#Plato 1728

[canmom]

choosing the treasure that eats you

the gods in narrative podcast The Silt Verses cover an enormous variety of motifs and subjects - and indeed, we are told how new gods are invented all the time, researched and tested by the government, competing to be the patron of companies and individuals, broken down and dumped when they're no longer needed. but they are all unified by two things: they all demand human sacrifices ('a god must feed' as Carpenter puts it in the opening episode) and they all inflict dramatic body-horror transformations (a process known as 'hallowing'), associated with their theme.

nevertheless, the idea of not following a god seems to be pretty alien to the people of this world. and you don't really get much choice: if, as in episode 7, your advertising company's restructuring decides that the weakest performers need to be sacrificed to their new 'sponsor', you don't get to opt out, it's in your contract and no doubt the police will catch you if you run. we see over and over how the gods (and their chief devotees) pick out the vulnerable, drive their believers to spiral down into life-defining obsession - by stringing them along with vague promises of some kind of final answer or fulfilment, then turn away and discard them as soon as they've served their purpose.

it is a very, very productive theme, and the writers have a gift for furnishing it with evocative words and nasty details so it doesn't get stale. so of course I reflect on the metaphor.

in nier automata, the childlike machine lifeforms search for purpose in a world that doesn't seem to offer any. the answers they find are their 'treasures': small, seemingly insignificant objects which individual machines devote themselves to protecting.

for example, one machine may devote itself to cultivating a flower (as in the second episode of the anime), or looking after a broken doll (as in the story of pathetic failmachine Plato 1728 seen in the DLC/the Deserving of Life single by Amazarashi). other sidequests lead you to encounter machines who obsess over fighting, or travelling fast (easy challenges to implement in a game engine).

the machines' behaviour seems inexplicable and even random to others, but the pointlessness is kind of the point: somewhere the chain of 'why' has to terminate. i choose this one.

sometimes i think about 'art' in the sense of a set of behaviours exhibited by humans. i don't have any interest in demarcating art vs non-art, just to understand what this phenomenon is, why it should be so compelling.

one definition that keeps sticking around in here, despite it not really working, is that 'art' is a word for the thing we devote ourselves for no other reason. you could spend your time drawing, but equally you could spend it speed cubing. we are obsessively optimising creatures so, presented with a defined scope of an activity - something like the rules of a game - we refine our skills within it, pushing the bar further and further, changing the rules as we go to keep it interesting. the art forms that stick around tend to be the ones that continue to be productive and evolve. but it's all, in a sense, pointless - and that's why it's the most important thing, because it's done for itself, not in service of some other goal.

this is not actually a good description of the thing it claims to describe. many things we celebrate as 'art' are done for extrinsic, not intrinsic motivations, like commissioned paintings. indeed, far from being purely intrinsically motivated, there are many extrinsic functions that the various activities we call 'art' perform: communication, entertainment, distraction, a tool to reason with, a safe zone to explore emotions, ideological propaganda, historical memory.

nevertheless, the idea of a thing done for its own sake, defying justification, continues to compel somehow.

art does not escape the logic of sacrifice. if you sacrifice your time, your health, your social connections in pursuit of your art - why, does that not prove the art is more important than your time, your health, your friendships? there's a romance in the narrative about burning up in pursuit of something 'great' - and if you want to undercut that narrative, you likely claim that the object is not particularly worth the effort. it's just videogames. it's just cartoons.

the slogan of The Silt Verses is the sarcastic line of Carpenter (originally her friend Vaughan, part of episode 7's corporate hecatomb): "you get to choose the thing that eats you". a very succinct statement! don't we, indeed.

not that sacrifice is always for some abstract intrinsic goal. in the story, the feeding is often done in exchange for some straightforward, material advantage - and in a sense that is the same in our world, with the threshold adjusted so you have to sacrifice a certain amount to just stay alive.

here's a calculation, because i'm fond of numbers: if you start working full-time at, say, age 21 (a conservative assumption, most people start earlier) up until the UK retirement age of 66 (currently, set to rise), working 40 hours a week (conservative, but then again most people don't actually work the hours they're paid for), the current price of a full human life is 114,793 hours to the gods of capital - pick your fave. if you sleep eight hours a night, the god of sleep gets 160,710 during that same period. harder to fit parameters on the demands of the gods of food, cleaning, caring for others, travelling to and fro, and 'being too tired to do much of anything', which certainly have their own demands.

that leaves you with a certain number to use for your own arbitrary ends. in theory, you get to choose what will eat those ones. in practice? a unified will? consistent intentions? ya joking mate. how many hours go to the god of 'responding to the thing in front of me', known by its sacred name, Aydeeaitchdee?

i used to feel jealous of people, some of them my friends, who seem to have some kind of unique vision, some sort of captivating identity to the creations that they express. the 'spark' that makes that special. i wondered - still wonder - if i will finally find my spark, a reason i'm here, a unique contribution i'm poised to make to the world, the value over replacement - the thing that all this mess was building towards all along, the thing that will make all the efforts so far feel less faltering and haphazard. but why should there be such a thing? if one day i live long enough to, by chance, find something that feels like it's an answer, it's just a retroactive reframing of the chaos - because that's what brains do. convince someone they made a decision they didn't, and they will justify it to you.

there is a song by Sassafrass, an incredibly nerdy a capella band who otherwise largely sing about norse mythology, called 'somebody will'. when i first heard this song i honestly kind of hated it (you can probably find that post if you dig hard enough). it felt like a tragic cope: facing the blatant reality that you will never be an astronaut as you (apparently) desire, to insist on narrativising your life as being part of the great project space colonisation - even if it's so remote as clerking a funding organisation or working at a scifi bookstore or attending a convention (it's from quite a specific milieu), you can claim to be one of the 'sailors' helping to 'conquer' that 'ocean'. i hated it, because why should the space program be all that? somebody will walk on mars someday - so fucking what? what then? job's a good 'un, everybody? is that really worth sacrificing shit ('sacrifice something i don't have for something i won't have') for, here and now? surely your life is about more than putting 'somebody' on Mars one day?

but considering it again today - i mean it might as well be the space program as anything else, right. you need a direction to move in. it doesn't matter what the direction, as long as it keeps you moving. change is life and stillness is death, don't you know. perhaps you drag others along with you and you get a current flowing that way for a while, until the energy driving it runs out, or it runs up against the overpressure around an as-yet uneroded bank. so we all move around and the dynamics of it all, invisible to us, build a delta, which becomes a rock, and against that flows another river one day, grinding down the rock to move it to another delta, all by the nearly-random movements of the water molecules. shit i think i lost the thread of the metaphor and now i'm just talking about geophysics

it seems... almost laughably tedious to be circling this existential drain still. in my milieu: douglas adams cracked his joke about 'the ultimate question of life the universe and everything' 30 years earlier in 1977. randall munroe uploaded 'i'll get the super soaker' in 2007. but navel-gazing has been a joke for much longer, surely at least as long as there have been people to question what the point is.

funny how it always comes back to water metaphors.

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 11.7

Beer Birthdays

Gary Fish (1956)

Steve Altimari (1960)

Jason Petros (1977)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Albert Camus; French writer (1913)

Marie Curie; French chemist, physicist (1867)

Al Hirt; trumpet player (1922)

Joni Mitchell; Canadian singer, songwriter (1943)

Morgan Spurlock; documentarian (1970)

Famous Birthdays

Ignaz Brüll; Austrian pianist and composer (1842)

Nellie Campobello; Mexican writer (1900)

James Cook; English explorer, naval officer (1728)

Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux; French author and poet (1619)

Francisco de Zurbarán; painter (1598)

Ed Dodd; cartoonist (1902)

Poppin’ Fresh; Pillsbury Doughboy character (1965)

Madeline Gins; poet and architect (1941)

Billy Graham; television evangelist (1918)

Ibn Hazm; Arab philosopher (994 C.E.)

Dean Jagger; actor (1903)

Norman Krasna; film director, screenwriter & playwright (1909)

R. A. Lafferty; author (1914)

Lorde; New Zealand singer-songwriter (1996)

Konrad Lorenz; Austrian zoologist (1903)

Herman J. Mankiewicz; film director & screenwriter (1897)

Kitty Margolis; jazz singer (1955)

Jan Matulka; Czech-American painter (1890)

Norah McGuinness; Irish painter (1901)

Lise Meitner; physicist, mathematician (1878)

Philip Morrison; astrophysicist (1915)

Lucas Neff; actor (1985)

Lawrence O'Donnell; journalist and talk show host (1951)

Paul Peel; Canadian painter (1860)

Dana Plato; actor (1964)

C.V. Raman; Indian physicist (1888)

Charles Ranhofer; Delmonico’s Restaurant chef, author of “The Epicurean” (1836)

Johnny Rivers; rock singer (1942)

Jean Shrimpton; English model (1942)

Antonio Skármeta; Chilean author (1940)

Ellen Stewart; film director (1919)

Joan Sutherland; Australian opera singer (1926)

Judy Tenuta; comedian (1949)

Leon Trotsk;, Russian theorist and politician (1879)

Lesser Ury; German painter (1861)

Andrew Dickson White; historian (1832)

[ideas-on-paper]

NieR: Automata Ver. 1.1a Quick Review - Episode 2

[WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE GAME AND ANIME]

[Use of he/him pronouns for Plato at my own discretion]

While the first episode of the Nier Automata anime was composed almost exclusively of action scenes, the second one takes its time to slow down a bit and illustrate some of the lore and background. This is certainly a nice change of pace, and a great opportunity to ease people who have never played the game into the setting.

The episode starts off with a speech from the Council of Humanity directed at the YoRHa androids, which also takes place in the game exactly at this point. However, in contrast to the game where all we see are the Operators standing in the Server Room, we also get a glimpse of various other, Earth-stationed YoRHa members who are receiving the transmission simultaneously. I thought this was a really nice change, since it gives you a broader perspective of YoRHa in general.

Quite unexpectedly, right after the introduction on the androids' side and the standard anime opening, the episode launches straight into the story of Plato 1728, a defective machine lifeform we only get to see in Nier Automata's DLC (which I personally didn't play but watched a walkthrough of). In the beginning, we see some shots filmed through "the machine's eyes", such as the booting sequence which looks really incredible - unfortunately though, the expositionary text displays are also back again. (This is the one part of the game's presentation that really started to annoy me over time; I thought it was fine with Simone, but especially during the later part of Route C, it got way too much for my taste and I was just sick of it.) The picture book scenes are also there, and though I wasn't the biggest fan of those either due to how cryptic they were, it seems like they have been shot with live-action props, which gives them a very unique look.

We get to see some shots of the factory environment from the DLC, all the while exploring Plato's backstory. Like all the other machines, he is was created to fight the androids, but after picking up a discarded book and finding a bookmark with the image of a Lunar Tear, he seemingly doesn't want to fight anymore. Upon discovering the real-life equivalent of the flower in the City Ruins, he and some of his buddies decide to try cultivating the flower, with their trial-and-error gardening leading to some hilarious situations. It's cute, but that's basically all there is to it, really. (I felt that the game was trying a little too hard to make you empathize with the machines at certain points, so I'm pretty much immune to it by now.)

In the following scene, Lily and the Resistance members are also introduced, and we get a general summary of the current situation and the conflict between the androids and machines. However, Lily (who replaces Anemone in this adaptation) is less than enthused about the rallying transmission from the Council of Humanity, silently commenting on how the guys on the Moon are able to display such bravado while the Resistance has never received a single firearm to support their cause. Furthermore, for the very first time in Nier Automata, we get a glimpse of the Moon itself - the "dwelling of the gods" as far as the androids are concerned - and by the looks of it, it's dented on one side, almost as if an impact of considerable size happened there. (Please don't bother to give me the lore explanation for this; I would rather enjoy the mystery of it instead of having to deal with the time/dimension traveling shit Yoko Taro usually comes up with.) Either way, it's obvious that Lily harbors considerably more mistrusts than Anemone and acts somewhat disillusioned, which might add an interesting new perspective to the Resistance. (However, please note that this does not mean I'm viewing the Resistance as the "good" organisation as opposed to YoRHa. The Resistance androids have enough questionable actions on their record, starting with their treatment of Devola and Popola - which is still the same in the anime - because no matter the circumstances, treating someone as an outcast of society and actively shunning them is an inexcusable crime for me. Not to mention the VERY dubious note from Jackass you receive after Ending C/D, which was one of the main reasons why I didn't finish Ending E.)

