#Saw one recently where someone posted some ai image and said something like 'i will not be posting this image in the future' | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

junker-town · 3 years

Text

Josh Giddey is the NBA draft pick who almost slipped through the cracks

How Josh Giddey went from being cut by his Australian state team to a potential NBA draft lottery pick.

Josh Giddey knew he was down to his last chance. As he arrived at a multi-day basketball jamboree known as the East Coast Challenge, Giddey was one of 60 youth players competing from the Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia hoping to be selected for the prestigious state team.

State basketball is the pathway to a brighter future in the game in Australia, but it had alluded Giddey to this point. Three times he had tried out for state-level basketball, and three times he had received an email at the end of the event telling him he’d been cut. Only 16 years old and already realizing he was at a crossroads in his career, Giddey was determined not to let it happen again.

He had the benefit of a recent growth spurt this time around that taken him up to 6’8 as a point guard. The added height only accentuated the gifts that always made him stand out: his passing and playmaking, and perhaps more importantly his ability to think one step ahead of the next defensive adjustment. After shining at the camp, the anxious hours waiting to hear if he was selected turned into a quiet confidence.

“I kept promising myself I wouldn’t get cut, I wouldn’t get cut, and the last opportunity I had to make the state team I didn’t get cut,” Giddey told SB Nation. “I finally got that one email I was waiting for.”

Giddey’s life has been in overdrive ever since. After shining at a subsequent national event, he was offered a scholarship by the NBA Global Academy at the Australian Institute of Sport. Giddey moved across the country to Canberra, where he would spend the next 18 months developing his game and his body while competing against peer-aged competition around the world. The accolades he earned at the academy eventually led Giddey to become the first Australian player to be tabbed for the Next Stars program in the country’s domestic professional league, the NBL.

After one season with the Adelaide 36ers, Giddey is now on his way to the 2021 NBA Draft. The same player who couldn’t separate himself from his peers in Victoria only two years ago is now projected as a likely lottery pick.

Giddey is at once on a meteoric rise and still just scratching the surface. He’s one of the youngest players in the draft and has a case as one of the most accomplished given his production in a pro league against seasoned adults. He is still growing into his body and refining his jump shot while already possessing the type of mental processing gifts that can’t be taught. It has been a wild ride to bring him to the precipice of his NBA dreams, but Giddey isn’t the type to get overwhelmed by the moment.

“It’s just good to see the work paying off,” he said.

Photo by Kelly Barnes/Getty Images

Marty Clarke remembers the first time he identified Giddey as a future prospect to watch during his days as a college assistant coach at WCC power Saint Mary’s. A fellow Australian, Clarke was a former teammate of Josh’s dad, Warrick, who enjoyed a long professional career with the NBL’s Melbourne Tigers and had his No. 6 retired by the club. He saw the traits that could eventually make the young guard the type of player Saint Mary’s would one day want to target, but he knew it was going to be a while before they could do so. Giddey was only 12 years old.

“When I first went to St. Mary’s in 2013, I said coach (Randy) Bennett, there’s a kid I want to put on the board but it will be like seven years before we can get him,” Clarke recalls. “He can really pass with his weak hand. He can pass full court, off the dribble, or from penetration. He was kind of doing a lot of that stuff as a 12-14 year old. Now he’s a 6’8 person who can do that.”

Clarke would eventually get his chance to help develop Giddey in a way neither could have anticipated. When the NBA partnered with the Australian Institute of Sport and Basketball Australia’s Centre of Excellence in 2017 to launch the NBA Global Academy, Clarke left Saint Mary’s to take a job as its technical director. Clarke was the perfect candidate as someone who previously had experience as a coach at the Australian Institute of Sport, and now had familiarity with American college basketball.

The same place that had produced almost every Australian player to reach the NBA — Andrew Bogut, Matthew Dellavedova, Dante Exum, Joe Ingles, Luc Longley, Aron Baynes, and Patty Mills among them — was now further investing in its connection to the league. Clarke would oversee all aspects of player development and coaching for the 12 high school-aged players who were offered a scholarship to the academy.

