails her character and her relationship with daisy specifically. in general as well, this is a really fun speculative take on the apocalypse written before s5 aired.

Chasm-e-Baddoor by kashinoha; https://archiveofourown.org/works/23917396/chapters/57510853

“Wherein Jonah Magnus gets acquainted with defeat at the hands of his associates. Repeatedly.”

lonely eyes a little but overall gen. essentially just a very well-written 3 piece suite about instances over the course of jonah magnus’ long life when he gets absolutely schooled by people within it. the gertrude piece is my favorite, to the point where i consider it canon.

And All Should Cry, Beware! Beware! by OldSwinburne; https://archiveofourown.org/works/24623179/

“When the Eye decides to select a new Avatar, it chooses Martin Blackwood, the Poet, rather than Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.“

very unique & well-written monster!martin that haunts me.

avatar groupchat by gayprophets; https://archiveofourown.org/works/21599185/chapters/51501598

fun gen popular chatfic. one of the only chatfics i’ve ever read where everyone is in character. a must-read in the fandom. lots of laughs to be had. i like that they bully elias.

this is really just the surface!! there’s A LOT that’s still on my to-read list, and also obviously a lot of new and probably phenomenal work has been published since july 18th that i have to catch up on. i hope that you enjoy!!! i love fanfiction and there’s a lot of really unique and fun stuff in this fandom

#me #/#my stuff #jonelias #jonmartin #lonely eyes #ships tagged for my own blog's purposes

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ozis-paradise · 4 years ago

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ØZI for Tatler

published july 3rd, 2020

[translated by me, proofread by @baobeejun]

Free like water, a born star! From Irene Yeh's son to the new king of popular music, the dazzling star you need to know: ØZI!

Bright red highlighted hair, equally red earpieces hanging around his neck. The boy with eye-catching tattoos is sitting on the make-up chair, skipping his feet while eating breakfast and he exudes a rebellious and free, yet delicate and pure atmosphere. Soon after his debut, he was shortlisted for six Golden Melody Awards last year and won Best New Artist. At the mention of his name, everyone will exclaime admiration and excitement, ØZI seems to have become a synonym of "cool" and "red" among the younger generation.

"I think I'm too rational, 100% rational, I should also be a little sentimental." This cool-looking artist was told by his agent that "his temper is very good, he most likely won't look angry." Isn't it a little unexpected for a rational rapper to be so talkative? Doesn't he also like to drink beverages with either honey or strawberry? Everytime ØZI gives a new answer, people have to reconstruct the imagine they already had in mind of him, contrasting to his appearance there is a vibrant and rich soul ready to stir trouble (in a "catching peoples attention" kinda way). Speaking of his definition of freedom, ØZI jokes "Freedom means that my agent won't call me, no work, blocking my agent's calls!" But in fact, the interpretation of freedom in his heart is somewhat aloof and mature: "Because society has a lot of rules, as far as I can tell, no-one is free; from family, love to friendship, they all have their own rules. But freedom comes from inner stability, it should be "like water", just then you're free. When it is placed in different containers, it becomes it's shape, it can adapt to every environment; to me, this state is freedom, because you can be free from restrictions and confined space."

When asked if he's free now, he mutters "Not necessarily, sometimes I get stuck when my inspiration runs out. It's been a little better lately, it wasn't like water in the second half of last year, instead it was more like ice cubes!" Last year was too busy to think, it was described by ØZI "like the mind is drying out". And because of his plans to go to the United States to relax at the beginning of this year - he didn't expect the immediate outbreak to happen - he got more time to produce, "I'm free now, I'm simply water now!", he smiles.

Living in a prominent family of performing artists - his mother Ye Ailing is an all-round entertainer, his father Chen Wenbin is a well-known photographer - ØZI's creative path can be said to be expected. Because his parents are both in the industry, he grew up in a musical environment ever since he was a child. But when it comes to his own creations, in fact, ØZI liked to draw as a kid. In Junior High, he liked to make and arrange music, in High School he began to write melodies, lyrics, from drawings to producing movies, "creations" of change because as a child, he liked to be "original" about this. He had six Music Videos, all on his iPhone. "At first, my dad said that there were a lot of problems with my Music Videos, so I was trying hard to improve, I learned about lighting and so on, just to prove that my Music Videos can look good, I wanted to get his approval!"

The requirement of children of celebrities is a blessing but it's hard to hold a grasp of it, it's difficult to excuse mistakes. The music world describes it as "to be born a Super Saiyan (means something like "Second-Generation-Star" because he's the son of famous parents). ØZI explains: "I was just lucky to be born into a musical family, I have enough space to be understood and supported. My dad knows what it's like to be a creator, my mom knows what it's like to be a performer. So I had the chance to train to become a Super Saiyan." It's a double edged sword, everyone was paying close attention when ØZI was nominated at the Golden Melody Awards. "After the rookie award, in addition to putting myself under a lot of pressure, I didn't change any of my creative motives and I'm very expressive. So if you don't get rewarded, you get mad at yourself." Maybe stress occasionally hinders his creative work, but at the same time, it's also a sign of determination to succeed and break through the golden sunken ship.

ØZI's first well-known Chinese song "Title" is about not being bind by anything, about wanting to have more freedom, more creative freedom for everyone. He's been making music for his "mission to internationalize Chinese Music" from the very beginning. "The internationalisation is something that not everyone can do, we listen to music from Latin America, Hip-Hop, K-Pop, it's all because of their atmosphere. For me, every artist has their own way of interpretating their culture. It's very important to let everyone know "Oh, that's C-Pop!"" And the new plans of ØZI will be followed by the release of some singles, a new album will also be released this year. He also revealed that he's working on three different projects at the same time now, experimental and core concept types. There's even a project that's "looking for the next stage of ØZI" trying to give his music a new image. "There will be a lot of music you have never heard from ØZI before, some experimental music, I can't reveal much!"

He's 100% rational when it comes to his family, but his sentimental tone betrayed him; when he talks about music, he becomes serious. Introducing his new tattoo is as exciting as being a little boy. His soul is free, but "ØZI" still has a lot of unavoidable restrictions.

"ØZI is the character I created, he's the embodiment of self-confidence, he has to be perfect. The self-confidence this character needs will be infused into my spirit, but this is only one part of it", he says slowly. With his high and straight nose bridge and the fine and smooth line of his chin, ØZI looks somewhat like his mother Ye Ailing; but he has taken off the label of being a celebrity's child, that used to stick on him tightly, a long time ago already. He's ØZI, free like water, a born star.

TATLER discusses with ØZI

What do you do to pass the time that make a perfect holiday?

Go to the beach of an uninhabited island alone or with a group of friends, lie on the beach and drink cocktails, read a book, maybe listen to music, sleep.

What do you like to do the most when you don't have to work?

Playing video games, eating, getting a massage, sleeping, watching Netflix.

If you could have one drink with an idol, who would it be?

Canadian Rapper/Singer Drake! So I can understand his logic of running his OVO Empire and see if I can absorb it and apply it on my own label.

Your motto?

The tattoo on my leg, it's a famous quote from "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises": "Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up."

Who is your life idol? Why?

Christopher Nolan, the director of "Inception"! Actually, everyone who gives me inspiration for a period of time is my idol.

What would you recommend to watch on Netflix?

I actually watch anything, from serious "13th" to pure entertaining "Too Hot To Handle", I want to absorb different elements.

Please define freedom in one sentence?

Be like Water!

Which abroad city do you want to visit first after the ban gets lifted?

Greece! I went there for the first time when I was shooting the MV to "Paradise Island", and I thought I have to come back when I get the chance to! It has a peaceful charm between the island and the city, it has their own ancient culture and beach parties, everyone is very relaxed and the atmosphere is very cool.

Favourite drink?

Apple Milk or Honey Water, I like the Honey or Strawberry kind.

When your mood is low, what do you do to cheer up?

Playing video games, hanging out with friends, working out.

What games have you been playing lately?

The remake of Final Fantasy 7, the graphics have changed very beautifully.

#øzi #ozi #tatler taiwan #tatler #interview #translated #200703

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eponymous-rose · 5 years ago

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(I’d rather this not be reblogged, just in case!)

I’ve had a funny conversation a couple of times this week, once with my cousin and once with my physical therapist, so I thought it might be fun to go over this: when I mentioned I wasn’t teaching this quarter, they both stared at me in shock and said, “And you’re still getting paid?” To be fair, I absolutely would’ve asked the same question before I started. This job is so weird I never would’ve guessed what all falls under it!

So here’s a little glimpse into what goes on in this particular professorship:

So, hey, there are different ranks of professor. I’m an “assistant professor”, which is about as junior as it’s possible to get, but I won the dang lottery and somehow finagled my way into getting the words “tenure-track” tacked on before that. This means that over the next six years, everything I do will be scrutinized (culminating in a "summary” of several thousand pages reporting on every single aspect of my job performance), and at the end of it, after about nine months of progressively higher-ranked people in the university voting and deliberating, I have a chance to be granted tenure, which comes with a promotion to associate professor rank and Extreme Job Security. The criteria here are basically being able to prove that I’m one of the foremost experts in my field in the country and hitting research/service/teaching goals, and I’ll talk a bit about that in a second here. Promotion (often many years later) to full professor requires proof of being one of the foremost experts in the field on the planet.

Also, if you don’t get tenure, you get fired after that six-year period. Some universities are dicks and hire three or four assistant professors for every tenured position they want to fill and just fire the spares after getting six years of work out of them. My university has an extremely high tenure rate (mainly because anyone who seems unlikely to make tenure will either have some sort of intervention on their behalf, be granted an extra year to make up the difference, or will be asked to quietly resign before deliberations start), and my department hasn’t denied anyone tenure in decades.

So! What the hell do I do? Well, universities in the U.S. that are particularly research-heavy are referred to as “R1 universities”, which is the situation I’m in here. This means that the majority (often the vast majority) of my time is not spent teaching: it’s all about doing research, to the point where I will not be teaching more than one class simultaneously. In my field, that research can look like a lot of different things:

There are indeed people who work with beakers and range hoods and snazzy lab coats: these researchers in my field might be doing stuff like growing snowflakes in the lab and using that information to figure out the conditions under which different kinds of snow can form. Also there’s chemistry? I don’t know this side of it too well. Professors’ roles here, apart from the science, include ordering the right equipment (which includes getting quotes from various suppliers) and hiring lab technicians and folks to keep the equipment up and running.

Some folks do intense numerical modeling: if you’re studying the atmosphere, you can’t just try your experiment on one Earth and compare how it’s different on another Earth, since we only have the one, so what we do instead is use the most powerful supercomputers on the planet to create simulations. These can be as detailed as looking at the flow of dust in the millimeters above the ground, or as broad as simulating the whole atmosphere of the entire planet (or other planets!). On top of the science, these professors often have to negotiate for supercomputer time (a precious commodity), purchase massive computational resources (e.g., a server room hosted locally), and sometimes hire dedicated I.T. support just for their research.

I work a lot with large datasets: if we have information about the conditions under which tornadoes happened over the past 15 years, what patterns can we pick up that forecasters might be able to use? What is physically, fundamentally different about tornadoes that happen in different places? This kind of stuff really just needs a decently specced desktop machine and some know-how, and a lot of research in our field involves sitting and thinking. Also in this category is the pure math and physics work in the field, where people bury themselves in impossible-to-solve equations to try to figure the best way to wrench them into things we can solve. This is probably the closest to what most people think of when they hear “research”.

Fieldwork. Think Twister. Coordinating large numbers of people, who may be on the ground, driving, in the air, in the ocean. Also, coordinating instruments that might be stationary or might be buoys or drones or something else. We’re a public university; we don’t have the cash to buy our own airplanes, so profs in this scenario have to rent time on research aircraft owned by organizations like NASA or NOAA, or rent time on boats, or hire folks to develop and build new instruments. Massive amounts of organization goes into this, and all stages from inception to execution are generally overseen and organized by the professor.

When any or all of these approaches come up with groundbreaking results (you’re expected to have that kind of result happen a couple times a year), it’s time to write a paper and get it published in a prestigious academic journal. That process can take between four months and a year, depending on a bunch of different factors, so often a professor is juggling a few different projects in different states of done-ness.

What you’ll notice in all this is that professors generally have to come up with the money to do this stuff. New profs generally get a starting budget to get them off the ground, but most of that winds up wrapped up in personnel and start-up costs (e.g., buying computing resources or space for a lab). For the rest of it? Grants.

Grants in my field right now are a bit of a mess: it takes months to put a proposal together, it’s chaotic and complicated as hell, and there’s only about a 10-15% success rate, so you can do the math on that one. In my field, grants range from “small” ones supporting a few years of the pure-science stuff (typically a few hundred thousand dollars that mainly goes toward paying several people’s salaries over several years, but also covers things like journal publication fees - it costs several thousand dollars to publish one paper in an academic journal) to much larger ones supporting field campaigns or long-term projects (rarely, several tens of millions of dollars if you’re talking projects with multiple aircraft and such). I get paid for nine months of the year, and have to come up with the remaining three months’ salary on my own.

The other thing, though, that grants pay for is graduate student salaries! My department pays students quite well (more than enough to afford the rent on an apartment here, which is saying a lot), and also provides full benefits and a complete tuition waiver. Grad students in my field are essentially in an apprenticeship situation: they pick an advisor and work with that person for typically about seven years. During that time, they have to hit certain milestones (nine months of classes, plus a few courses sprinkled throughout the remaining six years, giving presentations, passing exams, doing a defense, writing a dissertation---essentially a book of their research results), and if you’re thinking this is putting a horrifying amount of power in the advisor’s hands, you’re absolutely correct. The imperfect but step-in-the-right-direction solution my department’s adopted has been to give each student a committee of professors, where one leads the research but the others are always available for new ideas or to resolve problems or speak up on behalf of the student. Students are also strongly encouraged to take a year or two off from their main research project to work with another professor, either here or elsewhere, and explore new research ideas.