Next up is the Bunker scene which leads to 2B and 9S descending down to Earth to assist the Resistance, which plays out mostly the same as in the game. I will say though that while they couldn't replicate 2B's booting sequence for obvious reasons (which was one of the most innovative and creative game menu introductions I've ever seen), I was very happy to see they kept 9S' flustered reaction to 2B's comment that his voice is soothing. ;-)

After sending our two protagonists off, the Commander also has a brief inner monologue, saying "2B, 9S… Take care of yourselves." Ever since playing the game, I got the impression that the Commander might have had qualms about her actions from a certain point, but I couldn't discern when exactly this change of mind happened. Was it after learning about the extinction of the aliens? Or even before? Either way, we'll have to see if the anime elaborates on that.

We then cut back to the Resistance members, who are facing a downward fight against a horde of rampaging machines which suddenly overran the City Ruins. Being at a disadvantage and severely outnumbered, they decide to detonate a bridge to stop their advance (though it looks slightly different, the surroundings suggest it might actually be THAT bridge; makes you wonder how often they had to repair it by now). At the last moment, Lily manages to hit the bursting charge with her rifle while the rest of the enemy machines is bombarded by 2B and 9S from above, sending all of them tumbling into the abyss. Unfortunately, Plato was also caught in the crossfire, his broken body landing on a cliff where he glances at a withered Lunar Tear one the last time.

In the meantime, 2B and 9S finally make their entrance - and this time, the animators had the grace to make both of them look equally bad. It's obvious they simply skipped the step of integrating their hand-drawn bodies into the CGI flight units to spare themselves some time, but in the process, it makes the animation look somewhat cheap. I'm aware that combining 2D and 3D isn't an easy task, especially when the two of them touch, but there are productions that show it can be done if you're ready to invest the effort.

Here's, it becomes clear that Lily takes over Anemone's role in this, because she recognizes 2B as "No. 2" the first time she sees her. Lily is briefly attacked by a reanimated machine, but it's dispersed off rather quickly with the assistance of the pods. While the other Resistance members excitedly welcome the two YoRHa androids, Lily is lost in silent musings whether the Council of Humanity truly sent them the help they so desperately need.

One detail I greatly appreciate is that Devola and Popola are established early on as characters: When Lily gets wounded, they immediately cure her, which gives them a lot more presence this early in the story compared to the game. (At least it feels a lot less awkward than meeting them later on and the game just going like "okay, these people are important now".)

The last scene of the episode - and probably my biggest point of criticism - is a shot of the machine conglomerate in the desert and the implied/imminent birth of Adam. There are two main differences from the game here: First off, 2B and 9S are not shown to be present, which raises the question what even prompted the machines to strike up their trademark chant of "this cannot continue" and fuse all of their bodies to create Adam. Second - and this is what REALLY bugs me - they're shown to be reading instead of trying to imitate human sexual behavior like they do in the game. The reason why I loved this so much is because the way it's presented in game, it feels like the machines are trying to unlock the "secret knowledge" of humanity by mimicking their actions - except that it kinda doesn't work since, well, they aren't human. This impression is completely missing from the anime, and thus, the adaptation of this scene falls far behind its game counterpart.

However, this huge letdown is somewhat compensated for by the ending: because for the first time, we get to see the actual outro of the anime. It's a very touching scene, with 2B and 9S standing in a cornfield, him flashing a bright smile at her. 2B is visibly moved and runs towards him, abandoning her sword stuck in the ground, but as soon as she is within arm's reach, his form dissolves into nothingness. This scene - without even using any words - does a better job at conveying 2B's feelings for 9S than everything we get from the game. Discounting the fact that it's technically the outro, I'd say it's definitely the best scene from the whole episode.

After that, we once again get a lore skit with puppets. By shamelessly disguising himself as the sender of a fan letter, Yoko Taro asks his own characters what resources androids need to function, and 9S explains that while regular (=Resistance) androids only need water, the YoRHa models don't need to consume anything at all. I find this mildly curious since I remember it being explicitly stated in YoRHa Boys that YoRHa androids have a water tank as well, though maybe that's a feature the newer models don't come with. (Or maybe Yoko Taro simply retconned his own lore again. I wouldn't be surprised by that either.) Anyway, the episode ends with 2B removing her own OS chip and effectively killing herself. (At this point, you may wonder whether she has a death wish.)

Still, overall, I'd say I liked this episode way better than the first - that is, if I still had any genuine feelings for Nier Automata left. It's difficult to explain, but while I'm technically aware what I would be feeling, the emotion just doesn't reach my heart - at this point, the only thing I feel about the game is total, all-encompassing indifference. I suppose it's like looking back at memories with your ex - you know how you felt in that exact moment, but you just don't feel the same anymore. I doubt that my past love for Nier Automata can ever be rekindled (provided that I'd even want it to be rekindled), but I'm going to keep watching for now if simply to see what they make out of this.

[khalix-hyetology]

NieR: Automata DLC x Plato’s story and Name References

[toggle1-mrfipp]

Managed to get around to that Plato 1728 dlc.

Man, I did not expect that at the end.

[the-swan-sequence]

“Writing is the geometry of the soul.”

Plato

Art: Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799)

[practicallyastar]

Machine Spear

My name is Plato 1728. I am a failure of a machine. I was designed for combat, but I can't use weapons. Everyone makes fun of me, and my life is horrible.

---

I am a dumb machine. I got lost during battle, and ended up in some kind of factory. I found a whole pile of dolls discarded there. They share the same fate I do.

---

I am a foolish machine. Today, I had to fight at that factory. All of the dolls got completely destroyed. Crushed by my friends and foes, who can do nothing but fight fight fight.

---

I activated my cannon and shot everyone there. I'm not sure why I did that. All I know is I decided to fight. Because I'm just a stupid, broken machine.

(20/39)

[canmom]

nier automata anime 2-3

 So, I previously found the first episode of NieR Automata v1.1a disappointing. Thankfully, episodes 2 and 3 mark a huge improvement.

episode 2

Episode 2 makes a great decision in focusing most of the action not on 9S and 2B, but fleshing out some of the Machines and Resistance. We have Lily - very bitter after the events of the YoRHa stage play related here - and a machine cultivating flowers which explicitly references the DLC and Plato 1728.

Since this episode was playing pretty hard to the NieR lore nerds, let’s unpack a bit.

After a montage of YoRHa units receiving the good word from the moon, the episode proper opens with one of the picture book sequences from route B of NieR Automata; this one is Spirit of Fire. It relates when the robot P-chan, aka Beepy, which attained sapience and ascended into space, spread the gift to the other machines. This is covered in the story The Fire of Prometheus, and I talk about it in some detail here.

We’re introduced to a nameless Machine Lifeform (a Large Stubby), under orders to ‘Destroy All Dolls’ - relating to the infamous rampage of Plato 1728, which you learn about in the 3C3C1D119440927 DLC - more on that here. The same order to destroy dolls is the subject of the Amazarashi single Deserving of Life:

Here, we immediately see this machine lifeform identifying ‘dolls’ with the androids - but it shakes off this order, and becomes fascinated with a Lunar Tear flower. A montage takes us through the underground machine base from the 3C3C1D... DLC...

In a flashback, we see this machine sitting on the tower of TVs which houses Plato 1728′s records, reading a book with a Lunar Tear bookmark...

The machine finds a Lunar Tear on the battlefield, and although it crushes it, it’s inspired to plant some seeds and grow some flowers. Another picture book sequence - this one I think is new, I don’t recognise it from the game, expands on this to the machines learning. The machine’s eyes turn yellow, which in the game indicates neutral machines which won’t attack unless you attack them.

A long timeskip montage follows in which we see this machine cultivating flowers...

and before long, it starts a movement among the machines to cultivate flowers. At this point we’re ten minutes into the episode and there’s been almost no sound but City Ruins (Rays of Light) with J’nique Nicole’s beautiful voice, and a percussion track I’m having trouble placing. the only lines were the voiceovers in the picture book sequences, and one machine saying ‘Big Brother...’.

I love this sequence, it’s making much better use of the medium and pacing and really playing to the strengths of the soundtrack and the ruined city imagery. Finally, 10 minutes into the episode, we return to the androids. We’re introduced to a group of Resistance fighters, with low morale. Their leader is Lily from the YoRHa stage play. Here’s what she looked like in v1.2 of the play, as played by Kuroki Masako:

In the play, Lily - much like No. 2 - is a very anxious character. She is infected with the Logic Virus early in the play, and cured by No. 21, which earns the YoRHa the trust of the Resistance members. This gives Lily the ability to use the Machines’ power to create a ‘gravity wave’.

Later, Lily is a member of the group who stay above ground to fight off the Machines. She dies in the battle. In this version, Lily seems to have survived, embittered by the long machine war. I assume that means that in this version Anemone didn’t survive.

Amusingly, the Resistance still continue to use AK-family assault rifles even in this animated version. Also the CG is still kinda jank, but there’s less of it...

2B and 9S come back. Compared to the game, there’s a nice contrast between the relaxed body language of 9S and the stiff 2B...

We also see Commander White saying ‘be careful’, continuing her general sense of helplessly sympathising with the units she repeatedly sends to their deaths.

On the ground, the Resistance - accompanied by Devola and Popola - fight a pitched battle against a large group of machines moving in a big group that’s gathered over the course of the episode. (This is a cute touch - underlining that the machine tactics are more stochastic than planned).

At the same time, we get the picture book about the machines’ ‘Treasures’. This is Treasured Items in NieR Automata. The machines, as we have seen, find individual reasons to live in some specific treasured thing they fixate on in the world.

The battle rampages across the field of flowers we’ve seen early on. First, the charging machines trample the flowers - then 2B and 9S arrive at the last minute to rescue the Resistance, obliterating the whole group of machines in a rain of missiles. Lily, the only member of the Resistance to recognise the YoRHa clearly recognises 2B as the familiar model of No. 2, but of course 2B here is not the same No. 2 as the play. More significantly, Lily knows that the last time the Council of Humanity sent YoRHa reinforcements, it was a suicide mission which swept up all the Resistance members, all for the sake of gathering combat data.

Meanwhile, we see our friend machine blasted into the ravine, where it catches sight of another Lunar Tear; its eyes turn green and it falls in pieces into the ravine. The whole arc of this episode seems to be giving us an understanding of what the eye colours of the Machine Lifeforms mean beyond a convenient indicator of ‘hostile/not hostile’.

And of course, Devola and Popola are here, introduced as maintenance units.

And at the end, we see the cocoon that will later spawn Adam and Eve. In this version, rather than playacting sex and tending to imaginary children underneath it, the machines are reading books...

All in all, a nice episode. It’s necessarily firmly within the themes of NieR Automata, but it makes it feel fresh by shifting the focus. It doesn’t try for action scenes it can’t pull off, and it really gives the atmosphere that was missing in the first episode. And I’m intrigued by what they’re doing with Lily.

Visually... there’s much less bad CGI. Overall, the animation has the same issues as a lot of modern anime (douga that can’t quite keep the shapes consistent, struggling with very defined 3D forms). Most of the Machine Lifeforms in this episode are animated with CG, but it works a lot better than the flight suits and Engels in the previous episode. The backgrounds are... all right, they do a reasonable job of capturing the images of the game, lots of digital textures and I’m pretty sure a lot of them are straight up paintovers of screenshots. All in all it’s solid - the imagery of NieR Automata is pretty far from the norm for TV anime, and there are some nice moments of character animation for the MCs.

Onwards to...

episode 3

OK so first up this weapons trader with all the goofy looking fantasy swords from the game is great...

One of Kainé’s swords is tucked away on the left there!

