#Made a podcast that is itself a hole people fall into I guess

[sinkholepodcast]

I have no idea why SINKHOLE occasionally experiences strange little renaissances where several people seemingly binge the entire show in a single day, sometimes completely independently of each other, but hello and welcome.

[andromeda1023]

Pic:

On the left, what Rubin expected to see: stars orbiting the outskirts of a galaxy moving slower than those near the center. On the right, what was observed: the stars on the outside moving at the same speed as the center.

Dark matter holds our universe together. No one knows what it is.

If you go outside on a dark night, in the darkest places on Earth, you can see as many as 9,000 stars. They appear as tiny points of light, but they are massive infernos. And while these stars seem astonishingly numerous to our eyes, they represent just the tiniest fraction of all the stars in our galaxy, let alone the universe.

The beautiful challenge of stargazing is keeping this all in mind: Every small thing we see in the night sky is immense, but what’s even more immense is the unseen, the unknown.

I’ve been thinking about this feeling — the awesome, terrifying feeling of smallness, of the extreme contrast of the big and small — while reporting on one of the greatest mysteries in science for Unexplainable, a new Vox podcast pilot you can listen to below.

It turns out all the stars in all the galaxies, in all the universe, barely even begin to account for all the stuff of the universe. Most of the matter in the universe is actually unseeable, untouchable, and, to this day, undiscovered.

Scientists call this unexplained stuff “dark matter,” and they believe there’s five times more of it in the universe than normal matter — the stuff that makes up you and me, stars, planets, black holes, and everything we can see in the night sky or touch here on Earth. It’s strange even calling all that “normal” matter, because in the grand scheme of the cosmos, normal matter is the rare stuff. But to this day, no one knows what dark matter actually is.

“I think it gives you intellectual and kind of epistemic humility — that we are simultaneously, super insignificant, a tiny, tiny speck of the universe,” Priya Natarajan, a Yale physicist and dark matter expert, said on a recent phone call. “But on the other hand, we have brains in our skulls that are like these tiny, gelatinous cantaloupes, and we have figured all of this out.”

The story of dark matter is a reminder that whatever we know, whatever truth about the universe we have acquired as individuals or as a society, is insignificant compared to what we have not yet explained.

It’s also a reminder that, often, in order to discover something true, the first thing we need to do is account for what we don’t know.

This accounting of the unknown is not often a thing that’s celebrated in science. It doesn’t win Nobel Prizes. But, at least, we can know the size of our ignorance. And that’s a start.

But how does it end? Though physicists have been trying for decades to figure out what dark matter is, the detectors they built to find it have gone silent year after year. It makes some wonder: Have they been chasing a ghost? Dark matter might not be real. Instead, there could be something more deeply flawed in physicists’ understanding of gravity that would explain it away. Still, the search, fueled by faith in scientific observations, continues, despite the possibility that dark matter may never be found.  

To learn about dark matter is to grapple with, and embrace, the unknown.

Scientists are, to this day, searching for dark matter because they believe it is there to find. And they believe so largely because of Vera Rubin, an astronomer who died in 2016 at age 88.

Flash-forward to the late 1960s, and she’s at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, doing exactly what she did in that childhood bedroom: tracking the motion of stars.

This time, though, she has a cutting-edge telescope and is looking at stars in motion at the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy. Just 40 years prior, Edwin Hubble had determined, for the first time, that Andromeda was a galaxy outside of our own, and that galaxies outside our own even existed. With one observation, Hubble doubled the size of the known universe.

By 1960, scientists were still asking basic questions in the wake of this discovery. Like: How do galaxies move?

Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford were at the observatory doing this basic science, charting how stars are moving at the edge of Andromeda. “I guess I wanted to confirm Newton’s laws,” Rubin said in an archival interview with science historian David DeVorkin.

Per Newton’s equations, the stars in the galaxy ought to move like the planets in our solar system do. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, orbits very quickly, propelled by the sun’s gravity to a speed of around 106,000 mph. Neptune, far from the sun, and less influenced by its gravity, moves much slower, at around 12,000 mph.

The same thing ought to happen in galaxies too: Stars near the dense, gravity-rich centers of galaxies ought to move faster than the stars along the edges.

But that wasn’t what Rubin and Ford observed. Instead, they saw that the stars along the edge of Andromeda were going the same speed as the stars in the interior. “I think it was kind of like a ‘what the fuck’ moment,” Yeager says. “It was just so different than what everyone had expected.”

The data pointed to an enormous problem: The stars couldn’t just be moving that fast on their own. At those speeds, the galaxy should be ripping itself apart like an accelerating merry-go-round with the brake turned off. To explain why this wasn’t happening, these stars needed some kind of extra gravity out there acting like an engine. There had to be a source of mass for all that extra gravity. (For a refresher: Physicists consider gravity to be a consequence of mass. The more mass in an area, the stronger the gravitational pull.)

The data suggested that there was a staggering amount of mass in the galaxy that astronomers simply couldn’t see. “As they’re looking out there, they just can’t seem to find any kind of evidence that it’s some normal type of matter,” Yeager says. It wasn’t black holes; it wasn’t dead stars. It was something else generating the gravity needed to both hold the galaxy together and propel those outer stars to such fast speeds.

“I mean, when you first see it, I think you’re afraid of being … you’re afraid of making a dumb mistake, you know, that there’s just some simple explanation,” Rubin later recounted. Other scientists might have immediately announced a dramatic conclusion based on this limited data. But not Rubin. She and her collaborators dug in and decided to do a systematic review of the star speeds in galaxies.

Rubin and Ford weren’t the first group to make an observation of stars moving fast at the edge of a galaxy. But what Rubin and her collaborators are famous for is verifying the finding across the universe. “She [studied] 20 galaxies, and then 40 and then 60, and they all show this bizarre behavior of stars out far in the galaxy, moving way, way too fast,” Yeager explains.