“We have a really good blue print,” Clarke said. “The Australian academy has been here for 40 years. This is what this place has always been doing, producing Olympians and future NBA players.”

The NBA launched academies in India, Senegal, Mexico, China over the last 10 years as a year-round development initiative for elite youth prospects. Australia’s Global Academy takes teenagers from around the world. In its partnership with the AIS, players with the Global Academy live in dorms and attend classes while preparing them for life as a professional athlete. Instead of trying to win as many games as possible and compete for championships like a college team, the main goal of the academy is individual development.

The players at the Global Academy go to school and training six days per week with only Sundays off. In a typical week, players will be put through regular full team practices, as well as smaller group sessions that focus on things like connecting the bigs to the smalls by drilling pick-and-rolls and post entries. There’s shooting and skill training every morning before school, as well as weight lifting three times per week, and mindfulness training. Spliced in with all of that is education on nutrition, physiology, and personal learning like financial literacy and social media courses.

“Our goal here is when they leave here, they have lots of options,” Clarke said. “We make sure they’re eligible for universities. We want to make sure every door is open when they leave.”

The Global Academy also plays games against peer-aged teams, and that’s where Giddey continued to raise his profile. Giddey would lead the academy to the championship at the prestigious Torneo Junior Ciutat de L’Hospitalet tournament in Spain and was named MVP of the event. He followed it up with a strong showing at Basketball Without Borders during All-Star Weekend last year in Chicago.

“His development since he got here has been off the charts,” Clarke said. “Because he missed that state-level development, he skipped up to another level and had a lot to learn. He jumped a stage, really.”

Giddey’s time at the academy had given him multiple avenues to explore on what he should do next. That’s when he faced the next flashpoint decision in his burgeoning young career: Was he better off going to college in America or staying home to play in Australia?

Photo by Kelly Defina/Getty Images

Giddey had a long list of American college basketball programs who wanted him. He had standing scholarship offers from Arizona, Colorado, Rutgers, St. John’s, and more. After one college visit in particular, Giddey felt like he was ready to commit.

“I was 99 percent set on college,” Giddey said. “I took a visit to Colorado sometime in 2020, when I left there after my two-day visit, I was ready to commit there. I was about to commit there but my parents said just wait to we get home and we’ll talk about it.

“So I went home and we started talking to some people and they started talking about the NBL Next Star pathway. I met with Jeremy Loeliger, who is the CEO of the NBL, and they really sold it to me. The way they take care of their kids, the opportunity you’ll get to play against grown men at such a young age, I thought that was better for me personally than going to college to play against other kids.”

On April 16, 2020, at just 17 years old, Giddey signed with the Adelaide 36ers of the NBL. He had become the first Australian to take advantage of the league’s ‘Next Stars’ program, which was originally intended to lure top American prospects who didn’t want to play college basketball. Former McDonald’s All-Americans Terrance Ferguson and Brian Bowen were two of the first signees of the program, but it was a decision by LaMelo Ball and R.J. Hampton to sign in Australia that helped convince Giddey it was the best path for him.

“They surprised everyone with how good they were, especially LaMelo,” said Giddey. “It was good to see because it was something I wanted to do. I wanted to be an NBL player and eventually an NBA player. To see those guys come through gave me the confidence to think I could hopefully do something similar.”

Going from youth tournaments against peer-aged competition to playing against grown men was an enormous adjustment. Giddey struggled with it at first. The ambitious passes that defined his time at the youth level were often becoming turnovers in more meaningful games. He was ice cold as a shooter to start the year, hitting just 2-of-20 shots from three-point range over his first seven games. The biggest issue was playing through contact on both ends of the floor.

“I was struggling with the physicality of the league,” Giddey said of the start to his time in the NBL. “You don’t realize how physical the league is until you actually play against guys that are 35 years old and strong, athletic, and quick. It was just a completely different level to junior basketball. I was playing at a fast pace the whole time. I was rushed, I was nervous.”