Anyway this episode opens pretty low-key with 2B and 9S introduced to Jackass, who’s endearingly eager to take them apart. Commander White explains to the Operators (and us) that the disorganised Resistance are considered a disposable shield for the YoRHa on their recon mission. She’s tapping the riding crop the whole time she says this, of course.

2B and 9S set out in a truck(!) on a recon mission. There’s a really adorable shot where the Pods are clinging to the back of the truck.

and an even more adorable one later where 2B is petting Pod 042 after he’s thrown off the back by an explosion...

Not long after we get an action scene, which is setup for a fascinating aside where 9S hacks one of the machines that are imitating the Replicants of Facade, and finds his way into a kind of memory representation of the wedding between the King of Facade and Fyra from NieR Gestalt/Replicant.

As in the game, they make their way into a ruined city block, and find the corpses of YoRHa androids. At this point, we start to diverge and expand on the game. First of all, they find Machine Lifeforms that seem to have produced a white amorphous goo...

...which seems like it must be a precursor to the Adam/Eve project, not to mention calling to mind the imagery from the YoRHa Dark Apocalypse raid series in FFXIV!

Not long after, 2B and 9S are pulled into a huge underground chamber made up of the calcified bodies of Small Stubbies...

...and we do get to see them trying to fuck and raise babies...

Then is the incredible ‘This Cannot Continue’ sequence, and props to the animators, we have this incredibly cool sequence where Adam is first disgorged as a metal skeleton...

before white glowing tendrils construct the fleshy twinkbody we know...

2B and 9S stab him almost immediately and they make it nice and gruesome.

and when Eve is born from his corpse, they make sure you can see that it’s a rib which he’s born from...

Eve pops off way harder than he does in the game, with some classic cross-shaped flares a la Eva...

and 2B and 9S beat a fighting retreat. It’s pretty sick 2DFX. I’m surprised I can’t find anything at all from this show on sakugabooru.

The final puppet show has an adorable scene represented by bowling pins.

All in all, this episode had what I really hoped for from this anime: it’s playful with the source, it’s got some cool sequences that take advantage of being an anime rather than a videogame, and I hope it’s a sign of good things to come. Unfortunately it’s currently on COVID hiatus. I hope the team are all right.

All in all: if you drop NieR Automata ver1.1a from the first episode, I get it, but honestly you’re missing some good shit. I’m much more excited to see where they’re taking this version now it isn’t just doing ‘remember this from the game’ but starting to figure out some identity of its own! It’s inevitably going to be limited by both the conditions of modern anime production and the budget for this project - honestly it’s crazy that we’ve got an anime at all - but I’m glad they’re finding creative spins to put on quite a difficult task (adapting a massive JRPG plot into a single cour of anime).

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 11.7

Beer Birthdays

Gary Fish (1956)

Steve Altimari (1960)

Jason Petros (1977)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Albert Camus; French writer (1913)

Marie Curie; French chemist, physicist (1867)

Al Hirt; trumpet player (1922)

Joni Mitchell; Canadian singer, songwriter (1943)

Morgan Spurlock; documentarian (1970)

Famous Birthdays

Ignaz Brüll; Austrian pianist and composer (1842)

Nellie Campobello; Mexican writer (1900)

James Cook; English explorer, naval officer (1728)

Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux; French author and poet (1619)

Francisco de Zurbarán; painter (1598)

Ed Dodd; cartoonist (1902)

Poppin’ Fresh; Pillsbury Doughboy character (1965)

Madeline Gins; poet and architect (1941)

Billy Graham; television evangelist (1918)

Ibn Hazm; Arab philosopher (994 C.E.)

Dean Jagger; actor (1903)

Norman Krasna; film director, screenwriter & playwright (1909)

R. A. Lafferty; author (1914)

Lorde; New Zealand singer-songwriter (1996)

Konrad Lorenz; Austrian zoologist (1903)

Herman J. Mankiewicz; film director & screenwriter (1897)

Kitty Margolis; jazz singer (1955)

Jan Matulka; Czech-American painter (1890)

Norah McGuinness; Irish painter (1901)

Lise Meitner; physicist, mathematician (1878)

Philip Morrison; astrophysicist (1915)

Lucas Neff; actor (1985)

Lawrence O'Donnell; journalist and talk show host (1951)

Paul Peel; Canadian painter (1860)

Dana Plato; actor (1964)

C.V. Raman; Indian physicist (1888)

Charles Ranhofer; Delmonico’s Restaurant chef, author of “The Epicurean” (1836)

Johnny Rivers; rock singer (1942)

Jean Shrimpton; English model (1942)

Antonio Skármeta; Chilean author (1940)

Ellen Stewart; film director (1919)

Joan Sutherland; Australian opera singer (1926)

Judy Tenuta; comedian (1949)

Leon Trotsk;, Russian theorist and politician (1879)

Lesser Ury; German painter (1861)

Andrew Dickson White; historian (1832)

[khalix-hyetology]

NieR:Automata DLC Music Video x The Sad Ballad of Plato 1728

[surveystodestressme]

72.

5000 Question Survey Pt. 18

1701. How will tomorrow be like today? i don’t know yet 1702. How would you react if a stranger pinched your bottom? i’d probably smack them 1703. When was the last time you went on a date? ummm, jack and i don’t really go on dates anymore.  or at least, we don’t call them dates. 1704. Have you ever ridden a horse? yes. 1706. What is almost over? i don’t know

1707. What should you be doing that you are putting off? calling my college to set up orientation 1708. How much would you have to change physically before you would no longer be yourself anymore? a lot 1709. How much would you have to change mentally before you would no longer be yourself anymore? ^ 1710. Would you rather be famous or notorious? neither honestly 1711. Would you rather have a necklace that’s dripping with diamonds or a blueberry farm? blueberry farm 1712. Could you take first place in a beauty contest? probably not 1713. Who is the biggest hypocrite you know and why? i know a lot of them 1714. Would you consider yourself to be more opinionated or bitchy? opinionated. 1715. How long is it until your next day off? it’s my day off right now 1716. What sound is annoying you right now? nothing at the moment 1717. Imagine you’re taking a vacation with 4 people. Who are they? jack, wyatt, jake,and rebecca 1718. The five of you travel by plane. Suddenly your plane crashes down over snowy mountains. The pilot and the air crew and all the other passengers die. The only way for you to survive is for one of you to get eaten by the others. Who will it be? lol idk honestly maybe wyatt, he’s got the most meat 1719. Anorexia and obesity are two life threatening eating related disorders. Why is it that when it is discovered that someone is an anorexic they are rushed to the hospital, but when someone is obese they are not rushed to the hospital? that’s a good question 1720. Who is your favorite smurf? never watched that 1721. Why do you do things that you know are bad for you? i don’t know 1722. How important is testing to education? i feel like people think it’s really important but intelligence (in my opinion) is not based on how well you can take tests.  1723. What food group do you eat the most of (bread and pasta, meats and eggs and fish, fruits and vegetables, milk and cheese, sugar and butter)? probably meat 1724. Who is the most adorable person you know? some girl i know has a little baby and she’s really chunky and cute 1725. If you had to spend a half hour locked in a dark closet with someone from school or work that you don’t normally hang out with who would you want it to be? uhhh... i don’t know? maybe one of the theater people because they’re all funny and wouldn’t make me feel awkward about the situation lol 1726. How often do you masturbate in a week? recently at least once or twice a week 1727. In the USA people work a full third of the year for the government, due to taxes. How do you feel about this? it sucks 1728. Should people be allowed to use cell phones in their cars? absolutely not.  some people can’t even drive without their phones as a distraction 1729. Have you ever been in the room while a human baby was born? nope. 1730. Have you ever been in the room while an animal baby was born? no. 1731. Did you see the video The Miracle of Life in school? no. 1732. How do you feel about having a baby? don’t want any children 1733. Have you ever had a tooth pulled? no 1734. Who are you waiting for an email/call/note/visit from? my boyfriend. 1735. What are you counting the days until? until i can move out and have my own place with jack 1736. What is the greatest temptation for you? my boyfriend? lol idk 1737. How do you resist it? i don’t

1738. Who is your knight in shining armor? jack ig lol. 1739. If you were walking and someone behind you yelled “HEY YOU!” would you turn around? probably 1740. Do loud noises make you tense? sometimes 1741. Has anyone ever told you that your epidermis was showing? not in those terms lol 1742. Would you rather work or stay home with the baby? work bc i wont have a baby anyways 1743. Would you rather have people agree with you all the time or tell you the honest truth? tell me the honest truth. 1744. Will you/have you gone to your high school reunion? i probably wont bc i wont even be living in the same state hopefully 1745. What do you think of your yearbook picture? it’s ok i guess 1746. Are you more of a hunter or a gatherer? gatherer. 1747. If you ever were to visit Hershey Park, the theme park based on the chocolate candy, would you enjoy going to the spa where you can be treated to a whipped cocoa bath, a milk and honey bath, or simply a chocolate fondue skin wrap? none 1748. If someone asks you to read a poem they wrote, will you really take your time to try and understand what they wrote and tell them what you think or just read it quickly and tell them that its really good? i’m not too good at interpreting poetry, but i’ll try my best 1749. Do you feel that if a coincidence occurs it means something? maybe 1750. Were you beautiful as a child? not really lol 1751. Do you think that it is okay for a homosexual or a woman to become a priest? yeah???? i don’t think it matters either way 1752. Which would you rather give up forever, religion or sex? religion. 1753. What comes to mind when you think of these places: Canada? maple syrup UK? british people USA? bald eagle Australia? kangaroos and giant crabs Germany? hot german women Italy? spaghetti 1754. What does your favorite bumper sticker say? i don’t have any 1755. Have you ever taken a shower with another person? yes. 1756. What bath toys do you have, if any? none lol 1757. Would you rather propose to someone you love or would you rather be proposed to by someone you love? i’d rather be proposed to bc i feel like i’d make it awkward or i’d do it wrong 1758. How can you reject someone nicely? idk 1759. What kinds of diary names make you interested enough to check out the diary? - 1760. What do you think are three common passwords people use to secure their diaries? birthdays, names, or a bunch of random numbers 1761. Pick an object in the room. Give that object a name. lamp - lampy 1762. What is the quickest way to make you blush? compliment me 1763. Do you usually feel that you deserve it when other people compliment you? yeah, ig 1764. If you were to start your own business what kind of business do you think it might be? video games idk 1765. What is one of your pet peeves? bad drivers 1766. What question do you get asked too frequently? do you still talk to the last person you kissed? 1767. You notice a ring is priced $40.00, but the cashier only charges you $10.00. Do you mention this to the cashier? probably not 1768. Could a kiss on the ___ be considered cheating? Cheek? Lips? Nose? Hand? Ear? Neck? if it’s not a family member, then yes.  if my significant other kisses another person ANYWHERE and i find out about it, unless it’s the hand, maybe, i’m not going to be too happy about it and i would expect the same response from him if i did that 1769. Would it bother you if your lover occasionally flirted with others? yeah 1770. How long has it been since you last played truth or dare? it’s been a while 1771. Should people who are living now be obligated to do things that will make the world better for people who will live 100 years from now? not obligated, no 1772. Imagine you have a dream in which someone you care for acts mean to you. Is it possible you will still be angry with this person when you wake up? it’s happened before but no i shouldn’t be bc it’s in my own head not something they actually did 1773. Have you ever left someone a note with a picture in it? If yes, how do you do it? idk 1774. What do you fear more, death or pain? death 1775. Are the questions still interesting this far into the survey? somewhat. 1776. Do you like the cartoon Inspector Gadget? its ok 1777. You know how Gadget wears the same outfit all the time, and his closet is full of outfits that are exactly identical to the one he wears? If your closet was full of just one outfit that you had to wear everyday what would it be like? idk i dont think i could wear just one thing all the time 1778. Would you rather time travel to the future or the past? future. 1779. Would you rather know how the world began or how it will end? how it will end.   1780. Would you rather meet your ancient ancestors or your great great great great great great grandchildren? ancient ancestors bc i know i wont have grandchildren of any kind 1781. Out of these 4 which is most important (1=most, 2= second most, 3 = 3rd most, 4 = least)? Curing diseases such as aids, cancer: 4 Preserving wildlife areas: 1 Ending terrorism: 3 Building colonies in space: 2 1782. In your opinion should every child be entitled to a good education? yeah 1783. What news item are you tired of hearing about? fucking politics. 1784. Speaking of 9/11 the anniversary is coming up. What will you be doing? it’s already passed. 1785. If this were a recipe for you, how would it go? 2 cups: 1 cup: ½ cup: A pinch of: A dash of: Mix well and bake until: Add: Serve: idk man 1786. Which of the following would YOU be more likely to survive: A fall from a 3 story building Driving a car into the water neither lol, i can’t swim very well and i know i wouldn’t survive that fall 1787. What philosophy was manifested in the communist manifesto? idk. 1788. Who is your exact opposite? jack is pretty different from me 1789. Would you rather have serenity or insanity? serenity. 1790. What do these phrases mean? Moulin Rogue: Le voyage sur le bateau: Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir: i have no idea 1791. What is the longest distance you have ever walked? oh i have no idea man 1792. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato believes that beauty truth and justice all basically mean the same thing. What are your feelings about this? ehhhh 1793. How did you first begin to assert yourself as independent from your parents? no more asking their permission for things, having my own car, and eventually moving out 1794. If you had a magic bracelet, would you use it to gain luck, money, health, creativity or love? money. 1795. What would you do if every time you used your magic bracelet something bad would happen to someone else? i wouldn’t use it probably 1796. This is a story about a girl. While at the funeral of her own mother, she met a guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, so much her dream guy she believed him to be that she fell in love with him then and there, although she didn’t even see him after the funeral ended. A few days later, the girl killed her own sister. What is her motive for killing her sister? she's crazy???? 1797. Have you ever intentionally hurt someone’s feelings? i dont think so 1798. What do you think of Franz Ferdinand? don’t know much about him. 1799. What do you think of the band Modest Mouse? never heard of them 1800. What do you think of Morrissey? ^

