#One day ... if I can ever be successful at the Game Of Resources And Capitalism enough to have a modest little

[icewindandboringhorror]

Daily Log

Trying out (probably just temporarily) making short daily-ish notes about things, in an attempt to see if it helps me be more reflective or productive lol.

Activities: Badly carved an eye into an avocado pit with a nail cuticle tool thing. trying to think of better designs to carve into avocado pits. I don't really have the right tools, maybe should order some carving tools. I hate buying things online eeeeee..

Worked on translating a poem into Avirrekava (my constructed language for one of my fantasy species) so I can paint it onto a tapestry sort of thing I'm making, kind of in the style of medieval illuminated manuscripts? I do not have paintbrushes small enough.

Spent a lot of time thinking more about the story with an investigator tracking a doctor who's doing strange experiments and they eventually become friends(ish) after trying to kill each other a few times, lol (set in my fantasy world though, so magic is involved, etc. It's just interesting to think about testing the limitations of magic and what type of experimentation people would do, especially if you own a hospital or morgue or other scenario where you have access to bodies, or good cover for hiding them, etc. Plus worldbuilding religions in the world, what their ideas of morality would be, what an "investigator" or police force would even look like in that setting, etc. Two jhevona main characters in a city full of elves and the in-world politics of that, class war and royals, pretentious scholar communities and how they'd operate, actual magic combat between two advanced magic users and what that would look like (mixing illusions or higher level spells with minor brute force tactics, evasion, enchantments, shapeshifting, etc.) etc. etc. ).

Organized some of my plants, but still need to replant some fully. Succulents grow SO fast, I think I'll run out of room. Also one has burnt to a crisp during the heat wave last week.. my son.. ToT.

Edited a few costume photos then gave up because my camera is evil and I always have that thing where it looks really cool in the mirror but then the final photos suck, which demotivates me to even do anything with them/feels like a waste.

Still chronic health issue sick stinky as usual, plus it's still warm inside from the heat a few days ago so being hot makes joint pain worse... evil.. no energy. fell asleep on the floor for like 30 minutes.

Tried a new oreo flavor and ranked it on my comprehensive oreo ranking list. Mediocre as usual, but I'm too far in to give up now gghj.. I have to just try them all. A fool's labor.

Notable sights: found one 6 leaf clover, two 5 leaf clovers, and eleven 4 leaf clovers. Saw a rabbit, 3 cats in windows, and 4 ducks. Also at some point I was squishing gum in my hand and pulling it apart and when stretched out it would make these really cool spindly spider web patterns. The sky later in the day was hazy pink, purple, and blue pastel sunset.

Goals moving forward: Wake up on time even if I feel sick when I wake up!!! Focus on more immediate projects, don't get distracted. Actually make room for investing in social time and replying to people even with minimal energy reserves. Stay consistent with physical therapy exercises. Plant nasturtiums. Finish and upload videos, email doctors, edit pictures, post the poll adventure thing that has been sitting in a draft for weeks.

Notable foods: None today, but I have asparagus for later which is exciting... my new favorite vegetable whilst on the stinky Nutritionist Prescribed Special Limited Diet

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Ugh...

Here we go again with this... Something something, "It's not my fault Disney is making these sequels! I avoided their latest original movies because they sucked! I shouldn't be to blame for that!"

A) These Disney Animation and Pixar sequels were likely always going to be made regardless of how the recent original movies performed financially. In the biz, if a movie makes a shit-ton of money, it's likely getting a sequel. It ain't 1997 anymore.

B) There is no blame or punishment, per se... The system in the world of mainstream American feature animation is working as intended. It's capitalism 101. It sucks, yes, but that's how it is. The performance of one movie dramatically affects the slate, or even the studio's survival. Must we dredge up what happened to Blue Sky after The Walt Disney Company bought them and their first movie released by them lost money at the box office? Better yet, all the times Disney Animation faced shutdown for many decades.

C) What if... Hear me out... These sequels are all pretty good? Better than the recent original stuff, even? Impossible! Something can be a critically-acclaimed audience favorite, and you'd still have gaggles of people online insisting the thing in question is garbage. Just look at TURNING RED, for example. It's all fuckin' subjective at the end of the day.

D) It's never gonna be good enough anyways, so why bother? I don't think I can name a *single* Disney animated movie where almost everyone was on the same page, praising it... Since THE LION KING? The latter-years Renaissance movies all had their detractors, as did the early 2000s movies, as did all the "Revival" movies (why don't they do 2D anymore? Because a lot of people avoided PRINCESS AND THE FROG and WINNIE THE POOH). I remember there were at least a few people who didn't like TANGLED, WRECK-IT RALPH, etc. etc. Were very vocal about that or didn't think they were "Disney enough" or whatever. Hell, even LION KING used to get flack for the KIMBA similarities. Plenty of the now-beloved films overseen by Walt Disney himself were largely greeted with mixed or negative reviews upon initial release. It'll never be perfect, it's just the nature of the beast. How the movies live on, is the more important part. Not the opinions of self-appointed "experts" on the Internet. Again, it's all personal preference.

The thing is, the movies Disney chooses to make is kind out of our control. No one should be obliged to pay for a product so that you get the next one like it ("vote with your wallet!"), but unfortunately, that's how the biz works. If you're not game on the latest films from the studio, you're also not to blame for what they do next, but they're gonna do what they're gonna do. That's just that about that. Hell, the thing can be a big success... And they'll still do the opposite of what people want! Off the top of my head, not an animated movie, but WORLD WAR Z 2 not moving forward despite how well the first one did. Again, it sucks. But... If WDAS ever got to a point where they were making things that I just did not want to see whatsoever? Then I'd go watch something else. It's ultimately the higher-ups' decisions that are at fault.

Very rarely are financial failures looked at logically, very rarely do executives ever try to pick up the pieces from there. Instead it's "never make this kind of thing again" or "shut this place down". It happened to Blue Sky. It happened at DreamWorks, projects cancelled (B.O.O., MONKEYS OF MUMBAI, etc.), staff laid off, a whole animation unit closed down (Pacific Data Images), etc. Disney Animation threw 2D features out twice, cancelled many movies, laid off tons of people multiple times, they faced complete shutdown multiple times. Animated movies are expensive and require lots of people and resources, they're fragile as is. COVID-19 really cut into their box office, and it doesn't help that going to the movies costs a fortune.

I'm not saying this is all a good, it's not. I've just made peace with it, and can only hope films keep getting made, staff still have work and roofs to keep over their heads, and maybe... Just maybe, I'll like the movies, too?

Anyways, I hope I like MOANA 2. I'm curious to see what the director and writers and artists and musical talents all bring to this world that was created by the first film.

[daimonclub]

Finance & Trading

Wall Street Traders Booths Finance and trading. First of all, if you are not a professional I suggest reading Harry Browne's financial safety rules, then you can keep in touch with some very experienced traders and investors joining us on Facebook at this address Trading Lovers or following us on Stocktwits otherwise if you need some interesting trading books, let me know, and I will give you the material! Last but not least, don't forget to visit Investing.com for your global financial culture and to discover the best and worst stocks in the American pre-market, Yahoo finance for the best stocks gainers of the day, Tradingview for USA stocks date earnings and more, our inside Special trading section, the WSJ live market update for the last news, Interactivebroker that is the leading online transparent trading solutions for traders, investors and advisors, with direct global access to stocks, options, futures, currencies, bonds and funds with low commissions and financing rates and support for best execution, and nowadays you can also use a finance AI chat platform to have everything under control, the link below is an example of that resource. https://finchat.io/ The Complete AI Powered Stock Research Platform. Easily track what matters to you. Our intuitive platform gives you the flexibility to customize your experience and auto-save your research. Work faster than ever. Save time researching your next great investment idea with the comprehensive investment research platform for global equities. Poor is that man who has got no patience. William Shakespeare I always say that you could publish my trading rules in the newspaper and no one would follow them. The key is consistency and discipline. Almost anybody can make up a list of rules that are 80% as good as what we taught our people. What they couldn’t do is give them the confidence to stick to those rules even when things are going bad. Richard Dennis Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others. John Maynard Keynes To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils. Adam Smith The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning. Ludwig von Mises To trade successfully always remember that cash is the king. That means you must not take too much risk on a single trade. Then you must never forget that to make money you must know a lot about money and its religion even because money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. Carl William Brown The stock market isn't going anywhere. It's been around before you were born. Going to be around after you're gone. If you love the game as much as I and some friends do. There is no rush to make a trade. What's important is to keep learning. Set time aside and goals for yourself with learning. There is endless amounts of knowledge that you can learn for free. Charles Astor To earn money trading you don't necessarily have to know technical analysis perfectly well or be completely informed about all the news, but the most important thing is to have a long experience and an extraordinary developed sixth sense. Carl William Brown It’s all about making money and not being right. Too often, people get stubborn. The point is to be flexible. The market is always right. That’s one of the main things I learned from Paul… you’ve got to be around to play for another day. That’s capital preservation. Peter Borish

Seven types of income A small account size can limit your trading options, BUT this does not prevent you from making money by trading or building your account size up to the size you desire. You can swing trade with as little as a few thousand dollars. Carl William Brown Master YOURSELF, because you will never master the markets. Glen Dahlen No profession requires more hard work, intelligence, patience, and mental discipline than successful speculation. Robert Rhea As the statitics says: "95% of traders lose money; only 5% of traders can make a living at it, and only 1% of them really make money. Carl William Brown The greatest skill you need with Day Trading is "Imagination." You have to Imagine that a Crappy Stock like ACHV can go up 100%. Charles Astor Life is a school of probability. Walter Bagehot In bear markets, stocks return to their rightful owners. J.P. Morgan If you are a good trader you can steal money from the rich legally, because it's an extremely good thing that money sometimes must change hands. Carl William Brown Big money is made in the stock market by being on the right side of the major moves. The idea is to get in harmony with the market. It's suicidal to fight trends. They have a higher probability of continuing than not. Martin Zweig The more you find out about the world economy, the less you may truly know. Carl William Brown Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money. Ed Seykota Money management is the only strategy to survive in this crazy, stupid and doped financial world market. Carl William Brown Daily news roundup by TradingView The secret to being successful from a trading perspective is to have an indefatigable and an undying and unquenchable thirst for information and knowledge. Paul Tudor Jones Never ever trade against the trend. So you must always be profitable, going long or short and following the market! Carl William Brown Don’t give up trading. Market Wizard Marty Schwartz lost money for 10 years! Then he turned $5000 into $140,000 in one year. Trading Blog JK Life itself is based on trends. Ed Seykota Trading: the hardest way to make easy money. Tonny Stark This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society. David Hume If history can teach us to avoid making the same mistakes again, studying economic story is nothing short of a necessity; especially as the inner workings of the economy are opaque for the majority of us. Based on rigorous analysis, Crashed offers a critical assessment of the insanity of the financial sector and the incompetence of those in power. Crashed by Adam Tooze Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other. Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, 1823 Stock Analysts? Paid off & worthless. Give you a $20.00 recommendation on a $5.00 Stock then advise you to sell when it drops to .10 Charles Astor Every artist was first an amateur. Ralph Waldo Emerson NASDAQ: ABIL Ability Inc. from 06-21-2018 to 06-26-2018 has increased from 2.15 to 14.30 with a gain of almost 600%, and just in a week. So if you want to get your big bet forget about fair value, equity line, profit factor, gross profit, and all that stuff; in this case fundamentals are not so fundamental! Carl William Brown The rich are those who play to win. The middle class plays not to lose. Robert Kiyosaki It is essential to wait for trades with a good risk/reward ratio. Patience is a virtue for a trader. Alexander Elder

Mark Minervini Trading Legend Stop loss must certainly be used if you are trading a dangerous, unreliable and uncertain stock, for instance that of a bad bank (BMPS in Italy is such a good example), or if you are practicing day trading and you are betting on the rise or fall of a share, above all if you are trading with leverage, and finally when you are in a positive trade and you are already gaining money, so you can set a trailing stop and/or a stop loss. In all the other cases stop losses can result in a useless waste of money, without any real advantage for your business. That is clear since a share can move down even 10 or 15 per cent, if not more, in seconds or minutes and then rise again with the same speed or on the same day, and if your stop loss wasn’t set very skilfully probably you have lost money for nothing! Carl William Brown All you need to know about trading, finance and market news and analysis in a guide updated with thousand of books, software, courses, seminar, charts and quotes. Through our master trading links, you’ll be able to discover a lot of interesting website, useful resources for your knowledge and your learning activities. You will be able to find a useful reference guide to consult when you need highly specialized information, material, stocks analysis and market news. You will certainly enjoy our complete finance links list. You will also be able to expand your capabilities and bring in a lot of great money research and trading ideas. Always remember that through investigating all the different web links you can improve a lot your learning possibilities. Top Master Trading Links and Resources Trading and finance news Market, financial, business news Money, wealth, investments news Economics and Liberty Financial Safety Rules Trading or investing Traders Insight Campus Trader's Academy Campus InteractiveBrokers.com Trading tips and advice 1 Top stocks gainer today Stocks and Bonds to watch Technical analysis history Stocks analysis dictionary Best trading practices Technical approach to trading Trading lovers Rolex best watch investment 50 great quotes about trading Prediction and trading Paul King trading rules On Investing story Golden rules of trading 20 golden rules of trading Penny stocks trading Jesse Livermore trading lessons Jesse Livermore trading rules The true words of Jesse Livermore The wisdom of Jesse Livermore 50 Famous Quotes by Jesse Livermore Visual Capitalist Data Trading versus gambling Great trading advice Golden trading rules http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8SdSUfHcdw Trading glossary Trading-Synthetic-Dictionary.pdf Trading quotations Penny stocks trading English for business Management news The Stocks Exchange Quote master trading Speculation game quotes Wall Street Crash 1929 The Housing bubble 2008 Master trading links Venezuela Business News Finanzaonline.com Investire Oggi Forum Yahoo finance Investing.com Tipranks.com Google Finance Google Business News Bloomberg markets Reuters Business News Reuters Money News Reuters Company News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz5JUt9IKPM Read the full article

[tradingtips]

Unlock Trading Success: The Ultimate Guide to Instant Funding Prop Firms

In the ever-evolving landscape of trading, instant funding prop firms have emerged as a game-changer. But what exactly are they, and why are they so significant in the trading world? Let's dive in and explore this fascinating topic.

Understanding Prop Firms

What is a Prop Firm?

A prop firm, short for proprietary trading firm, is a financial company that invests its own capital in trading. Unlike traditional firms that manage client funds, best prop firms leverage their own resources, taking on the risk and reward themselves.

History and Evolution of Prop Firms

Prop trading has its roots in the early days of Wall Street, where firms employed skilled traders to maximize their profits. Over time, this model has evolved, incorporating advanced technologies and diverse financial instruments, making prop firms more dynamic and accessible.

What is Instant Funding?

Explanation of Instant Funding

Instant funding refers to the immediate provision of capital to traders by prop firms. This model allows traders to start trading without the usual lengthy vetting process associated with traditional funding methods.

How it Differs from Traditional Funding

Traditional funding often involves rigorous evaluations, capital commitments, and long waiting periods. Instant funding, on the other hand, bypasses these hurdles, offering traders quick access to funds based on their trading potential and performance.

Advantages of Instant Funding Prop Firms

Quick Access to Capital

One of the biggest draws of instant funding prop firms is the speed at which traders can access capital. This allows traders to seize market opportunities without delay.

Flexibility in Trading

These firms provide significant flexibility, allowing traders to employ various strategies without being tied down by stringent rules or substantial personal capital.

Low-Risk Opportunities

For many traders, the risk is a significant barrier. Instant funding prop firms mitigate this by sharing the risk, providing a safety net that encourages more bold and innovative trading approaches.

How Instant Funding Prop Firms Operate

Funding Process

The funding process in these firms is streamlined. Traders typically go through one step evaluation prop firm period, after which they receive immediate capital to start trading.

Requirements for Traders

While requirements can vary, most firms look for traders with a proven track record, a sound trading strategy, and a clear understanding of trading risk management.

Performance Evaluations

Regular performance evaluations are conducted to ensure traders meet specific benchmarks. These evaluations help both the trader and the firm align their strategies for mutual success.

Popular Instant Funding Prop Firms

Overview of Top Firms

Several firms stand out in the instant funding space, each offering unique benefits. Some of the most popular include FTMO, TopstepTrader, and MyForexFunds.

Comparison of Their Offerings

The Talented Trader: Known for its comprehensive evaluation process and generous profit splits.

TopstepTrader: Focuses on futures trading and offers extensive educational resources.

MyForexFunds: Provides a range of account types and flexible funding options.

How to Choose the Right Prop Firm

Factors to Consider

When selecting a prop trading firms, consider factors like the funding amount, profit split, evaluation process, and support services. It's essential to choose a firm that aligns with your trading style and goals.

Questions to Ask

What is the evaluation process like?

How much capital can I access initially?

What are the performance benchmarks?

Are there any hidden fees?

Requirements to Join an Instant Funding Prop Firm

Skills Needed

Successful traders typically possess strong analytical skills, discipline, and a deep understanding of market dynamics.

Trading Experience

While some firms welcome beginners, having prior trading experience can significantly boost your chances of securing funding and succeeding.

Financial Prerequisites

Most firms require a small initial fee to cover the evaluation process. This fee is usually nominal compared to the potential funding amount.

Trading Strategies for Success

Recommended Trading Strategies

Strategies like day trading, swing trading, and scalping are popular among prop traders. Each strategy requires a different approach and level of expertise.

Risk Management Tips

Effective risk management is crucial. Techniques like setting stop-loss orders, diversifying trades, and keeping a trading journal can help mitigate losses and maximize profits.

Common Challenges and Solutions

Dealing with Performance Pressure

Performance pressure is a common challenge. To manage this, set realistic goals, maintain a positive mindset, and avoid overtrading.