He points to his second game as his initial breakthrough, when he finished with 16 points, 11 rebounds, and seven assists against South East Melbourne, and was trusted to take the final shot in regulation. Even though he missed, the 36ers would win in overtime, and Giddey started every game the rest of the season.

Giddey was masterful at times as a facilitator, firing passes to open shooters in the corner with either hand and finding unique angles to get the ball to the big man near the basket. Starting center Daniel Johnson had one of the best seasons of his career at age-33 with Giddey at the controls, and fellow teammate (and former Kentucky big man) Isaac Humphries turned into a dependable scorer, as well. Giddey’s three-point shot also started to come around eventually, hitting 36.7 percent of his shots from deep those first 20 attempts.

“The big thing for me early in the year was I was so down on confidence,” Giddey said. “I was so worried if I missed what people were going to say, what scouts were going to think. There was a point where I spoke to one of my teammates and he told me all of this doesn’t matter. Just shoot every shot like you think you’re going to make it. That was when it switched for me.”

Before season’s end, Giddey had run off three triple-doubles over a four-game stretch and had firmly established himself as a first round NBA draft pick. Given his age and the level of competition, Giddey was remarkably productive: he averaged 10.9 points, 7.4 rebounds, and a league-leading 7.5 assists per game on 51 percent true shooting.

Those numbers stack up reasonably well to what Ball did in the same league a year earlier as 6’8 playmaking guard at 18 years old. Ball scored more, but slightly less efficiently (47.9 true shooting) while their rebound, assist, and steal numbers were similar. It is worth noting that while Ball was often deemed reckless as a lead decision-maker, Giddey’s turnover rate was significantly highly at 23.7 vs. Ball’s 12.4.

Giddey isn’t as flexible and shifty as a ball handler as LaMelo, but the baseline similarities and statistical profiles in the same league, at the same age will be tempting for teams, especially following Ball’s run to Rookie of the Year after being the No. 3 pick in the 2020 NBA Draft.

“To see how (Ball’s) game translated to the NBA, it’s made me feel even better about my decision,” Giddey said.

youtube

The appeal of Giddey for NBA teams starts with his intersection of size and passing. Giddey is an impressive facilitator off a live dribble who will fire passes with either hand while on the move. Against a set defense, Giddey is able to make quick decisions with the ball, and loves to zip a two-handed, overhead pass to his big man in the paint. His interior passing is particularly impressive thanks in part to his ability to leverage his length to find creative angles in tight spaces. The big question for his offensive game will be if he can make opposing defenses respect him enough as a scoring threat to fully unlock his playmaking gifts.

There will be serious questions about Giddey’s athleticism and strength, particularly if he has enough standstill burst to beat his man and force the opposing defense into rotation. Even if Giddey can’t put enough pressure on the rim to be a primary creator, he should be custom-made as a ‘connecting’ piece who can be a secondary facilitator and floor spacer as his jump shot comes around. In Clarke’s eyes, it’s Giddey’s overarching feel for the game that will help him overcome the challenges he sees at the next level.

“He’ll often have quiet first quarters or first halves, and then he’ll have monster second halves,” Clarke said. “He can figure things out on the run, and that’s a skill a lot of players don’t have. He can fix things in game.

“It’s not just feel for the game, it’s feel for the opposition and what they’re trying to do to you. A lot of people have feel for the game when the game is mundane and vanilla. He has feel for the game when it’s chaos going on. He can figure things really quickly.”

As the NBA moves into the pre-draft process, Giddey is widely projected to be taken in the lottery. We had Giddey going No. 14 overall to the Golden State Warriors in our mock draft, while ESPN has him going No. 10 overall to the New Orleans Pelicans.

Giddey’s entrance into the league is also an achievement for the academies the NBA invested in around the world. He’ll be the first male athlete to be drafted into the league after being a full-time academy student. Clarke sees Giddey as the type of player the Australian Institute always dreamed about developing.