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 11.7

Beer Birthdays

Gary Fish (1956)

Steve Altimari (1960)

Jason Petros (1977)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Albert Camus; French writer (1913)

Marie Curie; French chemist, physicist (1867)

Al Hirt; trumpet player (1922)

Joni Mitchell; singer, songwriter (1943)

Morgan Spurlock; documentarian (1970)

Famous Birthdays

James Cook; English explorer, naval officer (1728)

Ed Dodd; cartoonist (1902)

Poppin’ Fresh; Pillsbury Doughboy character (1965)

Billy Graham; television evangelist (1918)

Ibn Hazm; Arab philosopher (994 C.E.)

Dean Jagger; actor (1903)

Konrad Lorenz; Austrian zoologist (1903)

Kitty Margolis; jazz singer (1955)

Lise Meitner; physicist, mathematician (1878)

Lucas Neff; actor (1985)

Dana Plato; actor (1964)

C.V. Raman; Indian physicist (1888)

Charles Ranhofer; Delmonico’s Restaurant chef, author of “The Epicurean” (1836)

Johnny Rivers; rock singer (1942)

Jean Shrimpton; English model (1942)

Joan Sutherland; Australian opera singer (1926)

Judy Tenuta; comedian (1949)

[kronecker-delta]

Nier/Nier: Automata Analysis Masterpost

*Note, the views and opinions linked below do not always align with my own. But even in the cases where I disagree about interpretation or think factual mistakes were made, I still found them to contribute a variety novel and interesting viewpoints.

Please peruse them yourself if any sound interesting.

NOTE: SPOILER WARNING FOR ALL GAMES!!!

General Analysis of Nier:

-: Nier: The List

By Zachery Oliver, an examination of Nier and its story from a Christian perspective. Quite interesting. Highly recommended.

-: The Futility of Violence in NieR

By Zachery Oliver, a short essay about the use of violence and how Nier subverts player expectations with its narrative.

-: Weird games for weird people by a weird guy named Yoko Taro

By Ruben Ferdinand, a long and excellent summary of shared themes and concepts of Drakengard, Drakengard 3, and Nier. Highly recommended.

-: In Depth With Drakengard’s World: Language and Magic

By @rologeass​, a quick explanation of Nier/Drakengard’s magic language, its meaning, and the Celestial Language in which it is written. Highly recommended.

-:  Drakengard & Nier - An Evolution of Soundtracks (Youtube Link)

By ValkyrieAurora, this analysis video covers the music of the Nier and Drakengard games. Definitely worth looking at to see how things have changed  and developed over the course of the series. 

-: “NIER” WILL TEACH YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT IDENTITY.

By suduiko, a long and very in depth essay about Nier and the nature of identity as shown by the various characters in game. While the length and nature of this work can be intimidating, I found it to be a very interesting perspective to look at Nier from. Highly recommended.

-: ON NIER: OUGHT A GAME’S WORLD TO BE FUN TO EXPLORE?

By suduiko, a consideration on the ‘open’ world of Nier and how well it works within the narrative of the game itself.

-: THE TROUBLE WITH BODIES: A TRANS READING OF NIER

By Cayla Coats, an extremely interesting take on the characters of Nier. Definitely worth a read. Highly recommended.

Nier: Automata Focused

-: (In)visible Disabilities and Machine Bodies in NieR: Automata:- Plato 1728′s plight in a posthumanist light (Links to Tumblr post)

By @khalix-hyetology​, an analysis of Nier: Automata’s themes from a specific post-human/transhuman theme. A great deal of focus is given to the DLC elements, or at least those that are of narrative importance. Highly recommended.

-: Death, Sex, and Love: A closer look at NieR Automata

By Kyle Campbell, a brief discussion of the relation between sex and death within the narrative of Nier: Automata. 

-: The Hidden Humanity in Nier: Automata’s Fashion

By Caty McCarthy, a deeper look at the meaning of fashion and clothing designs within Nier: Automata. While there are deeper meanings connected with costume design, such as the feathers on 2B’s outfit, this is good start for those interested in exploring the character designs of this game.

-: Nier: Automata and the Illusion of Survival

By Caty McCarthy, a essay considering the central themes of Nier: Automata and how the character stories show this over the course of the game.

-: Ghosts of Humanity: Being Human in NieR: Automata and Xenoblade Chronicles X 

By Kelira Telian, a comparison of themes between Nier: Automata and Xenoblade Chronicles X on the nature of humanity and inhumane inheritors thereof. While I actually agree with some of the conclusions reached in this short piece, I’m not sure if they can be drawn as assuredly as the author does here.

-: The Girls of The Tower-The Unexplained Story of NieR Automata 

By UNKNOWN, a theory on the story of Nier: Automata. Sadly I think this has been mostly disproven at this point by post-game materials. It is none the less interesting to read and does represent a fruitful interpretation of in game events.

-: NieR: Automata – Dynamic Music Transitions and Events | Music Analysis

By Shawn Kays, a analysis of music and its uses in Nier: Automata. Specifically how it emphasizes motion through the game world and the nature of transitions between areas. Full material here at the site’s Youtube channel. Highly recommended.

-: NieR: Automata Analysis

By Hunter Galbraith, a long analysis of Nier: Automata in the context of Yoko Taro’s earlier games. Covers most of the important concepts. The opening section about the relative ‘artistry’ of games seems unnecessary though. Still, quite good for both depth and length of discussion. Highly recommended.

-: NieR Automata meets amazarashi “Deserving of Life” MV Trivia + NieR Automata Technology Analysis

By @rologeass​, an in depth examination of the music video (Youtube link) that came out before Nier: Automata’s release. Quite interesting how much could be discerned even before the DLC elaborated on it. Highly recommended.

-: WHERE ARE THE HUMANS IN NIER: AUTOMATA? 

By suduiko, a meta-narrative analysis of Nier and Nier: Automata. I can’t really say to what extent I agree with the conclusions drawn here, but I do find them interesting to consider.

-: YOKO TARO’S ETERNAL RECURRENCE: TRANSHUMANISM IN NIER: AUTOMATA 

By Kastel, an extremely detailed look at the themes and narrative of Nier: Automata. Probably my favorite critical examination of the game thus far. Highly recommended.

​-: Nier: Automata is a Brilliant Takedown of Drone Warfare and the Escalation of Conflict 

By Michelle Ehrhardt, a very interesting starting point for looking at Nier: Automata. Don’t let the title fool you though, it goes well beyond making comparisons between Androids/Machines and drone weapon systems. Highly recommended.

-: Nier: Automata’s Past Tells The Story of Our Apocalyptic Future 

By Matthew Kim, is mostly a summary/consideration of Nier: Automata’s story.

-: Drakengard Analysis

By Clemps, currently covers all Drakengard games and Nier with Nier: Automata hopefully planned later. Detailed examination of plot, themes, and character arcs throughout Yoko Taro’s games. Highly recommended.

-: NieR: Automata's Secret Meaning

By Strat-Edgy Productions, discusses the ramifications of AI and how that effects the search for purpose... among other things. Worth a view as it covers the game in its entirety.

-: Nier: Automata's Uplifting Existentialism (Story Discussion)

By Super Bunnyhop, comes at Nier: Automata from the perspective of the search for meaning in existence while also considering a Marxist examination. Highly recommended.

-: What You Missed From Nier

By Super Bunnyhop, goes over the plot and narrative of Nier quickly to summarize new comers to the series. Also briefly discusses side content such as the YoRHa stageplay. Highly recommended.

-: Why NieR: Automata Could Only Work as a Game (Spoiler Analysis)

By Writing on Games, a video that explains how the narrative is interwoven with the interactive nature of video games. 

-: Nier: Automata - Story Summary

By ValkyrieAurora, an excellent summation of the plot and events of Nier: Automata. Her channel also has numerous other videos on Nier and Drakengard content and all  are highly recommended as well for in depth considerations on game narrative and characters.

-: Nier Automata Analysis - A Love Story (Spoilers)

By Peahnuts.

-: The Meaning Behind Nier Automata Character Designs - 2B & YoRHa

By Peahnuts, these two videos discuss the specifics of the relationship between two of the main characters, and related elements, as well as the meaning in the costume design of the YoRHa Androids. Highly recommended.

-: NieR: Automata Analysis

By MisterCaption, a three hour video discussing Nier: Automata and most everything in it. While quite in depth, it does come from a newcomer to the series so there are some factual errors here and there, but I enjoyed the new perspective despite that.

(Note: Later deleted and uploaded to a new channel, Link Here.)

-: Thoughts on NieR: Automata

By Jason, a brief overview of the story of Nier: Automata and some conclusions that might be drawn from that.

-: Nier Automata: Introduction and History

By Pete Davison, at Moegamer this goes over the basic history of the Drakengard and Nier games in order to set up more detailed analysis to follow.

-: NIER AUTOMATA: CREATING A GAME THAT IS “UNEXPECTED”, THAT “KEEPS CHANGING FORM”

By Pete Davison, at Moegamer this article looks at the game design choices and how they are a particular figure print of creator Yoko Taro’s sensibilities.

-: NIER AUTOMATA: NARRATIVE, THEMES AND CHARACTERISATION

By Pete Davison, at Moegamer this article focuses on the characters and how they large scale trends on display are part of the narrative and the games own message.

-: NIER AUTOMATA: A GAME BETTER WITH — AND BECAUSE OF — ITS NARRATIVE

By Pete Davison, at Moegamer the last article, and one that posits to consider how important the narrative of Nier: Automata is to its own quality. 

This is a list of numerous sites and articles at Critical Distance for Nier.

Nier Criticism Guide.

Both of these contain links to numerous other short and long discussions on Nier and Drakengard material. Some of which I have linked specifically.

NieR: Automata - Sacrifice and the Meaning of Kindness

By Extra Credits, a focus on mechanics and narrative in regards to Nier: Automata’s ending.

Most Philosophical Game Ever? – The Philosophy of NieR: Automata

By Wisecrack, a discussion of Nier: Automata and the use of philosophical concepts within the game. Mostly centered on what all those philosopher names mean. Recommended.