Overcoming Trading Losses

Trading losses are inevitable. The key is to learn from them, adapt your strategy, and stay disciplined to bounce back stronger.

The Role of Technology in Instant Funding

Technological Advancements

Technology plays a pivotal role in modern prop trading. Advanced algorithms, AI, and real-time data analytics empower traders to make informed decisions swiftly.

Use of Trading Platforms

Prop firms often provide state-of-the-art trading platforms, offering tools and resources that enhance trading efficiency and effectiveness.

Instant Funding vs. Traditional Prop Trading

Key Differences

Instant funding offers faster access to capital and fewer barriers to entry compared to traditional prop firm trading, which often involves extensive evaluations and higher initial capital requirements.

Pros and Cons of Each

Instant Funding: Pros include quick access and lower risk. Cons might include less comprehensive support and training.

Traditional Prop Trading: Pros include thorough training and higher potential funding. Cons involve longer waiting times and higher initial costs.

Case Studies

Success Stories

Many traders have found success with instant funding prop firms. For example, a trader might secure $100,000 in capital after a brief evaluation and quickly double it through strategic trading.

Lessons Learned from Failed Attempts

On the flip side, some traders fail due to poor risk management or lack of discipline. These cases highlight the importance of a solid strategy and emotional control.

Future of Instant Funding Prop Firms

Emerging Trends

The industry is evolving with trends like AI-driven trading, decentralized finance (DeFi) integrations, and more personalized trader support services.

Predictions for the Industry

Experts predict continued growth for instant funding prop firms, with increasing accessibility and more innovative funding solutions becoming the norm.

Conclusion

Instant funding prop firms are revolutionizing the trading world, offering traders quick access to capital and low-risk opportunities. By understanding how these firms operate and what they offer, traders can make informed decisions and capitalize on the benefits they provide.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

Q. What is the typical funding amount provided by instant funding prop firms?

The typical funding amount varies but usually ranges from $10,000 to $200,000, depending on the trader's experience and the firm's evaluation process.

Q. Can beginners join an instant funding prop firm?

Yes, some firms welcome beginners, although having some trading experience can increase your chances of success.

Q. How do instant funding prop firms make money?

These firms make money through profit splits with traders, evaluation fees, and sometimes through spreads and commissions on trades.

Q. What happens if I don't meet the trading performance requirements?

If performance requirements aren't met, traders might lose access to their funding or face reevaluation. Some firms offer second chances or retraining programs.

Q. Are there any hidden fees in instant funding prop firms?

While most firms are transparent about their fees, it's essential to read the fine print to ensure there are no unexpected charges.

Blog Source: Unlock Trading Success: The Ultimate Guide to Instant Funding Prop Firms

[scuttle-buttle]

Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!

Part of the Baron on the Run series. Also available on AO3 @  scuttlebuttle. They say that life inspires art. i was vibing while making pasta last night and viola.

Summary: You and Zemo do a little dance.

Word Count: ~1.3

Rating: T

Tags: fluff, mildly suggestive, cold war talk, mentions of child loss, indiana jones, disco, italian food, just dance reference

______________________________________________

Zemo entered the kitchen and set his coat on the back of the chair. "Evening, liebe. How was your day?"

You walked over to him. The one nice thing about being quite tall was that you didn't have to go far to reach his waiting lips. Giving him a soft peck, you hummed "it was good. I finally got to look over that set of documents from Belarus this morning. There wasn’t much that I didn’t already know in it. Although, it did confirm that the push for economic and social stability in the capital, as well as the implementation of some westernized practices, was not so that the BSSR and USSR could modernize or even compete with the west - rather it was a means to draw people to settle in Minsk instead of the countryside where it would be easier for Hydra to keep tabs on anyone they perceived to be a threat…” you continued to ramble in the most analytic jargon about the historical implications you discovered.

Helmut made himself a glass of scotch, occasionally nodding along to what you said. Running out of breath you finally stop; "anyway… enough about me."

“I like listening to what you are passionate about. You have worked hard to be so successful and so young.” You gave him a look as though you didn’t believe a word he was saying. And it wasn’t like you were that young, only a little over a decade between you two.

“How did the recon mission go?”

"It went well. I was able to get close enough to the mark to get what I needed. They make it so easy when they openly discuss their plans. You would like the cafe - perhaps later this week we will go. The agreed rendezvous is late tomorrow night; I won't wake you." For the last month Helmut had dedicated his efforts to helping you with your dissertation research. You had limited resources on Sokovia due to the rampant corruption the nation faced. Those few that you had access to Helmut would help translate.

Hands gently massaging your shoulders as he leaned over you. His cologne invades your senses. “This right here - I’m not sure what it means,” you would tell him, pointing to the passage.

Glancing over it for a moment, Helmut responded with the translation. “You know schatz, I’m beginning to wonder if you truly need my assistance, or if you just want an excuse for me to touch you,” he chuckled.

The fall of the country and subsequent annexation made matters even more challenging. Some unsavory underground groups had been smuggling documents and the like for a profit. With his background in EKO Scorpion and the intelligence community it was an easy way for him to spend his time tracking the materials. "It won't just be for you, liebe. If I can recover any of the surviving artifacts and records from before the Avengers destroyed my country it is a step towards preserving my heritage," was his justification. He wouldn't admit it, but you knew he liked being back in the field, so to speak. You also knew that the more information he had the more cards were up his sleeve.

"Don't forget to bring your hat and whip when you go," you ribbed, referencing one of your favorite film series; Indiana Jones.

"Of course... Hmm. Maybe when I get back I will have to wake you. I'm sure we could put them to better use than just treasure hunting." Helmut loved to tease you after he discovered your fondness for a young Harrison Ford. In fact, teasing and flirting with you had become his favorite pastime since your first night together.

Groaning out a laugh at his suggestive joke, you turned and headed back over to the stove. You set on a large pot of water to boil. Helmut approached the stove. "And what are you preparing for dinner this evening, liebling?" he asked, rubbing your back through your top. You knew he didn’t expect you to cook for him, but you wanted to.

"Spaghetti and a homemade sauce with spicy Italian sausage - my father used to make it when I was growing up." You stirred the simmering sauce, letting the flavors continue to marinate together.

"It smells wonderful,” he moaned. Somberly he added “I used to make a bolognese. It was the one dish I knew how to prepare. It was my son’s favorite.” You squeezed his side in hopes to offer comfort.

“You’ll have to make it for me sometime,” you request tenderly.

His lips turned up in a soft smile. “Yes I will, liebe. I'm going to go change before we eat, I will be back shortly." He kissed your temple before heading to the bedroom of the house you were occupying.

When the water boiled you placed the noodles in the pot and set a timer. Grabbing your phone off the counter you pulled up Spotify, queueing your "feeling it" playlist. The beginning notes of ABBA's Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! began. Heading to the cabinet you brought down two glasses. Picking a bottle of red wine - sweeter to balance with the spiciness of the sauce - you opened it and poured yourself and Helmut a glass each.

Hips beginning to sway to the rhythm of the music, you returned to the stove. This playlist always put you in a great mood. You continued to move to the music, singing along softly. You take a generous swig from the bottle of wine still in your hand before adding some to the sauce, stirring the pot thoroughly.

Dancing through the kitchen you sing out 'gimme! gimme! gimme! a man after midnight!" You knew you were a terrible dancer, even worse than Helmut. That didn't stop you from partaking in the activity, your hips gyrating and shoulders shimmying.

You didn't notice the movement in the hallway, still caught up in the song. Wine glass in hand, you attend to the stove to ensure the water doesn't boil over. The song eventually changes over to a Boney M classic. "There lived a certain man in Russia long ago…." Excitedly, you put down your glass. You remember the choreography like it was yesterday, middle school you always danced to the song in an old video game.

Without hesitation you clapped your hands and swung your hips to the beat. Turning you notice Helmut leaning against the kitchen door. How long he'd been there, you didn't know. Based on the amused smile he wore he clearly enjoyed watching you look like an idiot dance.

Making your way to him you reach out for his hands. Helmut followed along, albeit hesitant to move his body yet. You locked your eyes to his. Wiggling your eyebrows exaggeratedly at him, pushing and pulling his arms in time with the beat. “Come on, Helmut - dance with me!”

“I thought I was a terrible dancer? Did you not say that in Madripoor?” he interrogated without a single trace of seriousness.

“Oh you know I love the way you dance,” you giggled, still moving to the beat.

There was a glint of something in his eyes; suddenly Helmut took charge of your little dance. He twisted his hips from side to side, breaking one hand away from you to twirl you under his arm. The two of you danced like dorks, firsts pumping and hands in the air and wagging your fingers around the kitchen.

A sudden shrill from the timer stopped your movements, both bursting into fits of laughter. Turning off the timer Helmut took care of draining the pasta for you. As you caught your breath you couldn’t help but admire the man. He had spent so long seeking vengeance, yet now here he was dancing like a weirdo with you in the kitchen. His face was so relaxed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look this happy and at peace you thought to yourself. Maybe, just maybe, you had something to do with that.

“Is the sauce ready?” Helmut inquired with a lingering smile.

You took a minute to keep appreciating him before answering. “Yeah. Yeah it’s good.”

Tag list: @ay0nha​

[sapphire777]

Betting Mistakes To Avoid in Sapphire777

1. Failure to Use Betting Banks

Most gamblers fail to understand that the best method of achieving a healthy and sustained long term profit from racing is to set aside a sum of money away from your main finances, solely for the betting of horses. Whatever method or system you are using, whoever you are following or subscribing to or however your own bets are calculated, you are better off with a "Betting Bank" that has built -in advantages that can help you. It needs to be independent from your own personal finances and needs to be protected from factors that can threaten it. This can take a lot of emotion out of the decision making process. Emotion is a factor that threatens all punters. The size of your betting bank will of course be dependent upon your own individual circumstances and free capital available.

An analogy to the world of shares perhaps may be that no financial advisor worth his salt would advise you throw all your capital into the stock market alone. The vast majority of punters fail to use any form of set aside bank. They bet randomly with what ever money they have in their pocket at the end of the week or go in too deep with stakes far in excess of their personal safety levels. A punter with a professional attitude will set aside what he can comfortably afford to invest and then determine the best use he can make of that fixed sum of capital. With a fixed sum of capital available you now move on to the next reason for failure.

2) Failure to Stake Correctly

It is vital that you consider your betting bank as capped in amount. You do not have an endless pool of resources to dip into. Betting by its nature carries inherent risks. These risks include periods of low strike rates and long losing runs. Your betting bank and staking should be adapted for the method you use. You must in advance, prepare yourself for the possibility of a worse than average sequence of losers through adoption of a sufficient number of units in your betting bank. Correct methodical staking in addition to the mathematical advantage, can also help overcome the risk of emotional reaction to a sequence of unusually positive or negative results. Take the Pricewise column in the racing post as an example.

Long term if you could get on at the advised prices, it would have returned a decent profit overall. During this time however followers would have to have endured runs of up to 40 losers in a row! Despite the overall long term profit I suspect the vast majority of Pricewise followers would have been terminated either by a failure to set aside a sufficient amount of points or through failure to cope with the emotion of the losing run. We have long since established here a strike rate of about 35% on our Best Bet selections and at an average S.P. of over 5/2 for each winning bet.

We feel able to protect clients banks as long losing runs haven't happened and the strike rate and odds have been more than enough to ensure long steady and safe growth for your betting profits. That is in essence the key to winning money. Manage your accounts in a way that protects them as far as possible from the element of risk that the game presents you.

3) Chasing Losses

Chasing losses at first sight may appear to be an easy way to guarantee an eventual profit but the true story is it is a game for fools and statistically will not work unless you generate an overall level stakes profit. Chasing losses is a game for the ill informed who do not want to make the effort to seek value in their bets. Bookmakers have to price up every race. Punters don't have to play in every race, they can pick the races they want to bet in,and that is the main edge that people fail to understand.

If you have had a losing day, by attempting to chasing your losses you give up that advantage and bet in the races that you should not be betting in. You are therefore betting the way bookmakers want you to and not in the way to win. Many punters will alter their stakes in the last race either to "chase" losses or "play up" winnings. Its no coincidence that the bookmakers have ensured that the last race on each day is often a handicap or one of the hardest races that day. There will be more racing the next day and the day after that.

The secret is waiting for opportunities and only betting when you know you have circumstances which favour you and not the bookmakers. You must never change your approach, or deviate from sensible staking as there is no such things as "The Last Race".

4) Lack of Value Appreciation

Appreciation of "value" in a bet is core to long term success. To profit over a long series of bets you must be betting at odds greater than the true chance of winning your selection have. To do this however over the long term, you need to concentrate on each race individually and seek the value bet in that race. There is value to be had in every race. The key to it is understanding where that value is. Many times a punter will screw up a losing betting slip and say "At least I had some value".

There is absolutely NO relationship between value and prices. A 33/1 chance may be diabolical value yet a very short priced favorite may be supreme value. It does not follow that the bigger the price you take the better "value" you have. The value is sometimes clear but more often well hidden and it takes a trained eye to see that. Everyone has this "Foresight" on occasions, it is a game about opinions after all and nobody is always right or wrong. Value can be the most expensive word in racing if you can't bet winner. The old cliche is that value is about betting a horse whose true chance is better than its price reflects.

That's only a small part of it. You also have to make sure that you bet in the right way and in the right races as that is the only way you can keep strike rates high and protect a betting bank. You should continually strive to increase value in your bets. Once you have a selection you feel is value do not just take the first acceptable price that comes along. Seek to improve it by shopping around the various bookmakers or try and top the best bookmakers price by looking to the betting exchanges. Marginal improvements on odds on each bet you make can have a dramatic effect on long term profits.

5) Greed For Instant Wealth

Many punters seek the thrill of a life changing bet that will produce huge gains of instant wealth for a small outlay. Bookmakers play on your natural desire and go out of their way to encourage you to bet exotic multiple selection bets that can in one hit, turn a small stake into a large sum. Professionals however rarely bet in multiples. Most professionals bet singles and steer away from the multiple bets. Bookmakers relentlessly promote a host of multiple bets with exotic names such as Yankee, Lucky 15, and Goliath.

The reason they are heavily touted is the profit margin in the bookmaker's favour increases the more selections you add to your multiple bet. Say you select any random 5/1 selection. If you bet this as a single the bookmaker may have a theoretical edge in his favor of 15%. Taking two such selections however and betting them in a win double, the bookmakers profit margin rises to about 30% ! Yes your win double can produce a much bigger win from the same stake however over the long term the bookmaker is eating away at your capital at a much faster rate.

It is a waste of time debating which type of multiple bet is 'best'. Unless your prediction skills are supernatural or you are incredibly lucky, then betting in singles is more often the best option. You may say that many "Pros," do bet in multiples in bets like The Scoop 6 or the Jackpot, but that's only because they know there is plenty of "Dead" money in any given Pool and they are betting against people who don't understand the dynamics of those types of bet. There are times you should bet in multiples but in truth they are few and far between.

You can't approach this as a "Get Rich Quick " scheme. It is a long slow process of serious and sustained profit and not a game for Get Rich Quick schemers. If you go Into any Betting shop, have a look at all the posters on the wall offering "special offers", "enhanced terms " and "bonus offers". You will see they are all multiple bets. Bookmakers want you betting in multiples and it is easy to see why. They carve most profit from them. You never see a Bookmakers promotion offering extra's on a win or each way single. Ask yourself why.

[disneyat34]

The Three Caballeros at 34

A review by Adam D. Jaspering

Mickey Mouse is, and always has been, the face of the Walt Disney Corporation. Perhaps it’s because of legacy or favoritism, because Donald Duck has often proven himself more popular. To expand on a quote from Walt Disney, it all started with a mouse, but a duck pays the bills. Never was this more apparent than in the 1940s.

As morbid as it seems, World War II was a great boon to Donald Duck’s popularity. Mickey Mouse represented an unflappable, upbeat everyman. He became popular during the Great Depression when people needed their morale lifted. Donald Duck was an angry fighter who got knocked down, and stood right back up, fists swinging. That sensibility was celebrated by many during the war. Seeing the influence he had, Walt Disney capitalized on his creation.

Donald was commissioned by many sources during World War II. The US Treasury, the United Way, and the Canadian Film Board all commissioned cartoons from Disney Studios. His likeness was merchandised in countless other places. Within months, Donald Duck was promoting war bonds and celebrating American resilience coast to coast.

Later, Donald joined the US Army, encouraging enlistment. As an act of patriotism, Disney produced seven of these shorts at cost for the armed forces. Why he opted for Donald to join the Army as opposed to the Navy, as is often suggested by his sailor outfit, is a mystery. Donald wasn’t the official face of the war effort, but not for lack of trying.

In 1944, three separate events lined up. First, World War II was still ongoing.  Second, Disney Studios was celebrating Donald’s tenth anniversary. Third, the follow-up to Saludos Amigos was nearing completion. It was time for another cinematic saga of comradery in the western hemisphere, this time featuring Donald Duck front and center.

Saludos Amigos was a rush job. Disney Studios churned it out for immediate financial returns. The writers and animators had unused ideas leftover. Some ideas were more dynamic and required money and time, not available in 1941. Now with a foot-hold on the Latin American film market, the studio was able to make a proper follow-up. That was The Three Caballeros.

The Three Caballeros uses the 10th anniversary of Donald Duck’s creation as a framing device. Throughout the film, Donald opens a multitude of gifts from friends and well-wishers. Each gift prompts or frames a new vignette. Like Saludos Amigos, the vignettes of The Three Caballeros were created to foster international goodwill between Latin America and the United States.

The first gift is a projector and film canister. The movie is The Cold-Blooded Penguin. It features a penguin named Pablo who dislikes living in Antarctica. Pablo hates the cold, and wishes to live in a tropical climate. One day, he pools his resources, and sets out on an ice floe for warmer weather.

Astute readers will notice the error immediately. What on Earth is a cartoon about a penguin doing in a film about Latin America?