“He’s kind of the guy we thought of 30 years ago when we started the program,” said Clarke. “Imagine if we had a whole team of 6’8 guys who are multi-dimensional and can pass, dribble, and shoot, defend multiple positions. We’ll stick one big guy in the middle with four guys like that. Josh is kind of exactly that.

“Coaches always ponder what the future is going to be. I think Josh is what we thought about when I first came here 25 years ago.”

If Giddey embodies the dream of what the AIS always hoped to produce, he also came dangerously close to slipping through the cracks. In the course of just over two years, he has gone from a player who couldn’t make it out of his home state to a possible top-10 NBA draft pick. For a player on such a rapid rise, the next question is the most exciting: how much room to Giddey have to grow from here?

4 notes · View notes

notthatiwilleverwriteit · 5 years

Text

I want to make one thing absolutely clear before getting any further into this: I am not in any way or form saying you are not allowed to ship whatever you want. I am not here to call you Toxic™ or Problematic™. In fact, I get hives when people guilt-trip others because of their fictional ships and make them feel like there’s something wrong with their head. I have many dark ships myself and know how the bashing feels so I would never do something like that to others.

For a long time, I didn’t actually have a real NOTP, and this one was mainly born out of the fans’ reaction to She Li and his recently revealed backstory rather than the ship itself. To me, it seemed like some people took the “easiest” way with SL and MGS’s relationship and jumped straight to romantic love. When, in fact, I find their past and relationship much more complicated.

I liked what OldXian had to say about the matter, actually. Thank you @nira18 for going through the trouble of posting and translating OX’s comments for us. (I’m going to borrow them for a while 🙏) But before that, a few words about what I’ve learned about interpreting during my years as a literature major.

Usually, I have mixed feelings about authors “explaining” their stories because fan-readers often use them to attack other fans’ interpretations that differ from their own and make them less valid. There are actually three major players and powers when it comes to interpreting: the author, the text itself, and the reader. You can study texts from any of those major perspectives, but you’d be surprised how little the author’s intentions weight when reading and interpreting. In fact, scholars and students of literature are very rarely interested in them at all.

What many fan-readers don’t perhaps realize is that interpreting isn’t supposed to be some kind list of correct and incorrect that you should check with someone to see if you “got it right”. As long as you can argue your point by using the text, your interpretation is valid. Which is actually an interesting issue since so much of the fandom culture stems from the fans’ almost rebel-like ways of reading characters and stories. For example, one reason why fans write fanfiction is to fulfill their own interpretations the author hadn’t explored. Actually, fan-reading revolves around the age-old question of literature: to whom does the power of interpreting belong after a text has been published, the author or the writer? So, why are we somewhat hypocritical when it comes to fan-interpretations that differ from our own?

All that being said, I’d still like to take a look at OX’s comments. But I don’t wish to use them as weapons, though. I’ve been saddened by how people seemed to almost rub them in the shippers’ faces.

“Two people can’t just stand in one place together and fall in love! [Laughing crying] There are many kinds of feelings in the world, family affections, friendship affections, romantic affections, hatred, jealousy, etc. I personally believe that the often interesting relationships (?), are complicated and unexplainable.” X

As I said earlier, when SL’s backstory and his first connection with MGS were revealed, some fans jumped straight to the romance wagon and saw SL being so hung up on MGS as romantic jealousy. I see where the shippers are coming from but find that a whole plethora of feelings that would fit between hate and romantic love is in danger to be bypassed. As OX said, there are many kinds of feelings in the world, and many of them are nuanced even though they share some common denominator. I am not saying people can’t see SL and MGS romantically, but it’s a bit frustrating if they choose to ignore all of other, more complex options. Just because 19 Days is a shounen-ai doesn’t mean there can’t be any other kinds of relationships.

Partly, my frustration stems from my “protectiveness” of SL’s character. It’s no secret I’m very interested in and intrigued by him. I realize he’s the bad guy of the story and fully understand why the majority of the fans hate him with a burning passion. But I can’t bring myself to dislike him. He’s in the long line of antagonists who have found their way into my heart.