Character Analysis Specific

-: Design Shop: NIER - Sins Of The Father (Links to Youtube video)

By SugarPunch Design Works, this video looks at the design and animations of Nier (default name of main character) from Nier. Quite interesting and worth a watch if you want to go into detail on Nier’s character design.

-: Design Shop: KAINE, A Delicate F***ing Flower  (Links to Youtube video)

By SugarPunch Design Works,  video looking at the design of Kaine and her place in the story of Nier. A very good and insightful look at the reasons for her striking design.

-:  Design Shop: EMIL & GRIMOIRE WEISS - A Face Worth 1,000 Words(Links to Youtube video)

By SugarPunch Design Works, and the conclusion of this character design look. Going into detail on the last two party members of Nier.

-: The pleas of false people mean nothing: Nier’s sound and enemy design carries a vital message (Links to Tumblr post)

By @revolutionaryduelist​, examines the detail and meaning behind the enemy design of Nier: Automata. Also makes comparisons to the webcomic Homestruck, the validity of which I cannot vouch for.

-: Nier: Automata’s Characters and Themes

By Jason, a short article considering the characters of Automata and how they contribute to the games overall themes and concepts.

-: Nier: Automata, Near Genocide

By Jed Pressgrove at GameBias, a review and short essay analysis of Nier: Automata and how the game’s plot focuses on the nature of persecution and bigotry.

Reviews

(Mostly lesser known reviewers I found interesting.)

-: Nier: Automata (UBGaming)

By UBGaming

-: Nier: Automata Review (Alexxdz)

By @alexxdz.

Let’s Plays

-: Nier Let’s Play (Two Best Friends Youtube Playlist Link.)

By TheSw1tcher, A play-through of Nier with one experienced player and one that has never done so before. Interesting to see how they react to the game’s twists and surprises.

-: Nier Playthrough,

An excellent Nier play-through by @something-very-special on tumblr with numerous discussion on game elements and themes. Definitely worth a look. Highly recommended.

-: Nier

-: Drakengard

-: Drakengard 2

-: Drakengard 3

By the Dark ID, these are complete play-throughs of all games as well as examinations of supplementary material availible at the time. My only complaint is that some of the running gags aren’t that funny (to me personally) and some headcanon ideas have been spread as if they were true. Still highly recommended.

Podcasts:

-: Spoilercast with Mr. Clemps

Featureing the Two Best Friends as well, this is a discussion of Nier: Automata and its story with Clemps.

-: ProZD (With Kira Buckland, 2B’s voice actress)

-: Close Playing

Supplementary Links:

-: amazarashi - “Deserving of Life” featuring NieR: Automata (Links to Youtube video)

-: Timeline of Games

Timeline for the Nier and Drakengard games.

-: Nier2

Fansite with numerous articles and translated supplementary materials cataloged.

-: Fire Sanctuary

Fansite with translated materials and news about Nier/Drakengard games.

-: The Ark

Another fansite that catalogs translated materials and in-game content.

Trailers and Intros:

Drakengard Opening and Alternate Opening

[khalix-hyetology]

(In)visible Disabilities and Machine Bodies in NieR: Automata:- Plato 1728′s plight in a posthumanist light

In [Jacques] Derrida’s terms, it is the blind, the disabled, who “see” the truth of vision. It is the blind who most readily understand that the core fantasy of humanism’s trope of vision is to think that perpetual space is organized around and for the looking subject; that the pure point of the eye (as agent of ratio and logos) exhausts the field of the visible; that the “invisible” is only — indeed, merely — that which has not yet been seen by a subject who is, in principle, capable of seeing all. 

— Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (132)

Embedded and embedding narrative frames assume precisely this self-referential form of form by marking the virtual edges of narrative structure.

— Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems, (94)

Upon Playing NieR:Automata’s DLC, which focused on the machine individual, Plato 1728, I felt that the narrative was engaged with the powerful aspect of disability. It allows the player to take control of a robot who is considered “defective” and does things poorly. Plato 1728 believes that he does poorly in everything, he cannot fight well as when he does his body betrays him, nuts and bolts come off and oil spills. He cannot hold a weapon. Yet, he tries his hardest hoping that he will be accepted and appreciated. 

This does not happen.

What you experience in the gameplay is a first person perspective of what it feels like to be disabled and ostracised for said-disabilities. The game poignantly attempts to show the player the censor and the frustration, alongside the mental trauma, a person with aa disability can face in a ableist society. It does this brilliantly by showing this efficiency prone behaviour and ableism in the lifeforms that invaded Earth. Though they are aliens they have adopted many human like aspects. The other machines tease and ridicule Plato 1728 to the point that he feels alone all the time. No one desires to be his friend and no one seems to care about him. 

Plato 1728 is a horrible dilemma. He was built to be a weapon but he has not of the proclivities and qualities of a weapon. Rather he mentions he abhors violence. Yet, as he is built to fight, he must continue to do so. The machines are all living workaholic existences in which their daily routine is comprised of sparring and maintaining, and building other machines for war alongside taking care of the factory. Some of the machines obviously have consciousness and existential thoughts but this gets stampeded over the nuts and bolts of what they assembly is comprised of. 

We, as the players, are put in the position to play as Plato 1728. It is something that overwhelms us. It is designed to show how inhumane and cruel the machine life routine is. Operating Plato 1728 you notice he glitches and seizes up at times and he cannot move at all. There are system errors shown about as you and Plato 1728 desperately attempt to keep himself composed. Then we are presented with the motor function test. We are in the position of Plato 1728 giving this test. Plato 1728 actually does well. You can, even with his body glitching, get 17-10 rings, which are the objectives of the motor examination. However, then multiple rings come on and off and go away easily and we are given a body that wasn’t either designed to move fast or we do not know how. 

This a crucial part of the narrative. After basically failing the test three times, with an “exceedingly poor” grade, we as players are made to ruminate why the motor function examination suddenly became what it was. Why did the runs suddenly come and go off in such a manner. Why were these tests designed like this. The players are also made to wonder if we were in control of 2B, 9S or A2 would be able to pass a motor examination like this? We probably could. However, in the base game when you start out with a mission directly with tutorials just being on-screen commands you may falter. The prologue is also designed to be 35-40 minutes gameplay that any newcomer can exceedingly fail in as well. 

It is not also a question of machine lifeforms themselves. Before coming to Plato 1728′s narrative, we must finish three coliseums. One coliseum is devoted entirely of machines and you must make 9S choose a machine to battle with. Depending on your level, you get a selection of machines. The thing is you upgrade or you choose a machine based on which level in the coliseum you are, what your skill level is and what the skill level of the machine is — they are all interconnected factors that help you win the tournament in the coliseum. 

Plato 1728, though saying he is a “defective” model, was able to get many rings. It is not his fault the test is designed such a frustrating way that failure seems to be the only option. Even with his disability Plato 1728 tried and succeeded a lot. However, due to the assessment requirements not being met, Plato 1728 is branded as a failure. 

Subsequently, this branding of failure persist. When we are doing combat training we, the players in control of Plato 1728, are shocked when a punch makes Plato 1728 lose both his arms! We can try to evade and move about and do what we can to keep the clock running but Plato 1728 fails. It is not that he is intending to do nothing. He is intending to fight but his body is having issues and no one seems to care and no one seems to assist him with his bodily issues. He is branded a failure. This is not only a desecration of justice but a desecration of life and the game wants you, the player, to feel it, as a machine with disability. 

Plato 1728 then decides, in his loneliness and ostracism, to take care of a doll. The factory is attacked, either by the player as playing one of the protagonists’ androids, and Plato 1728 helplessly watch as the doll he cherished goes up in flames. Feeling traumatised and grief beyond anything, all his pent up sadness came up and he started anyone and anything. When his rage is exhausted, his companions trap him and dispose of him. When we re-enter the factory as another machine, the player sees that some people are shocked that Plato 1728 have had so much power in him that they didn’t realise. Some don’t wish to go into battle, afraid at seeing the destruction that Plato 1728 wrought, some are still thinking he is “useless” and that his model should be stopped while others mourn his downfall and are ashamed at their own behaviours surrounding him. 

In fact, the machine the player is operating comments at his terminal as he has to input data on Plato 1728 goes on to say something like oh yeah, the guy who lost it.

Plato 1728′s consciousness and soul are still alive even if his body is gone. Though he wishes he could have a body again. He comments that the coliseum people are all selfish. The ones were machine are fighting to become stronger, the one where machines are trying to live by rules and the ones where machines are enslaved to be gladiators for android amusement. He says that is he really the crazy one? 

Due to the doll seemingly being the cause of Plato 1728′s madness, dolls when found, are destroyed in the factory now. The players are then shown a psychedelic, gothic music video of a random machine destroying dolls and in the end Plato 1728′s soul reaches out attempting to stop the machine to destroy the doll that looks like 2B but he fails and the 2B doll is symbolically destroyed. 

In my own reading of this DLC and the NieR:Automata game, I found aspects of posthumanism and transhumanism at a clash. My intentions to summarise the events of the DLC is to provide some of my own critical understanding of the game. In the base game, Pascal, 2B and A2 herald empathy and mostly posthumanist aspects in their characteristics. Though Route A follows more of a transhumanist path the characters present show some posthumanist nuances. In the game, the transhumanist agents are 9S and initially, Adam and Eve. 

Transhumanism believes in the augmentation of the human body. It believes that human limits can be “corrected” and transcended. The body is to be a workshop and that workshop perfects upon the body into an ideal type of unit or anatomy in execution. Posthumanism is different; in fact, posthumanism believes more in the imperfections of humans and it rejects the humanist model of ideal human saying there can be no ideal. It considers the value of all living life forms and the systems that interconnect them. It also shows that human bodies can inherently and environmentally differ from each other and that is a good thing. Posthumanism also does not advocate anthropomorphism. 

Bruce Clarke in his book Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems talks about humans as quasi-subjects and quasi-objects. This means they are neither completely subjective markers nor markers of objectification. Humans interact and they are heavily affected and influence by how, what and why they interact with (Clarke 44-45). Clarke also states that humans are biotic creatures and there can be abiotic organisms (Clarke 17). Biotic organism are organisms who can perform autopoiesis. Autopoiesis is the ability of the body;s various parts to organise itself, to keep its integrity but also to allow certain things to change, an example of human genome which does not change but phenotypical components such as hair and eye colour changing. The organisation of autopoietic structures is recursive; unique in its context. Non Autopoietic structures can exist within autopoietic creatures. Clarke states that non-living, non autopoietic organisms are called abiotic. He also states that there are metabiotic structures as well for example consciousness and social and psychical systems that make up society, an example would be media is an abiotic system that influences metabiotic structures like society and biotic humans. 

I talk about autopoiesis and abiotic, biotic and metabiotic structures because these are crucial elements to understand posthumanism. Posthumanism plays a large role in NieR:Automata not only in its embedded narrative style as Clarke would state it, but also as Wolfe would state, it attempts to broaden the self-reflexive criticism of disciplines themselves. Wolfe states that disciplines can keep their integrity, as in autopoiesis, but must understand that there is a multidisciplinary promise to every discipline and that disciplines can evolve. Wolfe follows the second system theory to a bit in that the observer(s) are also scrutinised and called into question or positionality as much as the observation (Wolfe 121). There is a difference to Wolfe between the accurate and the specific (Wolfe 115). Wolfe critiques that disciplines are important that they are specific and not necessarily always accurate as in the universalising way (Wolfe 115-117). Things have context and that context must be taken into consideration. This is important as NieR:Automata also looks a lot on the context of the situation via both its posthumanist narrative style into bioethics and but also through disability studies and trans-species disciplinary actions (Wolfe 141).

Wolfe uses the life of Temple Grandin to talk about the trans-species understanding in that Grandin’s understanding of things in pictures, this hypervisuality within her autistic self which she has to then add language to is both thinking in pictures and allows prosthetics become one with her which are both ahuman or considered nonhuman traits. However her approach has “canonical expression” which includes Renaissance theory of perspective, to Freud’s parsing of the evolutionary sensorium in Civilisation and Its Discontents, through Sartre’s discussion of the Gaze, to Foucault’s panopticon,  and finally to the various modes of electronic surveillance culture.” (Wolfe 130) Wolfe further postulates that there is obviously different ways to thinking that humans have but can be excised (140). He also quotes Derrida’s concept of knowing invisibility as another kind of spatialisation (Wolfe 133). 