It’s true, Pablo’s journey takes him around some of the coastal geographic features of South America’s west coast. These aren’t so much landmarks as name drops. We hear the narrator mention the Straits of Magellan, Cape Horn, Juan Fernandez Islands, Vina Del Mar, Lima, and the Galapagos Islands. But what’s depicted onscreen are rather nondescript landforms. These could be any straits, any coasts, and any islands.

The Cold-Blooded Penguin’s ties to South America are incredibly tenuous. Plainly, it does not belong as part of the film. So much so, it’s not even worth commenting on the animation or story. You could make the greatest rotisserie chicken in culinary history, but if you serve it atop an ice cream sundae, no one will care how the chicken tastes. 

The short shamelessly tries to mask itself as an extended cutaway from a larger feature called “Aves Raras,” or “Rare Birds.” The non-penguin half of this short does indeed focus on the indigenous fauna of South America. Somewhat farcically, but also with an informative nugget. This infotainment is what The Three Caballeros aspires to be, and achieves in certain quantities. 

Unfortunately, the filmmakers either get lazy or distracted. Strewn among the cultural aspects are nonsense and unsupportive jokes. Either the filmmakers were padding the film or afraid of losing the attention of a younger audience. The end result bogs down quality with unnecessary jetsam.

The highlight of the Rare Birds segment is the Aracuan Bird. This bird has a high-pitched, sped-up voice, and a warbled laugh. He has a screwball sense of humor, and an innate ability to antagonize all those who he comes into contact with. He has a bright red crest, a yellow beak, and oversized eyes. He debuted four years after another cartoon bird with alarmingly similar characteristics: Woody Woodpecker.

Woody Woodpecker first appeared in the 1940 short Knock Knock. Walter Lantz created the character, and licensed him to Universal Studios. The similarities between The Aracuan Bird and Woody cannot be ignored. I can find no information explaining this coincidence. There were no complaints filed, and no legal action by Lantz or Universal. It’s rather unlikely Disney’s animators resorted to plagiarism; we can only assume it was an unintentional, subconscious reproduction.

The Aracuan Bird appears here, and in two more brief scenes. He then disappears for the remainder of the film. One would think he would be a running gag, appearing regularly throughout the movie. Or at the very least, he would be a main feature in his own vignette, his other appearances being callbacks. He would certainly be more on-theme than The Cold-Blooded Penguin. 

The Aracuan Bird is an unpleasant reminder that The Three Caballeros was a pile of ideas leftover from Saludos Amigos. He is introduced, then subsequently forgotten. The movie was the production of different animators and writers, working independently. They each had their own ideas, and didn’t seek consultation. These ideas are threaded together as best as possible, but big gaps in style and substance exist.

The next vignette is The Flying Gauchito, set in the pampas of Uruguay. It is the story of a child, looking for the approval of the gauchos of his village. The boy goes on a hunting expedition, finding the rarest game of all: a winged donkey. 

The donkey is named ‘Burrito,’ the Spanish word ‘Little Donkey’ (which existed long before the popular Tex-Mex dish). Gauchito returns home with his newly acquired winged steed. Rather than show him off, Burrito is entered in a horse race. It’s one thing to show-off your luck. It’s another thing to demonstrate your worth.

What makes The Flying Gauchito special isn’t its story. Will and determination overcoming the established norms is a common moral. The true strength of the short is its utilization of an unreliable narrator. Gauchito’s journey is narrated by his older self, narrating from an omniscient standpoint in the future. It would be easy for him to tell the story accurately. Instead, he’s forgetful, indecisive, and admittedly unsure of specific details. 

This narrative style creates not only a humorous structure, but humorous accompanying animation. Whenever a detail is “corrected” or second-guessed, the corresponding imagery is swapped out. In quick succession, the characters onscreen are left helpless as their world is ad hoc corrected. They must endure a shifting landscape and environment before they can react accordingly. This gives them a sense of instability, like they’re wearing roller skates, or walking a tightrope. It’s an advanced narrative technique, and it’s executed well.

With two and a half shorts finished, Donald Duck moves onto his next present. Inside is his friend and Saludos Amigos costar Jose Carioca. Jose is just as jovial and passionate as ever, but now smoking a giant cigar shamelessly for all children to see. We’re a long way from the warnings of Pleasure Island.

Jose introduces Donald to the Brazilian city of Baia. In a combined mood of nostalgia and admiration, Jose begins a long musical serenade. As his memories and thoughts are manifest to reality, we are swept away in the romantic imagery. The pinks and purples of the city at sunset are wonderfully done.

The two avian friends find themselves at a celebration on the streets of Baia. They’re joined by singer and dancer Aurora Miranda, plus a small army of samba dancers. The interplay of cartoon and human is outdated by today’s standards, but to an audience in 1944, it must have seemed groundbreaking. The technique is used extensively throughout the remainder of The Three Caballeros, and to great effect. It’s a gimmick, but a gimmick employed and accomplished well.

Exiting the glory of Baia, Donald opens his next gift from a stranger in Mexico. The unfamiliarity is temporary. Inside the gift is the loud, ecstatic, pistol-packing Panchito Pistoles. This firebrand is so eager to meet both Donald and Jose, he declares the trio “The Three Caballeros.” Finally, forty minutes into the picture, well past the halfway mark, we meet the last of our title characters.

After a fiery song and dance number, Panchito introduces Donald to the piñata. Panchito identifies it as a Mexican Christmas tradition (The Three Caballeros was scheduled for a December release date). Until this point, Panchito has been a quite vocal and boisterous individual. Hearing him tell a reverent and humble tale of Christmas tradition displays his hidden depths. Panchito could have been a shallow and one-note character. Instead, we see him capable of many things.

Cracking open the piñata, Donald is treated to a tour of Mexico’s most popular sights. Panchito summons a serape, which flies like Aladdin’s magic carpet. The Three Caballeros visit the exotic locales of  Pátzcuaro, Veracruz, and Acapulco. 

Until this point, both Donald and Jose were nothing more than enthusiastic partygoers. They enjoyed the celebrations and sights of their destinations. And they never shied away from the pleasant company of a gorgeous woman. For whatever reason, upon visiting Mexico, something stirs in the mind of Donald. 

Going forwards, every woman Donald encounters is an object of lustful desire. Singing girls, dancing girls, sunbathing girls; Donald wants them all. Jose and Panchito do their best to subtly remind Donald he is a cartoon duck in a G-Rated movie, but Donald is driven by his id. 

It’s a common cartoon trope for a character to be so blindsided by a woman’s physical attraction, they lose control. From the works of pre-Hays Code Betty Boop shorts, to the then-contemporary Tex Avery, it was a well-established joke. Donald, however, is completely insatiable and unstoppable. It starts funny, gets ridiculous, and then turns downright disturbing. Donald Duck is insatiably in love with these Latin beauties, and cannot be tamed. It’s a running gag that runs far too long. Panchito shouldn’t have shown Donald a hot beach, he should have shown him a cold shower.

The movie ends in quite an interesting way. Instead of a traditional song and dance number celebrating Mexico, the remaining twenty minutes of film is a surreal, avant garde display. More than ‘Toccata and Fugue’ from Fantasia. More than ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ from Dumbo. Things are odd, formless, wild, and baffling. And lots of fun.

The Three Caballeros’s primary problem is how unbalanced it is. Any ten minute stretch is vastly different from any other. But it is unbalanced in a linear fashion. As the movie progresses, it becomes more cohesive and more audacious. Things are always building towards the (literally) explosive climax.

It begins with one short that doesn’t belong in the film at all. It moves onto a second short that, while more appropriate, could easily be excised. Jose is introduced, giving the movie more structure and narrative harmony. With him, more advanced animation techniques are employed. Panchito is introduced, giving the film a solid shape and definition. Finally, we’re treated to a grand tour de force. Disney’s animators use every trick to deliver a mindboggling trip for the eyes and ears.

The Three Caballeros as a group existed as Disney second-stringers for many years. Donald Duck remained as popular as ever, but it was rare to see Jose or Panchito acknowledged by the studio. Early in the 21st century, the cult popularity of the film prompted a resurgence for the forgone trio.

The Three Caballeros are featured at the Mexican Pavilion of Epcot Center (despite only one of the three members being Mexican). Don Rosa wrote two sequels for the trio, published in comic form. They’ve appeared in Disney television shows, such as House of Mouse, and 2017′s DuckTales. They even star in their own series on Disney+, where they become globetrotting fantasy heroes.

The Three Caballeros expands on the ideas of its predecessor, Saludos Amigos. A multitude of animation techniques continues the celebration of harmony in the Americas. Music, laughter, and a love of exploration unite us all. While the end result is something of a mixed bag, the highs are demonstrably high. It will stimulate some viewers while outright confounding others. But in the end, the wild, surreal adventure is a voyage worth taking. Hasta luego.

Fantasia Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Pinocchio Bambi The Three Caballeros Dumbo Saludos Amigos

[paullicino]

A Year like No Other

(Taken from, and funded by, my Patreon.)

A lot of people are now calling 2020 the lost year and it’s not difficult to see why. Most of us have never had a year remotely like this last one. For some of us, the calendar began to blur, weeks and even months merging into one another in a sickly, uneasy timelessness that had us double-checking what day it was. For others, there was stress after stress, as we worried about our health, our jobs, our governments, even our countries. And the two experiences certainly weren’t mutually exclusive.

This month, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on that, acknowledging both the struggles and the successes. It’s sometimes been a difficult twelve months for me, but it certainly hasn’t been without its inspirations and its wonderful moments. I wanted to share some of those, to talk about a few ideas and to spotlight the things that helped me through 2020. I hope it helps. I figure it’s as good a time as any for us to be sharing our blessings.

And I think that first involves celebrating you. I think that’s very important. This past month, a year on from the first COVID cases being widely-reported (and also the first reports of cases where I live), I’ve read a lot by people asking questions like “What difference does it all make?” or “What is the point?” when they look back. They ask these questions when they think about things like their life changes, their mask wearing, their activism or their voting. They see an ongoing pandemic, social unrest or political inaction and wonder why they should make an effort while others are lax or apathetic. It’s natural to wonder that. I think anyone can understand the fatigue, the cynicism and the disillusionment.

But I also, get this, have a Hot Take on this that says that the choices you made were vital. When you chose to wear a mask, to socially distance, to restrict when and where you went, you actively helped fight a deadly virus. You may well have saved lives, saved someone’s health, protected livelihoods by acting as you have. When you voted, shared a cause on social media, attended a protest or talked to even one person about helping others or making the world better, you contributed to improving your society.

In fact, I have capital-O Opinions about these things so strap in and hold on, 'cause here they come.

I’ve been very fortunate to share much of my work on the internet over the years, which is a very particular medium, and sometimes that work reaches a lot of people. My experience of this is that you never know who it truly reaches, or when, or even how, and most of the time you never find out. There’s certainly an immediacy to things where you can see, pretty quickly, what the instant reaction to something is, but that’s fleeting. It doesn’t last and, within moments, there’s already something newer demanding more responses.

In time, the true consequences of things shake out. People get back to you with their more considered opinions. Sometimes months, even years after you do something, you find out from someone what they thought about it, how it affected them or even how they were changed. It can take time for a person to realise how they were changed, too, and we rarely have perspective in the moment. Sometimes it takes us years to appreciate the choices and the actions of our friends, our family members, our teachers, our communities. People have contacted me about work I’ve done long, long after I first shared it, and many of those people have come from places that I never expected, have found my work in ways that I never expected. I think, now, that consequence never travels in straight lines. That cause and effect are strangers rather than siblings.

And so I hope it’s clear that the ramble you have so kindly indulged is meant to say that we don’t always notice the good things that we have done. We ask “What difference does it all make?” or “What is the point?” because we don’t get those answers immediately, or for a long time, or sometimes ever. But not knowing when we saved someone’s health, when we changed someone’s mind, even when we inspired someone’s actions doesn’t mean that we aren’t making a difference. There is a point to our life changes, our mask wearing, our activism and our voting.

I hope you can celebrate yourself and give yourself credit for the choices you made this last year. They have mattered.

I also want to thank you so, so much for supporting my Patreon. I know many of you have been with me since day one, for more than two years now, and I’m so grateful for both your capital-P Patronage and your presence, whether that’s in our Discord community or through your comments and your correspondence. That’s made a big difference to me this past year, helping me pay rent and put food on the table during a time when so much has been uncertain. 2020 was to be my first full year back in Canada after a complicated, circuitous absence and I had half-finished projects, freelance ideas and half a dozen tabs open in my browser with writing residencies to apply for, everywhere from nearby Richmond to the Yukon Territory. I hoped this would be a year that I’d both finally see more of Canada and be able to write about it, too. A lot of things didn’t quite work out, freelance budgets were slashed, work timelines lengthened and I became ill, but as I look back now I’m thankful for a great deal.

I still managed to fulfill some ambitions. At the start of 2020 I’d been finishing up some work on Zafir, which had been an absolute delight, and I was not far off starting spring work on Magical Kitties Save the Day. The close of the year saw me resuming work on a Feng Shui expansion and each of these projects has been really good for me. All of them gave me a chance to work with skillful, progressive people and to become a better designer.

As spring continued, I decided to make a one-off video about board gaming and mental health during a pandemic, partly to offer a practical and helpful introduction to playing board games online and looking after yourself, but also because I wanted people to feel that their actions during a pandemic mattered. Among the things I referenced and linked to, I’ve continued dipping into Headspace from time to time, and this helpful list of brief work-from-home tips has been further updated. I’ve also since further investigated the terrific work of Dr. Ali Mattu, a psychologist and therapist who has produced a lot of material over the last year focusing on how to handle the pandemic.

With the summer came widespread protests across the United States, which highlighted the oppressive and fatal consequences of systemic racism and the urgent need for police reform, both issues not exclusive to the that country (for me, the events echoed the protests that began on my Tottenham street in  2011 and the violent response to 2010’s student protests). I shared a list of resources that I thought were important at the time, but there also followed a wide call for white people to make more effort to both seek out, engage with and promote motion pictures made by Black Americans, or which reflected the Black experience. It wasn’t a big ask and, as well as watching films that had been recommended many times over (such as Us, Da 5 Bloods, The Last Black Man in San Francisco and the excellent BlacKkKlansman, which was the best film I saw last year), I also tried to diversify my social media feeds more. Instagram was host to a growing discussion about how the platform seems to (deliberately or accidentally) divide people by race, something which I think may still be the case, and several nature photographers I follow promoted Tsalani Lassiter and Rae Wynn-Grant. To my delight, among many of the things they speak about and share, both are experts on bears.

I thought it was important to look more closely at Canada, too, so I made more of an effort to follow Indigenous issues and have begun reading Indigenous news sources, including First Nations Drum, Windspeaker and the Nunatsiaq News. CBC runs its own Indigenous news section, much of which is written by Indigenous reporters.A lot of freelance and writing opportunities dried up as the pandemic contracted the world’s economies, but in 2020 I was able to start writing for VICE, working with my old colleague and friend Rob Zacny, and interview the world’s most famous board game designer. VICE has written a lot of relevant, helpful and informative material about current events over the last year and I was heartened by the words of a fellow VICE writer, Gita Jackson, who concluded her essay about living in The Cool Zone of historical possibility by reminding us how “In The Cool Zone, we can also rediscover hope.”

This year I was also inspired by Faith Fundal’s widely-shared CBC podcast They and Us, which was an excellent (and still rare) example of a mainstream media exploration of gender identity and trans rights, and really pleased for my friend Brendan, who launched his podcast project Hey, Lesson! in the autumn. Of course, I can’t mention podcasts without again reminding you of my love for the spooky, supernatural Death by Monsters, which I got to host last winter. It was my dear friend Paula, one of its presenters, who recommended that I start streaming regularly, something I now do here. She was absolutely right when she talked about how positive and social an experience it can be. It’s been a real joy, as well as added some important structure and schedule to my week.

And, of course, the arrival of my first full year as a Canadian resident meant that I got to celebrate my first anniversary as a Canadian resident. I paid my taxes! Let me tell you, it was a slightly confusing and esoteric experience, but it was also one of those mundane, humdrum things that confirms and validates you. Though I didn’t get to throw a party for that anniversary, I did get to enjoy my birthday celebrations before the pandemic really hit. My partner surprised me with a trip to the not-quite-remote-but-definitely-secluded Gibsons, on the quiet British Columbia coastline, which was the best birthday gift anyone’s ever given me and a chance to see more of the rocky, forested, mountainous fringes of a place I’ve fallen so in love with. Before Vancouver closed down, I was also able to collect more than a dozen people (representing five different nationalities!) together in a brewery and then a restaurant, something that now feels like an extremely alien concept. For some of us in our friend group, it’s the last memory we have of coming together and being in the same space. That gives it a pronounced poignancy, a bittersweet quality.

Finally, I’d like to share two more things with you. The first is particularly peculiar and personal: I found my wizard. After drafting this piece last summer, then sharing it in the autumn, a few suggestions led me not straight to my goal, but ultimately down the right path. The game that I was thinking of is called The Tomb of Drewan and I very much doubt that anyone, anywhere is likely to have heard of it. It’s thirty-nine years old this year and it was distributed by a publisher in Berkshire, not so far from where I grew up. It only took me three and a half decades to see what it looks like in colour.

Tracking down this game was a softly satisfying experience. It’s exactly as I remember. Everything makes sense. Reading through the manual reminds me of how difficult it was to try and understand this thing through a monochrome monitor, though I also think it was likely way too complex for the child I was. I don’t think I ever got anywhere. I don’t think I ever could have. But I at least know that my memory has served me well. That wizard was as real as could be.

The second thing is something about my own missing year, something that has also resurfaced in my memory as we’ve plodded through 2020. In the long, dark winter months, in the unstructured days and the collapsing weeks, I’ve been transported back to the early 2000s and to a time that now feels very familiar. Here's what that was like.