I find SL’s character highly complex which is why I don’t want to brush his feelings towards MGS and role in the overall story off as romantic love. It feels way too hasty. To go to such extreme as “love” is too easy and cuts too many corners.

What I think SL and MGS’s relationship could be boiled down to instead is “misery loves company”. SL had once managed to pull MGS down with him and intends to keep him there. Because if MGS gets freed from SL’s world, it would quite painfully point out how messed up SL’s life is, too. Which brings me back to OX’s point about nuanced feelings. To see others you thought shared your misery actually try and climb out of the pit, is its own form of jealousy. When I see SL being so hung up on MGS, I don’t see romantic jealousy but something more complex.

I like what @casually-inlove said about the different roles of SL and HT in her answer. HT is a savior of sorts in MGS’s life, someone who believes in him and strives to make him “an outstanding person” aka not ruin his life by becoming a part of the criminal gangs and underworld for good. The opposite of what SL ultimately wants to.

And the change in MGS must have been apparent enough for SL to take notice. Since MGS has gained more people who actually see good things in him and even admire him, it’s given him more self-esteem and confidence and started to convince him he’s not an outcast good-for-nothing delinquent. He’s been looked down by his peers since his childhood and after a while, he’s started to believe in that image, too.

Hope is a very strong motivation in life, and SL seems to despise the idea of MGS having any of it. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel that would ultimately lead MGS out the world he’s shared with SL.

Up until HT got involved, SL had managed to snuff out MGS’s hope quite effectively. He’s manipulated him by using the carrot by talking about “destiny” and seemingly giving MGS what he knows he’s desperate for:

But he also wasn’t hesitant to use the stick when he needed to remind MGS of his place. There’s a lot to be said about using gratitude as a way to manipulate others but it’s very effective and something SL seems to go for a lot:

I don’t know if SL actually believes MGS owes him for the rest of his life and sees himself as some kind of grand savior. It’s possible, I suppose, and would somewhat explain why he’s trying so stubbornly to hold on to MGS even though he obviously has quite a lot of followers already. SL seems to have a compulsive need to control and possess other people and sees MGS trying to leave his side as a betrayal. No one is allowed to think their debts have been repaid until he says so. Now, why is it like that is the million-dollar question. Why is he so desperate to shackle people to himself like that? Is it simply about power or something deeper?

We don’t know exactly how SL saved MGS either, but ultimately I think it’s about giving MGS a place to belong when others discriminated against him. He took advantage of MGS’s growing bitterness and strengthened his poor image of himself by creating a vicious cycle of being involved in gangs and further more estranging him from his peers. As I said in my earlier post regarding MGS’s character, there’s no faster way to turn someone into an outcast than by making them bitter and pushing them to join like-minded people.

However, it’s also possible it didn’t begin that way. It’s unclear to us how long MGS and SL have known each other. Their first encounter was revealed in ch 294, but it seemed one-sided. How soon after this

did MGS and LS meet again? Did SL recognize MGS? Were they actual friends at some point, and it all went to hell later on? Did they perhaps bond over both being seen as weirdos and outcasts by others? (As a side note, I’d like to recommend this piece of fanart by @naesol that I think offers an interesting possibility of how things might’ve gone down between them.)

At this point, you might rightly wonder how on earth I could like a character like that. A despicable manipulator who exploits others’ weakness and wants to drag them down with him. It’s actually partly why I don’t see a romantic connection between MGS and SL.

As crazy as it sounds, I relate to some of SL’s character. Up to a point, I see my own shortcomings in him. When I see him being jealous of MGS trying to turn his life around, ultimately leaving him behind and feeling betrayed by it, I 100% recognize that feeling because I’m prone to it myself. In those situations, I don’t go wielding pocket knives or try to manipulate them out if it, of course, but I can’t bring myself to genuinely root for them, either. Instead, I tend to feel jealous, envious, and bitter. When I see others fix the things in themselves that I hate about myself, I silently wish them to fail because if they can do it, what’s my excuse for not doing the same? I’m not proud of this side of myself but it is the truth.