The reason I have talked about this is that in the gameplay of NieR’s DLC our narrative focus on Plato 1728 shows many ways of understanding content. The language is not always constructed verbally. The players must level up, become fit and then fight battles in coliseums with different storylines and tangents, and rules and regulations. Plato 1728′s story origins begin with the machine spear which decodes some fragments of his story and this is later extrapolated in the DLC. Plato 1728 is sensitive and kind, communal and intelligent. He has almost all of the understanding of family and familial connections as once stated by 21O independently in the Data Freak quests that androids seemingly lack. Plato 1728 intelligence is differently abled but not all inferior to others and it is not to be taken lightly. When Plato 1728 in grief attacks in a berserk way he is only doing something normal in his condition though normative regulations deemed this to be the progression of him as a failure. 

Plato 1728 is not a failure as he understands that there is lack of justice, a seduction by rules and power in the coliseums and in life in Earth in general. A feeling and understanding he also shares with Emil. Emil is attacked by 9S is losing his mind. Emil calls 9S his “cherished companion” who still must be “punished” because he has done something wrong, obviously, from stealing from him. The player as 9S can defeat Emil in which, in this first form, states that in the end power dominates so much and he says, with reluctance, that 9S can use his room whichever way he prefers. Though, Emil just accedes only because he doesn’t understand what purpose 9S has to do this to him. In a similar way, Plato 1728 does not understand why his companion easily disposed of him instead of coming to his aid.

NieR: Automata uses a very embedded narrative. It uses a verbal embedding, which is a narrative that is horizontal and epistemic (Clarke 100) meaning it uses people in the same timeline such as Emil and 9S battling out within the same time period and context to say some of its story. Then it also has a modal embedding, which is ontological and vertical. That as Clarke expertly puts:

“here the same or different narrators are transported to and thus reframed within different storyworlds — for instance modal borders are crossed in the transit “through the looking glass” from waking to dream worlds, from the present to the past or future, or from physical space to cyberspace.”  (Clarke 100)

When we play as 9S or 2B or A2 we experience the story differently. Swords and hacking tell the story differently. Then there is Route C and D than changes a lot of the narrative setting and climate. The narratives are something, as Clarke puts it, stretching and meets at different viewpoints and that it what makes narratives embedded and autopoietic. They are framed to form something that has integrity but is also perpetuated amongst different disciplines. The modal embedding also goes to mathematics modular group, with the j variant, the function of complex numbers which satisfies a growth condition in the upper plane of a graph and shows the connection between monster group and modular group. 1728 is a number that is the cube of 12 and also part of the j variant. The monster group, or Friendly Giant, being the largest sporadic group in mathematics. The name is embedded into the narrative of NieR Automata thus disciplines evolving, looking at the observer and the observation, keeping the integrity but also going beyond. 

Additionally, many side quests and even the birth of Adam and Eve is a fusion between modal and verbal embedded storytelling. We can see this in both 2B and 9S routes where picture books also tell the story of machines getting consciousness and an identity. Also, we see machines having sex or attempting to in the chasm. It is as if they don’t wish anything to be ex nihilo but to have origin, purpose and an evolution in connectivity. 9S’s trauma is also reflected in quests done for Resistance members when they lose their loved ones. Though 9S’s actions are more severe and a disruption to not only his life but others. 

Going back to Temple Grandin, 9S is someone who espouses humanism and transhumanism a lot. Even when he hears machine talk he keeps on repeating to 2B they meant nothing. He even says that after he is traumatised and going insane. In the Forest, Resource Unit he hears the machine begging him for an explanation to the violence and asking him to just kill them but he almost takes sadomasochistic satisfaction in torturing them and being in denial. To him, only androids can have life. As Wolfe also states that the sciences Cartesian duality of consciousness and cognition is pretty ingrained (Wolfe 116) and 9S is a proof of that. He has selective empathy and he cannot see anyone not abdroid-like to be human. Pascal is an exception because 2B and he had visited him and 9S is just in denial as well to consider Pascal completely living even as there is something disturbing is seeing his memory being wiped. 

9S in Route A ending is accepting of his data being embedded in machines, in a way Plato 1728 was alright in loving a doll. Yet in Route C/D 9S is disgusted to know that their black box does contain the machines’ cores as well. He is angered to know that within him is embedded, in the flesh so to speak, the narrative of machines. This is why it was ironic when sometime ago he told to Pascal that he didn’t have a heart seeing their autopoietic structures are similar in detail. 

Similarly, Adam and Eve killed the aliens feeling they were too “plant-like.” This alone becomes at first their justification. They so are obsessed in bettering themselves in some mythical ideal way that they wish to even dissect humans to achieve this goal. It is noteworthy, that 9S is selectively horrified by this yet he too decides to dissect machines or remnants of YoRHa later on. N2, the machine in the tower, programmed to fight the enemy, felt they must keep the androids alive and manipulated the coding of machine s which help make machines like Adam and Eve and Pascal. Though, they didn’t really know if such machinations would bring forth what it did thus they are killed by their own transhumanist consciousness in a way. 

Empathy is not relinquished by A2 or 2B. Like Plato 1728 who signifies that invisibility, as in his own thoughts and emotions and different abledness, is a form of spatialisation, we can see that in these individuals as well. A2 opens up to Pascal and shows him kindness and empathy. She starts treating him as an equal and is heartbroken to erase his memories. When she fights Emils and tries to help Emil she actually calls him “kid” and wishes to protect him. 2B hearing machines feels terrible about injuring and killing them. That is why Route A ending was also a trans-species ending where 2B understands and accepts the machines’ souls and consciousness. It takes almost death for 9S to do this in Route C/D and he also falls like an angel from heaven. A hero who becomes a brutal villain due to trauma, idealism and grief. A2 already accepts this as in a way her ending shows her need to reunite with her old comrades, Pascal and the village’s lost children. 

The True Ending, reaches out and embeds both the old beginnings and a prospect of evolution. This is semiotically and semantically shown with the Pods but also the different endings that were possible showing that the future, open but still with some integrity and organisation, is not set in stone but growing and evolving. Plato 1728 also sends the player a mail thanking them for reading about his life and looking at it. This brings back the posthumanist term of the observer being observed and visa versa. 

In conclusion, The transhumanist and posthumanist conjugate with trans-species elements and disability studies in NieR:Automata. This is done expertly through various intermeshed narratives. The game attempts to make players embed both storytelling and the codex for change within them. Thus it generates new knowledges and a sense of hope even when the story and game ends. It is interesting to play a game as such that takes into context and spatialization/specialisation that individuals do not need to look human and androids can very well be more than standard AI and machines can evolve into their own beings. 

Sources:

         Clarke, Bruce, Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

        Wolfe, Cary What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)

[mcmansionhell]

McMansion Hell Does Architectural Theory (Part 3): British Palladianism

Hello Friends! Today we’re going to talk about a rather short-lived movement in late 17th, early-18th century architecture: British Palladianism, which is v “Palladio is great and I, an aristocrat, will only pay you if you design in reference to his style.” Of course it goes deeper than that, so, let’s begin! 

Background

In previous installations of this series, we’ve talked about the Italians and the French, but what the heck was happening in Britain all this time? Well, the answer is:

Seriously. The dang Brits were at war all the time - colonializing everything, sinking all of Spain’s ships, creating their own cool church bc their king wanted a son etc. 

Because of all this dang war, architecture in Britain for a long time was a messy hodgepodge of stylistic elements. Examples range from Henry VIII’s Windsor Castle Gatehouse (OG Tudor, though ostensibly Gothic) to the more classically-oriented but still rather Gothic Old Somerset House (completed in 1552) (demolished).  According to Mallgrave’s Architectural Theory (a great anthology), most of the classically inspired elements on pre-17th Century British buildings can be traced to Italian or French artisans. Oh well. 

Early English Classicism (Late 17th Century)

It wasn’t until the 17th century (v late) that classicism became a big deal in England. The first real-deal English classicist was the badass-ly named Inigo Jones, who actually went to Italy for a year (1613-14) where he encountered the work of Palladio for the first time -- which, needless to say blew his damn mind. Jones became the first British architect to have designed buildings in accordance to Vitruvian teachings and classical proportions.

The Dude Jones got into architecture through a weird angle: he was first a prominent set and costume designer for several English theatres. His Italian journey proved fruitful for him career-wise - many of the higher-ups were impressed with Jones’ knowledge of Italian aesthetics, and he was shortly appointed as the Surveyor to the Prince of Wales, before hella upgrading to being Surveyor of the King’s Works in 1615.

Jones’ earliest known architectural work (appropriately called Queen’s House), built for James I’s wife, Anne (who died before it was finished), was the first ever classically styled building in England. I mean, it’s great - just look at it. 

Photo by Bill Bertram (CC-BY-SA 2.5)

While Jones would go on to design a smattering of buildings, a great deal of his work was lost both in the English Civil War and in the 1666 Great Fire of London. Despite these minor setbacks, Jones’ is still considered to be among England’s greatest architects whose influence would span two centuries worth of British architectural technique.

Get it? It’s lit? Because half of his stuff got torched? I’m sorry.

As far as architectural theory goes during this era of budding classicism, the closest clue we have is the work of Henry Wotton, the British ambassador to Venice, who got so hellaciously sloshed on Italian architecture while he was there that he decided to write a book about it called The Elements of Architecture (1624), outlining his special interpretation of classical architecture. 

Wotton’s book was mostly a translation of Vitruvius with a little bit of Renaissance thought (a la Alberti and Palladio) thrown in. The most well-known snippet is his translation of the Vitruvian triad as “firmness, commodity, and delight” - an architectural catchphrase that often finds its way into contemporary architectural histories, though more accurate translations have been proposed:

Change in this line of thought came with Jones’ later successor, Christopher Wren. Unlike Jones who was rather rigorous in his classicism, Wren was a bit more...capricious. In fact, he even built in the Gothic style at the end of his long career (the dude built 45 churches alone) - a move that would have likely put Perrault and Blondel both in an early grave. 

Dude doesn’t even need the sunglasses, he’s throwing so much shade in this pic.

Wren’s ideas about architecture, encapsulated in his Tracts on Architecture (1670s) are varied. In Tract I, Wren opens up with the ballsy af statement: “Architecture has its political Use,” - that is, buildings form the national identity of a country and inspire patriotism amongst its citizens. This itself is a hot take, but it gets even hotter.

Like Perrault, Wren’s ideas about beauty are split into what he calls “natural” and “customary” beauty. Natural beauty consists of geometry, aka Proportions, following in the Platonic tradition® of an absolute beauty or harmony, inherently pleasing to all of us. Customary beauty, however, is more vague - Wren describes it as: “the use of our Senses to those Objects which are usually pleasing to us for other Causes, as Familiarity or particular Inclination breeds a Love to Things not in themselves lovely.”

Basically, we like certain things for some dumb reason like feelings and stuff.

In his second Tract, Wren gripes about architecture being “too strick and pedantick.” This makes sense, because Wren was really into blending a variety of interesting styles together, which was perhaps problematic to some.

Enter the Moralists

One person who was particularly sick of Wren’s sh*t was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who, in addition to being an Earl, was also a writer and philosopher. (He was notably taught at a young age by none other than John Locke, the guy you learned about in Civics class once.)

Shaftesbury hated (!!!) the Baroque stylings of Wren’s late work, as well as the next generation of architects including John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, deeming the pair’s Baroque-leaning Blenheim Palace “a new palace spoilt.” In fact, he wrote a very amusingly scathing essay in 1712 basically saying that Britain was literally *THE BEST* at all of the other arts except for architecture, after which he proceeds to take a huge dump all over the architecture of the day.