This is why people say Rubin ought to have won a Nobel Prize (the prizes are only awarded to living recipients, so she will never win one). She didn’t “discover” dark matter. But the data she collected over her career made it so the astronomy community had to reckon with the idea that most of the mass in the universe is unknown.

By 1985, Rubin was confident enough in her observations to declare something of an anti-eureka: announcing not a discovery, but a huge absence in our collective knowledge. “Nature has played a trick on astronomers,” she’s paraphrased as saying at an International Astronomical Union conference in 1985, “who thought we were studying the universe. We now know that we were studying only a small fraction of it.”

To this day, no one has “discovered” dark matter. But Rubin did something incredibly important: She told the scientific world about what they were missing.

In the decades since this anti-eureka, other scientists have been trying to fill in the void Rubin pointed to. Their work isn’t complete. But what they’ve been learning about dark matter is that it’s incredibly important to the very structure of our universe, and that it’s deeply, deeply weird.

Since Rubin’s WTF moment in the Arizona desert, more and more evidence has accumulated that dark matter is real, and weird, and accounts for most of the mass in the universe.

“Even though we can’t see it, we can still infer that dark matter is there,” Kathryn Zurek, a Caltech astrophysicist, explains. “Even if we couldn’t see the moon with our eyes, we would still know that it was there because it pulls the oceans in different directions — and it’s really very similar with dark matter.”

Scientists can’t see dark matter directly. But they can see its influence on the space and light around it. The biggest piece of indirect evidence: Dark matter, like all matter that accumulates in large quantities, has the ability to warp the very fabric of space.

“You can visualize dark matter as these lumps of matter that create little potholes in space-time,” Natarajan says. “All the matter in the universe is pockmarked with dark matter.”

When light falls into one of these potholes, it bends like light does in a lens. In this way, we can’t “see” dark matter, but we can “see” the distortions it produces in astronomers’ views of the cosmos. From this, we know dark matter forms a spherical cocoon around galaxies, lending them more mass, which allows their stars to move faster than what Newton’s laws would otherwise suggest.

Continue reading, pictures: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/21537034/dark-matter-unexplainable-podcast

[ahopefuldoubt]

Adoption Trauma

I’m feeling a bit stronger, so I’m reposting this.  A big thank you to my best friend and the adoptee community for their open ears and eyes and open hearts, and for making me feel less alone.

There’s something I want to address on here, prompted by a set of tags I saw the other week regarding separation, adoption, and infant trauma.  The tags reflected a view that isn’t restricted to just the one person who wrote them; rather, I’d say it’s a fairly common assumption.

The assumption goes like this: Infants separated at or near birth can’t be traumatized because they’re too small to remember their mother and/or the separation.

I’ve been thinking about this opinion a lot.  For years; as I’ve been confronting, sorting through and processing my own layers of trauma.  Before I go on, I also want to mention that the opinion that infants can’t remember being separated from their mothers probably helps contribute to the belief that infant adoption is “easier” (the desire to adopt infants): We’re “fresh”/blank slates, it happens before we can be traumatized, we can’t tell the difference / will adjust to a different mother without trouble, when we’re babies it’s easier to pretend that we “belong to” the adoptive parents, etc.

It’s hard, but I’m going to write about my own experience with trauma.  Though, listening to the podcast Adoptees On and reading many books and blog posts written by other adoptees [resources] have helped me realize that I’m not alone.

I was brought to an orphanage in Seoul, Korea, one day after I was born.  After that, I was fostered for four and a half months in Korea before being adopted to the U.S.  I’ve had issues with anxiety for as long as I can remember, this vague but present feeling of off-ness.  My childhood was fairly unremarkable in some ways; things seemed “fine.”

When I was a teenager, about 15-16, my parents announced that they were getting a divorce.  The divorce itself wasn’t a surprise, to be honest (don’t get me wrong, divorce still sucks).  They were unhappy and unhealthy together, never close, and for their sake, I was relieved.  But, for me, their divorce opened up this chasm that had been building since I was 12 or so.  My body was reacting even though my brain wasn’t consciously aware of why.  This is happening again.  Abandonment.  Losing a[nother] family.  The words do and don’t capture the feeling.  It’s like they’re too sophisticated, too word-y, too verbal, for the deep fear and loss that I felt.  I was set spiraling, falling without a net or anyone to catch me, my body dispersing to the winds.  Trying not to be abandoned again.  It’s probably this vulnerability, this need for safety, which my father exploited, doing what he did to me.  It was at this time that I started calling myself unreal, half-alive.  It was at this time that I started feeling like (or becoming aware of the feeling that) there was a hole inside every nucleus of every cell in my body.  What my mom’s pulling away from our family beginning when I was 12 or 13 and what her and my father’s divorce triggered was that initial loss, the loss of my first mother, an event which happened when I was just a day old.

The original animated Dumbo movie struck me deep when I watched it for the first time as a child (don’t remember how old I was; definitely lower primary school age).  Same with that scene where Widow Tweed lets Tod go in The Fox and the Hound.  Even when I watched The Children of Men at the age of 21 or so, I cried during the scene where Kee gets pulled away from Miriam.  It made me want to put my hands over my ears, curl into a ball.  I do not like separation scenes in movies or probably any media, especially when they’re violent or forced or sprung upon one or both parties.*  Because I can feel them.  Back then I don’t think I would have been able to tell you why; probably a combination of my body protecting me and perhaps society’s not addressing the trauma of adoption (no one ever asked).  However, I can now.  And when my mom died a little over three years ago, I was 28.  Her death triggered once again that first loss, and I grieved both her and my first mother, whom I hadn’t been able to grieve.  You see, subsequent losses only pile on top of that first critical one, hearkening back to it.  That first loss has been written into my cells, and it’s preverbal; my body remembers it, even if I can’t or couldn’t always articulate the conscious details of the trauma.  My reaction is not always as dramatic as with my parents’ divorce, but even something like a breakup has caused me to panic; therapy and time have given me the tools to calm myself.  And it doesn’t just crop up when loss occurs; the pain in my heart is now literal, constant, and deep, like a low-grade fever with some flare-ups.