Professors are responsible for teaching their students what they need to succeed, and our department has famously exceptional graduate students and graduate student mentorship: profs teach students how to do research (often guiding them through a Master’s project, then letting them take the reins and backing off to an advisory role for the remaining years of the PhD), which includes having them publish their results as the lead authors of their own scientific journal articles. Profs also pay to send students to conferences to showcase their research and introduce them to the people who’ll help them in their future career (one of the reasons I traveled a bunch this quarter was to meet some folks who might be good contacts for students who don’t want to just shoot for a job in the US). Some students will get to go on field campaigns, flying on research aircraft or, I dunno, driving tanks into tornadoes. Some will be more interested in non-academia pursuits and might spend some time shadowing insurance analysts or taking extra entrepreneurial classes in the business school or working hands-on with forecasters during the height of severe weather season. It’s our jobs as professors to know the job market, to know the right people, and to know our students well enough to help them get where they’re going. This department takes this Very Seriously, to the point where it eclipses research as our Top Priority, and the general understanding is that getting a grad student position here sets you up for life.

So! Part of my job this time of year is recruiting graduate students based on my budget. For some folks, that means actively advertising wherever possible and getting super involved in the visiting student weekends (we fly prospective grad students out here to visit before they make their decision, and there’s always a fair number of students who haven’t settled on an advisor yet). Some folks are absurdly lucky and study fields that are considered particularly cool and interesting, and the top students actively seek them out and will cold-call or send e-mails or introduce themselves at conferences (look, turns out it’s hilariously easy to sell someone on “come study tornadoes!” and even a newbie like me has to choose between several particularly strong candidates). Either way, the graduate student hiring process involves a lot of internal debate---we’re not a huge department, so we typically can only send offers to a little under 10% of the folks who apply each year---that mainly centers around making sure each student has a supportive research “home” waiting for them here, based on funding and how much time each faculty member might have. Professors need to coordinate grant budgets (or startup funds, or stopgap funds in the increasingly common situation where no grant money could be secured for a given year) to make sure students have any equipment they might need (cool stuff like supercomputer time, servers, equipment to take to the field, accessibility aids, but also mundane stuff like office space and desks). We also have to coordinate with the university to make sure international students can get here and stay here under the correct visa status.

Right now, I only have one graduate student, and he’s currently undergoing the barrage of first-year coursework, but we meet weekly and he’s started playing around with some data analysis and reading some of the big papers in the field (he’s coming in from mechanical engineering, so the math is familiar but the vocabulary is funky). I’ve developed short- and long-term learning goals for him, culminating in putting together a proposal for his master’s research in June, then converting his early results to a scientific journal article to help him hit the ground running, because he’s brilliant and he’d be able to pull it off without breaking a sweat.

I’m also on the committees of two second-year Master’s students, so my responsibilities there include reviewing their proposals and, in one case, helping her put together an application for a major fellowship that would put $100,000 toward her education, which means she wouldn’t be beholden to any given research grant and could study any topic she liked. I’m also co-advising a postdoctoral researcher---his primary advisor is a specialist on snow, which is his area of interest, but I’m a specialist on some of the methods he uses to study snow, so I’m consulting with him on that side of things. I’m also working with a couple of particularly motivated final-year PhD students who want to run a multi-day Python and machine learning workshop for the department. Heck yeah.

Apart from research and advising, another facet of being a professor is the nebulous category often just referred to as “service”. Volunteer work, essentially. Right now, I’m reviewing scientific journal articles, typically 2-4 at a time (down to one right now, although I anticipate a flood right before the holidays). This is all done as volunteer work, but it’s honestly the easiest way for me to keep up with the latest literature, because yeah, you can’t just sit in a room and think if you don’t know what everyone else is thinking about. And when even a small field has a dozen or so major academic journals putting out a couple dozen articles each a month that you have to stay on top of... reviewing can be a great way to get the highlights. Sometimes I also get to review other people’s grant proposals, which is really helpful! Still, I wish journals would pay us for this work---someone did a poll on Twitter and found that folks in our field spend on average about 6 hours per review. That adds up!

I also tend to help out with conferences, either doing logistical stuff like deciding what the major topics are, and who gets to speak when (and who probably shouldn’t be given a microphone...) or coordinating the judging of awards for student presentations. That sometimes involves weird event planning stuff like trying to find a venue and speakers and transportation for a formal dinner, or hiring caterers and dealing with competing hotel quotes for room blocks, or cold-calling reasonably famous people and asking them to volunteer their time (or offering them an honorarium) to Skype in to a room full of people.

I’m also on a few national committees that are working to define the priorities of some of the big professional organizations: mainly I work in my particular subdiscipline, but also with diversity/equity/inclusion and early-career support. Some of that is as simple as running social media accounts or helping to design surveys. I’ve recently been assigned to help audit a major organization’s commitment to diversity, which could be pretty interesting. It all sounds like a lot, and a lot of it’s coming to a head lately just because of conference timing, but it usually slows down to one or two hours a week of work in the off-season. I like this kind of stuff because it’s a relatively low-effort way to meet scientists all over the world that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

We’re also hiring a new faculty member right now, which is... hilariously complex. Every aspect is basically done by committee and the entire department has to agree on who to interview and, eventually, who to hire, because hiring someone for this position is potentially choosing your coworker for the next 30+ years. Interviews are two-day endurance training for the poor candidates, who get face-to-face meetings with every member of the faculty, on top of more specialized interviews. We’ve had about 120 competitive applications thus far. It’s... a lot.

And just because I’m not teaching actively right now doesn’t mean teaching isn’t eating a lot of time: there’s some fun logistical set-up to do! For instance, the class I’m co-teaching starting in January features a lab where we take all the students over to the engineering buildings to set up some instruments in a wind tunnel. Gotta make sure we’ve timed it right so they can actually give us the wind tunnel! We’re also coordinating the timing and the schedule so that both instructors are actually around for the parts of the class they’re teaching. For three of the five weeks I’ll be teaching, I have the previous instructor’s materials to work with, but the other two weeks are all new material (and a lot of ad-lib based on how students do with the first chunk of the class). I also haven’t done anything related to this class since I took a comparable class over a decade ago, so, uh. Better study up.

In the spring, I’ll be teaching an entirely new class that’s never been offered by the department before. That involves building a syllabus, figuring out what each lecture will be about, coming up with contingencies in case some lectures get cancelled, writing exams and assignments and lectures and (since it’s a programming class) making sure everyone has access to the necessary hardware and software and data for the big final project. And, because I’m me, I’ll also be coordinating the whole thing with a special office in the university that does long-term testing of teaching effectiveness---they’ll send someone over to spend a few minutes chatting with the students midway through the quarter, then work with me on recommendations and improvement. I figure it’s a new class being offered for the first time, so we might as well get in on the ground floor of longitudinal pedagogical study. Also, I don’t actually know this programming language yet. Little more studying to do, there.

So... yeah. This job is absurd. It’s a million different jobs, the vast majority of which I’ve had no training for. And I adore it. Nobody cares where I am or what I’m doing at any given time, as long as I get results and as long as my students are succeeding. As someone who loves nothing more than bland, repetitive tasks repeated over and over again, it’s not exactly in my wheelhouse... but I love how hard it makes me think, and I adore being pushed this far out of my comfort zone and knowing I actually have the resources and the know-how to succeed. Every single day is something completely new and exciting and bizarre. Hell, every hour. It’s pretty fantastic, and utterly terrifying.

#i'd rather you didn't rebagel just because there's some me-specific stuff in here!#eponymous job tag #eponymous academia tag #long text post

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dippedanddripped · 4 years ago

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As the number of abandoned storefronts and closed retail outlets continues to mount, the once unremarkable activity of shopping at brick-and-mortar stores can feel like reality askew — like a stroll through the Twilight Zone. As this glum new normal becomes, well, the norm, signs of life can be almost as jarring.

Take, for instance, a pair of storefront windows on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood. Just recently they were lifeless reminders of an upscale furniture store, now defunct. Then, in August, they began to fill with seemingly unconnected objects: bluejeans piled in a chest-high mound, a lounge chair upholstered in denim, a mannequin in a jumpsuit with an eyeball for a head standing amid a sea of paint-splattered drop cloths.

Hand-painted signage in the other window offered only that this “Appointment Only” storefront with the cryptic displays, and the 6,000 square feet of retail space behind them, are the domain of Gallery Dept.

Despite the name, Gallery Dept. isn’t a gallery or a department store but a hybrid clothing label that sits somewhere in the Venn diagram overlap between street wear label, denim atelier, neighborhood tailor and vintage store. Just as accurately, you could call Gallery Dept. the personal art project of its founder Josué Thomas, a designer whose own creative urges are just as disparate and layered.

With so many small brands in a state of retreat this summer, Mr. Thomas’s label has not only weathered these spirit-crushing conditions but thrived. In less than two years, Gallery Dept. has moved from a crowded workshop a few blocks down Beverly Boulevard to its new space in part because its hoodies, logo tees, anoraks and flare-cut jeans — each designed and hand-painted by Mr. Thomas on upcycled or dead-stock garments — have become unlikely objets d’art in a crowded street wear market.

This corner of the fashion industry is a crowded one, and in recent years there have been a glut of collaborations and merch drops that have taken on a corporate cadence. In contrast, Gallery Dept. is something of a bespoke operation, offering street wear basics that are blessed with an artist’s (in this case Mr. Thomas’s) singular touch.

Mr. Thomas began to cut jeans and screen-print shirts as the mood struck in 2017, and since that time Gallery Dept. has grown from an underground cult label for collectors to one with atmospheric clout after being worn by Kendall Jenner, LeBron James, Kendrick Lamar and two of the three Migos (Offset and Quavo).

Those lucky enough to enter the appointment-only space, now booked with up to 20 appointments a day, are greeted inside by a 20-foot-tall span of wall that reads, “Art That Kills” in a large crawl text, and the occasional reference to Rod Serling’s seminal sci-fi program.

Throughout the sunlit store, Mr. Thomas’s abstract paintings and writings fill the spaces between clothing racks and bright brass shelves heavy with the brand's thick hoodies and sweatpants. Over the chug of sewing machines, one can hear snippets of bossa nova Muzak, a vinyl-only mix also made by Mr. Thomas. (There are also plans to release music by other artists, including the New York rapper Roc Marciano, under an Art That Kills imprint.)

Gallery Dept.’s new space was financed on the strength of e-commerce sales from this past spring, and not with the help of venture capital or outside investors, Mr. Thomas said on a recent walk-through. This freedom gives him and the label, which now employs 12 people, the freedom to operate on its own esoteric terms. And there are a few. In the store’s dressing rooms, there are no mirrors to survey a fit. (“We’re going to tell you if a piece works or not,” he said.) Nor are there price tags on its garments.

“If the first thing you look at is the price, it’s going to alter your thinking about a piece,” he said. “I’d rather people engage with the clothing first.”

The Gallery Dept. does not indulge pull requests from stylists or send its pieces to influencers, a practice Mr. Thomas explains with a trace of punk indignation.

“Kendall doesn’t get a discount,” he said. “We don’t seed. I don’t care who it is — we don’t cater to different markets.”

Wearing cutoff carpenter pants and a white T-shirt, each dusted in a fine rainbow splatter, Mr. Thomas looked every bit like an artist roused from his creative flow, complete with paint-stained hands and individually colored fingernails. Standing in a mauve-carpeted room, Mr. Thomas pointed out his latest ideas: pewter jewelry in eccentric shapes, like an earring in the shape of a zipper pull, made in collaboration with the Chrome Hearts offshoot, Lone Ones, and shorts cut from dead-stock military laundry bags — while explaining the origins of his own style.

“I liked my parent’s clothing growing up,” Mr. Thomas said. “As a teenager, I was able to fit into my dad’s leather jacket. The beat-up patina on it was perfect, and I realized that that was personal style. It was something you couldn’t go to a store and buy.”

Mr. Thomas, who turned 36 in September, never studied fashion or garment making, and he can’t work a sewing machine. But growing up as the son of immigrants from Venezuela and Trinidad, he watched as his parents subsisted on their raw artistic skills to create a life in Los Angeles. And he now uses those same talents as an artist and designer: sign-painting, tie-dying, screen printing. For a short time, his father, Stefan Gilbert, even ran a private women’s wear label.

Similarly, in his early 20s, Mr. Thomas worked at Ralph Lauren. As one of the few Black people in creative roles in a predominantly white company, he soon realized that the only way to survive in the fashion industry would have to be with a project of his own making.

“I was the ‘cool’ Black guy, but there was nowhere for me to go,” he said. “Best case would have been sourcing buttons for women’s outerwear or something.”

Gallery Dept.’s spontaneous inception came about in 2016 when Mr. Thomas sold a hand-sewn denim poncho off his own back to Johnny Depp’s stylist. At the time Mr. Thomas was focused on making beats and D.J.-ing, but after selling all of the pieces he’d designed for a small trunk show at the Chateau Marmont, he realized he’d discovered a new creative lane.

It had less to do with ponchos, which were dropped from subsequent collections, and more to do with old garments being remixed in the heat of artistic paroxysm, with as little second-guessing as possible. With the help of Jesse Jones, a veteran tailor, Mr. Thomas began churning out made-to-order pieces for customers who often were unaware of what, exactly, they had stumbled into.

“We were creating pieces while we were selling them,” he said.

Working with heavy vintage shirts, hoodies, trucker hats, bomber jackets, whatever was at hand, Mr. Thomas would frequently screen-print the brand’s logo, adding paint or other flourishes as the feeling struck.

Today that extends to long-sleeve tees, sweatpants and socks. At the time, he also began blowing out the silhouette of vintage Levi’s 501s and Carhartt work pants into a subtle flare, accented with patches and reinforced stitching, resulting in a streetwise update of the classic boot-cut jean.

Mr. Thomas christened this style of jeans the “LA Flare.” And where denim has so historically hewed to “his” and “her” categories, the LA Flare is the zeitgeist-y “they” of street wear denim. (The label labels its items as “unisex.”)

The jeans come with a luxury item’s price tag, with a basic version starting at $395. Custom tailoring and additional touches by Mr. Thomas, can push the price upward of $1,200. One early collaboration with Chrome Hearts, a pair of orange-dyed flares patched with that brand’s iconic gothic crosses, has gone for $5,000 on Grailed.

“There is nothing like Josue’s repurposed jeans,” said George Archer, a senior buyer at Mr Porter. “They are both a wearable piece and a work of art. No one else is doing what he’s doing.”

For Mr. Archer, who first noticed the Gallery Dept. logo popping on men in Tokyo in March, Mr. Thomas “interprets and creates” clothing as if it was an end in itself — and not a commodity to be monetized. (Nonetheless, Mr Porter hopes to monetize a collection of Gallery Dept. pieces via its e-commerce site later this year.)