I’d been writing professionally for a few years, comfortably and competently, while still living in suburban Hampshire. As publishing moved from magazines to the internet, my work began to dry up, my options narrowed and, honestly, I didn’t respond to this shift by producing my best material. I also didn’t know what to do about all this change, becoming directionless and unsure. I didn’t yet have the confidence to take some of the larger steps that I eventually did and, instead, somewhere in all that I began to move backward. I struggled to find work. I slept the strangest hours. I was frustrated, but it also didn’t matter nearly enough to me because also, I was no longer motivated.

I have memories of waking up at all kinds of times of day and night. Of not knowing where to go. Of running out of things to take photographs of, after looking at the same local sights over and over. It was like living at the bottom of a well, with a tiny, distant view of the world and no handholds for climbing out. I wasted time because I had time to waste, something I deeply regret now, and I became crabby, unhealthy and inward-looking. I was far from my best.

The last time I was in England I found myself going through old things from the early 2000s. I found many of the books I read, a great deal of writing I’d done and, in particular, a lot of my old RPG notes. A lot of old RPG notes, an absolute wealth of work that far exceeded anything I’d done outside of any work except that on Paranoia. I’ve written before about my roleplaying past and how I have fond memories of it, but I had completely forgotten exactly how much material I had collected together. I had so many biographies that I’d indexed them. I was starting to form an encyclopedia of everything I’d done, just so that I could find and reference the things I needed.

I had also read so much, which both prepared me for my degree and began to make me a better writer. I’d mostly stopped reading in my mid-teens and this was a new spurt of interest that led me toward many of the tastes and preferences I have today. I began to develop my fiction and non-fiction writing styles and I developed an interest in non-fiction that had paid me back a thousandfold.

I was building a new me.

I see now that I didn’t lose a year. I was certainly caught in a swamp of sorts, struggling to make progress, but the experiences I had during that time still mattered. They didn’t matter right away and they didn’t matter in any way that seemed at all obvious to me at the time, but they helped to shape me and to guide me, to show me both what I wanted and, certainly, what I didn’t want. If I had the chance to repeat it, I’d for sure live that missing year differently. I’d live it so much better, so much wiser and so much more fruitfully, but I can at least see it now as not the waste I long thought that it was.

And so I hope it’s clear that the ramble you have so kindly indulged is meant to say that, some time in the future, you may look back on 2020 and find your successes, your satisfaction, even your strength. I don’t mean to disregard anyone’s suffering or sadness, your feelings are valid and the pain, loss and difficulties you’ve encountered are very real. I don’t much like people who dismiss the feelings of others and I apologise if I’ve been too glib. I think a past version of myself needed to read something like this, a long time ago, and I only want to give them, you or anyone who might see this, hope for the future, a few reasons to be optimistic and, very importantly, a reminder to celebrate yourself.

Happy 2021. You made a difference. You always have.

[the-house-of-the-nine]

In Mind of Misery: Reflections, Part 1

[Forward:  Since the end of “In Depths Below” the Nine have been busy trying to reclaim Lazarius’ family fortune, rebuilding, and forging new allies.  We are current in the WoW Timeline with this entry, NZoth has risen, the world is in chaos, and now, the Council of Nine are at a disadvantage.  New Readers, please note each of the roleplayers as the following...

[ L.K ] - Lazarius Kashebahl,  Algus Kross, Doctor Whistletorque, Marseille

[ V.D ]  Verzatea Duskflame , Pame

[ S.K ] Siida-Ray Kashebahl

[ K.A ] Koltun Ancientveil

[ J ] Jursol (AND JIMBA!)

And as always, thank you so much for continued support, posting, reblogs, likes and friendly messages!  Please enjoy! ]

[ L.K ]  The Bastille.  Several months had passed since the botched bank heist on the goblin city of Undermine.  Despite its success in freeing the capital of the families estate, Lazarius had cost himself several good captains within his order, as well as potentially risking so much more.

Though it did seem like it would have been a catastrophic end to the organization, with the help of Siida and Marseille; the Kashebahl estate was reinstated back into Quel’thalas and the Magistrate.  The family earned its titles and lands back; but also received compensation from the Horde and now Alliance for the loss of Tirisfal.  Because of what Sylvanis had done; they were given a large sum of funding to compensate for the loss of their estate.

Siida was fully in charge of the running of the house; because for now Lazarius was busy in Stormwind.  Also the fact that she was a surviving victim of Dawnseeker and his plan; the fact that she was a strong independent woman, not to mention an eligible heiress, she was the perfect choice to be the face of the legitimacy of their house.

When the public learned of what the rogue Magister had done, as well as how she survived, she was brandished a hero for her efforts.  It was a true rags to riches story and the public devoured it up.

That particular evening; the quiet organization had grown smaller.  Many who were still devoted to Nzoth and sought to join the old one in its madness had left.  The operation of Azerite that was being mined in Silithus was all but shut down with the end of the war, thusly Krazzlowe had begun moving most of those workers to his own mine and abandoned the order, goblins after all were known for looking out for themselves.  

The little green scum bag had been filtering out resources to fund his own works for some time, and they knew.  Another loose end.   But, he had no idea what was actually coming, and the truth that lay in the sands at this very moment.  What had already transpired there which remained a mystery even until now.

Lazarius sat at the massive drafting table in the library with his eyes tracing over the losses and names of those who had been sent away.  Their several thousand strong; now dwindled to a mere handful of hundreds.  He’d already sent agents to deal with stragglers and deserters; and Marseille had filled his quota for blood lust in quelling the possible dangers.

Kross was tending to books within the library; cleaning up possible students work and things that were no longer being used.  And Lazarius pressed his fingers against his eyes while thinking. What plagued him? What was it that drew on his mind?  Perhaps the resurgence of Nzoth was causing him pain.

[ J ] Jursol was walking the halls of the Bastille as she used her tail to amuse Jimba, who had grown since they arrived. Her scaled clawed hands curled around a book that seemed to have her attention. Lots had gone on over this time. She like others had grown over time. Learning all she could from her time with her new friends.

Nearing the library she spotted the elf who seemed deep in thought. Closing the book in her hands as she smiled approaching him.

“Ya seem ta be lost in thought. I know dat look of being plagued by ya own mind.”  She glanced at Kross as Jimba ran over to him for attention.

“Perhaps speaking about what be troubling you be helpful, hmm? Ole Jursol is a good listener.”

[ S.K ]  Siida had grown so quickly in what felt like such a short period of time. Protecting her family's name and getting it reinstated had possessed her waking moments and now that it was complete she finally found time to rest.

Being the face of House Kash'ebahl was tiring, but it was a task she'd been born for. Her gentle smile and kind demeanor made her easy to trust and people often seemed charmed by her. The Matron at the moment found herself wandering, unable to sleep as her mind seemed full to the point of bursting.

[ L.K ]  Lazarius gazed upward when the sound of the trolls feet padded across the room and she spoke.  Jursol knew his condition well; his sunken black eyes were heavy as he peered toward her.

“My dear Jursol...”. He reached his withered mummified hand toward her; void wrappings covering his badly mangled flesh.

If she’d taken his hand; he would pay it the respect of his forehead pressed against it; a gentle kiss against the top of her scales and his other hand patting it, to hold her three fingered hand.

“It always eases my mind to have you near...”

Lazarius sensed Siida nearby and peered back at Kross.  The old steward vanishing from his games with the raptor to tend to Siida. Such an unspoken way they had with one another.

Lazarius glanced back at Jursol. “The tides are calling Jursol.  The eyes of the black empire... it is the moment id hoped to avoid...NZoth is reborn...and now..”.

He sighed and shook his head. “I...have a fear that I understand my purpose now...why my Mistress chose me...”

Kross had moved into the halls and appeared beside Siida; walking through the shadows and into being.  

“Miss Kashebahl.  Your brother is in the library.  It is good to have you home for a bit.  Please come for a moment to see him.”

[ S.K ]   "Good evening Kross....of course, I'd planned on taking some time and it seems fate answered before me."

Siida smoothed a hand through her hair and moved towards the library, knowing the way better than most people, likely able to find it with her eyes closed if she tried hard enough.

As she entered the library she kept her steps soft, not wanting to create too much noise in the temple that she cherished.

[ J ]  Jursol gently took his hand in hers as she glanced at it sighing softly. She could tell it was in bad condition, but it was not due to reasons she fully understood. The void she knew some about, but as much as others. She listened to him as he spoke. Nodding some as she spoke softly.

“Ya know I nevea ask why you be chosen by her. What ya purpose is in da end. Felt it be better ta let you discuss it when ya be ready.”

Jursol knew full well that the Old God was back. This meant they all had a part to play in the upcoming events of the world. What part she would play, she could only guess.

Hearing Siida nearing in the halls caused her ears to twitch. A smile forming on her lips. She seemed to find Siida interesting, as she did others of The Nine. One day she hoped to speak to the others more to get to know them better.

[ L.K. ]  Lazarius has brought his attention full circle when his youngest sister entered the room.  Another soft pat would be offered to Jursols hand as he calmly released her.

“Though it is not my intention to keep anything from you all...it seems the truth of my origin is even more mysterious than I had wagered.”

Lazarius made a motion toward Siida as she entered. “Flower.” he said as warmly as he could, despite the pain in his voice that lingered.  

The golden haired vision was the light that brought him back.  She was his world.  With Vari and Koltun both dealing with Silithus, Lazarius leaned desperately on his younger sister for that bond of affection.

 “You are a sight for these tired eyes...join us please.”. He smiled and motioned her over.

[ S.K ]  "I could never refuse an invitation. Jursol, it is always lovely to see you." Siida offered a polite bow and moved towards her brothers side and gave him a gentle touch.

"Hello Lazarius, it is nice to see you again." Siida did everything she could to make things easier for him, so that he didn't worry. She felt the weight of her responsibilities, but see Lazarius made them all feather light.

[ L.K ] “These halls are quiet.  So much more quiet than before.  Our dominance in the sun seems to be waning...losing numbers as we did was a difficult blow. ..” Lazarius nodded into her touch; however it was given.

“Those who abandon us in our greatest hour do not deserve such sympathy Master.”. The voice of the ever present shade appeared in full form.  

Marseille stood beside Siida.  The withered ancient elf had been running ragged between helping deal with the loose ends and staying by the young sisters side at all times in Silvermoon.  He also looked exhausted but would not show it as he hid it well behind his cloth mask.

[ S.K ] "We have dealt with much, taking time to mend and repair is not weakness. We will regain our numbers for the times that are coming."

Siida looked to Marseille and offered him the faintest of smiles, that small touch of puppy love was still there, but she knew there was a time and place for everything. Her duties were to her family first and foremost, her hearts wants and desires could wait.

[ J ]  Jursol nodded in agreement with Siida. She knew others were out there, hiding, laying in wait till it was time to come forward to offer their help. For now was the time to plan, heal, prepare for what lays ahead.

“Ya sister be right. We can not be rushing into anything before it be time. Be prepared for times ahead, mentally and physically. Ya be lucky to have so many who be caring for ya. Don’t be taking it for granted my friend.”

[ L.K ]  “I never take anything for granted.  Not now...not since.”. He trailed off and shook his head.  

They would all remember the loss of nearly being crushed beneath the Magisters.  Lazarius gave them both a glance as he moved his fingers toward his tunic.  He wore a loose fitting black shirt which was slowly being untucked at the waist.

“...we do not have the luxury of time I am afraid...” Lazarius stood before the group of them, his shirt rolled up and showing off his abdomen.  

He turned to the side and allowed them the most horrible sight of his wounds and lashings of his youth.  But in the center of his rib cage on the side of his body was the tattoo.  One that he always assumed was for his mistress and her madness.  It was an eye, massive in size with its lids drawn closed.

“It is seeking...”. He whispered softly, and in that same voice the eye would open and reveal to them a very bloodshot and corrupted looking eye which darted around looking in all directions.  The folds of his flesh that served as the lid would blink open and closer as Lazarius held it available for them to see.

“Even in death Raelyndia continues to curse me...I had no idea what she’d done with this mark until now...why she always kept me close...like I was her crown jewel...” He sighed and shook his head. “I suspect it was her way of knowing Nzoth returns...”

[ S.K ] Siida had seen such horrid things since coming to this house, since aligning herself to the Nine, but this, it gave her pause. Her poor brother had been through so much and even the past had it's hooks dug so deeply into his flesh that he never seemed able to escape.

Sitting down  she looked at the eye before lifting her gaze to Lazarius.

"With Nzoth's return...the balance of the scales are going to topple even further...how...what are we going to do?"

Siida was very much accepting of her role as Matron, she would protect her family and those still loyal to the Nine. "The old ones...endless hunger and limitless reach..." She seemed to say that last part to herself, her lips stuck together in a thin line.

[ J ]  Jursol scanned the mans broke body as she frowned. Such pain she saw on his body. As he lifts the shirt more, her eyes rest on the tattoo. Her eyes grew wide as she peered closer at it. Ever the curious troll she was. As she reached to try and touch it, she saw it open. This caused her to leap back from him.

“Dis be bad juju.”

Her eyes still locked into the large blood shot eye. Hearing about the risk of balance being tipped, she calmed herself and stood up straight.

“She clearly be haven her own motivates, your old Mistress. I never seen anything like dis before.”

[ V.D ]  There was very little that unnerved Verzatea. She was a devoted woman, unshakeable in faith and stalwart to the temptations trying to veer off the course of the Nine. She followed her people blindly, advocating for her fellow devotees ans protecting them with her very life. That was before she returned to the state of the Nine now, the halls emptier and much lonelier than usual after a great many students and practitioners of the dark crafts had abandoned the Bastille in pursuit for more power.

This had left Tea feeling hollow and empty... Friends and students alike had disappeared without a goodbye, before she could wish the great fortune... She thought often of the people who had left, wondering if they were happy. She sure as fel wasn't. But she wouldn't complain. She couldn't fathom what led Lazarius to his decision, but she wouldn't question it. No matter how deeply the sudden change frightened her.

In truth, Verzatea followed Lazarius. He was their Inquisitor, he was her guiding light when she first joined as a young naive elf seeking purpose, he was the wisest of the lot who guided them and connected them to the other side of the thin veil separating the living world from the realm of the supernatural-- of the Gods which they worship. Or rather... Worshiped. So his sudden change in allegiance was... Startling. In the least to say.

Verzatea walked the halls as if on eggshells, desperate to not disturb the Bastille in fear she'd chew everyone up and spit them out like the traitor heathens Tea felt they'd become.

Desperate to not bring attention to herself, an overly cautious measure she practiced to try and ease her anxiety since her return. She even have gone as far as keeping her daughter in her arms or in her sight as Tea worked. She would not risk losing her precious child-- her miracle baby... Her sweet Brinys.

Tea feared that if somehow she drew attention to the young child the Gods would rip her straight from Teas arms... And Tea would be helpless in saving her babe.

Currently the mother daughter duo walked hand in hand, Brinys's quick growth resulting in the black haired babe having found her ability to walk during Verzateas four month long voyage across the great sea to visit her mother and father. Another major event of which Verzatea had to miss, thus setting the first time mother in a sour mood as she wished desperately to have been present for such a feat... Although, Tea was not shy about dotting on Brinys ever-still.

Quickly the mother had become happy acquainting herself with the joy of dressing her child up fashionably. Tea had a knack for her usual pastel colors and modernized, appealing vintage fashion, of which was a far cry from her current darker toned modest (though chic) gown.

In truth, this was the style Tea had changed to after she returned from her journey. Surely it was just a coincidence? After all, the layered fabric which hung loosely off the woman's thinner frame, was a stylish set that also gave her daughter a girly vibe.

For Tea, the dress billowed in an elegant fall, the layer of dress beneath the second layer clung to her waist and hugged the woman's thin, narrow pear shaped figure (in which her bust is smaller in comparison to her slightly larger hips). The dress stopped just at her ankles, feet wearing a matching color pair of open toed ankle strappies (unlike Brinys's sandals). Over all the greenish-blue fabric still managed to stand in contrast to the partially matching duo, Tea and Brinys sharing in their fair skin tone.

The sunken of Teas cheeks and the heavy bags of exhaustion beneath her eyes expertly hidden beneath a carefully applied layer of makeup meant to contour her face-- all in the effort of softening the devastating state of her emaciation.

Along with wearing makeup, the woman also wore a polite smile as she guides Brin toward the library, encouraging the girl to open the library for them, eager to help Brinys work on her motor skills, strength and coordination. After all, Tea had her hands full with one hand clinging to her daughters whilst her other arm had clasped her larger journal beneath the limb, too with writing supplies in her hand.

As they'd enter the library Tea pauses to acknowledge the other entities of the room, her eyes alight with a wave of peace. She felt less vulnerable with her beloveds close by.

"Blessings," she murmurs, her tone lacking a significant amount of confidence,

"I wasnt expecting seeing nearly everyone in one place tonight. Are you all conspiring without the others present for an official meeting?" She aims to tease, though her dry laugh would only make it awkward.

Another unusual far cry from the often perky and charming Confessor. Brinys stares up in wonderment at her mother, her free hand moving to pat Teas hand before releasing her mother all together. With a playful giggle the child bounces forward toward Siida before sweeping the woman's legs up into a hug as she clings to her favorite chosen-aunt.

And just outside of the library doors stood a hesitating Pame. She had been offered the decision to go, or stay by Lazarius... And she fought long and hard with herself over the decision, despite how easy you'd think the choice to be.

Especially after the mental and physical torture she endured as both prisoner and slave to the Nine. But there was... Something here. Purpose, Pame had come to assume, especially so after Lazarius denounced the Old Ones. She felt more at peace with joining ranks.

Although... She was quite hesitant meeting others that had remained, no matter how much she respected their devotion to one another as a group. In truth it had nothing to do with the individuals themselves. It was all due to the fact that she was just... A very socially awkward woman.