I’m not writing this to gain sympathy, or to be gratuitous.  I’m writing in hopes that this sharing of one experience will be helpful to others.  Adoptees all cope with separation and adoption differently, this is true.  But if you all keep thinking that small infants aren’t or can’t be affected at all by these things, if you only affirm the stories you want to hear (the “good adoption” stories); if that’s your attitude, then it won’t help anyone.  You will keep doing harm.  And I can’t stand by that.

Objectively, how can separation not be traumatic, even for — especially for — small infants?  It’s another thing I think about a lot.  Maybe this warrants a different post, but I mean, kittens and puppies aren’t supposed to be separated from their mothers before they reach a certain age.  Doing so before that time can affect their ability to thrive, to handle stress.  Quite simply, they need their mothers.  That seems pretty basic, right?  And yet people seem to turn their blinders on when it comes to humans.  And I just… wonder why that is (not wonder-wonder; I can easily guess why).  Why can’t mainstream society afford this understanding and compassion, to make room for the harsh, far more complicated stuff in the human adoption experience?

I don’t know.  I’ve been thinking about all this a lot.  And even though I’m afraid to post this and of the response (“You just had a bad experience,” “My neighbor’s uncle-in-law adopted a kid and they’re fine!”), I have hope that what I’ve written above will help: help people learn, help people who have experienced trauma.

*The complement to these examples/the trauma of separation is that I’ve always been searching for my birthmother (for reunion) even on a subconscious level.  This is another thing I know I’m not alone on.

Last edited: 8/16/19.  I added a link to the tags I saw and shifted some of the language in this post because I’m tired of mitigating.

[jackiestarsister]

My thoughts on “The Rise of Skywalker”

I just saw The Rise of Skywalker with my friend @ewoking-on-sunshine. I’m still processing it, but I have many thoughts. Spoilers below the cut.

It’s not a perfect movie. But I enjoyed it and am, for the most part, satisfied. All I wanted was for it to be enjoyable and make sense and bring some resolution to the story. I think it succeeded overall.

I feel like I can’t complain too much, because the biggest things I wanted to happen did happen: we got Ben’s redemption, a freaking Reylo kiss, and Ben smiling. We even got beautiful things I wasn’t expecting, like Han’s scene, and the revelation that Leia trained as a Jedi for a time. I think it can stand on its own as a story in itself, though The Last Jedi may remain my favorite installment as far as story craft.

Here are my miscellaneous thoughts and opinions:

~ Much of it feels like fan fiction. Whether that is good or bad, I’m not sure. It could just be that the fans were particularly good at predicting possible developments and the general direction of the story.

~ Nothing was revealed about Kylo’s style/method of governing, or whether he did anything to expand the First Order’s power as Rey predicted they would do in TLJ

~ Palpatine’s return could have been set up better

~ The symbolism and significance of Kylo killing his abuser is changed, if not completely ruined, since Snoke was Palpatine’s puppet, and Kylo seems to enter Palpatine’s service after learning that he was the one who manipulated him throughout his life. Maybe Kylo thought if he refused he wouldn’t be able to get away alive?

~ Palpatine’s plans are as confusing as ever. Just how much he controlled, what he was aware of, and what his true intentions were is unclear. In particular,  I’m confused about the fact that Palpatine made Snoke, who seemed ignorant of Rey’s origins and told Kylo to kill her, and the fact that Palpatine told Kylo to kill Rey when it turned out he wanted her to come and kill him. Were Snoke and/or Palpatine using reverse psychology in giving Kylo those orders?

~ Palpatine probably had the means to prolong and/or restore Padme’s life the whole time Vader was trying to find a way to do so

~  It is unclear whether Rey ever told anyone about her bond with Kylo or how he killed Snoke (which is pretty relevant information for the Resistance).

~  It’s unclear whether Rey and Kyko have seen or felt each other through the Force at all in the past year. Each movie shows several Force bond connections in a short period of time (one or two days each), and that would add up to a lot in a year, so I’m guessing they didn’t have any for that interim. It seems that although Rey closed the door, Kylo opens it. I don’t really like what that implies.

~ The beginning revealed so much and moved from one set of characters to another so quickly that I wondered whether the story was going to continue following the hero/heroine’s journey(s). Eventually it did, but it felt like the strangest beginning for a Star Wars movie, especially compared to the brilliant opening sequence of The Force Awakens.

~ Rey and Poe’s bickering was fun to watch

~ They did pretty well using those bits of Carrie Fisher footage and making Leia’s death play a role in the story. I’m sure if Fisher were still alive they would have had more justice for Leia.

~ I wish Rose had played a bigger part in the story, and that her relationships with other characters had been clarified and explored more.

~ I wish Ben had interacted with other members of the Resistance. He and Finn had so many parallels in their arcs, and the two of them actually had a couple scenes together, but they were always distant, with Finn watching as Rey interacted with Ben.

~ What was Finn going to tell Rey? What was their relationship about when it came down to it? They had such a wonderful dynamic and intertwined arcs in The Force Awakens, but in this installment it felt like they were running parallel to each other.

~ Giving Poe a shady past as a spice smuggler contradicts his canon backstory revealed in Before the Awakening by Greg Rucka.

~ Hux’s death was disappointingly anticlimactic. Seemed like a waste of his character. I’m not sure how I feel about the twist of him being the spy. He seemed so much less the crazed man who fired Starkiller or the calculating menace who considered killing an unconscious Kylo. Before TROS, Hux’s motivations seemed more political and ideological, a contrast to Kylo’s motives which seemed personal.

~ In what capacity did Pryce serve Palpatine in the previous war?

~ The fact that Rey is a Palpatine raises all kinds of questions about her family. There could be a whole trilogy about what kind of relationship Sheev and his child had. I wonder if the mother of his child was Mara Jade or someone like her who worked closely with him. But the mention of cloning and other strange techniques for making or passing on life makes me wonder if his child was even “natural” or somehow made.