“You can feel the warmth of Josue’s hands on each of the pieces,” said Motofumi Kogi, the creative director of the Japanese label United Arrows & Sons. An elder statesmen of Tokyo’s street wear scene, Mr. Kogi found the label on a trip to Los Angeles last year. It’s not only Mr. Thomas’s artistic touch that stands out to him but his vision for remaking a staid garment into something that Mr. Kogi believes has not been seen before.

“He took this staple of hip-hop culture and refreshed it,” he said, referring to Carhartt pants.

Getting the people who make that culture to buy in was another matter. “The first year we did the flare, in 2017, skinny jeans were in,” Mr. Thomas said. “Rappers would come into the shop and say they’d never wear a flare. Now, everyone is wearing it.”

On Instagram, fit pics by rappers like Rich the Kid, along with the aforementioned Migos, Quavo and Offset, Gallery Dept.’s flare has become a familiar silhouette, skinny jeans breaking loose below the knee, usually coiled up at the ankle around a pair of vintage Air Jordans.

One fan of the jeans, Virgil Abloh, sees Mr. Thomas’s “edit” of the classic garment as the next chapter of its history.

“Their flare cut is the most important new cut of denim in the last decade — since the skinny jean,” Mr. Abloh said. A self-described Levi’s “obsessive” who owns more than 20 pairs of Gallery Dept. jeans, he walked into Mr. Thomas’s workshop one day after a routine stop at the Erewhon Market across the street.

“I thought: ‘This is amazing. Here’s some guys editing their own clothes in a shop,’” he said. “It reminded me of what I was doing when I started out, painting over logos, making hand-personalized clothes.”

Mr. Abloh considers Mr. Thomas’s work to be the fashion equivalent of “ready-made” art, and he offers Shayne Oliver of Hood by Air as a distant contemporary. He suggested that he and Mr. Thomas come from a lineage of Black designers that is still in the process of defining itself.

“He’s a perfect example of someone creating their own path from a community that hasn’t traditionally participated in fashion,” Mr. Abloh said. “I see Josue as making a new canon of his own, showcasing what Black design can do.”

Mr. Thomas didn’t argue with that. But he was also a little preoccupied with whatever was taking place at the tips of fingers to get lost in the thought. The future of his brand, after all, depends on his ability to stay in that moment.

“People want things that aren’t contrived,” he said, pulling at his own shirt to drive the point home. “This paint came from me working. I wanted to recreate this feeling. Once something is contrived, when you can see through it, it’s ruined. There’s only so much you want to explain.”

#design #gallery dept #streetwear blog #upcycle designers

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uncurieuxrenard · 5 years ago

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Football is more French than you might think.

France has been part of my life since my birth, probably, but, through the years, this feeling grew stronger and stronger. There is actually a year where it started, and that's 2015, but it peaked in the summer of 2016, thanks to the European championship which took place in France. That tournament ended with France losing the final against Portugal, but that inspired me to research for the story of this sport I had just begun following (end of 2015). So I did. I am a perfectionist, so I wanted to dig as deep as possible into this mystery, the first of a long series of origin stories of inventions, sports and more, which, to be honest, were the main reason why I created this blog in the first place. So, I thought that the first one of these stories to share with you had to be the first I researched.

So, we will start from the very beginning and with the premise that, since the dawn of times, every civilisation having roamed Planet Earth has played games, and many of them involved a ball. There are evidences of ball games everywhere in the world, from Pre-Columbian America, where Mayans played the Tlachtli, the probable precursor of basketball, to Asia, and this is where our tale begins.

The civilisation is the Chinese one. The dynasty reigning is the Han. The century is the third B.C. The name of the game is Cuju. Born as a military training, this game, officially recognised by FIFA as the earliest form of the game, initially saw players trying to kick a feather-stuff ball into a goal made of two wood sticks planted on the ground. This game spread from the army to the royal courts and upper classes, always during the Han Dynasty, which lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD. Cuju evolved into something more complex where its popularity during the Tang Dynasty, and it started to resemble football even more. It became a team-oriented game and clubs started to be established, but its popularity exploded during the Song Dinasty (960-1279) and in the X century the first Cuju league was created, 800 years earlier than the British Football Association. Not bad. Eventually, cuju began to fade around the XVII century and soon disappeared.

In the same period cuju was being invented in China, in Europe the spiritual father of European football and rugby was being developed by the Greeks. Despite the image of the lone Greek athlete trying to reach for glory by himself, like a mythological hero, Greeks also played team-oriented games, and Episkyros was one of these. The teams of this violent game, especially in Sparta (where else?), were usually made up of 12-14 players. The field and the teams were divided into two by a line, and another line was behind them. The goal of the game was to push the ball to the other end of the field. This game incorporated, therefore, elements of both football and rugby, which actually were two sports of the same root at the time of their "inception" in XIX century England. But, according to some sources, even the atmosphere was similar back in Ancient Greece. One of these comes from the Egyptian writer Athenaeus of Naucratis' Deipnosophistae, which contains an excerpt dating from the IV century by Antiphanes, the famous comedy writer who describes a moment during an Episkyros game and the consequent reactions from the supporters, all written in a modern television commentary style:

"Once he took and passed the ball, he was enjoying that, while he was dodging an opponent and making another one of them fall on the ground. Then, he helped one of his team mates lift off the ground. All around were strong yells saying "out!", "long ball!", "high!", "low!", "short ball!", "shoot it back to the fray!"

Episkyros never was an Olympic sport in Ancient Greece, but, as you can read above, the agonism was all there, both from the athletes and the audience, unlike cuju, which was merely an exercise, a game. Sports and games always were a serious thing for the Greeks.

Once the Romans conquered Greece in 146 BC, one of the many things they "borrowed" from the Greeks was this game. Romans renamed it Harpastum and it is said that they introduced the rule which forbade to touch the ball with the hands. Plus, when Rome built the empire we all know, this game got immensely popular among the centurions defending the limes of the Roman Empire. This means that, while Greeks invented this game, Romans spread all over Europe (which means the British Isles, naturally).

Actually, the first mention of an unidentified ball game in Britain comes from the IX century AD. We cannot know whether it had anything to do with football, but probably this game was the Harpastum of some game deriving from it. What we know, though, is that the game which officially started it all came from... France.

In fact, if we want to find the actual origins of modern football we have to move to Northern France where, around the same time above mentioned, a new game developed and spread in Normandy and Picardy named Soule (or choule). This game was usually played after a religious function or during the holidays between two teams composed of people coming from two villages, usually close and rivals, but also between two different social statuses or situation (for instance, married men against bachelors et cetera). The game ended when one of the teams, composed of a potentially unlimited number, managed to push the ball with any means (besides the feet, sticks and hands were also allowed) towards the opponents' village, and then shot the ball into the portal of the local church, scoring de facto one gol. The ball disputed in a Soule game was made either of leather or animal bladders, filled with bran, hay, moss or horsehair. The field was of variable dimensions and could include ditches, streams, woods and wetlands, but the game started in the "midfield", which could be the border between the two churches (or "goals", in this case), the square of the village, a graveyard or even the castle of the local landlord.

As my description of this game may suggest, la Soule was a manly, violent game. While this was true, it was unexpectedly regulated and accompanied by an actual code of rules. Surely, it was much less violent than believed, since any type of violence towards the opponents was allowed. If today this sport is remembered as a barbaric, medieval game is surely thanks to the infamous, so called "remission letters", in which real court cases involving injuries and, some times, deaths, were evoked and told. When we actually think about the amount of players involved in a single game of this ancient sport, though, these sad cases were possible, as they are in every sport up to this day. Despite this, these letters helped give this game a bad, and equally unjustified, fame.

The first mention of the Soule in France dates back the year 1147, but it's almost sure that it was played in Northern France way before that date, since scholars are nowadays sure that this game was introduced in England by the Normans after William the Conqueror invaded the island in 1066. Moreover, this theory sounds incredibly plausible because the so-called "mob football", medieval English ball game from which modern football as we know it today descends, has no anterior mentions than 1174 on British soil, and, also, this mob football was characterized by almost identical features and rules than the French soule. However, I think it is right to specify that from the moment the soule was introduced in Britain, every development of the game that eventually led to the codification of modern football, the establishment of the Football Association in 1863 and the birth of the first football clubs (the first of which is Sheffield F.C.), all occured in the British Isles, even though soule kept being played, with discontinuity, on French soil at least until the XIX century.

A special mention goes to all the other subsequent ball games which were played throughout the history of Europe, from the Icelandic Knattleikr, first mentioned in XII century (but probably older) to the Italian Calcio Fiorentino from the Renaissance.

Finally, we can say that this long story tells us that we should never write or talk about history with the verb to be. Football, as in many other inventions and other things in history, is not English. This verb sounds like something definitive, an ended argument, as sure as death. As we can learn from this story, instead, history can surprise us with a lot of beautiful "maybes", "ifs", "actuallys", by showing us Ancient Chinese people kicking a ball, an Ancient Greek young man freestyling and medieval French people scoring goals by shooting balls inside churches, by playing a primitive form of the sport which eventually became the most popular one in our world.

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shownuslaugh · 6 years ago

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Be Well

Series: Bigbang 6th Member AU

Pairing: SJ/Seungri

2017

“Wait, what?! Really?! When?!” SJ smacks Seungri’s arm hard, the sound of the slap accompanied by his scream of pain echoes around the room. “Oppa, you’re the best! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Seungri pushes her hand away, giving her an exhausted look. “Good news?”

She looks at him, joy lighting up her face and rubbing off on Seungri. His smile is just as wide as hers when she says, “That was Hyun-suk. Seunghyun, he wants me to be in a music video for Sechskies! Filming starts tomorrow.”

For a split second Seungri is in shock. His mind travels back to debut days and a time even prior to that. She hasn’t called him Seunghyun for a very long time, the name Seungri just coming easier to her since the inception of Bigbang. He forgets how much he misses it until he hears her say it. Is it the same for her? Does she get so used to hearing SJ that her real name comes as a shock? No, that can’t be right. This is SJ. She knows who she is and what she wants out of life.

And right now what she wants is to be in a music video with her ultimate idols.

“I don’t know why anyone even thought of me, but I also don’t care. Maybe it’s dramatic to say this… I haven’t been this happy in months.”

Seungri shakes his head. “No, that’s not dramatic. You deserve this.”

He can’t remember the last time he saw her smile so brightly. It hasn’t been this year, which he’s sure of. Ever since Siwon called off their wedding she’s been nothing but the shell of his best friend. Who would’ve thought one little call from YG demanding a favor from her would be what snapped her out of it. Honestly, it makes Seungri a little jealous. SJ’s his best friend and he’s been doing everything in his power to makes her feel better. If he’d known all it would take was another idol group, he would’ve got in touch with them months ago.

“SJ,” Seungri calls her attention away from her phone. She’s probably texting Minnie the news so they can scream and cry together. “You know the show I’m supposed to be doing for Netflix?”

“The FSO thingy? What about it?”

“JaiJin is in it. Should I find you a part?”

She glances at him shyly. “Can you?”

Seungri puffs up with pride. “Of course I can! It’s my show.”

“Show off. I know what you’re doing, ya know.” SJ twists her body so her legs are in Seungri’s lap as they recline beside each other on the sofa in his studio. “I appreciate it, but it’s not necessary. All of you…” She clears her throat as her voice becomes thick with emotion. “All of you have already done so much for me. There comes a point where it’s all on me to make myself feel better.”

“SJ-”

“Let me finish, will you? We both know how often I spill my heart like this. I’ll… never be able to express how blessed I feel to have friends like all of you. Especially you, Seunghyun. You’ve always been there. Even when I don’t deserve it. Especially when I don’t deserve it.”

Seungri takes her hand, running his thumb over her knuckles. “SJ, don’t think like that. It’s not about whether or not you deserve something. You’re going through a rough patch. What kind of friends would we be if we let you suffer alone?”

“Still. All of you have gone above and beyond to help me… but finding my happiness again is something I have to do on my own. You can’t do it for me. I need to work again and start branching outside Bigbang. Seungri, our last dance is coming. We all need to be ready.”

Seungri, hating how heavy the atmosphere of the room suddenly became, says, “So you’ll be joining Sechskies while we’re gone?”

SJ laughs, her smile showing off her teeth. “God damnit, Seungri! You always figure out my plans!”

“Of course I do! You only open up if you have an ulterior motive! All this talk about what great friends we are is only because the second you film this music video you’re ditching us!”

“Your words, not mine.”

Seungri jumps up off the couch. “You weren’t supposed to agree.”

“But when you’re right, you’re right.” She shrugs simply.

“I’m telling Youngbae.”

“Tell him! I dare you!”

Seungri pulls out his phone and pauses to look over at SJ. “Wait, didn’t hyung change his number recently?”

SJ’s eyes widen as she gasps. “Are you being serious?”

He clears his throat. “Of course not. I was just checking to make sure you knew I knew-”

“You know nothing! Seungri, how do you not have his number? Do you have any of our phone numbers?”

“We always use Kakaotalk!”

“No we don’t!” SJ’s voice goes a pitch higher in disbelief. “Seungri, what the hell? You at least have to have my number!”

He does.

Not that he’d admit it at the moment.

“You’re unbelievable,” she tells him in English.

He points at her. “Now who’s being the show off? You’re sitting there speaking in English!”

“You know English too!”

Seungri scoffs. “I don’t have to take this. Have fun with Sechskies, SJ. See if I ever talk to you again.”

“We’re recording for your solo album the day after tomorrow,” she reminds him.

“So I’ll see you the day after tomorrow,” he says as he grabs his coat.

“Seungri! I love you!” SJ shoots him a heart and blows a kiss. He returns the favor dramatically before actually leaving.

He needs to get some beauty rest.

After all, he’s got a music video shoot to crash tomorrow.

#bigbang au #bigbang 6th member au

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amandajoyce118 · 6 years ago

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Captain Marvel Easter Eggs And References

My goal for Easter egg lists is always to get them up within a week of a movie’s opening, or the same night that a television episode airs, but I’ve had an injured wrist/thumb that has made writing difficult. So, Captain Marvel hasn’t been delayed because of a busy life, but because I’ve been trying to rest my hand. I’ve been wearing a brace and thumb stabilizer for most of my day for the last few weeks, so I should be getting back to normal soon.

As usual with my Easter egg lists, this list assumes you’ve seen the movie, and the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for that matter. There will be spoilers. You have been warned. I’m sticking mainly with comic and MCU references, so you won’t find a lot of pop culture ones here. If you want someone to give you the 90s rundown, I’m sure you can find it online.