She meant well, but often came off as aggressive and even hostile-- It’d be no secret by now that Pame had made one girl cry after what Pame assumed was a friendly argument over a game of chess they were playing... Of course, as Pame later reflected, she came to understand and make note of how "I'll rip your heart from your chest and devour it before your eyes prior to my slurping those from your skull, you dense fool!" was not an appropriate way to substitute "Check mate".

After that experience she'd become a real wall flower, trying to fit in but failing miserably. Now that she'd watched so many pour into the library to mingle and work, Pame was fighting with her decision to enter and join in an exercise of her socializing.

Her doubt was winning out, evident given how she nervously picked at her more casual attire-- Having found comfort in a fresh, long sleeved brown tunic partially tucked beneath her ripped work trousers(ones often paired with her armor), though against her very nature Pame opted to wear shoes (her armor boots). Her long, dark green hair tied up into a messy bun, few strands hanging freely all around.

Her muscular and broad figure cast quite the intimidating shadow against the doorway, likely peeking from beneath the doors, her arms folding beneath her moderate sized breasts, a massive thoughtful frown weighing her thick lips, silver eyes practically burning holes against the door with such intensity.

[ J ]  Jursol seemed a bit more at ease when the mother and daughter walked in. Her smile came off as warm as to not frighten the child. With a bow of her head she greeted them. However her eyes caught the shadow of another who was not yet in the room.

Jimba noticed right away and was in mid leap before she stopped him. Grabbing him up into her arms, Jursol walked over to the doorway. Her usual scent of herbs linger on her body.

“Ah, I see someone be hesitant.” She said softly as she eyed Pame up and down.

“Come now I be sure no one gonna bite ya for entering. If dey not be wanting ya here they tell ya.” Reaching a scaly clawed hand out to Pame as she smiled.

“Come, we can enter together.” Jimba struggled to get free from the trolls strong arm. Clearly he wanted to play with Pame, but now was not the time.

To Be Continued: In Mind of Misery: Reflections, Part 2

[60b3r]

Memes Kill Creativity?

Memes vs. Genes

In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme' to describe something with symbolic meaning that spreads by imitation from person to person within a culture. This idea is an analogue to the nature of selfish gene, described similarly as a piece of genetic material possessing information required to be able to replicate themselves inside a living. The only key difference in both terms is that the gene is natural, while memes are artificial. The rest of memes' operating schemes completely mimic the genes perfectly. In our current timeline, memes as we know today are taking many forms: as image macros, short videos, and rick-rollicking music. Memes in imageboards and forums have been pushing internet porn traffic into a stalemate and putting our power grid into unnecessary burden. Of course, memes are not to be regretted, but otherwise need to be taken seriously, since they are able to put our current understanding of media industry and economic system into shame.

As with every other thing that have existed, memes are not exempt in its dualistic nature. If you ever venture to the depths of dark web, you may know that memes also took part in the infamous mimetic Tumblr-4chan War. Not only that, some memes are reportedly causing harm towards some users, even though it is often disguised or said to be a dank joke or mere sarcasm. Memes have seen its share of use in online bullying, mass shootings, and hate crimes, cowering behind the freedom of expression tag. Regardless, memes are also an extremely effective form of information transmission. Like all living systems with no set moral standards, memes do evolve and are subject to natural selection. Memes, like genes, actually work like a mindless machine. Again, this is eerily like the performance of DNA in living systems. The last thing we want from this thing is virulence.

Every day, something went viral on Twitter. Hashtags are flaring into the top trends, some videos are being watched billions of times, and another cat vs. cucumber pic garnered thousands of likes. Viral properties of a virus (duh) is defined as the capability to multiply quickly in relatively short amount of time. The term saw a huge increase in usage during the dawn of the internet age and the rise of computer malwares spread through unsecured ports of network protocol. This term is being applied to memes, as it is like a virus (which is a pure embodiment of a selfish gene). Now, a lot of people are utilizing memes to create art, because it enables them to cater the short-attention spans of current internet users. They create shorts, illustrations, inside jokes, and small comic strips. Some of you might not agree with me on this one, but stay with me now and I will explain to you why I would like to treat memes and art as a single unit of interest in this argument.

The dawn of meme-technology

Viral memes and their popularity are now often considered important in defining a time period in the internet culture. Now every netizen can somewhat distinguish the approximate age, sex, and political views of other users from the usage of rage comics, meme songs, and meme platforms they use. Intuitively we can make a generalized difference between the userbase of Reddit, 4chan, 9gag, Vine, and now Tiktok. Others, by the share of relatability with sub-genres of different areas of interest (film memes and game memes). Some others, even, in the perspectives of different social and economic class system (first world problems and third world success memes). Meme preferences to us netizens are ironically giving away our anonymous identity. Identity which the media companies are vying to get their hands on. That's where I would like to come into my opening argument: both memes and genes which originally possesses no intrinsic value, suddenly become a subject of value with technology.

How do we draw the logic, I say? The ones and zeros inside electrical systems are value-free, so does DNA in living cells. As we meddle ourselves with biotechnology to manipulate genetic material for profit, we also simmer ourselves in the computer sciences and tweak physical computation to perform better. We give value in the inanimate object by manipulating them. In our world, we often heard these expressions: that communication is key, sometimes silence is golden, and those who control the information wields the power. What’s these three statements have in common? Yes, information and expression. Memes are the simplest form of both. This is the beginning of the logic: memes are no longer in and on itself independent of external values. The infusion of utilitarian properties in memes as artificial constructs are seemingly inevitable, and for the better or worse shapes our current society.

We might have heard that somewhere somehow, the so called ‘global elites’ with their power and wealth are constantly controlling biotech research and information technology—or, in the contrary, they control these knowledge and resources to keep shovelling money and consolidate their power. Memes are one of their tools to ‘steer’ the world according to their 'progressive agenda', seemingly driving the world ‘forward’ towards innovation and openness. Nah, I am just joking. But, stay with me now. It is actually not them (the so-called global elites) who you should be worried about. It is us—you and I, ourselves—and our own way of unwittingly enjoying memes that are both toxic and fuelling the age-old capitalism. Funny, isn't it? We blame society, but we are society. But how are be becoming the culprits yet also be the prey at the same time?

Middle-class artists are hurt

Now, aggressive marketing tactics using memes are soaring. Media companies are no doubt cashing in the internet and viral memes to their own benefit. Streaming and cataloguing are putting up a good fight compared to their retail, classic ways of content delivery. This is quite true with the strategies of Spotify and YouTube, other media companies alike. They can secure rights to provide high-quality content from big time artists and filmmakers and target these works directly to the end consumer, effectively cutting the cost of distribution which usually goes to the several layers of distribution line like vinyl products, radio contracts, and Blu-ray DVDs. I believe this is good, since it is like an affirmative action for amateur artists to start a career in the art industry. Or is it? Does it really encourage small-time artists to begin? Yes. How about the middle-class artists? Not necessarily.

You might sometimes wonder, “how the hell did I get somewhere just by following the trending or hot section in the feed?”. This toxicity of memes often brings some bad things to our tables. Social media algorithms handle contents (like viral memes) by putting those with high views or likes to the front page, effectively ‘promoting’ the already popular post and creating a positive feedback cycle. By doing so, they could capitalize on ad profits on just few ‘quality’ contents over huge amounts of audience in a very short amount of time. The problem is most of the time, these ‘quality’ contents have no quality at all. They just happen to possess the correct formula to be viral, with the correct SEO keywords and click-bait titles with no real leverage in the art movement. This way, I often find both the talented and the lucky—of which the boundaries between them are always blurred—overshadow the aspiring ‘middle-class’ artists who work hard to perfect their craft.

If you are already a famous guitarist with large fanbase, lucky you, you are almost guaranteed to top the billboards. What, you have no skills? Post a video of you playing ‘air guitar’ and… affirmative actions to the rescue. Keep on riding the hype wave and suddenly you get to top trending with minimal effort, thanks to your weird haircut. Those haters will surely make a meme out of your silly haircut, not even your non-existent guitar skills. But still, hype is still a hype, and there’s no such thing as a bad publication. This also answers why simple account who reposts other people’s content could get much more followers than the hard-working creators. Not only being outperformed by the already famous artists taking social media by storm, now the ‘middle-class’ artists are also dealing with widespread content theft and repost accounts because of the unfair, bot grading system. It is unimaginable how many nobodies got the spotlight they don’t deserve just because they look or act stupid and the whole internet cheers around them. Remember, this is not always about the artist, but also the quality of the art itself. I believe a good art should be meaningful to the beholder.

Why capitalism kills creativity

The problem in current art industry is that we are feeling exhausted with the same, generic, and recycled stuff. We indeed already see there’s less discourse about art now. Sure, the problem lies not in the artist or medium, but is in the viewers—the consumer of the art form—and how the capitalist system reacts to it. The hyper efficient capitalist system doesn’t want to waste any more time and money trying to figure out what’s new or what’s next for you. What we love to see, what is familiar to us, the market delivers them. The rise of viral memes phenomenon in the social media pushes the market system to the point where they demand artists to create the same, redundant, easy art form. Listen to some of The Chainsmokers’ work and we'll see what music have become: the identical 4-chord progression, the same drop, the predictable riser, and the absence of meaningful lyrics. We sat down and watch over the same superhero movies trying hard to be the next Marvel blockbuster. The production companies are also happy not to pay writers extra to come up with new ideas and instead settle with borrowed old scripts from decades old TV drama. Disney's The Lion King and its heavy use of the earlier Japanese Kimba The White Lion storyline is one guilty example.

Despite it initially being an economic system and not a political ideology, it is untrue that many Marxist philosophers usher the suppression of art. While it is ironic that Stalinist policy intends to curb ‘counter-revolutionaries’—in this case his enemies—by limiting freedom of press and media; American propaganda added further so that it seems that the ideology is also limiting art and kill creativity. We all know the Red Scare in the U.S. during the Cold War saw a popular narrative of communism and socialism that is devoid of freedom of expression. This state propaganda then further become ‘dehumanization’ and make freedom of expression invalid under the guise of equality. Marx argue that total equality is not possible, and the uniqueness is being celebrated by having them doing what they do best and provide the best for their community. Thus, an individual's interests should be indistinguishable from the society's interest. Freedom is granted when the whole society is likely to benefit from an action. According to Mao in his Little Red Book, freedom of expression in art and literature, after all, is what initially drive the class consciousness. It is capitalism, not communism, that kills creativity.

If left unchecked, the threat of this feedback loop is going to cause a lack of diversity, resulting in stale content, less art critique, and overall decline in our artistic senses. Artists’ creativity that are supposedly protected by the free internet are destroyed within itself through the sheer overuse of viral memes. Capitalism has successfully turned the supposedly open, free-for-all, value-free platform that is the internet against the people into a media in which they are undeniably shaping new values on its own: the art culture that's not geared towards aesthetics and appreciation, but towards more views and personalized clicks. How social media and media industry caters to the demands of the consumer are, in Marx's own words, “digging its own grave”.

Spare nothing, not even the nostalgia

Well, people romanticize the oldies. The good old days, when everything is seen as better and easier. Look at the new art installations that uses the aesthetics of naughty 90s graphic design to become new, the posters released in this decade but with an art deco of the egregious 80s pop artist Andy Warhol, or the special agent-spy movies set frozen in the Nifty Fifties. Nostalgia offers us a way to escape from the hectic choices of our contemporary: different genres of music, dozens of movies to watch, and different fashion to consider. We choose to settle with our old habits, that we know just works. Remember how do we throw our money on sequels and reboots and remakes of old movies we used to watch during our younger days? We don’t even care about new releases at the cinema! Did you remember how Transformers 2 and their subsequent sequels perform at the box office at their opening week?

The huge sales of figurines and toys of Star Wars franchise—if we could scrutinize them enough—came from the old loyal fanbase of the late Lucasfilm series, not primarily from new viewers. Then suddenly, surprise-surprise. Our love for an old franchise deemed dead enough to be remembered and treasure soon must be destroyed to pave way for three new outrageous sequels (the ones with Kylo Ren and Snoke) by the grace of our beloved capitalism. Sadly, nothing is left untouched by the capitalism’s unforgiving corruption. Nostalgia has become a gimmick that makes people like some art more than they should, because it’s familiar. It is another way of squeezing your pocket dry.

Not that it is bad to make derivatives like covers or remixes, but the trade-offs are far too high. Consequentially, the number of original arts is now very little, because artists don’t bother making new stuff if they just aim for a quick buck. Most of the young adult novels are essentially the same lazy story progression with only different time setting and different character names. Most of them even have the same ending! No more a beautiful journey like the thrillers of Dan Brown or the epic adventures of Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, which defines their respective times. Do we seriously want to consider Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey as a unique work? Isn’t the Hunger Games and the Maze Runner essentially the same?

If you play video games, you must have known that the trend always starts over. Game developers are making gazillions of sequels, and only a few of them that are actually good. Most are outright trash. Oh, wait, old video games like Homeworld are also getting remasters to cater the demand of nostalgic consumers. No new Command and Conquer release from EA Games? Re-release the 25 years old Red Alert because people will re-buy it! Profit!

15 June 2020 8.03 PM

[arcticdementor]

In the David Fincher produced, 2017 Netflix series, Mindhunter, two FBI special agents travel the country interviewing serial killers in the 1970’s. The series, based on the non-fiction book “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit” by John Douglas, chronicles the beginnings of advanced criminal profiling techniques developed by the FBI in response to a number of high profile, and gruesome crimes carried out during the era, beginning with the Manson Family murders of 1968. Throughout the show the fictional special agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench meet with frequent resistance from other law enforcement personnel as they attempt to unravel the minds of the serial killers they meet. Everyone from their bosses in the agency to the local police officers they encounter along the way express extreme discomfort at the thought of empathizing or attempting to understand the killers Ford and Tench interrogate. These men are just evil. There’s nothing more to it. Nothing can be learned from them. No insight can be gained. They’re simply, purely evil, and attempting to say anything more on the subject is an affront to the victims, their families, and to human decency and capital-J Justice in general.

Fictionalized though the series may be, in our own time, in the era of mass shootings, one doesn’t have to go far to find similar responses to this uniquely contemporary category of violent crime. Media coverage of the killers oozes sensationalized language that depicts them as dark, evil, twisted, vile, abhorrent, insane. The public, in internet comment forms across social media, offer up their thoughts and prayers, and inevitably, the discussion devolves into a debate on the second amendment and the merits of gun control as politicians and journalists quickly move to steer the national conversation to more politically fruitful areas in order to amass momentum in passing various pieces of long desired legislation targeting gun owners or the NRA. The killers themselves, their personalities, their motivations, their worldviews, the experiences that shape them, every time quickly slip through the cracks of the conversation and are forgotten long before their respective cases are ever brought to trial.

…

Over the course of hundreds of hours beginning in 1959, Ted Kaczynski, the future unabomber, participated in an intense psychological experiment conduced at Harvard by Dr. Henry A Murray. During World War II, Murray had worked for the Office of Strategic Services in developing personality assessment techniques designed to test potential recruits on how well they would endure interrogation and torture by the enemy. At Harvard, Murray went on to further develop his method, transforming it from a diagnostic assessment of mental anti-fragility, into the basis of a radical personality modifying procedure he hoped could be used to forcibly evolve human consciousness in order to prevent the nuclear annihilation he feared was inevitable in light of mankind’s petty national prejudices and self-interest during the period of the Cold War. Kaczynski was among his unwitting test subjects, and though his personal, radical Luddite beliefs would ultimately diverge from the kind of technocratic globalism Murray intended to inculcate in Kaczynski, in a strange way, Murray was also more successful than he could have possibly anticipated.

…

No case provides better evidence of this possibility than that of Adam Lanza, the 2012 Sandy Hook shooter. After years of denied requests, more than 1,000 pages of evidence relating to the Lanza case were finally released to the Hartford Courant in December of 2018. Lanza, who killed himself following the attack, left behind no manifesto. He had even taken the precaution of smashing his devices’ hard drives prior to the shooting. In the end hundreds of pages worth of Lanza’s writings were ultimately recovered by the police, and it’s only from these scattered fragments that his beliefs and opinions emerge. Like Holmes in the weeks and months leading to the Aurora massacre, Lanza was no stranger to psychiatric evaluation. Throughout Lanza’s entire life, from the age of 3, when he was first diagnosed with speech and developmental problems, he knew little else but the offices of therapists and counselors and psychiatrists. A rotating cast of mental health professionals drifted in and out of his life. They all recognized the so-called ‘warning signs’ all too well, but even with a lifetime’s worth of treatment, they completely and utterly failed to prevent his transformation into mass murderer.

…

Lanza goes even further, and characterizes the years of psychiatric treatment he received since childhood explicitly as abusive: “I was molested at least a dozen times by a few different adults when I was a child. It wasn’t my decision at all: I was coerced into it… What do each of the adults have in common? They were doctors, and each of them were sanctioned by my parents to do it. This happens to virtually every child without their input into the matter: Their parents sanction it.”

…

The United States spends more per capita on primary and secondary education than almost any other country. As of 2014 the U.S. is in the top 5, below only Switzerland, Norway and Austria. Despite this however, year after year, a majority of Americans report dissatisfaction with the quality of K-12 education in their country. Alternative education remains a persistent source of controversy within the public consciousness. Private schools, charter schools, school vouchers, homeschooling, all are topics that filter in and out of the national political conversation. Democrats, on the whole, maintain an unyielding support for the compulsory nature of public education in America, while practices like Homeschooling are largely written off as the exclusive province of religious fundamentalists and political separatists. The same goes for the diverting of public resources to charter schools by means of a tax exemption or credit. The argument that has formed over time to circumvent these controversial alternatives boils down to a single word: Socialization.