~ Rey’s Dark Side heritage makes her affinity with the light side even more ironic and miraculous. Or maybe the irony is that someone as dark as Palpatine could come from such an idyllic utopia as Naboo. Maybe they are trying to show that it is our choices, not our origins, that define us.

~ The fact that Rey is descended from a powerful established character takes away from the idea that Rey represented for me and many others, that a great person can come from humble, unimportant origins.

~ Finn’s arc was opposite of predicted stormtrooper rebellion. The stormtrooper paradox still holds.

~ The hunt for Sith clues doesn’t make sense. It makes even less sense than the search for Luke in TFA, which was full of holes and unexplained coincidences.

~ The way Ben stands on the Death Star looking out at the horizon was 100% Byronic hero, but also similar to Luke’s posture when looking at the Tatooine suns.

~ Seeing Kylo talking to Han and Rey talking to Luke underscored how Kylo and Rey are co-protagonists.

~ How long did Ben stay at the Death Star ruins contemplating his and Rey’s situation? Apparently long enough for Rey to go to Ahch-To, talk to Luke, and go to Exegol, because he arrives there later than her. Time and distance in these movies have never made much sense, but I wonder if there might be some deleted scenes involving Kylo at this point. Did he realize he had lost control of the First Order? Did he ever think about ordering them not to follow Palpatine?

~ Regarding minor pilot characters: Happy to see Wedge Antilles back, sad to see Snap Wexley die.

~ Poe could have had better resolution for his arc as an emerging leader

~ Finn tries once again to sacrifice himself despite what Rose said to him after he tried to do that in TLJ. (While I don’t think it was necessary, Ben’s death was in keeping with her words because he died to save what he loved.)

~ We finally got a Reylo music theme! If I’m not mistaken, it had the Force theme sort of underlying it but there were other things going on too. I look forward to hearing the What the Force podcast’s discussion on this.

~ Rose was right that they would win by “Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.” Rey refused to even hate Palpatine. Ben came to save Rey and that enabled her to save everyone else.

~ My favorite moments of each sequel involve Rey, Ben, and a light saber passing between them.

~ Everything that was said to Rey and Ben about home, family, coming home, coming back ... it was all leading up to their teaming up. Palpatine was wrong when he said he was Rey’s only family. Ben became her family, and that was part of the reason why she took his family name. Whoever wrote the caption “The belonging you seek is in Ben Solo’s arms” was right.

~ We still don’t know what, if any, ideology Ben held, how he felt about political power and different forms of government. That pretty much reinforces my belief that for him this has never been about politics, it’s all been personal for him.

~  Ben’s death is problematic if he is supposed to represent people who have been abused and made poor life choices. It’s a beautiful sacrifice, but did Rey really have to die and necessitate it? She could have been mortally wounded, and he could have healed her without dying himself.

~ If passing his life force to Rey cost his life, Ben should have died before Rey kissed him.

~ Ben’s death is tragic, but not technically a tragedy in the literary sense, because it’s not about learning how to avoid making mistakes like his. For all his faults (narcissism, anger that manifests in violence), Ben didn’t have a particular fatal flaw. He fell because he was a victim of circumstances and forces beyond his control. He died saving the woman he loved, which sounds like a good thing.

~ I’m surprised the Lars homestead was still standing after it seemed to have burned to ash in A New Hope, and I find it difficult to believe that on a planet like Tatooine someone else would not have claimed it.

~ The title refers to both Ben and Rey, since Rey becomes a Skywalker

~ From a certain point of view, Reylos and Rey Skywalkers were both right, and both wrong.

~ Why didn’t Ben become a Force ghost like Luke and Leia? Can he become one in the future? I find the matter of whether a Jedi/Force-user leaves behind their physical body or fades away to become one with the Force, and whether they become capable of manifesting as a ghost, sketchy and inconsistent.

~ What is Rey going to do now? Was she moving into the Lars homestead? Will she raise a family of her own? I think it unlikely that she would fall in love with anyone as deeply as she did with Kylo, and I think she might be hesitant to have biological children who would inherit her (Palpatine) Force abilities, but I can picture her adopting and/or mentoring children.

~ The theme of IX seems to be “You’re not alone,” the way 8’s was “Failure is the greatest teacher.” It is the lesson Rey, Finn, Poe, and Ben each learn. But in the end Rey does seem alone.

~ Rey’s greatest fears were being alone and being insignificant. Is the takeaway supposed to be that she is okay with being alone? That would go against the movie’s overarching theme. Similarly, Star Wars is about family, and while that theme definitely comes through, it would have been so well punctuated if the story ended with the main characters starting families.

~ Nothing was resolved regarding the government(s) of the galaxy. Is it in a state of anarchy now? Were they able to learn from the mistakes of the past two republics?

~ Did Rey, Ben, the Jedi, and/or the Resistance bring balance to the Force? Is the corresponding rise and fall of the light and dark finally over? Will this peace last? Will Rey be the last Jedi or will she pass on their legacy?

~ What was the point of this trilogy as a whole? What message are we supposed to take away from it? Is it still a Prodigal Son type of story?

Now I’m going to spend time thinking about how this will impact my fan fiction and my essays on the Christian themes of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. I will look forward to reading the (apparently expanded edition) novelization and having good quality screenshots and one more Shakespearean parody by Ian Doescher.

[swirlingblackfog]

How Not to Write Horror; Down (Into the Dark)

As someone that spiraled down in into an unfathomable hole of depression that halted my want to keep writing, this is my general opinion piece on how Down (from Hulu’s Into the Dark series) ignited a fire in me to put it out there in the world.

Now, let me just say- writing is a terrible feat. You have to create a world people can escape to and believe in, while still making it interesting. Horror struggles a lot with this, in my opinion, due to the general nature of the genre. In the genre, you have to keep the main character close to danger in order to keep the movie going. Most of the time this results in a very overt plot-hole filler sweeping through the scene, such as:

Does anyone have service?

This cabin is miles away from civilization.

I broke my phone!

My battery just died!