The Stan Lee Tribute

Every MCU movie opens with the same sequence, highlighting the heroes that are part of the universe. This is the first Marvel movie to hit theaters since Stan Lee’s death, so they did something a little different. That sequence instead highlights him. The color scheme and the background text remains the same, but none of the actors are there, just shots of Stan Lee from different movies and red carpet events. I won’t lie. I’ve teared up a little every time I’ve seen it.

Hala

Both the name of the main planet and the capital city in the Kree Empire. MCU fans saw it before in Guardians of the Galaxy, though it was a bit darker and didn’t seem as tech-friendly. It makes me wonder just what happened in the years in between.

“There are tabs for that.”

Not an Easter egg, but a tiny bit of world building. Going into this movie, I think most people knew that Carol Danvers AKA Vers was really from Earth. But, I find it interesting that Yon-Rogg is so quick to offer Carol a Kree sleeping aid. It reinforces the idea we’ve seen on Agents of SHIELD that human and Kree physiology are relatively compatible.

Supreme Intelligence

Less of an Easter egg and more of a direct comic book adaptation, the Supreme Intelligence is also an A.I. in the comics. There, it’s made up of all of the minds of the smartest and most distinguished Kree after they day. That’s presumably what Yon-Rogg’s “join the collective” comment meant in the movie as well. The idea of it becoming the person you most admire is created for the movie.

Carol’s Inhibitor

The comics have tried many different inhibitors on characters with super powers over the years. The X-Men usually have collars. Alien species like their neural inhibitors though, which is what Carol appears to have when she trains with Yon-Rogg. Kudos to the MCU for keeping their tech consistent across movies and TV since it appears to be the same type as what Quake ends up with in the future on Agents of SHIELD. Interesting that Daisy’s is embedded in her brain tissue while Carol’s is on the surface of her skin. Something changed in the decades in between - probably the fact that Carol was able to disable hers. Then again, so was Daisy.

Starforce

This is considered a group of supervillains in the comics, so perhaps movie fans might have expected their turn if they knew that. A few of the members are different in the comics. For example, Yon-Rogg isn’t a member, but Ronan the Accuser is. ScreenRant did a good job at running down who’s who in the movie version since they’re all comic book characters. You can see that here.

Torfa

Torfa is a relatively new creation in the planets. It first popped up in 2014, which tells you the movie pulls from a lot of the new comic book continuity. Like the movie, Torfa was a planet where refugees lived. Also like the movie, not all of them survived the hostile atmosphere, though in the comics, it was chemicals, not Kree that were hostile. Carol also had it out with Starlord’s comic book dad there.

Talos

Talos is in the comics, but apparently he’s also a Star Trek reference. Not a Trekkie, though I do find the franchise interesting, so I’ll direct you to this article for a full explanation.

Carol’s Look

One of Carol’s most iconic looks in the comics is her mohawk. She gets it for the movie in the form of her helmet keeping her hair in place. Her uniform, with the green color scheme, is one all of Starforce uses, but it’s also a nod to the original Captain Marvel’s uniform in the comics. In fact, the color changing of her suit appears to be a nod to a few other costumes she had in the comics too. The red, yellow, and blue came later. I’m just glad we didn’t have her bathing-suit like uniform of her Ms. Marvel days.

Maria “Photon” Rambeau

Maria is created for the movie (her daughter is from the comics), and though we learn more about her much later, we see her callsign on her jet during Carol’s early flashbacks. Photon is actually one of the many superhero names Monica Rambeau uses in the comics. Nice touch.

Carol’s Family

Carol’s family flashbacks only ever show us her brother and her father. We don’t get much of an idea about her homelife other than her relatives not wanting her to be as rough as the boys. That’s very much a part of her comic book background. Her father favors her brother so much that, even though Carol has the better grades growing up, he only pays for her brother to get a university education. Carol joins the Air Force for the free tuition and to prove she’s as good as the boys to her father. (It’s also interesting that we never see her mother since a recent retcon in the comics has her mother as a Kree refuge and Carol’s birth name as Car-El as she’s half Kree.) It’s also interesting to note that a lot of Carol’s major stories in her classic comics involve her losing her memories and having to figure out who she is all over again.

Lieutenant Trouble

It’s a cute nickname for Monica with Carol’s military background. It’s also a nod to another little girl Carol new in the comics with the same nickname and Monica being a police officer in the comics when she’s introduced as an adult. She’s also from Louisiana, just like the Rambeaus are in the movie.

Dr. Lawson

We’ve got some genderbending going on for the new generation. In the comics, the original Captain Marvel is Mar-Vell, a Kree soldier sent to Earth to monitor the planet as it gets destroyed by Galactus. Mar-Vell comes to sympathize with humanity and turns on the Kree to help the humans. He also takes the guise of a scientist with NASA named Dr. Lawson while he’s undercover. Sounds familiar, except her Lawson and Mar-Vell are a woman and the race she sympathizes with are the Skrulls. The original story also had Mar-Vell and Carol ending up in an accident with a piece of Kree technology that left Carol with his powers. I love the twist on this origin story. There’s plenty of nods to the source material without Carol’s jealousy of Mar-Vell from the comics, and without her playing second fiddle to a heroic dude for a long time.

Project PEGASUS

In the comics, Project PEGASUS is a unit researching alternative energy sources. It also acts as a prison for those with superpowers. We’ve actually seen mention of it in the MCU before. For the MCU, it was created in the 1940s when Howard Stark found the Tesseract in the ocean while looking for Captain America. It was a joint venture between the Airforce, NASA, and what would become SHIELD to study it. It gets a mention in a few of the tie-in comics for the MCU movies, but specifically, Tony Stark mentions he wants files on it to JARVIS when he’s going through his dad’s stuff in Iron Man 2. A sign for it also appears on the wall in a SHIELD facility in Agents of SHIELD.

Blockbuster And Radio Shack

A+ choices for the businesses for Carol to run into. Two companies that are essentially extinct 20 years later, but were cutting edge at the time. (From what I understand the Blockbuster scenes were actually filmed at the last Blockbuster left in the US. It’s in Arizona. Go figure.)

True Lies

True Lies gets noticed in the video store because Carol shoots the standee, but the spy movie is known for a fighter jet sequence, and it was the first true “blockbuster” movie because it cost over $100 million to make - unheard of in 1994. The fighter jet prop used in it was also repurposed and used in The Avengers, so it’s like Easter egg inception here.

Universal Translator

So much is made about alien races speaking English in the MCU. In the comics, pretty much anyone traveling through space has a universal translator built into their ship or their helmets. This one off mention from Carol reminds us of that, though she’s likely speaking English anyway.

Coulson the Skrull

Phil Coulson appears as a rookie agent in the 90s. I’d wager this is one of his first big jobs since he’s still on evidence collection. You know him from the Iron Man and Avengers movies as well as, you know, Agents of SHIELD. I like that he’s the one a Skrull simulates instead of Fury because there were so many theories about who could be a Skrull when they were announced for this movie. It’s also a nice misdirect from Marvel that there’s concept art out there of Fury’s transformation from a Skrull, but not Coulson’s.

And, I mean, Nick Fury’s not an Easter egg, so I don’t need to remind you he basically started the MCU with Hulk and Iron Man, right? Though this movie does make me worry about his driving record in the MCU. He seems to end up in a lot of accidents.

Stan Lee And Mallrats

Stan Lee’s cameo is extra special because it’s also a nod to a real life cameo of his. How very meta. The script he’s holding on the train is for Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, where he really did say the line, “trust me, True Believers,” something he also said a lot in his editorials in the comics.

Kelly Sue Deconnick

When Carol gets off the train, she passes a woman with red hair and glasses in her walk. That’s Deconnick. She wrote the Captain Marvel comic book series a few years ago that this movie pulls a lot of its nods (and aesthetic) from. We can likely credit her with the surge in popularity Carol’s seen the last few years, and the reason she had a movie in development at all.

1989

In case there’s anything noteworthy for you in the year Carol ended up in Hala: Ron Perelman bought Marvel Entertainment Group, the massive X-Men Inferno story arc played out, the new Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD comic launched, and Jubilee made her comic book debut.

1995

Likewise, for Carol’s return to Earth: the Age of Apocalypse comics launched, Thor made his 400th comic book appearance, comic books like The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man had landmark issues as well, and a bunch of Punisher comics were cancelled, only for Marvel to turn around and launch a new Punisher comic later in the year. The Skrull Kill Crew mini series also launched.

SHIELD Logo

Thanks, Carol for calling out the fact that a covert group shouldn’t put their logo on everything. Fans have been saying that for years. Also, nice touch that it’s not the sleek and modern logo we see in Agents of SHIELD, but the older one seen on the Wall of Valor in the MCU before.

“Smile for me.”

I know that Brie Larson was asked about this moment in an interview and said it wasn’t an Easter egg. But the fact that she was criticized so much by male fans for not smiling in promotional materials made me add this to the list.

SHIELD Medical Examiner

Nelson Franklin played him. He also appeared in an episode of Agents of SHIELD. Maybe they’re just relatives.

A “Full Bird Colonel”

Carol calls Fury this during their chat at Pancho’s. His military history before joining SHIELD is right in line with the comics. Of course, he was from New York, not Alabama there. He also says he likes the B’s and spent time in Budapest. Not the same mission as Hawkeye and Black Widow though, right?

“Just Fury”

Nick Fury also points out that he only goes by Fury. Not Nicholas. Not Nick. Just Fury. I intend on going back and finding when in the MCU someone calls him Nick to his face. Maybe it’s like a distress signal for him.

“You look like someone’s disaffected niece.”

Fury says this to Carol when he points out her clothes not fitting in on a secret base. But it reminded me of the comments about her looking like Emily VanCamp, who plays Peggy Carter’s niece Sharon.

The Welcome Wagon

Carol’s not familiar with the term, though Fury is. Probably because that’s what they call the intake program for new “assets” with SHIELD. That’s what Coulson eventually wants Skye to do when he adds her to his team in Agents of SHIELD.

Ronan The Accuser

You probably recognize Lee Pace’s character from Guardians of the Galaxy. In that movie, he was after a little purple gem that turned out to be the Power Stone. He’s a Kree purist, out to conquer neighboring lands and make sure the Kree stay in power. He’s not all that different here. His mention of coming back for the weapon and the woman at the end is likely a nod to him pursuing other Infinity Stones, even if it’s not clear that he knows what they are here. By the time of Guardians, he’s got whole rituals he’s participating in, which includes painting his face in Blue Kree blood. It doesn’t look like he’s quite that fanatical here. He does, however, inspire loyalty in Korath, who eventually works for him directly, which does make me wonder what happened to Yon-Rog after this and how much Korath told Ronan about their encounter with Carol on Earth as well.

“That’s a flerken.”

Goose likely gets his name from Top Gun, but he gets his alien identity from the comics. In the comics from a few years ago, Carol has a companion on her spaceship - a cat named Chewie. As Rocket Raccoon points out to her, “that’s no cat. That’s a flerken.” Like Talos, Rocket was right. Chewie ends up having a whole litter of flerkens. Goose just eats things and people at convenient times.

Women Flying Combat

Maria notes that women weren’t allowed to fly combat in 1989. That’s true. They weren’t allowed to fly combat until 1993, a few years before the movie is set. The first woman to get to after the ban lifted? That would be Jeannie M. Leavitt. Now Brigadier General Leavitt, she actually trained Brie Larson for her role in the film and appears in the new Air Force ads.

ASIS

The name given to Lawson’s new aircraft, as mentioned briefly by Maria, is ASIS. It’s a nod to Marvel’s Ultimate universe where that version of Captain Marvel developed it. Carol was his head of security, and his girlfriend, in that universe.

A Kree Blood Transfusion

We find out that when Carol was brought to Hala, she needed a blood transfusion to stay alive. I like this nod to GH-325 on Agents of SHIELD, but it does make me wonder why Carol was saved from going mad. Is it because that particular Kree on the series had something in his blood that made everyone end up with it driven to find the ancient city? Is it because Carol was already brainwashed into thinking she was Kree? It’s interesting that Kree blood often comes with messing with memories though.

A Kree Imperial Cruiser

Mar-Vell much have had some military connections when she left Hala and came to Earth if she had a cruiser. We’ve seen them before in the MCU commanded by Ronan’s people. The design here is basically the same, but again, it looks like she’s got more tech, likely because the scientific nature of her work. It does make me wonder if she ever ran into the other smaller ships stationed near Earth that were monitoring the planet for Inhuman activity. (Remember the ones left in orbit to destroy the inhuman abominations in Agents of SHIELD?)

The Tesseract

The Space Stone certainly gets a lot of mileage in the MCU. Hydra wanted it, SHIELD experimented with it, Loki stole it, and now, we found out what else SHIELD was doing with it besides Fury’s secret weapons making team. Lawson, though we see her as part of the air force, is a SHIELD scientist. Like I said, PEGASUS is a joint effort by a few groups. She’s using the Tesseract for space travel though, like it should be.

Quadjet

Nice touch that Carol and Maria use a quadjet to rescue the Skrulls. Why? Because just a decade later SHIELD is using the later model - a quinjet.

Carol Stopping The Warheads

This imagery, like a lot of what comes with Carol glowing and flying, is straight out of the comics. She actually flies into Earth’s atmosphere and slows a sentinel from crashing to Earth in one comic. It looks nearly exactly like this sequence, except, you know, there are other Avengers with her in the comics.

Sizzling Power Lines

We hear the crackle of electricity and see power moving along the lines when Carol brings Yon-Rogg to Earth. This looks to be a nod to how her power works in the comics. She doesn’t just magically produce photo blasts. She absorbs ambient energy from her surroundings to fuel herself. That’s why she doesn’t technically need to eat, or even why she doesn’t need to breathe in the vacuum of space. Her power converts energy around her to sources to sustain her.

Mother Flerken

This has to be a nod to the fact that MCU movies don’t drop F-bombs, though Samuel L. Jackson loves them.

Mar-Vell. Two Words.

Fury mistakenly calls Mar-Vell Marvel. Carol corrects him. That’s kind of how the Captain Marvel term came to be in an alternate universe in the comics though. No one could pronounce Mahr-Vell in the Ultimate universe, so people called him Captain Marvel.

“We found her, and we weren’t even looking.”