Public schools not only educate students in facts and skills, the argument goes, but also serve to socialize children by serving as a microcosm of the pluralistic, diverse society in which these students will one day have to live and contribute to. A private, all male school, for instance, will fail to prepare its students for the modern workplace, where they’ll have to cooperate and even take orders from female colleagues or superiors. Likewise, desegregation busing is required to ensure students experience a sufficiently diverse environment. When it comes to a wide variety of controversies in public education, the socialization argument continues to form the backbone of liberal resistance to conservative attacks on the public schooling monopoly.At the same time, as liberals defend the practice and theory of socialization, the scourge of bullying has, on-again off again, served as a cause célèbre among many of the same people. Since 2010, October has become National Bullying Prevention Month, a campaign by the non-profit PACER organization in coordination with companies like CNN and Facebook, among others. Television shows and documentaries have tackled the subject, and celebrities like Ellen regularly champion anti-bullying causes. But what is bullying but the core of Socialization? In a sense the two can almost be considered synonymous. Bullying is, after all, the school of hard knocks which children undergo to learn the complex, unspoken rules of social game playing. Socialization is about instilling conformity, and bullying remains the core experience for many children in learning about all the ways the deviate from the norm. When children are unresponsive to bullying, that’s when things are kicked up to the teachers and administrators and school counselors, and that same unpliability and unresponsiveness is re-conceptualized by well-meaning adults as developmental disorders.

In 1975 Autism was diagnosed in children at a rate of 1 in every 5,000. Today that number has soared to nearly 1 in 100. This has ignited a public controversy over the source or cause of what by every definition deserves to be called an public health epidemic. 75% of children diagnosed with Autism today are boys. There’s no need to go searching for a cause. Vaccines aren’t behind the explosion in Autism rates. Teachers and school psychologists are. School psychology today is a booming industry, one which the US Department of Labor identifies as having some of the best employment opportunities across the entire field of psychology. 75% of school psychologists are women, with an average age of 46. It is this same group of people most empowered to conduct psychological monitoring of children across the country, and over the last 30 years, they have come to classify a larger and larger percentage of young boys as having developmental issues, to the point where it’s not clear whether there is anything wrong with these children at all, or if school psychologists have simply written off a wider and wider range of behaviors which they find problematic or incomprehensible as constituting autism.

…

In 2013, a Texas teenager named Justin Carter was locked up for threatening a school shooting. Whether or not the threat was legitimate is another matter entirely. In a bout of online shit talking over League of Legends Carter wrote “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts…” in response to a quip by a fellow gamer calling him crazy. He quickly rejoined: “lol jk,” likely realizing the fact he could get himself in trouble saying such things. Whether or not it was a good idea for him to make such a comment is immaterial, what matters is the violent, disproportionate response that followed. A Canadian woman, thousands of miles away, reported Carter. He was arrested and locked in jail. Bond was set at half a million dollars, which his family couldn’t afford to pay. He languished in jail, was assaulted by fellow inmates, and then locked up in solitary confinement for his own safety. After 4 months in jail an anonymous donor paid to have Carter released on behalf of his family. The state dragged out the matter for years, delaying the trial as long as possible on tenuous grounds. In the interim Carter was banned from using a computer. It wasn’t until spring of 2018 that a plea agreement was finally reached and Carter was let off with time served.

This is the paranoid system which today we entrust with rescuing at-risk young boys. This is what stands between us and more school shootings. Never mind the fact that as this system has grown, it has only led to a rise in mass shootings. Maybe the real cause of such cases is not guns, or a failure to identify and treat students, maybe the cause is these same students, following a protracted process of isolation and attempted psychological modification, learning to play the part the system has assigned to them, that of the security threat. When schools spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on active shooter drills and security systems, isn’t it just wasted money until someone comes along and gives them an excuse to use it? The complicated apparatus of psychological surveillance and socialization that prevails among schools today is, like the TSA checkpoint at the airport, nothing more than an elaborate piece of (psychological) security theater, and theaters require drama, and more importantly, villains. People like Adam Lanza and James Holmes are certainly killers of the very worst kind, guilty of evil, but on a larger scale, their evil is a only a reflection of our own, of the perverse societal mechanisms we’ve developed to give ourselves piece of mind, regardless of the children that must be fed to the machinery for it to function.

[arickert93]

Animal Crossing is Really Effing  Boring, and I Love It So Much

I don’t know how many of you need to read this, but I definitely need to write this. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are abuzz with proclamations of joy for the game called Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or あつまれどうぶつの森 (Atsumare Doubutsu no Mori, literally “Gather Up! Animal Forest”). If you’re like my mom, you’re probably really interested in such a popular Japanese game because East Asian culture has become so globally legible in the past few decades. 

So, for all of you out there who want some armchair knowledge of the newest Japanese game that’s become almost trivial knowledge to swarths of internet-users, then buckle up, buttercup. Here’s five reasons why this game is so good:

1. You Can Choose Your Gender, But This Choice Means Nothing

The game begins thus: you’re a cute little human (boy/girl/gender-fluid) on an airplane to an uninhabited island that you will be living on. Yes, you can change your gender anytime AND you can wear whatever clothing you like regardless of your gender. Yes, the metaphoric implications of a game about fleeing to a deserted island is ironically an extremely successful game during a time of global quarantine. Don’t think about it too much.

The island is owned by a cute raccoon dog (tanuki in Japanese) named Tom Nook. He and his two identical twin baby tanukis provide you with a tent and some basic furniture, along with two other random villagers who were on the same flight as you: in my case, a unibrowed squirrel named Airisu and an anteater whose name is like Makoto or something.

Together, Airisu, (maybe) Makoto and I began slowly exploring the island. The game lliterally tells you at the beginning, “do whatever you want.” You can run around, discover fruits, and visit Tom Nook&co. in his large, central tent that serves as a town hall. It’s a simple premise that becomes exponentially more interesting.

2.Tom Nook Is a Capitalist and, Yet, I’m Weirdly OK with It

Nook is all about that cash, or bells as the in-game currency is named. After a day goes by, he begins to make suggestions. You can use his workbench to craft furniture and other items out of resources you’ve found around the island. He teaches you how to make tools to extract resources from different objects on the island. You can build a fishing rod to fish (and sell the ones you catch to him of course), or a net to catch insects (again, sell-able for bells), or a shovel to mine iron and stone from rocks. For some, this becomes the purpose of the game: to generate revenue to enable further progress in the game.

But it’s, like, utopic capitalism. Resources are literally infinite (because they are not real) and no one is poor. The game is quite generous, offering tons of freebies that make even chopping wood from your trees an exciting experience. Tom Nook, and his deputy mayor, Isabelle, ultimately treat you like the Head of the Village, and the game quickly becomes more about sharing and having fun.

3. PETA is Mad about It, Which Means It Definitely Treats Animals More Ethically than PETA

Notoriously extreme non-profit PETA wrote a “vegan guide” about how you should not use the game to symbolically harm animals. Yes, the game features fishing, bug-catching, and clamming, and PETA claims that because this would harm the animal in real life, players should abstain from doing it in game.

It’s theoretically possible to avoid fishing and bug-catching, but it means you will only get to experience about 40% of the game. For example, there is a museum where you display the different insects, fish, and pre-historic fossils you find around the island, but to invite Blathers the Owl to your island and prompt him to build this museum, you must catch and “donate” these items to his museum where he displays them. Nook’s twins will buy fish and bugs, villagers will keep fish and bugs as pets. No villager is ever shown eating meat.

In fact, everyone is vegan. The only edible resource in the game is fruit which, when consumed, let’s you dig up and transplant trees (very nifty), or destroy rocks (which you should never do...). Even carnivore animals, like my Tiger Maririn, only drink fruit smoothies, or talk about protein powder, as my anteater “probably-Makoto” does incessantly. He, like every jock, loves to talk about being a jock.

4. I Weirdly Care About My AI Villagers?

I’m an Animal Crossing veteran. I remember when I first played Animal Crossing on the Gamecube at my daycare, the boy playing it with me genuinely asked me “are you a boy or a girl?” when we had to decide our in-game gender. I remember being so furious when he would continuously reset the game.

I remember, as a teenager, talking about my “crush” on certain villagers in the game with some guy I actually had a crush on. Nook, Blathers, the villagers, they’ve been with me throughout my life. I genuinely like them all.

And they have gotten so much smarter. The dozens of different animal species that can populate your town have some pretty sophisticated AI.

And they become your best friends.

Villagers give you presents, they tell funny stories, they interact with each other, and they have personalities. You can also give them clothes and they wear the clothes if they like it and it’s so precious. They’re kind of like tamagotchi, if anyone remembers that. Although, some of them suck, and that’s why you ignore them until they move away from neglect. I don’t have time and energy for everyone, ok?

5. It Helps Me In My Real Life

This game is easy to complain about. The gameplay can be laborious. The third-person camera angle is one-dimensional, so you have to structure your island to ensure you aren’t hiding things. It’s super easy to mess up simple procedures because your character is slightly facing the wrong direction. Your watering can breaks and you have to constantly build new ones. And, inviting someone to your island takes hours of menu navigation and loading screens (ok, more like five minutes, but still).

But, all of this is weirdly OK? It is a life sim, after all, and life is about balance.

The time in the game is real-world, which means if something takes a day inside the game, it takes an actual day. I think about my own time so much more confidently now. I know the value of focused work. I’ve spent hours of free time arranging my fruit trees into a giant orchard, decorating my tatami bedroom to the tiniest detail, and building flower fields devoted to my kangaroo, Mami, a single-mom with an everpresent joey in her pouch who actually waters flowers and teaches me useful recipes, and whom I cherish as my in-game soulmate. The game helps me stay focused and think about large-scale tasks as discrete pockets of consistent (sometimes unpleasant) work. 

At times, it’s pleasantly boring. And boredom is the greatest place to find inspiration.

If you don’t already own a Nintendo Switch, good luck. They’re short-stocked in both the US and Japan as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds. But for anyone who still hasn’t downloaded what is shaping up to be the best game of 2020, send me your friend code if you do. Seriously. 

[absurdfuture]

'How can I complain?'

An essay about mental health by musician James Blake, from It’s Not OK to Feel Blue (And other lies).

James Blake 09 OCTOBER 2019

It’s especially easy to poke fun at the idea that a white man could be depressed. I have done it myself, as a straight white man who was depressed. In fact, I still carry the shame of having been a straight white man who’s depressed and has experienced suicidal thoughts. And still, when discussing it with most people, I will play down or skirt around how desperately sad I have been; instead I emphasize how much happier I am now. I emphasize the work I had to do to get to a better place, and how it was hard work and fruitful work, and how I empowered myself by doing it. I usually focus on how I regained control and an enthusiasm for living (‘Nice one, mate!’), not on how I lost it. That is the last of my defensiveness.

I remember doing an interview with the New York Times where the interviewer asked me why my childhood was painful, and how I got to such a dark place in my late twenties. I told him, ‘You know, other kids, bullying, etc.’ – and instantly regretted my brevity. He said something like, ‘Right, so a pretty standard childhood then.’

Fuck. After all this public talk of depression and anxiety, and many albums of expressed pain, I felt exposed as a fraud, but I was relieved not to have shown my cards and revealed how pathetic and weak I must have been when I was younger. Maybe he was right. He’d probably been through worse and wasn’t complaining about it.

I picked up a resentment towards other people from school. My parents were very loving and supportive and, unusually for my generation, still together. I went to school completely unequipped to deal with certain kids who were taking their fractured and in some cases abusive home lives out on me. I know that now. I was ‘too sensitive’, and I never learned how to act. I was a baby who’d been kept away from germs, and now I was getting ill from anything and everything. (I should say now that I have many happy memories of childhood, especially of my parents and of certain friends who I could count on, and that my inability to focus on those positives probably didn’t help.)

During my school years I spent thousands of hours walking on my own with headphones on or playing piano in the practice rooms, often going there first to cry in private and then occasionally with a mind to play. I was addicted to video games from the age of twelve, rarely going out to socialize. I had a few ‘best’ friends over the years who, looking back, I didn’t know well. But I’m grateful for having had them.

I put girls on pedestals and worshipped them, but only ever remained their friend. I fell in love many times and it was never reciprocated. I had no automatic right to them of course, but they kept me around for years and allowed me to be bullied and humiliated by their friends, accidentally betraying me out of awkwardness. I resented their understandable, youthful inability to know what to do with a sensitive boy who made them laugh and feel good about themselves, but whose body they did not want.

Boys would see my sensitivity as weakness and, while I was sharp and quick-witted, I wasn’t sporty, which was my first mistake with them, I think. Again, I didn’t know how to act. I wondered for years whether I had some behaviour disorder. I still wonder. In any case, year upon year of capricious bullying and humiliation followed.

These feelings of betrayal, persecution and rejection I kept to myself. In the crude gender stereotypes I was aware of at that age, I thought I had the sensitivity of a female but in a male’s body. I joked my way through it and made sure nobody ever saw me cry. I remained a virgin until the age of twenty-two, because I was awkward and unable to be natural around women. I was afraid of the vulnerability of sex after so many embarrassing attempts at it. (The song ‘Assume Form’ is, in part, about finding the ability to feel safe during intimacy.) It seemed to me that it had taken my success as a DJ for women to pursue me, and then I distrusted them for their sudden, transparent interest, so I pushed them all away. Slowly the face of every woman morphed into the faces of the girls who I felt had betrayed and humiliated me. And the face of every man became a bully who would underestimate me and try to kill my spirit.

Becoming relatively famous, my persecution complex turned into a self-serving narcissism, and my obsession with proving my worth to people who’d underestimated me was now being rewarded financially. To those ends, my first emotional language – music – had been the vehicle. I wanted to show everyone what they’d missed out on for all those years.

To some extent I succeeded in that, but I became so self-obsessed and isolated that I wasn’t the success I seemed to be on paper. And so the chasm grew between my alias – the guy with the ‘Pitchfork best new music 8.0+’, with the uncompromising and flourishing career, who seemed in control of everything – and the man-child who for many years was hurting, spiralling, never leaving the house, wasting away in an ego prison, refusing to collaborate, allowing himself to be bled financially and taken advantage of by his friends and their extended family, playing video games and smoking weed fourteen hours a day and not taking any care of himself what-so-ever until he was in a black depression, experiencing daily panic attacks, hallucinations and an existential crisis. I was asking questions like ‘What is the point of me?’ and saying I didn’t want to live. I became afraid of the growing fog of war outside my house because of what I knew people expected of me if I entered it: a normal interaction and, even more impossible, a new album.

I wanted people to know how I felt, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell them. I have gone into a bit of detail here not to make anyone feel sorry for me, but to show how a privileged, relatively rich-and-famous-enough-for-zero-pity white man could become depressed, against all societal expectations and allowances. If I can be writing this, clearly it isn’t only oppression that causes depression; for me it was largely repression.

I’m still not sure I fully believe I am entitled to be depressed or sad at all, because I’m white and cisgender and male, and life for people like me is undoubtedly the easiest of any group. But my privilege didn’t make me want to stick around, and it makes me feel even more embarrassed for having let myself go.

When the delusional mental force field of whiteness finally popped (the ‘psychosis’ of whiteness, as Kehinde Andrews puts it, which most white people are still experiencing – I was still able to reap the now obvious benefits of being white, straight and male but without the subconscious ability to ignore my responsibility to the marginalized), I started having the uncomfortable but rational thought that my struggle was actually comparatively tiny, and that any person of colour or member of the LGBTQ+ community could feasibly have been through exactly the same thing and then much, much more on top of that. A plate stacked until it was almost unmanageable. For me it became embarrassing to mention my child’s portion of trauma and sadness.

Combining that thought with the normalized stigmatization of male musicians’ emotional expression in the media, I felt like I must be the ‘Sadboy Prince and the Pea’.

But my girlfriend verbally slapped some sense into me, saying it does not help anybody, least of all oneself, to compare pain. And that was good advice to hear from someone who’d been through what she has. I can only imagine how frustrating it was for this Pakistani woman to watch me – with all my advantages in life – self-sabotage and complain like I have. Fuck.

And then you look at the statistics: according to the Yale Global Health Review, ‘in 2015, the crude suicide rate [in the USA] for white non-Hispanic males aged 40 to 65 was 36.84 per 100,000 people – more than twice the rate in the general American population’. If it wasn’t already clear that we have more than enough representation, we’re huge in suicide too.

Given this, I think it’s worth examining why many privileged white men can end up feeling they have no legitimate claim to pain, and then never deal with what they can’t lay claim to.

Even while writing this I’m visited by the thought ‘Who even cares? There are much bigger problems in the world than white men who feel sad.’ (This is a bloody laughable thing to write your first piece on – get some perspective, arsehole, and put away your tiny violin.) But you know what? I’ll continue because I think we need to advance the conversation around mental health for everyone, and it’s the only experience I feel qualified to talk about.

From systemic toxic masculinity (‘Boys don’t cry’, basically) and an ostensibly homophobic fear of sensitivity being beer-bonged into us by our friends, family and the media from as early as we can remember (‘Chug, chug, chug!’) to the slow realization as we get older that the world is actually stacked towards our success, we end up thinking that our individual psychological decline is shameful.

I believe it is psychologically dangerous for our egos to be built up as much as they are; for the importance of success to be so great; for the world to open its doors more to us than to others (most of us willfully ignore that those advantages exist, though we feel them deep down, and subconsciously know that it is unfair and that we must capitalize on them).

It is dangerous for us to be made to feel we can do anything and be anything, to gain an understanding of women as a resource rather than a lesson in empathy and love – and then find in all our capitalistic and egoistic fervour that we have neglected to take care of that other muscle that enables our survival: the mind.

I for one felt like Donald Trump, starting with $413 million and ending up broke and lying about my tax records. Maybe then it’s no surprise that so many disaffected white men identify so deeply with him. (It should be noted that I absolutely don’t.) That and our shared love of doing anything we want and saying whatever we like without consequence to ourselves.