Aside from writing about the horror of technology itself, it’s very hard to write around this in the modern day. Take a look at movies/books like Gerald’s Game: they had to literally tie down a woman in order to avoid that plot hole.

Despite the swelling of horror and crime podcasts, I would like to just let everyone know: we probably live in the safest time ever.

As someone that can barely get out a single blog post, this isn’t me hating on Down. This is just me expressing my opinions about some holes I poked at and saw through in the directing/ screen play writing in a stream-only movie on Hulu that my sister recommended to me and nobody has really seen. Low-hanging fruit? Definitely.

And imagine, in a world where I had a few beers before watching this movie, this post on my blog that absolutely no one follows would have never existed. Can you imagine a world like that?

For a long time horror fan and daughter of my mother, the person who cried “he’s a ghost!” 30 minutes before the big reveal in Sixth Sense, one could say I have a... great nose for foreshadowing. See what I did there?

And now for what no one came here for: a plot synopsis!

Down follows Jennifer Robbins and “Guy” as they get stuck in an elevator late at night on President’s Day Weekend. The day that they get stuck in the elevator is also Valentine’s Day. They hit it off, drink a bottle of wine that Guy landed as a hot-shot attorney or whatever and hey! they end up having sex. Afterwards, Guy is very affectionate towards Jennifer and she rebuffs him (gasp!) as she was actually planning on catching a flight to see her ex and get back together that night.

Guy then reveals that he is actually JOHN DEAKINS, head of security. He is in love with her and actually force stopped the elevator to seduce her into falling in love with him too. She freaks out (obviously) and says she’s gonna call the cops on him. He’s been to prison before and he ain’t going back, he says, so he promises to restart the elevator if she doesn’t call the cops. He puts the key in, they fight and she ends up kicking the key and breaking it.

They now both freak out, several more fights ensure. Jennifer lands directly on her head like eighteen times. I forget a lot about the dynamics of this part to be honest. But the movie ends with another security guard trying to save them. He gets killed by John (by, you guessed it, being crushed in elevator doors)! And then John drives out to a dumpster to burn Jennifer’s Body (Hi Diablo Cody, I love you) and then she comes back to life, surprisingly, and murders him.

HOKAY. So, you’re probably not here anymore if you haven’t already seen the movie, so congrats. I normally give up on these things when it comes to plot-synopsis.

The main and most infuriating part of this movie is the plot is set in stone and the characters fall victim to it. It doesn’t work in a horror movie that doesn’t involve fate or curses. This is a non-magical, no-destination-is-final type of movie. This whole plot is all firmly rooted in reality. And I feel like that’s where it falters, dramatically.

There’s a scene that I purposefully didn’t mention in my synopsis because I wanted to really explain in. After Guy turns into John and the key turns into broken, Jennifer and John discover a hole in the top of the elevator meant for maintenance. Neither one can reach it on their own. John tells Jennifer to kneel down so he can climb on her and go up to the top and go get the elevator running.

To Jennifer’s credit, she makes a convincing argument to go up first, saying that she’s lighter and she can climb up to the next floor easier and she DEFINITELY (WINK) won’t strand him in the elevator and call the cops. John agrees and boosts Jennifer up.

JENNIFER. THEN. DOES. THE STUPIDEST FUCKING THING I’VE EVER SEEN A CHARACTER IN A HORROR MOVIE DO IN ALL MY LIFE.

She gets out of the elevator and immediately turns around and FLIPS. JOHN. OFF.

If the point is to escape in a cunning way, this is the worst route to follow. This is driving off a fucking cliff.

This results in John lifting himself up out of the hole to chase her through and eventually pull her back DOWN (gasp) to the elevator. She falls a floor and magically wakes up to live another 45 minutes to an hour.

So, this is the instance where a pivotal turn in character direction is not set forward by her/ her defiant personality. It’s the only feasible way this screen play writer could have written himself out of a corner. Isn’t John the one who is reckless and flies off the handle easily? Why couldn’t have he just gotten really paranoid and chased after her regardless of her reaction? Does her flipping him off add tension? Why am I even bothering to write about this?

In contrast, there’s a better way to go about writing like this- technology is not without its faults, but it’s reliable. You know what isn’t reliable? People.

In another movie I watched recently, Unsane, the writing made the maze a lot harder to navigate in a sensible way. The protagonist is unwillingly committed into a facility for rehabilitation and mental health and realizes her stalker has come to the facility as a worker as well.

In this case, no one around her trusts her- no one knows her, and she’s a place that’s filled with those struggling with their mental health. So the key relies in persuasion and maintaining her cool around her biggest nightmare.

Now, back to Down, let’s talk shop- what if, instead of the elevator being broken and them having to find a way out, the other security guard comes in and doesn’t rush to save them because John is a good guy and hey-- Jennifer already missed her flight and she already peed in the elevator. Jennifer tells him the truth about what’s going on and he doesn’t believe her.

It’s not noble-prize worthy writing, but I think that instead of driving the characters to do stupid things, you should maybe make the inherent flaws of people and the insidious nature of acquaintances the driving force behind the escape gates pushing away.

The best horror movies to me always lie in the truth. I don’t believe for a minute that anyone would formulate a whole plan to keep me trapped in a elevator to fall in love with them. I do, however, spend a lot of my waking hours wondering about what I would do in situations where no one would believe me or trust me when something bad was happening. I worry about the true nature of people. I think that’s a lot more believe-able and powerful.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be so invested in the goddamn plot, but it bothered me enough to plug away in this text box.

[thesecretbookstore]

This Week’s Expert Picks

Okay, I must admit, I am biased with this review, but I promise that if you check out the book you will attest to the magic. Last year, with the help of RAW Storytelling & RAW Made, I got to teach an amazing poetry class with amazing people. We took all of their poems and turned them into an incredible book, aptly titled Grammatical Siblings. Flowing with poems about the love/hate relationship with love itself, lingering doubt mixed with passion, falling down and getting back up, this collection has something for just about everyone. Re-reading it now, I am reminded and blown away at the powerful yet approachable poems there within. I couldn't be more proud of these poets. RB

Ryan Buynak is a rock & roll poet and the author of a number of poetry collections. In his latest collaboration, he facilitated a poetry writing workshop in early 2019. Grammatical Siblings documents 8 weeks where 3 students became poets, 1 teacher found his purpose, and 4 people left as lifelong friends.