I know that this is a nod to Fury’s eventual gathering of the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow, and Hawkeye together. But this is also a reminder that for decades, SHIELD was seeking out people with powers. As Agents of SHIELD showed their audience, some of those people were then locked up and exploited by Hydra agents working undercover. SHIELD still likely has a lot of super powered skeletons in its closet.

Mid Credit Scene

What a surprise. Captain Marvel will show up after the pager is activated in Avengers: Endgame. We’re all surprised, right? (Sarcasm, I know.)

Special Thanks

During the credits, there are a slew of comic creators listed in the special thanks section. Among them are heavyweights like Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Waid, Ralph Macchio, Gene Conway, Jack Kirby, and Chris Claremont. I honestly missed that section the first time and didn’t read them fast enough to catch more. But they aren’t directly responsible for Captain Marvel, but instead had a huge effect on Marvel comics as a whole with massive runs for different properties.

Post Credit Scene

Goose coughing up that tesseract was necessary for Fury to later use to attempt to develop weapons, just like Hydra, in a secret SHIELD program that Captain America won’t like in The Avengers.

A few side notes:

Coulson’s Gut

To be perfectly honest, I feel like Coulson’s part was originally just a generic rookie SHIELD agent in the script. I think when they got the chance to add Clark Gregg to the cast, a few things changed, like this exchange between Fury and Carol about going with your gut instead of following orders. That has always been Coulson’s thing. And, even though Fury is always yelling at people to follow orders, it’s actually how he operates too. It’s why he’s always set up ways for himself, and his proteges, to work around the system. I like that it was touched on here since it’s such a big part of Agents of SHIELD.

Coulson’s Kree Knowledge

Does this create a plot hole? Coulson specifically remarks to Fury at the end of the movie that he heard a Kree took out his eye. But when Lady Sif made her appearance on Agents of SHIELD, Coulson had no visible reaction to her telling him that Kree were one of the blue skinned aliens she knows of. Also, does Coulson even know they were (mostly) blue? After all, he might not since his only face to face with a “Kree” was Carol. It makes me wonder if he suspected the alien that provided GH-325 was Kree all along. Obviously, this is just the kind of thing that happens when universes expand, and it can all be explained away with SHIELD’s use of their memory machine on him, but it still makes me wonder.

Fury And The Women Around Him

I love the theme in the MCU of Fury surrounding himself with powerful women. We’ve seen that Maria Hill is his right hand over and over - even when she was working for Stark. We also saw that he and Natasha Romanoff were close. He trusted her to do the dirty work Steve Rogers wouldn’t. We also know he trusted Sharon Carter and Melinda May to report to him directly during their spy work. Now, Carol Danvers inspires the Avengers Initiative and he invites Maria to work with him after spending one mission with her. I want to meet Fury’s mom. Because she must have been one hell of a woman.

That’s it. Anything I missed? Feel free to tell me because there’s no way I caught every Easter egg.

#captain marvel #marvel comics #marvel easter eggs #agents of shield #iron man #easter eggs

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wendynerdwrites · 7 years ago

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Interview With Jonathon Burkhardt AKA ChaosD1

Jon Burkhardt AKA ChaosD1 is a video game reviewer specializing in MMO’s. He’s found himself embroiled in the controversy surrounding his old not-quite-employers, Channel Awesome, with the rise of the Change the Channel hashtag and the publication of the Google Doc Not So Awesome, which he contributed to. Having been a long time contributor to the Video Aggregate, he personally witnessed much of the mismanagement and poor treatment committed by the site’s management, culminating in his own abrupt termination.

He was nice enough to talk to me in some more detail about the controversy, the fallout, and his plans going forward.

First, can you go into, in your own words, who you are, and what you do?

I go by ChaosD1 online, but most people know me as Jon. I’ve been doing video game related content on YouTube for nearly 10 years, but focused specifically on MMOs with my show “MMO Grinder” as well as have livestreams on Twitch.tv most weekdays.

How did you come to work for Channel Awesome?

I was fairly involved with the site as a fan, as I think a lot of us were, back early [during] its inception back in 2008. Funnily enough I had a manager from my job at the time mention [the Nostalgia Critic] NC specifically, but I didn’t end up checking it out until watching Noah’s announcement that he was posting on there.

Early on there was a flash game arcade that kept track of overall points in each game, and I gained recognition when gaining the top rank overall in the arcade. I was contacted by the wiki team, who hired me on to work on the wiki with them.

Far later after meeting and talking with a few friends who started out as people I was just a major fan of, like Phelous, I decided to start making videos of my own. One of them won the Transmission Awesome contest to have me featured and interviewed on the podcast.

It wasn’t until I started my show “MMO Grinder” that I felt I had any content worthy of placing onto the site, and after Julien (Sad Panda) used up one of his schedule spots to give me a trial run, I was well enough received to earn a spot on Blistered Thumbs in October of 2011. I posted there and on TGWTG.com and after the site merger when BT was shut down, until May of 2017 when the incident I wrote about occurred.

How did you get involved in Change The Channel?

I never figured my story was important or interesting enough to provide any fuel to the fire that was quickly becoming #ChangeTheChannel, to the point I didn’t even make a big deal about what happened when I was let go, though I did have forward enough thinking to save the conversation, just in case something like this even came up. People involved as well as curious fans, still asked to tell my story through the Twitter thread, as well as some anon asks on Tumblr. It happened more after I reblogged Allison’s post from years ago describing the incident after she once again received a ton of people asking her why she didn’t watch or work with Doug anymore. Despite my thinking I didn’t really have a great story to add, I figured it was more a cautionary tale for those who still remained, as well as at least symptomatic of what was an overarching problem we all had for years.

There have been rumors and statements flying kind of under the radar for some time about the channel. What do you think sparked this movement now? What about this period in time led all these people to contribute to a mass document like this?

I think with the current climate on social media, as well as less and less people holding onto those idyllic ideas of a peaceful online utopia that was the internet equivalent of making it big in Hollywood, people were just more accepting now. Also with less and less producers being on the site, more were willing to finally let loose with the stories rather than rock the boat for those who were willing to put up with it. Just another case of straws breaking the camel’s back and what not. As you said, these rumors have been around for years… and honestly it’s nice to finally be able to come clean about a lot of them, rather than just let speculation fester and have contributors thrown under the bus for CA’s policies of silence and non-involvement for any form of bad press.

Can you talk about your personal aims in contributing, as well as what you think the general intent of the document was?

If anything, to show support for those that have, and give my take, regardless of how seemingly insignificant it was. The document’s intent is pretty outlined in the opening paragraph, but some people want an apology for their mistreatment, while others just want people to know why we don’t enjoy being questioned about what CA’s been up to, like we’re forced to be lifelong fans just because we were involved with them once. At least that’s my reasoning. I don’t expect an apology. I know how they do. I just remember feeling more disrespected, like every one of us not in the main studio were a burden upon the website they deeply regretted bringing along in the first place.

Something that’s become a hot button topic over the last few years and has been a major point in the Change The Channel complaints is the concept of being paid “in exposure”. What are your feelings about that whole idea and it’s validity?

I understand it to a certain degree. In the event of an aggregate site, it does help when the community is being fostered. Where fans can potentially become contributors, which is exactly what CA USED to be. There’s a slight validity to the claims that people on CA would be NOWHERE without Doug, but that’s not the case for everyone who was involved. People like Smarty [For Smarty’s story, click here], Mike J and myself didn’t really see any level of channel growth directly from CA. In fact, both Mike J and I’ve made mention of how shockingly LOW the metrics coming from CA were. We’re talking a percentage of a percent.

But if that site gains popularity because of you, it’s only fair to share some of that success with the people who helped you reach that point.

And if you’re only there to host people and pay them in “exposure” it’s not fair to make complete demands of them for how they post their content, or what content they post, especially if you were fine with everything they did beforehand.

There’s benefits to the aggregate site, but I don’t think anyone’s willing to put in the work for that kind of thing anymore.

What means do you think an online media worker has to protect themselves, and what measures and protections would you like to see become a reality?

Honestly that’s something I should be looking into myself. It’s still pretty much a Wild West right now, with so many people at the mercy of any company’s whim. If anything it would be nice to see a more hands on approach and clear communication between all parties involved, instead of leaving everything up to an experimental AI. Get some PEOPLE involved and create some jobs. Don’t just shut down channels or delete videos for having footage if they aren’t going to check the context that footage was placed in. I dunno. I’m not really an expert here.

What was your experience fresh off of your split from the Channel?

It was a non-starter all around. As I’d mentioned in my Tumblr post (I would have added more detail to my section of the doc, but figured I’d just keep things concise.) views from CA were next to nothing at the time of my departure. I’m not joking when I say a percent of a percent. 10k views? About 20 from CA. 100k in a month overall? Less than 200 from CA. It just wasn’t worth the effort, but staying just felt like some kind of principle you know? Phelan, Allison and Julien were all wondering why I bothered to stay on as long as I did, but I figured as long as I didn’t get any flak either way, I’d stick around. In a way I knew I was going to get canned for posting just one video that month. I didn’t ever really want to bother asking to get back on until I was encouraged to do so by the producer chat. It felt like I was freeing myself from a needless burden after they let me know, but the whole thing still felt really shitty. They never really did much of anything to promote me. In turn, I never bothered to promote them. Notice how I never included the Channel Awesome logo bumper, nor mentioned them in my credits scrawl after Blistered Thumbs was shut down? That was on purpose.

If anything did surprise me, it was how upset a lot of the producers were after they let me go in such a… and let me use this word correctly here, “callous” manner. In fact I think at least two producers quit in solidarity shortly afterward. For the producers, they all seemed to care about me. For the management? I was a fly on the wall they just shooed out the window. Out of sight, out of mind. They just never asked the fly how much information it gathered beforehand.

Do you think workers at online companies - particularly in online media, are particularly vulnerable given how unregulated the medium is? After all, as we’ve seen with cases involving everything from fair use and “revenge porn” cases, it seems the law is far behind properly addressing how to handle the internet?

I think cases like this, regardless of how important this whole thing might seem to the average viewer, or online atmosphere are steps in the right direction. A lot of these companies did just start out as a group of friends deciding to do a thing, and spiraled into unexpected popularity they weren’t ready to handle. You can say the same about a lot of online producers. Hopefully we just keep moving forward with all of this and perhaps in time we’ll see some protections for new media. As long as old media isn’t still trying to completely invalidate it out of fear of being replaced.

A lot of people have taken notice of this over the last couple of weeks. What do you want to say to people who wish to support you?

To support me, or anyone you choose to support, visit their shows directly. Share their videos. Leave feedback and engage with their communities. Follow them on social media. If they have a Patreon, contribute if you can. Even a dollar makes up for literally HUNDREDS of views worth of ad revenue. Just continue to recognize what they do, as long as you enjoy what they do.

And what actions should they avoid?

Don’t be a sycophant or a zealot. You don’t need to directly “attack” anyone on our behalf, and plenty of innocents tend to get caught in the crossfire around that kind of behavior. Be mindful of those upset by the information, as for a lot of people, it’s very tough to deal with the news. I tend to forget just how long the site’s been around, and some people literally grew up with our videos. That dose of reality is a lot harder to deal with than some.

Also, for the love of God, do NOT speculate on things that have been kept vague. I’m seeing a whole bunch of people trying to piece together parts of the puzzle left by a few anon contributions, and several people I know were NOT involved were thrown under the bus as a convenient scapegoat. Sometimes it’s easy to want to hate someone for a certain reason, and use them to blame all those mysterious stories, but the truth is far darker than you can imagine, and there are none who come out of top by trying to decode the message. If they decide they want to add more information to their stories, they will. Until then, respect their decision to remain anonymous and vague when they feel they need to be.

How have you found the response so far?

I’m genuinely appreciative and shocked for the outpour of support I’ve seen. Yeah, there have been more than a few “hell no we won’t go” die hard fans with some disturbingly zealous responses, or attempts to dismiss our stories as whining or revenge, but far more are willing to accept this kind of thing as reality now. If you’d have asked me years ago if I’d ever wanted this day to come, I would have honestly said no, as we were all starry-eyed hopefuls once, but I think the writing on the wall’s been there for years, and only now are people starting to read it. I’m not hoping to see any one particular outcome from all of this. I’m just glad people are finally reading that writing.

What are your plans going forward professionally?

Having nothing to do with Channel Awesome, the market situation of MMOs has forced my hand into a defacto hiatus, but we’ve been going fairly steady with the side content, and I plan on doing a new show focused on my new gaming passion Indie Games. As much as I’d like to talk about my favorite Switch or AAA games, too, I think it helps to carve out a niche.

Going into #Change the Channel, was there any fear or anxiety about possible legal retaliation by CA?

For me? No. Someone on Tumblr asked why I wasn’t on CA and I answered.

Others might have concerns, but I think many more fans have been concerned, or defenders of CA outright teased producers, that legal action would head their way, but so few things were under contract. I never even got a welcome package. That kinda works both ways.

After leaving CA, did you keep in contact with your old co-workers prior to the Change the Channel collaboration? What was the general atmosphere among ex-CA members before this?

Considering I only really ever spoke with them, and never really the management, yeah I did, and most of us usually did. There were plenty of times collabs would have ex-members pair up with current At that point, most of us were disillusioned with the concept of CA being some kind of exclusive club. It was never a "member vs non-member" mentality. Friends we made there tended to remain friends. There is even a group Skype most of us have remained in just to chat and collaborate. This is far from the first time any of us had grievances with the management, but it's definitely the first time it's been this public.

There's been a lot of talk about how the sense of camaraderie was what compelled a lot of people to put up with the mismanagement and mistreatment. Can you speak to that?

That's, from my perspective, an unquestionable truth. Many of us didn't share stories just as we didn't feel it necessary. (Again, my reason for being let go is basically nothing in the grand scheme. It fits more for the "They don't care about non-studio producers." side of the story than the "Here are some generally horrifying practices." portion. I learned about many of these from the doc, just like the rest of you.)There are plenty of people who wanted the status and recognition they perceived they would get from joining the site, two of who I warned personally about, but really, we mostly stayed for the sense of community with each other. That's why so many, past and present, left in small groups of solidarity. It's when we realized that it wasn't the site keeping us together. It was just us.

You can follow ChaosD1 on his youtube page, his Twitch stream, on twitter, and at his tumblr page @chaosd1. You can also find his work on his website, MMOGrinder.net. Also, please consider supporting his Patreon!