That shared love has rightly led to a debate about what white males are entitled to say and do. I believe we’re entitled to no more than anybody else, which at this point requires a lot of listening and rebalancing. I also believe everybody is entitled to pain, no matter how perceptibly or relatively small that pain is. I don’t want the shame around depression and anxiety in privileged people to become worse any more than I want it for the marginalized. Because without addressing that pain we end up with more cis-gendered white male egomaniacs who bleed their shit on to everybody (and some of them will write albums about it).

James Blake's essay is from It's Not Ok To Feel Blue (And Other Lies), a collection of writing about mental health, curated by Scarlett Curtis.

[gnosticgnoob]

I recommend the book Julian (1964) by Gore Vidal. Like Game of Thrones, it has the intrigue of warring kingdoms, family treachery, scheming within the imperial court, mysticism, prophecy, and religious conflict. But this is our history, and Emperor Julian's quest was to undo Roman Christianization.

Throughout Julian's and his older brother Gallus' youth, they were essentially political prisoners kept around merely in case they could be of use due to their noble lineage. Their father was executed without clear cause in typical fashion of paranoid Roman politics, and during their upbringing the imperial court kept an eye on them like vultures who would either disdain them and ask for their heads or petition them for political favor, depending on the mood of Emperor Constantius, who seemed at various points just as likely to also have them killed (as he did their father) as to have them formally accepted into the active political scene.

Julian Augustus [writes:]

Ecebolius was eager to go to Ephesus, rather to my surprise; I had thought he would have wanted to keep me from Maximus. But he was compliant. "After all, I am your teacher, approved by the Emperor. You cannot officially study with Maximus, or anyone else. Not that I would object. Far from it. I am told Maximus is most inspiring, though hopelessly reactionary. But we hardly need worry about your being influenced at this late date. After all, you were taught Christian theology by two great bishops, Eusebius and George. What firmer foundation can any man have? By all means let us visit Ephesus. You will enjoy the intellectual life. And so shall I."

What Ecebolius had come to enjoy was playing Aristotle to my green Alexander. Everywhere we went, academics were curious to know me. That meant they got to know Ecebolius. In no time at all, he was proposing delicately that he "exchange" students with them. "Exchange" meant that they would send him students at Constantinople for which they would receive nothing except the possible favour of the prince. During our travels, Ecebolius made his fortune.

In a snowstorm we were met at the gates of Ephesus by the city prefect and the town council. They were all very nervous.

"It is a great honour for Ephesus to receive the most noble Julian," said the prefect. "We are here to serve him, as we have served the most noble Gallus, who has also honoured us by his presence here." At the mention of Gallus, as though rehearsed, the councilors began to mutter, "Kind, good, wise, noble."

"Where is my brother?"

There was a tense pause. The prefect looked anxiously at the councilors. They looked at one another. There was a good deal of energetic brushing of snow from cloaks.

"Your brother," said the prefect, finally, "is at court. At Milan. He was summoned by the Emperor last month. There has been no word about him. None at all. Naturally, we hope for the best."

"And what is the best?"

"Why, that he be made Caesar." It was not necessary to inquire about the worst. After due ceremony, we were led to the prefect's house, where I was to stay. Ecebolius was thrilled at the thought that I might soon be half-brother to a Caesar. But I was alarmed. My alarm became panic when later that night Oribasius told me that Gallus had been taken from Ephesus under arrest. "Was he charged with anything?"

"The Emperor's pleasure. There was no charge. Most people expect him to be executed."

"Has he given any cause?"

Oribasius shrugged. "If he is executed, people will give a hundred reasons why the Emperor did the right thing. If he is made Caesar, they will say they knew all along such wisdom and loyalty would be rewarded."

"If Gallus dies..." I shuddered.

"But you're not political."

"I was born 'political' and there is nothing I can do about it. First Gallus, then me."

"I should think you were safest of all, the scholar-prince."

"No one is safe." I felt the cold that night as I have never felt the cold before or since. I don't know what I should have done without Oribasius. He was the first friend I ever had. He is still the best friend I have, and I miss him here in Persia. Oribasius has always been particularly useful in finding out things I would have no way of knowing. People never speak candidly to princes, but Oribasius could get anyone to tell him anything, a trick learned practicing medicine. He inspires confidences.

Within a day of our arrival at Ephesus, Oribasius had obtained a full report on Gallus' life in the city. "He is feared. But he is admired."

"For his beauty?" I could not resist that. After all, I had spent my childhood hopelessly beguiled by that golden creature.

"He shares his beauty rather liberally with the wives of the local magnates."

"Naturally."

"He is thought to be intelligent."

"He is shrewd."

"Politically knowledgeable, very ambitious..."

"Yet unpopular and feared. Why?"

"A bad temper, occasionally violent."

"Yes." I thought of the cedar grove at Macellum.

"People fear him. They don't know why."

"Poor Gallus." I almost meant it, too. "What do they say about me?"

"They wish you would shave your beard."

"I thought it was looking rather decent lately. A bit like Hadrian's." I rubbed the now full growth affectionately. Only the colour displeased me: it was even lighter than the hair on my head, which is light brown. To make the beard seem darker and glossier, I occasionally rubbed oil in it. Nowadays, as I go grey, the beard has mysteriously darkened. I am perfectly satisfied with the way it looks. No one else is.

"They also wonder what you are up to."

"Up to? I should have thought it perfectly plain. I am a student."

"We are Greeks in these parts." Oribasius grinned, looking very Greek. "We never think anything is what it seems to be."

"Well, I am not about to subvert the state," I said gloomily. "my only plot is how to survive."

much later, as Emperor:

...My old teacher Bishop George had finally succeeded Athanasius as bishop of Alexandria. Not surprisingly, George proved to be an unpopular prelate. He was highhanded and arbitrary with everyone. Matter came to a head when he destroyed a Mithraeum, saying that he intended to build a charnel house on its foundation. When our brothers rightfully protested this sacrilege, he retaliated by displaying all sorts of human skulls and bones as well as obscene objects, declaring falsely that he had found these "proofs" of human sacrifice buried in the Mithraeum. It was an ugly business.

George also incurred the wrath of the Athanasians by his single-minded persecution of all those who had followed the teachings of the bishop. The Alexandrians could not endure him. When word finally came that his protector Constantius was dead, the mob stormed the bishop's palace and murdered George; his body was then tied to a camel and dragged through the city to the beach, where it was burned and the ashes thrown into the sea. ...Not long after, Athanasius appeared in the city with a great mob of fanatics and resumed his old place as bishop. Almost his first gesture was to "baptize" the wife of my governor. This was too much. I banished Athanasius, making it clear that a return from exile did not mean a return to power for deposed bishops, especially those who are resourceful enemies of Hellenism.

At about this time I acquired George's library, easily one of the best in Asia. I am rather sentimental about that library, for his were the actual books which had shaped my own mind. I am travelling at this moment with George's set of Plotinus. The rest of the books I left at Constantinople as the nucleus for the Julian library.

The edict of 4 February had a good effect, though there was much complaint from the Arian bishops, who felt that by allowing their Athanasian brethren to return, I was ensuring doctrinal quarrels which would inevitably weaken the Galilean organization. Exactly! They are now at one another's throats. I have also insisted that all lands and buildings which over the years the Galileans seized from us be restored. I realize that this will cause some hardship, but there is no other way of getting the thing done. I am quite prepared for trouble.

...Late in February I learned, quite by accident, that Vettius Agorius Praetextatus and his wife were in the city. He is the leader of the Hellenist party at Rome while his wife, Aconia Paulina, has been admitted to every mystery available to women as well as being high priestess of Hecate. I was eager to meet them. Praetextatus is a slight, frail main, with flowing white hair and delicate small features. His wife is somewhat taller than her husband and as red-faced and robust as a Gaul, though she is of the purest Roman stock. They are most enthusiastic at what I am doing, particularly Aconia Paulina. "We have had a remarkable response at our temple of Hecate. Truly remarkable. And all due to you. Why, last year in Rome we could hardly get anyone to undergo initiation but now... well, I have received reports from Milan, Alexandria, Athens... everywhere, that the women are flocking to us! We are second only to Isis in enrollment, and though I am devoted to the Isis cult (in fact, I am an initiate, second degree), I think Hecate has always drawn a better class of women. I only hope we shall be able to open a temple right here."

"You shall! You shall!" I was delighted. "I want every god represented in the capital!"

Aconia Paulina beamed. Praetextatus smiled gravely. "Every day," he said softly, "every waking hour, we pray for your success."

For at least an hour the three of us celebrated that unity which only those who have been initiated into the mysteries can know. We were as one. Then I got down to business.

"If we are to defeat the Galileans we must, very simply, have a comparable organization."

Praetextatus was dubious. "We have often discussed this at Rome, and until recently we thought we were at least holding our own. At heart, Rome is anti-Christian. The senate is certainly Hellenist." He paused and looked out of the window, as though searching for Zeus himself in the rain clouds rolling in from the sea. "You see, Augustus, we are not one organization like the Galileans. We are many. Also, we are voluntary. We do not have the support of the government..."

"You do now."

"...now, yes but is now too late? Also, our appeal is essentially to the individual, at least in the mysteries. Each man who is initiated undergoes the experience alone. At Eleusis it is the single soul which confronts eternity."

"But there is also the sense of fellowship with other initiates! Look at us! You and I are brothers in Mithras..."

"That is not the same thing as belonging to an open congregation, our conduct governed by priests who are quite as interested in property and political power as they are in religion."

"I agree." I tapped the papers in front of me. "And I suggest we fight them on their own ground. I plan a world priesthood, governed by the Roman Pontifex Maximus. We shall divide the world into administrative units, the way the Galileans have done and each diocese will have its own hierarchy of priests under a single high priest, responsible to me."

They were impressed. Aconia Paulina wanted to know if cults would be represented in the priesthood. I said yes. Every god and goddess known to the people, no matter in what guise or under what strange name, would be worshiped, for multiplicity is the nature of life. We all believe -- even the Galileans, despite their confused doctrine of trinity -- that there is a single Godhead from which all life, divine and mortal, descends and to which all life must return. We may not know this creator, though his outward symbol is the sun. But through intermediaries, human and divine, he speaks to us, shows us aspects of himself, prepares us for the next stage of the journey. "To find the father and maker of all is hard," as Socrates said. "And having found him it is impossible to utter him." Yet as Aeschylus wrote with equal wisdom, "men search out god and searching find him." The search is the whole point to philosophy and to the religious experience. It is a part of the Galilean impiety to proclaim that the search ended three hundred years ago when a young rabbi was executed for treason. But according to Paul of Tarsus, Jesus was no ordinary rabbi or even messiah; he was the One God himself who rose from the dead in order to judge the world immediately. In fact, Jesus is quoted as having assured his followers that some of them would still be alive when the day of judging arrived. But one by one the disciples died in the natural course and we are still waiting for that promised day. Meanwhile, the bishops amass property, persecute one another, and otherwise revel in this life, while the state is weakened and on our borders the barbarians gather like winter wolves, waiting for us to stagger in our weakness, and to fall. I see this as plainly as I see my hand as it crosses the page... To stop the chariot as it careers into the sun, that is what I was born to do.

[quietdaysco]

The Process: Research

Ever wanted to make something, but didn’t know where to start? We too. In this second installment of The Process, we’ve finished forming our idea and now it’s time to inform it. 

2. Research 

Mind you, this isn’t a “step two” per se. Here’s the big kicker on what we soon discovered about this part of development:

Research is an active, ongoing process, whose goals change throughout pre- to post-production.

We may have created the idea of Primrose Path but our research didn’t stop at the end of pre-production, as if to say we’ve got everything we need and now it’s time to dive into making it. During production, we still had questions. Research is the only reason that, if you stopped us on the side of the street, the topics of future biomaterials and methods, dynamic UI design, and historic architectural eras could all pop up in the same conversation.  

And all of that is valuable information to us, because researching is relevant in every area of the process! But what kind of information did we look for? 

Our five categories are Community Canvassing, Story & Character Development, Team Management, Game Design, and Marketing. 

Let’s break it down:

A. Community Canvassing

Identifying and learning our target audience.

Identify personal wants from our game.

We have to stop and think: what kind of game do we want to play? If you want something, chances are, there’s a group of people out there who want the same thing. They are our audience.

Identify the type of media and genres relevant to our game.

Our video game is a visual novel, and its market genres are predominantly adult, drama, and romance. Because the medium of visual novels originated and is popular in Japan, we use the term otome (Japanese for “maiden” or “girl”) or otoge (portmanteau of “otome” and “game”) in our genre list. So, our game is an adult, drama, romance, otome—or focused on a female main character who deals with a cast of potential male partners.

Case any census data and statistics on target and related communities’ research blogs.

This one was important to us because we like considering quantifiable data that gives us the bigger picture. Statistics blogs and databases helped us get a clearer view of different demographic subsets of the visual novel community. It’s also important that we read material about sister media like the general interactive fiction community, as both deal with reader input and resultant story-branching.

Inquire fans in those genres for game recommendations and any opinions.

Community hubs are a click away. We connected with others via forums like Reddit and instant messenger servers like Discord that specifically revolve around fans and game developers of the visual novel medium.

Read game reviews in those genres by other fans and critics.

The most interesting thing for us when we read these reviews is not so much what someone did or didn’t like, but what aspects of the game they focused on, and what other topics they decided to connect to their original answer. You may be surprised how people decide to expand on their answer and where tangents lead, which is very telling, valuable associations.

Connect with other developers for support and networking.

The Western visual novel community is a small community, but commercial success is not confined to said community. Building a rapport with other hardworking devs is important, as it follows us in such a small space—for better or worse. There’s a lot to learn from the wider indie development community, too.

B. Story & Character Development

Creating an organic experience.

Real-world parallels to inspire for or reference in game direction.

Whether we take a trip to the city with a camera and sketchbook, rent and buy books from libraries and bookstores, or visit Google Maps in satellite view, we are pulling up everything we need to inform our game’s locations, people, and events.

Observe and converse with people.

The behaviors, quirks, appearances, opinions, and feelings of people are abundant, and it’s not until we observe and sometimes familiarize ourselves with others that we catch some of the concerted expressions that create a nuanced individual. 

Interacting with others is first-hand experience, and listening to or reading others’ experiences is second-hand. If we can't write from first or second-hand experience, we must inform ourselves with other sources, as it’s crucial in writing characters with whom we may not directly or easily identify. We often defer to interviews and documentaries to start.

Psychology and sociology research.

Sometimes reading from experts about general trends and triggers of the human condition makes it easier for us to understand, verify, and better portray things like addictions, behavioral disorders and mental illnesses, fetishes, and cultural stigmas for our character development and world-building. Though this isn’t limited to negative or abnormal things we cannot identify. It can also be in what ways the values of a person or society evolve, or how players interact with video game avatars!

Read and deconstruct critically-acclaimed novels in our genres

It’s understood that if people want to become better writers, they have to become better readers. Being able to settle down with some traditionally-published, well-received books relevant to our interests will help us build on our knowledge of suitable writing conventions, as well as analyzing broader narrative elements, like plot pacing. We even have a list of writing resources saved to help us break it all down!

C. Team Management

Standardizing ways to increase workflow efficiency.

Pipeline development.

Know a general end-date to keep in mind for the finished product. Setting a scope for our project and a timeline for production challenges us to keep on task as we work towards that date. We’ve set ours up by month and refer to that document for phase estimation.

Time management, task delegation, task tracking, and work logs.

Whether your team is me, myself, and I, or made of employees and contractors, it’s important to stay synchronized and keep record of that progress. Quiet Days has our own GitScrum board to help us with assigning tasks, timing how long a task takes us versus the amount of time we expected it to take, and streamlining the process from start to finish. It also keeps track of percentage of overall project completion and key performance indicators (KIP), or the metrics of a user’s personal contribution and work ethic over a period of time. There are a plethora of other task management sites and apps available to use too.

Style guides to standardize writing and art.

Between the two of us at Quiet Days, we both work on the 2D art and writing, and we both default to different visual and writing styles. So, we’ve set up and continue to add to our respective guides, keeping the art style and narration and character portrayals consistent. This is especially helpful should we take up other artists or writers, so that they can easily assimilate into our workflow. 

Account delegation for social media and company correspondence.

Understanding who does what for cohesion under a company brand is important for its image. We share all accounts under the company name, so technically both of us have access, which works well for our team of two. It’s early, but so far “delegation” seems to have taken on a natural division between Coda and Elm—the former taking to micro-blogging, and the latter to streaming and forum correspondence. While this dynamic may change in the future, we both refer back to each other under the Quiet Days brand.

Potential for contracting help.

We’ve considered that there may be a time in production where a helping hand is needed. Additional considerations like the freelancing market and pricing are kept in mind for the future. 

D. Game design 

Scrutinizing game elements from a developer’s lens.

Consider for which platform to design.

PC? Mobile? Console? Cross-platform? While we are primarily designing our game to be played on PC, should we want to capitalize on popular handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch, for example, things like game engines and builds, game optimization, resolution, encryption, touch capabilities, and content guidelines for their private company platform all need to be considered. These things change between platforms.

Consider designing globally.

There are people different from us who would like to enjoy our game too. We consider the user experience (UX) for things like the possibility of game translations and using fonts types that read well for different language characters like Chinese or Russian. We also consider how to customize the experience to accommodate for players with different cognitive abilities, which falls under accessibility features.

Play what’s commercially un/successful and community-recommended.

We can learn a lot from both good and bad game design, and what the community mostly consumes. We engage with these games and take notes on graphics, accessibility features, user interface (UI) designs, game mechanics, soundtracks, and overall presentation and aesthetic. What did we like and what would we have preferred?

Stay updated on game design development tips from industry heads

There are people who have been doing it much longer than we have, and a number of them are setting industry standards. We can learn a thing or two in how they handle a problem and find solutions.

E. Marketing 

Methods for optimizing outreach and return of investment.

Social media strategies for engaging and involving our audience.