A graphic anthology of obscure black history for children? Yes, please. Gill fills in lots of holes left by textbooks and historians from black American history. Each biography tells of an ordinary-amazing real person from American history who beat the odds. At once a history book and a push to the reader "Strange Fruit" encourages its readers to "free themselves" from the ropes binding them. Strange Fruit is well written, beautifully illustrated, and very important. Black history is hugely ignored and not well documented and Strange Fruit is a great starter books for kids to learn about important faces from American history. SE

Sarah Elgatian is a writer living in Iowa. She currently spends her days in isolation wondering how long her hair will get before quarantine ends.

I won an advanced copy of this book earlier this year before its March release date and unfortunately finally got around to reading it! From the creators of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home is the 3rd novel set in the world of Night Vale. The first book Welcome to Night Vale and the second It Devours! delve more into the world of Night Vale. The Faceless Old Woman deals more with a specific character's back story with flashbacks until finally setting in modern-day Night Vale. This book works as a standalone book but you will get more out of it if you previously read the other 2 works or listened to the podcast.

The book focuses on, (you guessed it) the faceless old woman lurking in other’s lives, specifically someone named Craig whom you won’t understand why for most of the book. Much of the book is the old woman retelling the story of her life, tales of swash-buckling pirates, crime, and vengeance ala Count of Monte Cristo. The old woman eventually gets to the present day where we find out why she is faceless, long-living, and so obsessed with this Craig character! It definitely reads more like a novel though it does drag a bit. It’s compelling in areas and like the other preceding books, creative. CJH

Callahan J. Herrig is a writer from Iowa. He is here to tell you more about nothing and less about everything. He owns CallahanCreative.

I’m living in a beachside hostel so I am supposed to be discovering myself or having some kind of profound something or whatever right now, and one of the other houseguests is a Christian and has been encouraging me to read the Bible.

...and it’s like, okay. I’ll give it a try. Is it going to hurt? Is it going to burn me? I’ve done a series of things and events have occurred, should I wear gloves?

Anyway, I haven’t really read all that much yet so I’ll have to get back to you but so far it’s just a bunch of people making their lives way more difficult than they collectively need to be so I’m sure there are some parallels to be drawn there and applied or however they do it. LAW

Lauren is a humorist and owner of both The Secret Bookstore and Paradisiac Publishing. Grab a copy of her latest essay collection if you’re into essay collections and LOL’s.

[entergamingxp]

Five of the Best: Villains • Eurogamer.net

Five of the Best is a weekly series about the small details we rush past when we’re playing but which shape a game in our memory for years to come. Details like the way a character jumps or the title screen you load into, or the potions you use and maps you refer back to. We’ve talked about so many in our Five of the Best series so far. But there are always more.

Five of the Best works like this. Various Eurogamer writers will share their memories in the article and then you – probably outraged we didn’t include the thing you’re thinking of – can share the thing you’re thinking of in the comments below. Your collective memory has never failed to amaze us – don’t let that stop now!

Today’s Five of the Best is…

Villains, or baddies as I like to call them. For me, everything revolves around the baddie. They’re the threat, the goal, the quest, and they have to be convincing. If they’re a bit flimsy, the whole thing goes wibbly-wobbly and I’m left thinking what’s the point? But if they’re on point and menacing and, let’s be real, probably quite alluring too, then I’m all in. Take Palpatine in Star Wars: I can’t get enough of him. He’s irresistibly evil and lights up every scene he’s in, sometimes quite literally. His pantomime menace sells (maybe one too many of) the films.

It’s the same for games. If the villain is limp we won’t feel spurred on to defeat them. So let’s celebrate the baddies for a change. Here are five of the best. Happy long weekend!

M. Bison in Street Fighter 2

I broke my fancy see-through SNES pad because of M. bloody Bison. It was in the Street Fighter 2 days and he was the end boss, and whatever I did, I couldn’t beat him. It was that jump he did on top of my head and then the backflip back around. And his spinny forward jump, and the frontflip leg kick – I’m pretty sure I’m nailing the technical terms here. I just couldn’t get a handle on him.

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Actual, tangible proof Bison is evil!

Again and again he beat me, and you know what he did every time he won? He smiled about it. The arrogant bastard. And one day I just couldn’t take it any more. Like a toddler I let loose, jumping up and down on my controller before bending and snapping it my hands like a strongman (or petulant child) bending a metal bar. What a wally. I tried taping it back together but it never worked in the same way again. And it was all M. Bison’s fault. I think.

-Bertie

Darth Traya in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 – The Sith Lords

I almost wrote the Nameless One here, the protagonist from Planescape: Torment, but the more I thought about it, the more I wasn’t sure if he actually was a baddie. He definitely did bad things but he wasn’t really the baddie.

My gut wants to go with someone else, one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever come across in a game: Kreia from Knights of the Old Republic 2. Perhaps it’s no surprise KOTOR 2 and Planescape: Torment come up in the same breath, given so many of the same people were involved in both games, Chris Avellone in particular.

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This a nice, detailed explainer.

Kreia begins KOTOR 2 as your friend. In fact she’s more than that, she’s your mentor. She’s the person you look up to and who teaches you in the ways of the Force. But what makes her so unusual in regards to other Star Wars mentors is she’s neither good nor evil, not for the longest time. She’s the one who chastises you for your charity to a homeless person because they’ll get robbed by other homeless people who saw what you did. She makes you think. She is Obsidian making you question how you approach a game like this, and a licence like this.