And that’s why I think it’s dangerous to bash other people for what they ship or what characters they like. You can’t possibly know the reason why and can make them feel really shitty about themselves by assuming they just don’t know right from wrong or want to romanticize problematic things. The thing about fiction is that it provides us a safe environment to experience and discover different feelings, some of which can be weird or scary or conflicting, and possibly recognize those feelings in ourselves and work on them. And people should be allowed to do that without being bashed or made assumptions about by others.

All in all, because I relate to what I interpret SL is feeling I don’t recognize the romantic aspect some readers find between them. I think it’s more based on fanon than actual canon, but that doesn’t mean I have the right to tell anyone what to ship.

30 day 19 Days challenge

#30 day 19 days challenge #she li #mo guan shan #19 days #kinda long post again #but this has been on my mind for a while now #and what sometimes bothers me about this fandom

240 notes · View notes

megashadowdragon · 5 years

Text

The True Face of Pariston, The Kurta Clan Massacre and The events that lead to it

source : www . reddit . com/r/HunterXHunter/comments/6jzwyo/theory_the_true_face_of_pariston_the_kurta_clan/

Ok, so there was a post recently saying Pika was partially responsible for the massacre of his clan. I also had a fever dream a few days ago and the answer to to the Kurta mystery suddenly appeared within the dream. The fore mentioned post said that basically Pika was responsible because he didn't let the elder know his eyes went red while he was on his mission in the human town during the test, so someone spotted him. The Kurta are nomads, so anytime they think someone might find their location, they change it. Since the Elder hadn't known about Pika's incident, they didn't move the village, and, well, we know what happened after that. So, here's my theory with the evidence, step by step:

1)Pariston is Sheila

The evidence we have for this is;

-they look extremely alike

-Sheila wanted to become a Hunter, Pariston IS a Hunter

-Sheila has the rat ears, while Pariston is the Rat Zodiac

-Sheila's suspicious behaviour(see next point)

2) Sheila(Pariston) didn't get lost in the woods, he was searching out the area for the Kurta clan

-Pika and Pairo find her in the woods with a broken leg and severely dehydrated, but when they give her water, she has a few gulps and suddenly, she's back to normal!(Was she just faking it?)

-To show her gratitude, she gives them a book*, which is really weird and random since they don't speak or read the language(was the book some kind of tracking device or had a chip in it?)

-There's a scene that shows them(Sheila, Pika, Pairo) holding their forefingers against their closed mouths(the generic hand sign of keeping something a secret). Did she tell them not to tell anyone in the clan they found her? Did she want her appearance to be kept a secret so the clan wouldn't be alerted?

-Sheila's leg starts to heal but then SHE STARTS FALLING AND HURTING IT AGAIN MANY TIMES ALL OF A SUDDEN. This is the most suspicious part. But the question is, since she obviously wanted to prolong her stay there, why would she want to do that? Still, suspicious as a mother#ucker.

-She one day suddenly decides to leave and leaves them a letter saying goodbye and all that jazz. Why is this suspicious? Pika and Pairo are shown in the panel being surprised at her leaving, so they thought she still had to rest some more to heal her leg. Amplifies the above point about her faking a leg injury.

3)Kurapika's (seemingly) fatal mistake

-Pika's seemingly fatal mistake was when he was on his mission to the 'outside' with Pairo world during the test, when he got mad and his eyes reddened. A bunch of people saw this and word must have gone around. He didn't inform the elder about this, so , in his mind, when he heard of the massacre, he thought it was his fault. Why do I say he 'thought' and not 'it WAS his fault'?

Because of the tracking device in the book Sheila(Pariston) gave him. That book was actually the reason the Troupe managed to find the Kurta village, and not the fact Pika had his 'outburst of red'. Pika doesn't know this and it only amplifies his rage and creates terrible self hate and blame, since he thinks the massacre of his kin was his own fault.