We’ve laid the groundwork for character accounts on social media to launch as a way for our audience to interact with characters from our game. While role-playing is a fun marketing and meta world-building device, we’re exploring other cool avenues like exploitable images and audience challenges to drum up future participation. 

Types of advertising and promotional materials.

There may come a time when word-of-mouth may not be enough. Would we consider purchasing ad space on different sites for greater visibility, or spend money on “promoting” features on social media? Would we commission or create and sell promotional merchandising for our audience?

Crowdfunding platforms and prospects.

Popular ones like Patreon, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo all have their draws and their drawbacks for creators and supporters alike. For what expenses would we crowdfund? What additional rewards would we provide for the financial support, if any? Do we want financial support for our project, or continual financial support as a company creating content? Some developers don’t actually use these platforms to request funding, but as another way of advertising their game. Would we do that?

Cross-exposure with other devs.

Interviews, public events, and collaborations with other game developers is a win-win situation with everyone involved. We want to be able to not just network, but allow each other to introduce our products and skills to a greater audience, creating and sharing a unique, dedicated fanbase in the overlap.

The Takeaway

At the time of this post, we’re still in the production phase, so some of this information isn’t applicable right now, but no knowledge is wasted: these things will always be handy to know and consider for later. We’re making our decisions in lieu of—and even despite some of—our research, in order to create a game that we’ll love and hope others will too. It’s important that as a game developer, you too keep yourself informed!

Speaking of ongoing research, Western otome is a largely indie market with many small, tenacious teams and hardly any corporate studios. If you are a Western otome developer, please contact us! We’d love to interview you in a Q&A, get your input on your process, and feature your story on our blog! 

[thecloserkin]

book review: Mira Grant, Feed (2010)

Genre: Sci-Fi

Is it the main pairing: Yes

Is it canon: No

Is it explicit: No

Is it endgame: Yes

Is it shippable: Hell to the yes

Bottom line: Creepily Codependent Siblings Survive the Zombie Apocalypse! They are adopted but the way they refer to each other as “my brother” and “my sister” when they could have used given names instead? I am here for it. While tight plotting is not one of this book’s strengths, you should slog through the infodumps to the ending which packs one hydrogen bomb of an emotional wallop.

This is the first book in the “Newsflash” trilogy about a pair of journalists, Georgia and Shaun Mason, who begin by blogging out of their parents’ basement and end by uncovering a vast governmental conspiracy subtended by various alphabet-soup agencies. The zombie apocalypse itself happened 23 years ago, and it happened the way these things invariably happen: Scientists try to cure cancer/the common cold, unleash freak virus on humanity, cue end of the world as we know it. Georgia and Shaun are the paradigmic products of this remade world: They, like many children born in and around the chaos of the outbreak, were orphans. On their adoption papers their birthdays are given as the same day—an arbitrary made-up date, but it makes them twins even if George is def a few months older. She acts older too, acting as the business brains of their fledgling journalistic operation while Shaun’s job is to “poke dead things with sticks” and look good while doing it. There is a performative aspect to Shaun’s mugging for the camera and flirting with anything in a skirt. He’s doing it because outrageous behavior garners them more hits, obviously, but he’s also doing it for George who gets a kick out of watching him charm the pants off people. She is bemused but not remotely threatened. George is all-business all the time, emotionally guarded and wary of physical contact, and one time when someone tried to hug her Shaun smoothly stepped up to intercept the hug to spare her the discomfort of enduring it. I SCREAMED. Note that George doesn’t mind being touched if it’s Shaun doing it:

I shuddered. Shaun caught the gesture and put a hand at the small of my back, steadying me. I flashed him a smile.

Shaun put a hand on my knee, steadying me, and I covered it with my own.

These small moments of tenderness punctuate an endearingly banterful sibling rapport. This is them reacting to the news of their big break—they’ve been tapped to cover the presidential campaign of an idealistic Wyoming senator:

Shaun was sure we’d get it. I was sure we wouldn’t. Now, staring at the monitor, Shaun said, “George?” “Yeah?” “You owe me twenty bucks.”

This is George shooing Shaun out of her room so she can change her clothes:

I pointed to the door. “Get out. There’s about to be nudity, and you’ll just complicate things.” “Finally, adult content! Should I turn the webcams on?”

This is big sister Georgia mocking Shaun for his youthful indiscretions:

”Remember how pissed you got when we had to do all that reading about the Rising back in sixth grade? I thought you were going to get us both expelled.”

In conclusion I love them sfm they are perfect.

As an aside, the people tagging this book “horror” on Goodreads have either not read the book (which is legit, TBR piles are a thing) or don’t understand what horror is? It’s like they saw the word “zombies” and just auto-completed the genre. What defines horror is not blood, gore, or violence but the fear and loss of agency engendered by that violence. That’s why so many horror film protagonists are women, who experience loss of agency in large and small ways on a daily basis and must learn to survive in the face of it; it’s cathartic to watch them take back control. The point of this digression is that THIS IS NOT A HORROR NOVEL. It’s not about that kind of fear!!! This is a political thriller so buckle in kids we’re going for a ride.

Twenty-three years ago during the outbreak, Georgia and Shaun’s parents lost their eight-year-old biological son. He was bitten by the neighbors’ dog. This was before it was widely understood that the virus could jump between mammalian species, and that anything surpassing the 40 pound threshold was susceptible to its effects. The dog weighed over 40 pounds. The Masons, who were award-winning reporters in their own right, dealt with their grief by channeling their emotional resources into chasing the news ratings. They continued to be phenomenally successful journalists as well as shitty parents to Shaun and Georgia, whom they seem to have adopted entirely for publicity purposes. The narrative invites us to draw the comparison between George and Shaun, who have chosen to pursue this career out of a thirst for THE TRUTH, and their parents who have less lofty motivations. Not to put too fine a point on it but their parents are mercenary motherfuckers. These kids survived their childhood by building an emotional bunker that they never learned to climb out of. This line from the very first chapter is so telling because they’re out in the field and Shaun is being chased by a zombie right?:

I screamed, images of my inevitable future as an only child filling my mind.

When Shaun’s in mortal peril, Georgia doesn’t think of him as “the center of my universe”— which he is—she thinks of the void that would result in the loss of her brother. That’s how they fit together, that’s what they are to each other, and all the other stuff is layered on top of the shared trauma of their childhood. Ffs they even have a ritual for administering each other’s blood tests—you know that thing at wedding toasts where the bride and groom loop their arms together and tip the champagne flute into the other’s mouth? Like that:

Moving with synchronicity born of long practice, we broke the biohazard seals and popped the plastic lids off our testing units

So the protocol for taking blood tests, which everyone has to do all day long to prove they’re not infected, is to come into the foyer/antechamber/vestibule one at a time and once you test clean you proceed into the building while the next person cycles into the chamber. That way, if anyone is found to be infected, they can be isolated. Georgia and Shaun have never once complied with this rule:

Our next-door-neighbor used to call Child Protective Services every six months because our folks wouldn’t stop us from coming in together. But what’s the point of life if you can’t take risks now and then, like coming into the damn house with your brother?

Implying that if one of them ever got bitten by a zombie the other one would rather spend the rest of their short life trapped in a garage with the shambling corpse of their sibling than die in their sleep at a ripe old age. Talk about ride or die.

I said before that this presidential campaign, this is their big break as much as it is the candidate’s. Up till now George and Shaun have been blogging under the umbrella of news aggregation entities (sort of like how BuzzFeed and HuffPost and Medium are populated by user-generated content that isn’t necessarily making the content creator an appreciable pile of money), but now they’ve finally landed the story that will let them strike out on their own. One of the sharpest things about this book is how it depicts journalism as a job, and a tough one to do right. Nashville does the same thing for the music industry, and as over-the-top as that show is, it shows you the nuts and bolts of success in a profession where practitioners are supposedly driven by “passion” alone. Here the distribution of labor is skewed pretty heavily towards George:

I get the administrative junk that Shaun’s too much of a jerk and Buffy’s too much of a flake to deal with.

Buffy is their business partner and some kind of auteur hacker + tech whiz. Shaun is the public face of their media brand. But make no mistake, George is the heart and soul and brains of this operation. You see her business acumen in drive-by observations like “Replacing that much equipment would kill our operating budget for months,” or when she talks about i n s u r a n c e. And George talks about insurance a lot. She mentions how a certain camera covered in zombie body fluids is an insurance write-off, how being present in designated high-risk zones during certain times of day can triple your insurance premium, how a certain treatment for her chronic vision condition isn’t covered by health insurance. I … just wanna point out that the human race has survived a flippin’ zombie apocalypse, but the United States remains wedded to private for-profit health insurance where who and what are “covered” remains a game of Russian roulette?!! Whoever said it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” was onto something. This society is functioning cohesively enough that elections are a thing (thus, nation-states are still a thing). If you want to tell me our fragmented, inefficient, fee-for service model of paying for medical care that routinely bankrupts & kills our citizens has weathered the end of civlization and emerged intact from its ashes, you better look me dead in the eye and bring receipts.

What’s really impressive about Georgia is she’ll rattle off exactly what kind of activities (those forbidden by her journalistic licensing) will invalidate her life insurance if she’s stupid enough to get killed while doing them. From which I surmise that she and Shaun are both covered by pretty hefty policies of which they are each other’s sole beneficiary. Which makes sense, they’re in a dangerous line of work, but I feel like it’s a poor investment since whoever was left behind would be doing their damnedest to climb into the grave next to their sibling lol.

Another little requirement of the household insurance—since we leave safe zones all the time in order to do our jobs, we have to be able to prove we’ve been properly sterilized, and that means logged computer verification of our sterilizations.

George is talking about the AI that is apparently located in her showerhead that douses her with a bleach & antiseptic compound when she comes back from being in the field?? That sounds painful but what concerns me is the breathtaking scope of the Internet of Things’ penetration into her life. The AI is in the bathroom. It knows exactly where she’s been bc ofc her GPS location can be tracked via her phone, and it’s merrily sending packets of information off to …. somewhere, where it will doubtless be aggregated with all the data collected about George from other sources, and combed for patterns to predict future behavior. That’s how surveillance capitalism works. if this sounds chillingly familiar it’s because it’s already happening, it’s what the tech giants are already doing—gobbling up as much data about as many people in as many contexts as possible—and leveraging that data for profit. Privacy is a joke. George is not unaware of this, but what choice does she have? It’s either install the damn AI in her showerhead or get her parents’ homeowners’ insurance policy cancelled for being too “high risk.”

I want to circle back to George’s chronic medical condition for a sec. She’s got a disability—what’s a called a “reservoir condition” where the virus takes up residence in a body organ, in her case the retina—meaning essentially that she has zombie vision; she can see ridiculously well in low light situations but direct sunlight will blind her. She has to wear shades even indoors and is literally incapable of crying since her tear ducts are inoperative. So there’s a testy situation where a federal agent tries to get her to take off her sunglasses so he can verify her identity with a retinal scan right? And because they’re standing outside this is obviously a recipe for permanent blindness, quite aside from the fact you wouldn’t be able to get a valid scan anyway due to the virus over-dilating George pupils. But instead of checking George’s files, where her disability & its effects are prominently listed, this grunt insists on making her remove her glasses because Procedure. It’s a pretty tense moment. Shaun goes ballistic. He doesn’t physically threaten the dude, or insult his mom or anything. No, Shaun understands that he needs to make this pencil-pusher more afraid of the consequences of taking George’s glasses than of Not Following Procedure. And it works. YEET.

On the campaign trail the Senator’s aides arrange for sex-segregated hotel rooms but Shaun and George are having none of it:

On the few occasions when I’ve tried sleeping without Shaun in the next room, well, let’s just say that I can go a long way on a six-pack of Coke.

The ostensible reason the sleeping arrangements need to be reshuffled is, Buffy can’t sleep without a nightlight and George’s eyes can’t tolerate a nightlight. Clearly the real reason is George and Shaun are c l i n g y and codependent as FUCK. One night after a zombie attack and the long grueling hours of cleanup/decontamination that followed it, they actually climb into the same bed—I guess this room only had a double instead of two singles?? The scene the next morning, the two of them having predictably overslept:

“Fuck a duck, Buffy, what are you trying to do, blind her?” … Shaun, clad only in his boxer shorts, staring at an unrepentant Buffy.

So Shaun’s beef with Buffy is not that she barged in on them while they were asleep & half-naked but that she opened the curtains, thereby triggering a painful migraine for George’s sensitive eyes. Buffy explains she didn’t shake them awake because they both sleep armed, lmao. George’s disability and Shaun’s practiced ability to help her maneuver around it (like a trusty prosthetic, he’s an extension of herself) serves to highlight how in this partnership they are one unit and they know each other inside out. This is them after their close shave with the dunce who tried to take George’s glasses:

“Fuck you, too,” I muttered as Shaun got his arm around me and hoisted me away from the barn. “You kiss our mother with that mouth?” “Our mother and you both, dickhead. Give me my sunglasses.”

And this is George waking up in their hotel room, eyes squeezed shut against the glare of multiple computer screens:

He touched my hand with the tips of his fingers before he pressed my sunglasses against my palm.

This is absurdly, spine-tinglingly intimate. First he touches her hand with the tip of his fingers, the most fleeting of touches to let her know it’s him, and then he presses the glasses into her palm to restore her agency so she can, you know, open her eyes. And that earlier scene with him guiding her by the elbow in broad daylight!!! I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING

Sometimes I can hardly believe that George and Shaun are twenty-three years old. When I was twenty-three I … was not adulting half so well as these kids. But then, giving their barbarous upbringing, that’s not surprising; my parents loved and nurtured me. When I look at George and Shaun and the successful business they’ve built and the professional relationships they’ve cultivated and their expertise and their bravery I just feel this proud parental glow you know?

I want to say a word about Senator Ryman before we move onto spoiler territory. There’s a big controversy initially about whether the Senator is “genuine” or not (spoiler alert: he is). But what does that even mean, genuine? He’s a good egg, sure, but what are his policies, none of which are explored in depth except his support for horse farms??? I’m not kidding. In a world where any animal weighing over 40 pounds is a zombie outbreak waiting to happen, it’s a controversial position to say people should be able to keep pets in residential zones. Here is how George describes our Candidate:

He’s like a big, friendly Boy Scout who just woke up one day and decided to become the President of the United States of America.

I see two major problems with this: One, they say “Personnel is Policy” so who the hell is he planning to appoint to key Cabinet positions and can he trust them to pursue rather than undermine his objectives (and does he even have a deep enough bench of people to draw on)? Two, the Boy Scouts of America are not exactly, er, unproblematic, and while it’s safe to say our faves are always problematic, I think “Boy Scout” is shorthand here for “no skeletons in his closet,” which again puts the focus squarely on his personal qualities rather than what policies he espouses. It’s great that he hasn’t cheated on his wife or his taxes. But morality and ethics are not the same thing:

Morals are how you treat people you know. Ethics are how you treat people you don’t know. Your morality is what makes you a good spouse/friend … Your ethics are what makes you a good politician … Morality dictates that you take care of your family, friends and even acquaintances first … For a large society—a society where you can’t know everyone—to work, ethics must come before morality, or ethics and morality must have a great deal of overlap. By acting morally, you must be able to act ethically.

I think we can all agree that this does not describe how our society is currently constituted, and it doesn’t describe George and Shaun’s America either. So this narrow fixation on whether individual candidates are “genuine” or corrupt imo kinda misses the point. George says:

I haven’t even been able to find proof that his campaign received funding from the tobacco companies, and everyone’s campaign receives funding from the tobacco companies.

I don’t want to undersell how important it is the guy is not taking tobacco money. But is he also eschewing Wall Street money, Big Pharma money, defense contractor money? How could George possibly have time to investigate all this dark money if she is supposed to be covering the actual campaign? Seems like it would be a lot easier to reform the campaign finance laws than to vet every single single candidate’s funding sources.

I think one reason the Senator is long on identity & personal charisma and short on policy is that he’s up against an opponent whose base of support is millenarian-fundamentalist “the Rapture is here, we’re all going to hell”:

it was either Ryman’s brand of “we should all get along while we’re here,” or Tate’s hellfire and damnation.

If that is the main faultline in society, I guess half the voters don’t really wanna hear how a given politician is planning to make a material difference in their lives, since they’ve already got eyes on the prize aka the next life.

So there you have it. George and Shaun are scrappy independent muckrakers digging for the truth. Time and again their allegiance to that holy grail overrides their concern for trivial aims like idk personal safety. There’s a vast, shady conspiracy afoot, and as our heroes get closer to it they start getting shot at. They lose comrades. None of this deters them because they are after THE TRUTH. Oh wait there is in fact one thing George values more than the truth:

”You’re more interested in your brother than figuring out the truth?” “Shaun’s the only thing that concerns me more than the truth does.”

And later:

The sight of him was enough to make my heart beat faster and my throat get tight. I knew he was wearing Kevlar underneath his clothes, but Kevlar wouldn’t protect him from a headshot.

Her first concern is always, always, for him.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

George gets infected. That’s the denouement. George is infected and Shaun has to shoot her before she turns all the way. Every single person who makes it to this scene is just bawling by the end of it:

His lips brushed the top of my head as he bent forward and pressed them to my hair. I wanted to yell at him to get away from me, but I didn’t. The barrel of the gun remained a cool, constant pressure on the back of my neck. When I turned, when I stopped being me, he would end it. He loved me enough to end it. Has any girl ever been luckier than I am?

The reassuring pressure of the gun on the base of her neck??? Has there been a more romantic moment in cinematic history??? I THINK NOT. Shaun is a crack shot—he’s the kind of guy who caresses his guns, names them after pretty women, causes his sister to grouse about digging through a suitcaseful of his weaponry to find her clothes—and yet here he is using his gun to kill the woman he loves most in the world.

It was supposed to be Shaun. They both took it as a given that Shaun would be the one to die first. Now he has to find a reason to continue living other than the obvious (vengeance). Stay tuned for the next installment, narrated by Shaun!