Photo by Derova, (CC-BY-2.0)

Shaftesbury tried to sniff out a philosophical basis for Platonic thought regarding absolute beauty and harmonic proportions. What he came up with is essentially moralism, claiming that in order to be able to perceive the naturally good and beautiful ideas in art, one must themselves be naturally good and beautiful on the inside.™ Good taste comes from good inner resolve® to be true to what we know is true beauty and not be swayed by the evils of fashion™ blah blah blah.

The Height of British Palladianism 

This line of thought continued within what was now deemed British Palladianism (a movement whose discourse consisted mostly of wealthy Earls tutting at each other). British Palladianism saw several architects (Colin Campbell, Nicholas Du Bois, and William Kent, specifically) launch their own careers by releasing translations or new editions of works by Vitruvius, Palladio, and Jones, respectively with some pithy bits in the introductions haranguing the “ridiculous mixture of Gothick and Roman” of the previous generation thrown in for good measure.

Like all movements, the Palladian movement had its own shadowy figurehead, who funded the work of several of the architects working in the 1720s - Richard Boyle, Third Earl of Burlington.

Burlington was extremely wealthy, and spent most of his time being a total dilettante architect, traveling to Italy to collect manuscripts of Palladio and the like. In fact, Burlington fired Colin Campbell (the English Vitruvius!!) from working on his Piccadilly Villa because apparently Campbell’s classicism was **just not pure enough** for the good Earl, who decided he should just build his damn villa himself.

Burlington’s ruthless aesthetic commitment had a huge impact on the contemporary architects of the day, most of whom he fired. Of the ones he did not fire (aka he did not hire them in the first place), Robert Morris, the most prolific writer of the Palladian movement, is perhaps the most significant. Morris’s work chronicles not only the dawn and spirit of the movement but also its decline.

Morris’s 1728 essay “An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture” is about exactly what you would expect:

(((Tutting intensifies)))

The essay of course devolves from tutting critique to legit 17th century fanfiction:

I-Inigo-sama!!! <3

The End of an Era, I Guess

Jokes aside (yours truly used to ship historical figures back in my 7th grade fanfiction days and is not proud), Morris would take a rather different tone in 1739, in an essay commonly cited as a hint to the movement’s end, “An Essay upon Harmony.”

This essay breaks away from the Platonic ideas of absolute beauty, and instead breaks beauty up into several different categories - a relativist aesthetics coming from a contemporary movement (mostly in landscape architecture) called the picturesque, or picturesque theory, which will be the subject of next week’s post.

“In Harmony,” writes Morris, “there are three general Divisions, which may be distinguish’d by the Terms, Ideal, Oral, and Ocular.”

The Ideal is of course numbers and, duh, proportions. Oral harmony is how things are related to each other, with a v Plato allusion to musical harmony. Old news, right? 

But it’s Ocular harmony that offers a glimpse into what will ultimately be a much more powerful movement, spanning (serious, not dilettante) philosophy, art, and of course architecture: the picturesque and the sublime, supported by John Locke & Co.’s empiricism (but we’ll get to that).

Ocular harmony is the harmony of nature in its natural state - both “Animate” (animals, insects, also beauty and perfection, apparently) and “inanimate” (hills, woods, valleys, scenery - “noble, rural, and pleasing.”)

Morris’ ideas are ones of subjectivity, blind sensation to what is and is not lovely, rather than dictated ideas of aesthetic morality. He later goes on to say that in architecture, “The Proportion should be with respect to the Situation; the Dress, Decoration, and Materials should be adapted to the Propriety and Elegance of the Situation and Convenience…”

If that’s not the antithesis to Burlington’s objective classicist purity, I don’t know what is. And so, the bell finally tolls on British Palladianism.

Photo by Chris Nyborg, (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

I hope you enjoyed this bit of (admittedly long-overdue) tutting. Stay tuned for Wednesday’s Maine McMansion, and next Sunday’s installment where I trash talk a bunch of dudes who are way too into gardens.

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store - 30% goes to charity.

Copyright Disclaimer: All photos without captioned credit are from the Public Domain. Manipulated photos are considered derivative work and are Copyright © 2017 McMansion Hell. Please email kate@mcmansionhell.com before using these images on another site. (am v chill about this)

[melbynews-blog]

Wie verkauft man die Leiche?

Neuer Beitrag veröffentlicht bei https://melby.de/wie-verkauft-man-die-leiche/

Wie verkauft man die Leiche?

Wir sprechen weiter über den Buchberuf. Wir haben bereits Texte über Leser und Büchersammler veröffentlicht. Heute werden wir über Buchhändler sprechen – der Hauptberuf, der mit dem Buchgeschäft verbunden ist. Wir erzählen Ihnen, wie der Buchhandel mit all seinen Mythologien und Mechanismen erfunden wurde: von den Salons mit den Lesesälen bis zum Büro auf der kaputten Dorfstraße.

Die Geburt der Technologie: von der Bibliothole zu Wikileaks

In der Antike wird Buchhandel erstmals im 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Erwähnt. e. der Historiker Xenophon und der Komiker Aristophanes. Buchhändler-Bibliopole (Bibliopole) arbeiteten nicht nur in der athenischen Polis, sondern auch weit über ihre Grenzen hinaus in den griechischen Kolonien. Der Schüler von Plato Hermodor, der seine Schriften in Sizilien gehandelt hat, ging sogar in das Sprichwort: "Er verkauft Reden über die Hermodor-See." Nach einigen Quellen bedeutet das Sprichwort Fleiß in der Verteilung der Bücher, nach anderen – zu locker und nicht ganz ehrlich Buchhandel.

Die Namen einiger römischer Buchhändler sind dank der Epigramme von Martial bekannt. "Gehen Sie zur Bank Zweitens, gehen Sie, dass die Wissenschaftler von Luke freigelassen werden, die Welt hat die Schwelle überschritten, der Pallas-Markt ist vergangen …" "Sie verlangen alles von mir als Geschenk an Sie, Quint, meiner Bücher. Ich habe sie nicht: sie werden vom Buchhändler Trifon verkauft. "

Aber der systemische und regulierte Buchhandel in Europa beginnt erst mit dem Aufkommen der Druckerpresse in der Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts. Die Verbreitung gedruckter Bücher hat nicht nur rasch an Dynamik gewonnen, sondern auch Vermarktungstechniken gewonnen: Abonnementverkauf, Handel durch Kommissare, Vorbestellung, bibliografische Beratung, Buchdruck, Buchlotterien

Parallele Marktentwicklung: Das Buch wurde sehr gelesen oft wieder in den Verkauf – es gab keinen klaren Unterschied zwischen dem Handel mit neuen und gebrauchten Waren. Verkäufer-Kenner seltener und "beshnyh" Bücher wurden "Second-Hand-Bücher" genannt. Das französische Wort bouquin aus dem flämischen boeckin (ein kleines Buch) wurde ursprünglich halb verächtlich als das schäbige Buch bezeichnet.

Seit dem 16. Jahrhundert erstreckten sich lange Reihen von Second-Hand-Läden und Tabletts entlang der Seine. Es ist kein Zufall, dass die Pariser die Seine als Fluss bezeichnen, der zwischen zwei Bücherregalen fließt. Die Besitzer von Buchhandlungen haben zunächst spontan Bajonette gehandelt und in den Antiquariaten skrupellose Konkurrenten gesehen. Der Königliche Erlass von 1577 setzte Buchhändler mit Dieben ein. Ein paar Jahre wurde das Gesetz weicher, aber nur zwölf Antiquariate durften handeln, und nur an genau bestimmten Orten. In Frankreich wurde die Tätigkeit des Antiquariats 1822 vollständig legalisiert.

Etwa um die Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts, fast zeitgleich mit den Antiquariaten, entstand der Antiquariatsbuchhandel in Europa. Im engeren Sinne der Antike (lat. antiquus – "alt, alt") – Spezialist für antike Bücher und Handschriften. Der Antiquar kombinierte den Beruf eines Sammlers mit der Arbeit eines Buchhändlers und der Arbeit eines Wissenschaftlers, sammelte in enger Zusammenarbeit mit Universitätsprofessoren gewissenhaft Informationen über jedes Buch, erstellte ausführliche Beschreibungen, studierte die Geschichte des Bibliothekswesens.

Deutschland gilt als Geburtsort des Antiquariats, die ersten Kataloge alter Bücher erschienen auf den Leipziger Messen und Frankfurt. Im 17. Jahrhundert erschien der Begriff "Colporte" (Fr. Portier à Spalte – "auf dem Rücken oder am Hals getragen" – eine meist preiswerte Zeitung und Buchhändlerin auf dem Land. Sie finden es am Halskorb mit einem Band – daher der Name. Es gab auch Geldgeber – "Schreier", die auf den Straßen und Plätzen faule Käufer winkten. Sie verkauften hauptsächlich religiöse Literatur und alle Arten von Konsumgütern wie kleinformatige Broschüren auf blauem Papier, die 1602 von Jacques Odo, dem Verleger von Troyes, herausgegeben wurden. Gleichzeitig mit dem Verkauf von Büchern kündigten sie Neuigkeiten an, zeigten Zirkusnummern, zeigten Tiere oder unterhielten das Publikum mit lustigen Geschichten.

Wie bei jedem Geschäft hatte der Buchhandel eine Schattenseite. So wurde der englische Verleger und Buchhändler Edmund Curl (um 1675-1747) für Untergrundpublikationen von Pornographie, Scharlataner Arztberatung und lügnerischen Flugblättern bekannt. Er begann seine Karriere mit Buchauktionen und setzte seine Aktivitäten in seinem eigenen Geschäft fort. Er drängte unautorisierte Ausgaben, "links" Auflagen (vorbei an Verlegern und Autoren) und "gebrochene" Biografien – ohne das Wissen der Angeklagten und mit skandalösen kompromittierenden Fakten. Das heißt, er war Piraterie und war der Vorgänger von Wikileaks. Für die Veröffentlichung des unanständigen Buches "Der Eunuchismus der Parade" wurde er von Daniel Defoe geschlagen und nannte solche Veröffentlichungen "Curlismen" (Curlism). Der schamlose Curl verwandelte Zensur in Werbung und veröffentlichte einen Katalog seiner Bücher mit dem Titel "Keralism Paraden".

Neffen, Pfeile, Araber

Aber wie entwickelte sich das inländische Buchgeschäft? Die erste schriftliche Erwähnung des Buchhandels in der Alten Rus ist das Leben von Grigory Pechersky (1120). Die Felder der Manuskriptbücher speichern eine Menge Eigentumsrekorde über den Weiterverkauf. Einer der frühesten: "Dieses Buch zwei Minei Ivan Ivan Charitonov verkauft Ivan Danilov Sohn eines Schreibers und legte seine Hand."

Der erste Buchladen erschien in der St. Petersburger Gostiny Dvor im Jahre 1714. Der Buchhandel ist mit der Gründung der Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste verbunden, in der 1728 die Buchkammer eröffnet wurde. Aber vierzig Jahre später gab es in Russland nur einen Buchladen. Der Binnenhandel verlor viel besser in Übersee – mit Vorlesungsräumen (Lesesälen) und sorgfältig ausgewählten Publikationen in verschiedenen Sprachen. Und die Adligen lesen meist ausländische Publikationen.

Tavik Frantisek Shimon. Paris Antiquariate, ca. 1907

Foto: tfsimon.com

Sie erhielt nicht die erwartete Unterstützung und handelte mit einem neuen, "zivilen" Buch, das unter Peter I. anstelle des Kirchenbuchs in Zivil gedruckt wurde. Ein paar gebildete Leser aus dem gemeinen Volk bevorzugten alte gedruckte "Cyrill" -Bücher. Im nächsten Jahrhundert wird Misstrauen durch Prahlerei ersetzt werden: Besitzer von seriösen Geschäften, wie Pavel Shibanov oder Sergei Bolshakov, werden nur handgeschriebene und früh gedruckte Bücher verkaufen, die Bürger, die "Staatsbürgerschaft" ausüben, verächtlich betrachten.