It’s not until you deal with the game’s two other, equally memorable villains – Darth Sion, a person whose body is crumbling apart and is in constant pain and rage holding it together; and Darth Nihilus, who’s not a person at all but a wound in the force, sucking everything into itself like a black hole – that the real villain, their former ally, is revealed. And of course it’s she who has been beside you the whole game, steering you. It is Kreia, or to use her Sith name, Darth Traya.

-Bertie

Below is a Making Of KOTOR 2 podcast I recorded several years ago now with members of the Obsidian team and the Restored Content Mod team. There’s an adjoining article too.

Kefka in Final Fantasy 6

I mean, of course Kefka’s on this list. How could he not be? Final Fantasy 6’s villain has every right to call himself video game’s ultimate baddie, a cackling clown who is a thing of pure evil. Psychotic foes are ten-a-penny in games, of course, but Final Fantasy 6’s masterstroke is – spoiler alert – showing you what happens when evil wins out. And boy is it not pretty.

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This is a good explainer too.

Even before that point, Kefka’s wrongdoing takes Final Fantasy 6’s adventure to some surprisingly dark places, killing off an entire kingdom by poisoning the water supply – and that’s him just getting started. It’s like pre-Hays Code cinema, before video game’s burgeoning popularity meant a new kind of morality swept across the medium. Even then, there’d never been anyone quite as evil as Kefka in games – and I doubt there ever will.

-Martin Robinson

Mahatma Ghandi in the Civilization series

Nuke-mad Gandhi endures as the ultimate not-a-bug-but-a-feature of video games. But it was a bug once. In the first Civilization game, the story goes, Gandhi’s hidden aggression value was set to the lowest possible value on the scale, which was 1. But if he adopted the doctrine of democracy, which lowered his hidden aggression statistic by two points, he accidentally became the antithesis of himself. It’s because instead of going falling to -1, his aggression counter would loop back around to the maximum value of 255. (An interesting aside here for the real nerds: 255 is a significant number in a lot of games, like Pokémon’s EVs for instance, if you’re into competitive training. In my admittedly limited understanding, this is apparently down to storage. A single byte stores 256 different values, but because it begins from zero, 255 regularly occurs as the maximum value, as in our good old friend Gandhi’s aggression.)

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Anyway! Gandhi, as a result of this little quirk, became the most aggressive Civilization leader ever when adopting democracy. Ever since, he’s been intentionally programmed to be nuke-heavy as a nod to the bugs of the past, though Firaxis has made him a bit nicer for the rest of the game, which is probably fair enough.

-Chris Tapsell

Loot boxes in everything

Surprise! Or should I say… surprise mechanics?

I bet you weren’t expecting to see loot boxes in the mix here, but can you think of a more hated villain in games history? The backlash to EA’s implementation of loot boxes in Star Wars: Battlefront 2 was so severe that multiple countries eventually banned them. Players have spent thousands of dollars on them without even realising, and even the NHS has weighed in to say they’re “setting kids up for addiction” to gambling. That’s quite the portfolio.

For me, and many other players, loot boxes are so hated because they prey on basic human weaknesses rather than just giving the consumer value for money – if you’re chasing a particular skin, you’ll often end up with duplicates and other guff rather than what you want. Then there’s the fact they often exploit those most prone to gambling addiction, relying on big spenders (whales) to sink hundreds into their favourite games. And if you add gameplay-affecting elements into loot boxes, that pressure to spend becomes even more problematic.

An artist’s impression of an evil loot box.

You might think we’ve started to move on from loot boxes towards other forms of monetisation such as battle passes, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Loot boxes are still prevalent in our games, with a recent study finding 71.28 per cent of their sample were playing Steam games containing loot boxes as of April 2019. The European games regulator PEGI recently introduced a “paid random items” descriptor for game boxes – a good start – but while the UK Gambling Commission recognises a potential risk to children, it argues loot boxes cannot be classified as gambling as no money can be withdrawn. Will loot boxes ever get their full comeuppance? I guess we’re still waiting for that chapter.

-Emma Kent

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/05/five-of-the-best-villains-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=five-of-the-best-villains-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[canaryatlaw]