Art by Andrew Dickman.

#chaosd1 #channel awesome #change the channel #tgwtg #that guy with the glasses

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painted-starlight · 7 years ago

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T*ngled Wasn’t Suited for an Animated Series

Warning: SUPER long Post under the cut, Swearing, and extra anti-Tangled, I also get a little repetitive because I feel like this subject really needs to be said.

I think what really tells me that T*ngled: The Series was created to revitalize a franchise that doesn’t have the staying power Disney thought it would is because of a few curious elements in it’s transition from a movie to a series.

When the Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Hercules got their own spinoffs, they were within maybe one to three years (give or take) between their movie’s inception and the creation of the series. Aladdin was a straight continuation and the series was thought of during it’s actual production. Which is probably why it’s one of the most recognized continuations/Disney Sequels and is accepted by fans into the Disney Canon.

The Little Mermaid: The Series was a prequel. And while it’s status as a canon part of the animated movie is often downplayed or outright ignored in later iterations (for example, The Little Mermaid III is the biggest offender.) it has expanded upon the given source material and has a healthy memory in Disney for bringing in new aspects to the canon.

Consistency is Key to Making an Animated Series

What these two shows have in common is what is needed for a series made from a Disney animated movie to have: consistency.

Consistency between sets, characters, and supporting characters that mesh well with the world and bring new perspectives into the setting. Agraba was completely recognizable in the animated series and when it brought new elements of magic, it fit.

The animated series of the Little Mermaid was created to fill in the gaps of who Ariel was before the events of the movie. People can instantly recognize Atlantica because of the visual consistency.

They used their new setting to bring in more diverse depictions of characters, such as the classic and beloved character Gabriella, a deaf mermaid who connected with Ariel in sign language. The original movie of the Little Mermaid was racially homogeneous for no reason other than the filmmakers inner prejudices. Having Gabriella in the series brings a human element to the franchise.

The creators of the Little Mermaid had the opportunity to make people of color exist in the movie, but they chose not to. This is a fact. While I adore Gabriella, I also wish that she was in the movie. This would have been a great lesson for the filmmakers at Disney to learn that inclusivity makes settings feel real.

But apparently not.

The Changes in the End are Superficial

The only difference between the Little Mermaid and Aladdin and it’s respective animated series is ultimately superficial. The animation may have taken a downgrade but the settings and interest in the stories being told were unique enough to stand on their own.

The sets are recognizable to the audience and the flavor of the original series is kept while bringing something new. It also helps that this is before the Disney Princess Marketing went into full swing. We get more nuanced characterizations of characters due to the fact that the writers had a little bit more freedom.

But we should take a look at a post Disney Princess animated series made from the Disney Animated Canon.

Big Hero Six is getting an animated series to continue what was left after the end of the movie. It deliberately left interest in the audience about what might happen next. As much as I highly dislike Big Hero Six’s exotification of Japanese culture, the setting is recognizable. The change from 3d animation to traditional animation still has that recognizably.

It also premiered in 2017, while the movie came out in 2014. Three years isn’t too much of a stretch and kids will be able to remember the movie.

There’s stuff to expand upon. And if they finally decide to touch upon the criticisms they gotten (lack of characterization for the other members of the team, Hiro’s other relatives of Japanese descent, actual names given to Gogo Tamago and Honey Lemon) this is perfect place for it to jump off of.

So What the Hell Happened with Tangled: The Animated Series?

Tangled: the Animated Series also continues where the story left off, but it premiered in 2017. SEVEN years after the movie, which it takes place directly after. This is a huge margin of time between the movie and the animated series. This is incredibly suspicious to me because they already released a short (Tangled Ever After) in 2012 that takes place a number of years after the animated series.

My theory about why this happened is because of marketing, but it’s not as simple as “Disney wants more money.” Sure they want more money. But let’s look at what they do specifically for Tangled and Rapunzel:

Theory Part 01: She’s not as Popular or Memorable as They Thought She Would Be

She is lined up with all of the other “classic” white Disney Princesses, despite coming after Tiana. Disney pushes Rapunzel HARD as a classic Disney princess even though she doesn’t have the same recognizably or staying power. And even when she is recognized, I imagine that no one in the target audience really cares because Tangled was a simple, completed story. That’s also probably why they didn’t have a more open ending for Tangled, because they wanted it to be a “classic,” with a traditionally happily ever after and nothing else. This proved to be a huge mistake on their part. Maybe sales of Tangled dwindled, kids no longer were interested in Rapunzel like they were Elsa and Anna (for the moment, their popularity also took a dive). And they couldn’t just give Frozen a series because it had a sequel coming along and making an animated series would have too many continuity errors if they conflicted. So to boost Rapunzel’s throne as the go to “White Disney Princess,” alongside Aurora, Snow White, Ariel, and Belle, they decided to give her animated series. Except it had to change everything to make it even remotely watchable.

Theory Part 02: The Movie’s Setting Was Too Underdevloped and Flat To Make Compelling

It couldn’t look like the movie. Because the original movie took place in an unrealistically racially homogeneous and isolated part of the country with no surrounding territory except for trees, trees, and more trees. And I guess maybe a tavern and Rapunzel’s tower. The creators of the animated series had a problem on their hands, and it was huge.

Ta*ngled in it’s original form was unwatchable as a series. I’ve said this before on another post, but it really needs to be said again.

Does anyone actually recognize this part of Corona?

The first is supposed to look like farmland that Corona occupies/owns. But I never saw anything that even remotely looked like that in the original movie. the movie showed that Corona was really consolidated and sequestered in a small, but wealthy area. Everything else around it was pretty barren and people were either in poverty or excluded.

The second supposed to be a part of the town, but it’s architecture is completely and totally different from the one seen in the movie. The town surrounded the castle on a sloping hill. But this area of the town (which is supposed to be sloping given the background buildings in the atmospheric perspective).The town was incredibly congested too with little walking space.

Almost everything about T*angled the Animated Series is different from the original movie. Kids are going to see this wonderful, diverse city with bright colors and interesting architecture, and then they're going to see Tangled. And they’ll be disappointed because of how dull, sparse, and bland it really is when they watch the movie.

Theory Part 03: T*ngled’s Filmmakers Put All the Story Building/Character Diversity/ACTUAL FUCKING Work onto Their Successors Because They Didn’t Know How to Worldbuild

T*angled’s creators had the opportunity to learn from The Little Mermaid’s mistakes. Just two years before was the first black Disney princess, Tiana, but they didn’t.

Ta*ngled had all the chances it did to keep moving Disney animation forward instead of backward but wanted to be rewarded for being another white Disney Princess movie that had to get changed anyway for subsequent adaptations to connect with it’s core audience.

The thing is is that the series tries to revamp Corona into an actual believable place because it had to. There was just no way it could stay the way it was. But if they had to put so many bandages on the original movie’s flaws, then why didn’t the movie have more thought put into it? Why was it made the way it was?

Well, it’s because it was created to appeal to white nostalgia and the idea of an all white Europe. That’s why all the black and brown characters were given the boot. It was released to eclipse the Princess and the Frog. This is purposeful on the part of Disney to bury the first black princess with a milquetoast White Disney Princess #21257 (TM).

When your film has an all white cast, your placing more work on not only the the majority of viewers to identify with characters who don’t represent them (and who realize that these types of casts only exist to preserve white supremacy), but you also make subsequent adaptations or expanded materials have to work harder to fix your mistakes.

T*angled should’ve looked like it did in the animated series, but they wanted to make sure that their big budget film was lily white due to their belief that it would be an “Instant Disney Classic”. That it’s all white cast would hold up to the test of time.

Spoiler alert: T*ngled actually sucks mighty ass. And it actually worsens in quality with each passing year because it's bland, simple, and has no interesting things that make a viewer want to know more about the setting or characters.

Ta*ngled’s original form was boring as stale bread. And this tells me more about the actual quality of the movie rather than the animated series.

Final Thoughts

T*ngled (the original movie) had the opportunity to learn from The Little Mermaid’s mistakes. Just two years before was the first black Disney princess, but it didn’t. It had all the chances it did to keep moving Disney animation forward instead of backward but wanted to be rewarded for being another white Disney Princess movie that had to get changed anyway for subsequent adaptations to connect with it’s core audience. It encouraged all white casts to continue on without being criticized.

Remember, they CHOSE to do this. No one forced the filmmakers of T*ngled to get rid of all the black characters in the concept art. If they were forced, no one objected. No one forced them to make an all white cast. If they were forced, no one said a damn thing.

They exist in an environment where dissenting opinions about the way projects are headed are not taken into consideration, but are shouted down, brushed off, and the people in charge are allowed to bask in their own racism and ignorance. At least until they get burned eventually by the negative press. So keep burning Disney, call them out. Don’t reward them when they do the care minimum. Tell them to do better, to LISTEN.

It’s only way they learn.

#anti tangled #tangled crit #i hate tangled so goddamn much #HATRED #the filmmakers didn't learn a damn thing #they wanted to make the next Instant Disney Classic #with an all white cast of fucking course #and then the series that didn't need to be made GOT MADE #and they probably had to scramble to fix the crappy EVERYTHING #big hero six #disney criticism #racism

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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In the last couple of weeks, as the purges of alleged racists have intensified in every sphere, and as so many corporations, associations, and all manner of civic institutions have openly pledged allegiance to anti-racism, with all the workshops, books, and lectures that come with it, I’m reminded of a Václav Havel essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

It’s about the dilemma of living in a world where adherence to a particular ideology becomes mandatory. In Communist Czechoslovakia, this orthodoxy, with its tired slogans, and abuse of language, had to be enforced brutally by the state, its spies, and its informers. In America, of course, with the First Amendment, this is impossible. But perhaps for that very reason, Americans have always been good at policing uniformity by and among themselves. The puritanical streak of shaming and stigmatizing and threatening runs deep. This is the country of extraordinary political and cultural freedom, but it is also the country of religious fanaticism, moral panics, and crusades against vice. It’s the country of The Scarlet Letter and Prohibition and the Hollywood blacklist and the Lavender Scare. The kind of stifling, suffocating, and nerve-racking atmosphere that Havel evokes is chillingly recognizable in American history and increasingly in the American present.

The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the “successor ideology” to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” He told Times media columnist Ben Smith this week that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be). And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity? That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, “the justice system — in fact, the entire American experiment — was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.”

…

This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric. No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency. No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged. And we are not defined by black and white any longer; we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.

And a country that actively seeks immigrants who are now 82 percent nonwhite is not primarily defined by white supremacy. Nor is a country that has seen the historic growth of a black middle and upper class, increasing gains for black women in education and the workplace, a revered two-term black president, a thriving black intelligentsia, successful black mayors and governors and members of Congress, and popular and high culture strongly defined by the African-American experience. Nor is a country where nonwhite immigrants are fast catching up with whites in income and where some minority groups now outearn whites.

And yet this crude hyperbole remains. In yesterday’s New York Times, in a news column, there was a story about the attempted purge of an economics professor for not being adequately supportive of the protests of recent weeks. It contained the following sentence, describing research into racial inequality: “Economics journals are still filled with papers that emphasize differences in education, upbringing or even IQ rather than discrimination or structural barriers.” But why are these avenues of research mutually exclusive? Why can’t the issue of racial inequality be complicated — involving many social, economic, and cultural factors that operate alongside the resilience of discrimination? And wouldn’t it help if we focused on those specific issues rather than seeing every challenge that African-Americans face as an insuperable struggle against the hatred of whites?

…

The orthodoxy goes further than suppressing contrary arguments and shaming any human being who makes them. It insists, in fact, that anything counter to this view is itself a form of violence against the oppressed. The reason some New York Times staffers defenestrated op-ed page editor James Bennet was that he was, they claimed, endangering the lives of black staffers by running a piece by Senator Tom Cotton, who called for federal troops to end looting, violence, and chaos, if the local authorities could not. This framing equated words on a page with a threat to physical life — the precise argument many students at elite colleges have been using to protect themselves from views that might upset them. But, as I noted two years ago, we all live on campus now.

In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing. “White Silence = Violence” is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches. It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause. In these past two weeks, if you didn’t put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol displaying your wokeness, you were instantly suspect. The cultishness of this can be seen in the way people are actually cutting off contact with their own families if they don’t awaken and see the truth and repeat its formulae. Ibram X. Kendi insists that there is no room in our society for neutrality or reticence. If you are not doing “antiracist work” you are ipso facto a racist. By “antiracist work” he means fully accepting his version of human society and American history, integrating it into your own life, confessing your own racism, and publicly voicing your continued support.

…

If you argue that you believe that much of this ideology is postmodern gobbledygook, you are guilty of “white fragility.” If you say you are not fragile, and merely disagree, this is proof you are fragile. It is the same circular argument that was once used to burn witches. And it has the same religious undertones. To be woke is to wake up to the truth — the blinding truth that liberal society doesn’t exist, that everything is a form of oppression or resistance, and that there is no third option. You are either with us or you are to be cast into darkness.

And that’s where Havel comes in. In his essay, he cites a greengrocer who has a sign he puts up in his window: “Workers of the World, Unite!” If he did not put one there, he’d be asked why. A neighbor could report him for insufficient ideological zeal. An embittered employee might get him fired for his reticence. And so it becomes, over time, not so much a statement of belief as an attempt to protect himself. People living under this ideology “must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

…

Liberalism is not just a set of rules. There’s a spirit to it. A spirit that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ideology — friendship, art, love, sex, scholarship, family. A spirit that seeks not to impose orthodoxy but to open up the possibilities of the human mind and soul. A spirit that seeks moral clarity but understands that this is very hard, that life and history are complex, and it is this complexity that a truly liberal society seeks to understand if it wants to advance. It is a spirit that deals with an argument — and not a person — and that counters that argument with logic, not abuse. It’s a spirit that allows for various ideas to clash and evolve, and treats citizens as equal, regardless of their race, rather than insisting on equity for designated racial groups. It’s a spirit that delights sometimes in being wrong because it offers an opportunity to figure out what’s right. And it’s generous, humorous, and graceful in its love of argument and debate. It gives you space to think and reflect and deliberate. Twitter, of course, is the antithesis of all this — and its mercy-free, moblike qualities when combined with a moral panic are, quite frankly, terrifying.