Der russische Zweitbuchhandel entsteht um dieselbe Zeit und europäisch. Der erste Nachweis von gebrauchten Büchern findet sich in Stoglav (1551) und ein Nachwort zu Ivan Fedorovs Erstdruckwerk The Apostle (1564). In den Beschreibungen der Moskauer Druckerei erschien der Begriff eines Second-Hand-Buches, das aufgrund fehlender Editionen des Druckgerichts selbst der Nachfrage von Klöstern und Kirchen nach Verhandlungen entsprach.

Per Dekret von 1721 wurde der Handel mit alten gedruckten Büchern verboten – ohne Korrekturen entsprechend den Bestimmungen der Kirchenreform. Zehn Jahre später, die erste offizielle Erwähnung der Täter dieses Dekrets – Stepan Fedotov und Grigory Chern, die sich mit dem Aufkauf und dem Weiterverkauf von Büchern aus zweiter Hand beschäftigten. Die Antiquariate waren lange in Verruf geraten. Adolf Plushars enzyklopädisches Wörterbuch (1835) gab ihnen eine sehr schmeichelhafte Definition: "So werden kleine Ladenbesitzer genannt oder verändert, die Tauschhandel, Geiz, Verkauf oder Tausch von alten, gebrauchten Büchern betreiben."

Zwei Jahrhunderte später beginnt sich das antiquarische Buchgeschäft in Russland zu entwickeln , als in Europa. Der Pionier war Ignatiy Ferapontov, in dessen Händen fast alle russischen Bücher der vorpetrinischen Zeit zu Gast waren. Der berühmte Laden von Ferapontov befand sich in der Nähe des Spassky-Tors des Kremls.

Die Antiquare praktizierten das Prinzip des "Kaufs durch den Käufer" oder "auf Abruf": Das Buch hatte zwei Preise – weniger zum Verkauf und mehr, wenn gezielt gesucht wurde ". Die Diskrepanz in den Preisen war mindestens drei Mal und das einzige Maß des Wertes – die Aufregung des Suchenden. Die Sammler mochten Antiquitäten nicht sonderlich, weil sie die Marktsituation genau kannten, die bibliophilen Feinheiten verstanden und sich nicht saufen ließen. Sie wurden normalerweise in extremen Fällen angesprochen, wenn es sonst keinen Weg gab, das richtige Buch zu bekommen.

Die Schlüsselfiguren bei der Entwicklung des russischen Buchhandels waren Alexander Smirdin und Nikolai Novikov. Hochachtungsvoll genannt "König der Schriftgelehrten", glaubte Smirdin, dass "das Kapital die lebende Seele der russischen Literatur werden muss". Novikov sah den Buchhandel als die wichtigste Voraussetzung für die Bildung der Menschen, für die er eine wirklich titanische Anstrengung unternahm: Er kommunizierte mit allen Buchhändlern, gab Kredit- und Kreditbücher heraus, führte Kommissare und förderte den Buchhandel in den Dörfern

Aber im vorletzten Jahrhundert, große Buchhandlungen Immer noch ein bisschen – das Verhandeln war hauptsächlich in Geschäften und Hausieren. 1885 gab es in St. Petersburg 327 Buchhandlungen und in Moskau 224. Die Stände dienten gleichzeitig als Handelsplatz und Lagerhaus, bildeten in Buchreihen getrennte "Buchreihen", die sich entlang von Alleen und Böschungen erstreckten, die sich spontan auflösten. Aber das war das goldene Zeitalter der russischen Second-Hand-Bücher.

Die Verkäufer von Büchern wurden kollektiv als Lesezeichen bekannt. Spotter verwendeten Bücher zu Hause, die Elstern genannt wurden – von dem Namen, der über seine Umhängetasche geworfen wurde – "Hemd" oder "Hemd". Sie bedienten eine Elite-Leserschaft und gewannen Buchraritäten und engstirnige Publikationen. Sie konnten politische und pornografische Publikationen erhalten, die durch Zensur verboten waren, und verachteten das "dunkle" Produkt der Druckerei nicht.

Eine besondere Kaste, und in der Größe der ganzen Armee gab es "Pfeilspitzen" – kleine Buchhändler, die die Basare und Häuser durchstöberten, Extraktion in den Tavernen, schnell und schnell sortiert und an einen größeren oder Fachhändler übergeben: an welche Zeitschriften, an welche Romane, an wen die Bildungsliteratur, an wen sind seltene Editionen. All das für Witze und reichlich Trankopfer. Jeder hatte einen klangvollen Spitznamen: Nikolka Tadpole, Pashka Kalbsbeine, Vanya Another Kopf, Pashka Broken Nase, Petya Thistle … Die großen Kaufleute – zum Beispiel der berühmte Ivan Kolchugin aus der Nikolskaja Straße – hatten ihre eigenen Mitarbeiter "Shooter"

Es gab auch " Neffen "- Markthändler hausieren. Unter den St. Petersburger Antiquariaten, den sogenannten "Schützen", die in Buchauktionen handelten, und Straßenbuchhändlern waren in Petersburg aus der Hand als "Araber" bekannt. Unter ihnen gab es viele Analphabeten, die jedoch die Arbeit, in der Mobilität am meisten geschätzt wurde, Geschäftssinn und gutes Gedächtnis nicht störte.

Ein separater Bezirk im Laden bestand aus "kalten" Antiquariaten – Buchhändlern, Buchhändlern an Orten von Massenfeiern, Militärlager, manchmal reichen Häusern wie private Händler ähnlich. Um sie zu lernen, war es möglich, auf einer hohen Kappe oder einem Truff, einem langen Mantel und einer großen Segeltuchtasche mit einem Loch in der Mitte, eine mobile Buchhandlung zu werden. Die Nachfragetrends kennend, konnten sie sogar dem anspruchsvollen Buchliebhaber etwas Interessantes bieten, das in der müßigen Menge zielsicher kalkuliert wurde.

Eine Besonderheit von "kalten" Antiquariaten: Unternehmen: sie machten gemeinsame Einkäufe und standen nicht miteinander in Konkurrenz. Für einige war es etwas wie ein Fangfang, Saisonarbeit für andere – ein konstanter Verdienst, für den dritten – und überhaupt für die Art zu leben. Der "kalte" Antiquariatsmann Semen Andrejew, Spitzname Humboldt, ging dank des bekannten Nekrassow-Gedichts "Der Buchhalter und der Bibliograph" in die Geschichte ein.

Sutton Nicholls. Der Auktionator, verkaufte die Bücher eines erhängten Arztes in London, um 1850. 1700

Foto: public domain

In den Provinzen haben sich Buchhändler – Käufer, die auf der Grundlage der aktiven Korrespondenz mit Lieferanten und der Kundschaft der Hauptstadt arbeiteten, umgedreht. Nachdem er das angeforderte Buch erhalten hatte, kaufte der Käufer es dem Kunden, oft ohne selbst etwas verkaufen zu müssen. Es kam zu Anekdoten: Ein Kunde aus St. Petersburg oder Moskau, der neben einem großen Schreiber wohnt, rühmte sich "mit unglaublichen Schwierigkeiten" das extrahierte Volumen, das genau von demselben Schreiber gekauft wurde. Das Buch – meist Druck – kam zu den Dorf- und Landbewohnern Hausierer, Mitarbeiter und Büros. Sie arbeiteten häufiger unter den Bedingungen der Sklaverei, die den Secondhand-Händlern der Stadt unterstanden. Nur einer der berühmten Ladenbesitzer, Vasily Loginov, wurde von bis zu 500 Büros bedient.

Streuner und Straßenbuchhändler nutzten alle möglichen kommerziellen Tricks und Werbebehälter, um Gewinne zu steigern: Sie verkauften das Produkt in einer bestimmten Menge – "strickt", Gewicht – "von Puds" »; hinzugefügt zu den notwendigen Veröffentlichungen nicht beansprucht und Müll – "im Gegenzug". Die listigsten und künstlerischsten arbeiteten paarweise "am Tresen" – sie porträtierten die Konkurrenten, entzündeten die Aufregung und füllten den Preis.

Im Schattenbuchgeschäft unterschied sich Russland ein wenig von Europa. In den Läden unter dem Boden verkauften sie verbotene Publikationen. In den dunklen Gassen der Buch-Wagemutigen verbot das gleiche Verbot, Kunden zu begraben. Es gab einige Kuriositäten: manchmal wurden Käufer mit Polizeischnüffeln behandelt.

Die Buchhändler hatten ihren eigenen Jargon: "Leiche" – Bücher, die keine Verkäufe haben; "Stale Jungs", "gefrorene Kolben" – lange verkaufte Bücher; "Schönheit" – ein luxuriös gestaltetes, aber uninteressantes Buch; "Elefant", "Ziege" – ein langsames, dickes Buch; "Ferkel" – ein Buch in Pergament gebunden; "Hähnchen" – stark divergierende Broschüren … Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts tauchte im Stadtbuchhandel eine neue Gestalt auf: ein reisender Verkäufer: ein Reiseagent, der Kataloge mit Hauszustellung verkaufte. Die Verteilung von Druckerzeugnissen in Wohnungen wurde schön als "Kolportazh" bezeichnet, was wiederum dazu führte, dass man sich an die Träger von vor dreihundert Jahren erinnerte. Und in den Dörfern gingen die Büros weiter, die nach dem berühmten Bibliographen Nikolai Rubakin "das Buch in solche verhärteten Ecken schleppten, wo kein anderer Buchhändler es hinschleppt."

Im Land des siegreichen Sozialismus, wo der Hauptdichter "wollte" zum bajonettgleichgestellten Stift ", der in die militärische Hauptmetapher des Buchlesers eingebaut wurde, führte alle die gleichen Funktionen durch. "Das Buch ist eine Muschel, ein Buchmacher von Soldaten" wurde auf Boris Iogansons berühmtem Agitationsplakat gedruckt. Nun, der Buchhandel in der Sowjetunion war für eine millionenschwere Buchproduktion geeignet. Lediglich die Antiquariate und Geschäfte zählten mehr als 4.500

Secondhand-Buchhändler in der UdSSR nannten Ladenarbeiter, die sich auf gebrauchte, seltene und antike Werke der Presse spezialisierten. "Kalte" Antiquare wurden in der Nähe der Buchhandlungen als selbständige Kaufleute oder als Gebrauchthändler bezeichnet. Commodore-Experten nannten sie immer noch "Abfangjäger".

Heute verschwindet oft hinter dem soliden Namen "Vertreiber eines bekannten Verlages" der ehemalige helle und rotierende Bücherboy. Er bietet Fahrgästen elektrischer Züge, Büromitarbeitern, Müttern auf Spielplätzen Bücher an, ist aber oft eine passive Person: er wird bockig entlassen, manchmal werden ihm Bücher vorenthalten, manchmal sogar geschlagen. Auch der Kauf von Büchern im digitalen Zeitalter stellt sich als eine neue Art von Geschäft heraus mit einer besonderen Mission – Menschen vor "Papiermüll" zu retten. Die ganzen Hausbibliotheken werden für die Dekoration von Innenräumen von Cafés, Salons, Landhäusern gekauft. Die Websites von Antiquariaten (die bekanntesten sind Alib.ru und Libex.ru) und Käufer-Großhändler, die die Ausgaben in nur einer Stunde schätzen und dann gleichzeitig Geld ausgeben, werden im Internet multipliziert, wenn der Kunde mindestens hundert Publikationen anbieten kann Für eine komfortable Existenz in der Zeit der Bestände, mit der Umwandlung des professionellen Ladens in eine Aktiengesellschaft, brauchen private Buchhändler ein neues Wörterbuch und eine neue Mythologie. Der Handel wird von spektakulären Begriffen umrahmt, Business-Technologie erhält den Status besonderer kultureller Praktiken. Wie jedoch Orwell zu Recht bemerkte, "werden Syndikate nie in der Lage sein, einen kleinen unabhängigen Buchhändler zu verdrängen, wenn sie den Lebensmittelhändler und den Milchmann vertreiben."

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Achtung! Dieser Artikel wurde automatisch von Russisch in Deutsch übersetzt. Den Original Artikel finden Sie hier: Quelle

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