Today was okay-ish. Not great really. I'm still just in a weird space, mentally. Still can't get my mind to stop racing. I did call my psychiatrist today but he wasn't in that office today, but they took a message and said they'd have him call me, and asked if I needed to be today, so I said I mean it's okay if it's tomorrow but today would be preferable. I didn't get a call back today. Sigh. And it's just that much more difficult now that I'm working 9-5 because when am I supposed to do things like call my psychiatrist or anyone else that is only open 9-5? When am I supposed to go to the doctor ffs? I have one appointment scheduled for late June at 8 am. I'm sure that's gonna go over well with my brain. Sigh. Now I'm getting worked up over this which is the last thing I wanted to do. I think I'm gonna go up to 4 mg of Xanax a day though. It's still within the threshold he said I could try to figure out. I just want to talk to him about it because this guy knows my brain better than probably even me and when something that used to work is no longer working it's not a good sign. I should move on now though. Alarm went off at 7 and I successfully convinced myself to get out of bed by 7:01. Got ready, poured my cocoa krispies and then looked at my milk and it had apparently curdled when the refrigerator does was stuck open for some reason when I got home yesterday. Great. At least I figured it out before I poured it onto my cereal. So I hurried around grabbing some oatmeal (one of the disposable cups) and some cinnamon toast eggos. Made the bus so that's good. I got to the office and went to go see my supervisor but she wasn't in her office, so I just went back to mine and started working on the stuff she gave me yesterday. Not that long after she showed up at my office and said she was gonna be taking a personal half day but would make sure I had enough work, and that she'd probably be going down to court at 10:30 if I wanted to join her so I said sure. Kept working until then, then went down to court and absolutely nothing interesting happened when I was hit by another one of my wow you're going to close your eyes every 3 seconds now and be incapable of keeping them open spells that I've been getting lately when I'm sitting still and focusing on one thing, and at some point after that started my supervisor came over and said it looked like all the cases were just getting dates so it wasn't gonna be interesting if I wanted to go back upstairs. I'm not sure if she saw that I was visibly falling asleep or not, lol, but I took the out. It was a little past 11 at this point and I think then was when I called my psychiatrist. Then I didn't really have any work to do so I closed my door and set my alarm for noon and took a nap. I woke up at like 11:45 so I was probably only "out" for like 30 minutes, which I figured I'll just work through my lunch to make up for so it'll be fine. I mean, power naps are a thing right? And as long as I get the work done it's not like anyone cares, so....not a big deal lol. So I then opened my office door and started conversing with the two ladies who have the offices across and next to mine. The offices are kind of set up mostly in these 3 pod systems, and this is the first time I'm actually in a full 3 pod, since first semester the office next to mine was empty and last semester I was just kind of off in a corner. So we talked as we worked and that was cool. One of the ladies gave me some DCP packets to do, which they seem to think is like the worst thing ever and kept apologizing for giving me such a boring assignment and I'm like.....dude, I spent an entire semester doing this basically. This is child's play lol bring on the packets I can do them all. So I did all 4 then reported back to her and expressed my concern about the investigation into the last one that was somewhat lacking (whenever an allegation gets unfounded on the grounds that "it's the kids word versus the foster parents word so I'm gonna believe the foster parent" the kill bill sirens start going off in my head). So that was good. She then asked if I wanted to do some trial prep for a TPR, so I spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through a rather large file to write up a timeline of services that mom and dads 1&2 did or did not do (no polygamy, just two different dads for two kids). It wasn't terribly thrilling but it was fine. I left right around 5 to catch the 5:13 train, which I'm gonna have to start leaving a little bit earlier for because the last two times it's been a few minutes early and I've barely made it (it's typical for me to get in anywhere between 8:50 and 9, so I figure 5 minutes here or there evens itself out). Trip home was fine, quickly threw some dinner together and tuned into the flash, most of my excitement stemming from knowing that watching this week's episode meant getting to next week's episode when my bby Len is coming back haha so more of a means to an end than anything else, but I actually really liked the episode! I definitely like, snorted when they showed that in wiping Barry's memories they screwed over Savitar too and now killer frost was like welp, gotta help them fix it lol. The scene with her and Cisco though, like stop it broke my heart so much <\3 like JUST LET CAITLIN BE HAPPY DAMMIT IT ISNT THAT HARD UGHHHH so that made me sad. The main part with Barry was pretty comical, him and Iris were adorable together even with the inevitable this isn't their reality looming over their heads. And they managed to get the probable cause hearing fairly by the book, so I didn't get too pissy over that (I mean, there's no way that would be the only possible way to keep the guy in custody and he would HAVE to be released otherwise, so that part was totally unrealistic, but I realize that was just a necessary plot point). But overall I really liked the episode and then of course the first shot of the preview had me flipping a shit immediately because LEN IS STANDING IN FRONT OF THE WAVERIDER and we already know he was wearing oculus clothing in other shots on the sizzle reel and ugh.......I really don't want to get my hopes up but I can't help it, they're already sky high. I really wouldn't be surprised if it's another fake out, though I would probably be the angriest I've been with them at this point. I guess we'll see where that goes. It took me about 6 minutes to remember that prison break comes on right after the flash (and by remember I mean going to the my shows list to watch B99 and see oh shit it's recording) but I caught up to live pretty quickly. I felt pretty distracted during this week's episode, probably just due to weird mental head space again. But I'm glad they're making progress and then they were like 3 episodes left!!! and I was like what????????? This is way too short lol. But I'm very much looking forward to that teased Michael/Sara reunion for next week because I know it's gonna be epic. Lol, at the end of the episode they're like "Michaels dying!" and I was like lol, when is Michael Scofield not dying? Also, at this point I'm just convinced Michael doesn't know how to give up on anything so he just keeps trying crazier and crazier ideas until one of them inevitably and inexplicably works. But I am enjoying that. So after that, I did watch Brooklyn 99. I may be totally wrong on this, but I could've sworn B99 used to be a half hour show??? I'm probably just wrong but I definitely thought that. This episode at least seemed very distinctly split into two parts, both of which were pretty great. The Rochester partying was hilarious of course as was them recreating what happened. Then there was the whole Amy/Jake storyline with her taking the sergeants exam that led to that super sweet scene of him just being like this is your dream and it's been your dream before we started going out, I've always known you were gonna be my boss anyway and it was really adorable (and then he went all die hard and it was really funny). And yeah, that pretty much capped my tv for the night. I got into a Twitter DM convo with one of the DCTV podcast hosts (I'm being intentionally vague here) regarding the appearance of the waverider in the trailer and they weren't happy about it and was just kind of ranting at legends and normally we just have stupid and amusing conversations about our shows so it got kind of awkward for a minute there but we both calmed down and were like okay it's fine people have opinions lol. And plus they have an entire podcast to rant to about their opinions, so the need to do it to me personally isn't really there. We're fine though, I like them and I enjoy talking to them. And that was pretty much my day. Tomorrow is Wednesday and my third day at "work" for summer. Did I mention I'm the only law clerk in the office right now? My name looks so lonely on the sign in sheet, lol. Most people are still in finals, I just finished really early and wanted to make sure I made it back in time for the child death case to be up so here I am. I'm probably the only law clerk in the building at this point 😂 but yeah, as far as I know I'll finally be going iron the field (maybe I should pack a change of clothes? We didn't discuss this) or maybe she's coming to the courthouse but I'll be interviewing a 5 year old girl who was removed from her mother's care about 2 weeks ago after reports of physical abuse and that mom was a heroin addict with visible track marks on her arm, and she was always referring to her daughter as "that little bitch" and like throwing her around, and also they were living in like complete desolation, like there were holes in the floor and no heat (and this is Chicago and even though ITS FUCKING MAY it's still been freezing) and many other such examples and yeah, it wasn't good. The DCP investigator seemed to think the girl appeared as a normal happy, healthy 5 year old so that's encouraging. I guess we'll see how that goes. Okay, time for bed now. Goodnight punks. Stay awesome.