#andrew sullivan #new york magazine #new progressive orthodoxy #great awokening #death of liberalism

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web4study-net-blog · 5 years ago

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CHALLENGES FACED BY PAKISTAN IN 21ST CENTURY | Essay for CSS and PMS

Pakistan suffers from a number of social, political, and economic problems. Pakistan is experiencing unwanted growth. While projections indicate that the population growth rate of Pakistan may actually be decreasing, those same projections also predict that by the year 2050 Pakistan will have ass_umed its place as the third_ most populated nation in the world. A rapidly growing population, along with local tensions, both internal and external, and an economy trapped in a cycle of debt, all serve to prevent Pakistan from attaining the progress it needs to advance, and perhaps to survive. Some of the major problems faced today by Pakistan as a country are: Since its inception, the most difficult challenge Pakistan has struggled to meet has been to establish a true democratic system, which could guarantee its survival, stability and development. Unfortunately, the plant of democracy in Pakistan has not taken its roots deep enough to make the country "a durable democratic state". Pakistan was conceived on the basis of Islam, which is democratic both in Jetter and spirit. But unfortunately, we have not proved worthy of the freedom achieved after immense sacrifices and selfish interests and political intrigues dominated the national scene. It is imperative to have a constitution when a country starts fresh. Sudden and unexpected events within the body politics of Pakistan not only delayed the making of a constitution according to the needs and ideology of the country but also thwarted the process shaping the opinion in favour of democracy as a modern political necessity. The Draft Resolution was thrown into cold storage. The country had a Constitution in 1956 that was strangled and killed after a military coup by General Ayub Khan in 1958. The second constitution was drawn in 1962 to give a semblance of democracy in the form of Basic Democracy and to suit the purpose of one man who was a dictator in the guise of a president. Not Parliamentary but presidential form of government with wide powers was imposed on the people. It also served the seeds of regionalism and disintegration in the country. There was democracy in name only. Experimentation in politics is always dangerous because it kills continuity of democratic convention and gives rise to instability in the country. It is only a strong constitution that is always above the ordinary Jaw and gives stability and inspires sense o( nationhood among the people. When the experiment failed, second Marshal Law was imposed in 1969. Wide based political parties are essential for running the democratic government by the elected representatives of the people. The 1970 Elections were held in the free atmosphere on a party basis to put the country on road to democracy but what followed, is the darkest chapter in the history of the country. The country was dismembered as a result of Jack of political foresight, sense of compromise and undemocratic attitude on the part of some political leaders. The breaking of the country necessitated the making of a fresh constitution and the result was I 973 Constitution and democracy in Pakistan. However, nothing had been provided in the 1973 Constitution to secure this democracy. The very fact that it had been amended time and again is a clear proof of its weakness. From 1977 onwards, no stable government has been formed till now. The military has been intervening, sometimes intentionally and sometimes invited, in the political affairs. Several amendments have been made to the constitution, each change serving the purpose for some selected people. Moreover, the opposition failed to play its due role and the rulers were too proud to listen and to bear criticism. We have still to see real rule of law in the country. Democracy can never exist without rule of law, justice, civil liberties and equality of opportunities. Representative rulership could not uphold these values due to favouritism, nepotism and obstructing the course of law. Such limping democracy can never serve long. Deeply linked to the massive debt and poorly educated people is the large portion of Pakistan's population that lives in poverty. With an average of 2,000 dollars of GDP per person (adjusted for purchasing power parity), the average citizen is forced to live off very limited resources. This is reflected in the fact that 34% of the population lives below the poverty line, despite a mere 7% unemployment. Poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere. It is a scrooge and one of the worst curses and miseries that a human can face. According to an analysis conducted by the government of Pakistan, poverty has increased roughly from 30% to 40% during the past decade. Consider that if 40% of a country's population is earning their life below the poverty-line in which the people are deprived of basic necessities of life such as clothing, shelter, food, education and medication, such families and their children will be forced to think of their survival only. Poverty has emerged as the most important issue for Pakistan. The reason that economic growth has failed to trickle down to the poor in Pakistan 1s the slow improvement in social indicators Economic growth and social sector development are interdependent as one reinforces the other. In fact, economic growth is necessary for poverty reduction but poverty reduction itself is necessary for sustained growth. The main reasons for the increase in poverty during the 1990s can be attributed to the relatively lower rate of economic growth, rising unemployment, stagnant real wages, the declining flow of worker's remittances and bad governance. Pakistan's lack of financial resources is yet another barrier against foreign investment. Without foreign investment, Pakistan lacks the resources to bring about positive economic development. Without positive economic development, Pakistan is unable to attract foreign investors. Without foreign investors, Pakistan will remain poor. Read the full article

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renaramblesaboutcomics · 7 years ago

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Wednesday Roundup 8.30.2017

We have quite a varied bundle today and I’m pretty excited for a lot of these. We’re getting some interesting developments on some storylines, some beautiful conclusions to others, and we’ve got some... hm. as well. Of course, wasting just a touch of time here so lets just jump into it since I’m getting this Roundup in right on the wire ; )

Image’s Black Magick, DC’s Gotham City Garage, DC’s Harley Quinn and Batman, IDW’s Ghostbusters 101, Kodansha’s Princess Jellyfish, DC’s Wonder Woman

Image’s Black Magick (2015-present) #7 Greg Rucka, Nicola Scott

Oh my gosh do I love this book, do I love this aesthetic, do I just adore every thought and texture put into it. As much as I absolutely, positively adored Rucka and Scott working together on Wonder Woman, it’s a truly wonderful thing to have Black Magick aailable to read again. And what an issue we have.

Story: There’s obviously quite a bit going on in Black Magick at this point. Rowan’s job as a detective is getting testier since, being pulled in multiple directions has led her to be disconcerting for her partner and it’s beginning to come to a head, especially as his own personal life is getting more complicated by the minute. And it’s amazing how tense her procedural drama elements feel when the whole time one’s nerves are being wracked by whether or not she’s going to blow her cover as a real witch. At the same time she’s beginning to really embrace the heritage that she has been flippant with all this time at best, not training her magic abilities or honing her family’s passed down skills until now. And in this issue you can really see the literal fire lit within her at last now that her closest friends are being threatened by the actions of this mysterious witch hunting society.

Art: Nicola Scott’s art is positively gorgeous, of course, but what really stands out about Black Magick is the use of tones rather than colors except for important magical effects in each issue. It gives a truly other worldly feel to the comic and draws your eyes to the textures used from the leather of Rowan’s jacket to the flickering of flames which gives it such a unique experience compared even to black and white comics. I really appreciate and feel inspired by the bold choices being used here.

Characters & Dialogue: Rucka is fantastic for giving all of his characters very distinct ways of talking, so much so that I feel like without seeing who a word bubble is directed toward most times I can already hear who it’s coming from. And I felt that was probably most significant in the precinct and when Rowan and her partner were on their stakeout. I love how well he understands characters and how to really portray so much with just the right word choice for each character. It’s so fantastically appreciated.

IDW’s Ghostbuster 101 (2016-2017) #6 (of 6) Erik Burnham, Dan Schoening, Luis Antonio Delgado

I am so sad to see this amazing, hilarious crossover come to its end but the journey has been well worth it, and I’ve heard that Answer the Call’s team is going to be getting a book which means we’re bound more lovely, fun adventures with the girl team coming soon. And I have to admit, I simply love that everything came together just as well as it did. Erik Burnham and Dan Schoening have absolutely mastered this franchise in a way I don’t think anything else can truly compete with and I’m so grateful for their positive and honestly loving portrayal of the Ladybusters throughout this comic.

Story: We’re at the end, so obviously there was quite a lot to wrap up -- saving both dimensions, giving as many characters defining moments as possible, so on and so forth. And it felt just as large and bombastic as one would hope as the different styles of both sets of Ghostbusters really got to be explored, things were figured out, and we even got some hints about how the multiverse versions of different characters might have been. It’s a truly inspired effort, honestly. And I just loved the conclusion.

How the six issues as a whole have been, I have to admit this is entirely satisfying. I make it no secret that, to me, comics best length of a long story is four issues, with six always tending to have a lot of flab that we could all benefit from trimming up. But this is a rare occasion where I felt there was no fat. Even with a bit of a slow first issue, this series was pretty much defined by its shockingly large cast and paying off the years of faithful attentiveness paid by the fans of the comics through all these years. It wasn’t just an introduction for the Answer the Call Ghostbusters into the comic universe, it was a celebration of all the change the franchise has experienced for the past thirty years. And that’s just quite plainly unique and satisfying on both a story and on a meta level.

Art: Dan Schoening’s style has become so synonymous with Ghostbusters that I practically can’t imagine how they would look outside of that style. It’s so distinct and yet the charicatures feel so perfect for the characters’ portrayals within the movies. This is the height of stylized art for me. That being said, I did think it’s a bit off putting how that signature style wasn’t always in full effect for the Answer the Call cast. As cartoony and expressive as the regular Ghostbusters are, the Ladybusters did tend to have that more realistic style Schoening sometimes has for side characters in the regular Ghostbusters books. I do think that it changed as he got more comfortable with the characters over the issues, particularly with Holtzmann, but there was a lot of give and take for the first few issues. This issue though was near perfection, and I loved the distinction between the entire lineup and how you could immediately identify who everyone was by glance.

Characters & Dialogue: Like I said, Burnham just owns this franchise as far as I’m concerned and as far as my love for it all goes. He has a distinct and unique voice not just for the original cast but for every character who has ever been involved with the franchise and he carries that distinct presence with every new character added, every old character reinvented, and every new franchise add on that needs to be folded into the IDW comics. Quite frankly, I love it, and the sheer amount of love for these characters and all of their potentials is what makes me continue to read the IDW comics after years and years of following them.

DC’s Gotham City Garage (2017-present) #2 Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Brian Ching

Well, I did give the comic a good try, and I don’t necessarily think there’s all that much wrong with it. In fact I could see it becoming a fan favorite rather quickly online in the same vein as a lot of other Digital First endeavors have here on tumblr. But for me, issue #2 just comes to prove that while the components exist for what DC has seen work for them in the past there, there’s not really a clear presentation here that would give me any more confidence in the narrative than, say, Ame-Comi Girls which found too much direction after squandering around a bit to advertise the figurine line. So I don’t think I’ll be following Gotham City Garage longer. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say a good amount of that is because I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why it’s centered around Gotham. I mean. They’re in the middle of a desert. Without resources. Gotham has never since its inception not been a city with a giant harbor that gets poisoned every three minutes. The main characters outside of Selina and Harley have nothing to do with Gotham. The main villain is Lex Luthor. Why. What. Who. Whatever.

Story: I stand by the fact that the story for this comic has really fallen flat for me since the first issue. There are just a lot of gaps of logic that it feels like I’m just supposed to fill in myself or ignore until it’s addressed later. And while I’m a huge fan of starting a story with the action and world building through example and casual nuance, there is also way too much happening in far too small of a space that the medium of a short digital comic can really provide. In fact, if I hadn’t known about the statue line, the culture surrounding Mad Max the Road Warrior and Mad Max Fury Road, and the tremendous success DC has had with DC Bombshells, I don’t know for sure if I could confidently tie together everything that’s even happening right now that I do get. And the fact that the most familiar characters in the franchise are acting so outside of the characterizations most audiences would be familiar with isn’t very helpful in arguing against that analysis. If you’re not already a fan of these characters, two issues in there hasn’t been anyone really established save maybe Kara Gordon herself. And if you’re a fan of these characters, the changes in allies, the relationships on display, and just the general atmosphere is so different that you probably won’t be very engaged in figuring out why your favorite isn’t behaving the way you love them to.

Art: The art’s pretty good, but it’s running into a lot of the problems that most of these Digital First comics I’ve been reviewing have a problem with and that is the rushed feeling to the art, with this comic in particular it comes through most in the background art I feel, especially coloring.

Characters & Dialogue: Like I said before, I’m not sure who these characterizations are supposed to appeal to, but I’m fairly confident in saying that at least for these two first issues we don’t have a lot to work with because it’s just too many all at once, which isn’t learning from what made things like DC Bombshells and even, to an extent, Injustice work -- that being the slow introduction building our relationships with characters and their parts in the world before moving forward to giant team ups and so on and so forth.

DC’s Harley Quinn and Batman (2017) #2 (of 6) Ty Templeton, Rick Burchett

I am like. On a whole new plane of self consciousness and worry about this comic now that I connected the dots that this probably came about because of the direct to dvd feature cartoon Batman and Harley Quinn which recently came out and, yes, I’m aware of how pathetically obvious that loos in hindsight. But like. Just for clarification I almost used the picture for this review being one of the shots of Harley walking around in her underwear to be like “Rick Burchett doesn’t draw double ass” which I think sums up my feelings on the animated feature pretty well.

Story: While I am concerned about how much influence the animated movie is going to ultimately haveon this comic’s storyline, I have to admit that there’s a very basic love in me instilled from childhood to just have my heartstrings automatically pulled by the concentration on the relationship between Harvey and Ivy. They’re genuinely one of my favorite relationships in all the the DCAU let alone Gotham, and it’s just so full of complexity and intrigue. But most importantly, we see an abuse victim like Harley moving into a relationship -- regardless of whether or not you see it as romantic or not oo-- where her emotions are validated and received openly by a partner. Not only that, but her intellect and unique perspective is valued by Ivy unlike with the Joker, which makes this issue a complete stark comparison to the previous issue.

As for Ivy’s henchman..... I don’t know. Guess we’ll see where that goes. It’s kinda offputting for now because I’m not used to Ivy playing well with anyone but Harley, though I’m certain itl’l be a plot point.

And man do I hope that’s Ivy’s mind controlling cereal from Batman: Gotham Adventures because that callback alone would make this series immediately worth it.

Art: I mentioned with the first issue both how I’m a fan of Rick Burchett’s art and also how I try to be pretty lenient with Digital First comics because I know the time scale for these are massively shrunk from what artists in the industry have grown accustomed to.

I think those defenses fall a little flat now that it’s apparent that unlike some other series, this isn’t a weekly updated comic, and the page count is still rather short considering the medium, so my excuses sort of dry out here. There’s a lot of off model art, bland gradient backgrounds, and the such. But at the same time... $0.99 comics on the regular is something you basically can’t find from any of the other mainstream comic companies.

It’s by no means terrible, but it’s definitely ushed. And the colors are very uninspired, even tones throughout with no attention to lighting or difference that would result from lighting scene to scene.

All that said, it gets a huge positive thumbsup from me for the simple reason that Rick Burchett remembered what so many forget -- Harley and Ivy have different body types and Harley’s the taller and more lean of the two. It’s glorious to see that played out in a hug.

Characters & Dialogue: Considering my rather large apprehensions I had and still have with this series, it’s honestly rather enjoyable to see that the voices of the characters comes through so clearly -- arguably more clear than in the previous issue. Harley and Ivy really steal the show throughout the issue, but the short moments between Bruce and Dick are pretty fun too. Ty Templeton obviously has a lot of experience writing for the DCAU version of Batman at this point, but it’s always such a comfort to see my favorite version of the character handled by people who really seem to understand the things that make Batman admirable to begin with, including the occasional sense of humor like we get when Bruce needles Dick slightly by taking the opportunity from him to make a pun. I hope this consistency continues throughout!

Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (2015-present) #22 Brandon Montclair, Natacha Bustos, Tamra Bonvillain

I don’t think there has been a more surprisingly lovely Marvel comic in the last few years than the always amazing, all-ages Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. I’ve been asked plenty of times to rec comics specifically for younger kids who want to follow superheroes, and the continuing pleasure I’ve gotten from being able to answer with Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is truly something else.

Story: We seem to be closing up on the space adventures (and out of the territory of being forced to deal with Secret Empire as a crossover so ha take that editorial) with Lunella confronting the epitome of her own loneliness and fear of alienation through the form of the Girl-Moon. At the same time, Robo-Lunella and Doombot cause havoc for poor Mr. and Mrs. Lafayette who just want to take their daughter to an eye doctor’s appointment. What’s getting more and more emphasized, mostly in Lunella’s absence, is that her parents are increasingly worried about the distance and lack of relatability they have with their own daughter which sadly is beginning to come to a head not only outside of Lunella’s periphery but while she’s completely off planet. And their concern with her genius as well as her part time shenanigans as a superhero are driving especially her mother to lose patience. Hopefully, after “one last adventure” Lunella and Devil will come home and straighten things out.

It still astounds me just how much emotional maturity and clarity this comic has while still being simple enough that a very young reader could read and enjoy it. It’s also amazing how inventive this comic is, with adventures that would come straight out of the Silver Age but without the on the nose camp sensibilities or feeling entirely out of tone with modern comics. It’s just a good comic embracing the absurdity of what only good comics can do.

Art: I’m obviously still a huge fan and just love the art style for this comic, but one thing I really want to emphasize on this issue in particular is just how amazing and awe inspiring the choices in color were throughout, especially in space. Everything was jaw droppingly gorgeous and I just wish I had a third of the talent for picking color palettes.

Characters & Dialogue: Lunella’s still a great protagonist, but I was surprised that this issue really didn’t focus on her development as much as I would have thought it could. I actually felt the characters who received the most development even with far less page time were her parents, whose frustrations and concerns were clearly demonstrated and highly sympathetic. It’s just so good to see a story from a child’s perspective understand the nuances and difficulties of a parent-child relationship without being all perfect or all awful.

Kodansha’s Princess Jellyfish (2008-2017) Chapter 84 Akiko Higashimura

All good things must come to an end, and nothing is more true to that saying this week than Akiko Higashimura’s nine year long epic about strange nerdy girls, sexual identity, and overcoming the cruelty of politics and poverty, Princess Jellyfish. I have been reading this manga for years, adored the twelve episode anime based on it, and am a little stunned and beyond words right now that we are actually at an end for what has become one of my favorite manga.

So here I go, giving my final review and a fond farewell to Princess Jellyfish.

Story: The hardest thing to explain about Princess Jellyfish has to be the story itself because, well, it’s sort of beyond explanation. Sure it’s a slice-of-life, sure it’s a Coming of Age narrative, sure it’s a story about the nuances of trauma and damage and how to overcome them all unique to the strengths of each individual character. But as structured as genre usually is in manga, at least that which gets transcribed and popularized here in the USA, I’ve never felt like any category accurately described Princess Jellyfish as a whole.

Halfway through the first arc, we watch it transition into a drama set with the fashion world as its backdrop, there’s political intrigue throughout, the question of gender gets constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed again with this finale ultimately deciding once and for all to prove to the women of the Nunnery that their love and appreciation of Kuranosuke has no gender itself, and that people they have loved and cherished all along have been kept at arm’s length by their own stony attempts at self-preservation. Not the other way around.

Ultimately I personally have a difficult time pegging this to a genre, even romance, because at the end of the day, it’s not romantic love that really saves everyone, though there is that. By the end of this last chapter, the love that saves all of them is the love of themselves that they inspired each other to find. Kuranosuke and Tsukimi most of all have come to love all parts of themselves and each other without really putting it to words before this last issue, and that’s what makes the ending so powerful as all the threads, all the plots, everything comes colliding together for a conclusion with Kuranosuke reuniting with his mother, Tsukimi learning that her mother truly meant she had been a princess all along and she didn’t need to change, to the Amamizukan’s being themselves for a fashion show and realizing they can brave a crowd.

Everything is beautiful and lovely, and I’m so grateful for it.

Art: I think when most people imagine manga or anime, there is a very specific aesthetic that has become somewhat standard for the medium. Which is somewhat sad in a sense because it really undermines how much style and variation there actually can be, and the simple, sweet, and almost solid looking style of Princess Jellyfish is one of the first examples that really comes to my mind. It’s very distinct and very much a product of Higashimura’s work more than anything else.

These later chapters, especially this finale, have a much more vibrant use of tones than previous chapters, which do give more depth to the images and add to the art’s complexity more, but it’s still so soft and not distracting that the real star is again just that distinguishable style.

Characters & Dialogue: I want to focus on the true magic of the entire manga but especially this conclusion: Tsukimi and Kuranosuke. For as much as I find it difficult to label Princess Jellyfish as a comic, I don’t share those difficulties with how I feel about the lead characters. Tsukimi and Kuranosuke are amazing, round, complex, and deeply flawed people who tuly improved each other over the span of 84 chapters. In different ways, they needed to learn confidence and love for parts of themselves that they had never been able to love before, and as they did so, they drew strength from one another that helped a friendship and love deepen between the two of them that is so unique and so unlike almost any other kind of romance I’ve seen before. I truly believe not only that Kuranosuke loves Tsukimi, but that he truly means it when he says that he just wants to be with her, that platonically, romantically -- he needs her because she helped him learn to be a better, more confident, more caring person.

And Tsukimi, I am so proud of her. I feel like I’ve watched her actually grow into a person in ways few characters can. We conquer depression, anxiety, trauma, loss, social duress, and self-loathing in ways that I can’t say I’ve seen tackled so deftly by others before. And all the while, Tsukimi maintained her signature weirdness and enjoyability all the way.

I just love this story and love these characters. And I’m so grateful that I had the pleasure of reading Princess Jellyfish for myself.

Image’s Saga (2012-present) #46 Fiona Staples, Brian K. Vaughn

Every time a new issue of Saga is released, an angel gets its wings. Or a devil grows its horns. Really, who knows who the real faults lie with in the confusing grays of war. If you can’t tell, I adore Saga on a deeply personal level and I feel like so few comics have ever held up to its standards of imaginativity, difficult subject matter, and just all around fantastic character building. Probably none because Saga is one of a kind and it is truly just owned by Fiona Staples’ art as much as it is Brian K. Vaughn’s seemingly boundless creativity.

Story: This issue is incredibly heavy, arguably the heaviest of any issue of Saga to date and considering the kinds of things that are touched on by this comic? That’s an honest to god accomplishment. But sometimes, you’re just unexpectedly given a speech on the difficulties of being realistic about black-and-white views of the world like being pro-life vs pro-choice by a naked six titted coyote alien and it’s one of the most visceral and understanding presentations of the argument you’ve seen in media that both firmly takes a side without demonizing the viewpoint of the opposition. And that’s just the A side of the tape. B side we’ve got Robot and Petrichor wavering between saving one another, hating one another, drinking with one another, and plain and simple tapping that like there’s no tomorrow. All while talking about issues of trans gender acceptance, gender fluidity, suicidal thoughts, mourning the deaths of loved ones, and all without faltering on the facts that Robot’s a pompous ass and Petrichor is needlessly antagonistic and looking for excuses to throw down.

Art: What’s there to say. The art is the story. Fiona Staples is easily one of the greatest talents in the industry, every panel she draws breathes a whole new life into the comic, and her unique character designs and ability to make the most outlandish concepts for anatomy and just life in general are beyond compare. There is just so much attention to detail and so many little emotional choices folded into every pen stroke I just love it.

Characters & Dialogue: I cannot believe I didn’t see Robot and Petrichor’s kiss coming. I have no idea why I didn’t. But I’m not only sincerely amazed by it but I am more than ready to see where this gets them. Other... than probably dead because this is Saga after all. It’s less safe than Game of Thrones. In any case, everyone’s amazing and I especially love how Marko’s flaws are becoming more pronounced and just apparent in general in the narrative. He’s not always the voice of reason and he’s not always right and while Alana’s impulsiveness and crudeness generally makes her mistakes more pronounced, the weight of Marko’s own shortcomings and the way so much of his own will has driven them toward many of the places they’ve been throughout the plot is becoming more apparent. I think that’s important, and just as important is beginning to see how young Hazel matures and grows into the jaded worldview of narrator Hazel, as she’s already seen so much and gone through so much that she can’t even remember the eyes of her best friend anymore after his death.

Like I said, super heavy issue.

DC’s Wonder Woman (2017-present) #29 Shea Fontana, Inaki Miranda, Romulo Fajardo Jr.

We are continuing with “Heart of the Amazon” and Shea Fontana’s leading role as the new writer of Wonder Woman after Greg Rucka’s stellar run. And while there’s no doubt that we are dealing with a different beast tonally and story wise, the spirit of Wonder Woman is as strong as ever and continues to exceed my expectations for this creative team switch.

Story: Diana’s protectiveness of her friends -- her only real family off of Themyscira -- continues to be emphasized in this arc and it really highlights something that that I feel like was my main reason for always being apprehensive about too much focus on the Steve Trevor romance in previous incarnations of Wonder Woman, and that’s that too often he is focused on to the detriment to her relationships with female friends, female villains, family, goddesses, and so on. But Fontana waited to bring Steve in on this storyline for just that reason, I feel, and because of that wait, their love and romance doesn’t take away from the platonic and other relationships which mean just as much to Diana, to the point that she’s willing to walk right into what is obviously a trap for them. Fontana gets it, she really gets where Diana’s heart lies and it’s what makes me look forward to reading these issues.

That said, I am hoping that after this storyline we get some more fantastical Wondy stories from Fontana because I’m curious about her take not only on Themyscira but on Diana’s relationship with the deities in general. Especially after the conclusion of “The Lies”.

Art: I think honestly that art is going to be my biggest point of contention on this run. In all fairness, they’re following up some of the best artists in comics right now, but at the same time it feels like we’re getting a very rushed version of this artist’s work. Probably not helped by the incredibly tight schedule we have right now of a bimonthly comic release. That said, other than nitpicks from me personally, I appreciate that the artist understands how to draw Diana toned (even if a bit too thin), with a more matured face, and most importantly of all tall as heck.

Characters & Dialogue: Everyone has a distinct voice and a really honestly pretty in depth perspective on everything that’s happening right now. We are visibly seeing Diana’s opinions and concerns being morphed on the page, and likewise the reactions of Steve and Etta feel timely and consistent with the actions of the moment. I really appreciate what a solid read Fontana seems to have on everyone so far and am happy to see it keep up consistently.

Now for my picks of the week. And if you can’t tell that I’m cheating this time around and picking multiple comics... uhhh well, that’s what’s happening. Because I am just absolutely floored by so many great comics this week and it really came down on the wire for me so I decided to settle for explaining why three issues in particular this week really captured my heart and mind.

First up, Black Magick is a unique experience all on its own already and its continuation has filled me with joy for an old obsession I haven’t had since probably middle school -- that being witches and covens. I love them. From Practical Magic to Hocus Pocus I love witches, I love magic, and I love when their stories are handled intelligently, maturely, and with a really empowering view of the witches in question, which Rowan definitely is. And beyond that, it’s also a procedural drama which is also a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine given how many of those I watched and still watch. It’s just a good mixture of both in a way that only Greg Rucka could tell so captivatingly and with a distinct artistic direction only Nicola Scott could manage so convincingly.

Next, I jut can’t ignore how amazing Saga is. I feel like it’s unfair almost to put it against other comics every week it comes out because I enjoy this comic on such a visceral and complicated level that I hardly know where to begin. And it’s amazing to me just how predictive and progressive Vaughn manages to be with issues of the day, especially in as relevant of times as there is now. It’s a beautiful comic, a well told comic, and most of all it’s an important comic. And it, along with Black Magick just prove that Image lately has been absolutely firing on all cylinders, I have to say.

Finally, we had two comics I really enjoyed coming to an end this past week and while there’s no doubt I’ve poured my love for Ghostbusters 101 in many posts, it is difficult to express how happy and sad I am to have read the final chapter of Princess Jellyfish. Not only is this a bit of a nostalgic comic for me, having been something I’ve read for many years now, but it’s just such a pleasant read. I tear up for these characters, for their triumphs and their failures, for their relationships and their screw ups more than I have almost any “slice of life” manga I’ve ever read before and it’s owed entirely to how beautiful the characters are, how unique the view on the fringes of society are, and just how lovingly the story shows that all people, no matter their background no matter their issues, deserve to be princesses.

And those are my picks of the week, and just my opinions in general. Do you agree with me? Disagree? Think I missed out on picking out a new release? I would love if you let me know!

And finally, another necessary plug:

I am in a bit of a financial crunch for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being the medical bills I’m paying for my dog, Eve, who experienced a catastrophic dog fight and underwent surgery recently.

As such, I really would appreciate if you enjoy my content or are interested in helping me out, please check out either my Patreon or PayPal. Every bit helps and I couldn’t thank you enough for enjoying and supporting my content.

You could also support me by going to my main blog, @renaroo, where I’ll soon be listing prices and more for art and writing commissions.

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#Wednesday Spoilers #SPOILERS #Rena Roundups #Princess Jellyfish (2008 2017)#Harley Quinn and Batman (2017)#Wonder Woman (2017 )#Ghostbusters 101 (2016 2017)#Black Magick (2015 )#Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (2015 )#Saga (2012 )#Gotham City Garage (2017 )

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