Kurapika's(and Pairo's) true fatal mistake wasn't this, it was not informing the clan of Sheila and accepting the book*

4)Origins of the Kurta Clan

-To those who more or less frequently browse this sub, the belief that Kurta originate from the DC is prevalent. The evidence is abundant(their huts and the birds they use for transport are also found on the DC map, Kurta traditional symbols resemble the lake Mobius and the gatekeeper's fate symbols) Here's a good post that proves this point:

www . reddit . com/r/HunterXHunter/comments/5ugjiq/the_lake_mobius_strip_the_kurta_and_the_dark/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=comment_list

Mobius, in case anyone doesn't recall, is the name of the great lake the known world of HxH currently resides in. The name "Mobius" seems to originate from the Mobius Strip; an example of a mobius strip is a ring of tape with a half twist on it. Anything caught in a Mobius strip, by it's definition, cannot escape the boundary of the Mobius strip. A Mobius Strip can also be made into a three dimensional plane so the boundary is a circle, but it would look something like this....

It is also interesting to point out that if a line is drawn at the seam, it ends up at the starting point but on the OTHER side of the Mobius strip. If the line continues it will end up back to where it was. I believe the lake they reside in is going to be shaped like a Mobius strip and will cause a great deal of problems once they realize the shape of the "lake" they reside in. The Dark Continent must reside somewhere on this Mobius Strip, perhaps off to the side somewhere. If I had to guess it would be far, on the other side of the starting point like the example I stated.

Further evidence of that basically confirms this is this image from the manga when Ging is talking about the Dark Continent to the specialists on the boat.

What gets even stranger is the fact that on Kurapika's robe, you can CLEARLY see a Mobius Strip on his robe.

I think this is conclusive evidence that the Kurta have some tie to the Dark Continent and Kurapika is going to learn some truths about the Kurta if he survives his trek to the DC.

There are 3 Mobius Strip instances in HxH to my knowledge:

Kurapika had it on his second Kurta robes in the YorkNew arc

The known human world is in the center of a giant lake - Lake Mobius

2 books that Don Freecs wrote/is writing about DC form a Mobius Strip

And we know that Chimera Ants came from DC to the Human world. Here is the scoop - almost every explanation about how traversal works in a Mobius Strip is using ANTS as an example

google Mobius strip ants and see it for yourself

So, basically I think the Kurta came from DC(well, duuuh). But why did they come?

Well, we know that every time mankind has tried to explore/colonize/invade(colonize and invade? wtf? - I'll explain) the DC a calamity has befallen humanity IN HUMANITY'S OWN WORLD. This is an important distinction. There were 4 calamities mentioned: Hellbell, Papu, Brion, Zobae and Ai (also probably the Ants, but that's a theory for a different time). Well, these weren't the only ones. The one that was overlooked and not mentioned was the "Great Kurta Retribution" and the Creation of Meteor city.

Sidenote: Did you know the Vikings were the first ones(from Europe) to discover and try to colonize North America? (They have sagas about it, and they called it Vinland). What happened to these Vikings? They arrived accidentally in NA while following the water currents, decided to colonize the place, got in a fight with the natives and we're all killed by the same natives in retribution.

Now, back to HxH. Here's what I think happened: In the place of Meteor city, there was once the capital of a large, wealthy kingdom. This kingdom decided to explore(or better yet, colonize) the DC. They sent their army and fleet across the ocean. What they found were the Kurta, who, even though they lived in small huts and rode birds, were extremely advanced and strong. This DC-exploration force at first glance thought the Kurta were weak and primitive and so they wanted to conquer them. Long story short, this exploration fleet got their asses handed to them, and a big war ensued. The Kurta were beating this Kingdom badly, the conflict moved from the DC into the Known World , and as the climax, the Kurta destroyed the Capital of the kingdom and other large parts of it. In this place of rubble and trash Meteor city was born. The name of Meteor city comes from the time of Kurta invasion, and I guess the Kurta attacked the Kingdom with blasts from the skies that resembled meteors, and also turned the Capital of the Kingdom to rubble and ruin with these attacks. Yes their power was that great(remember when Uvogin mentions to Pika while they were fighting that the Kurta were really strong, this is what he meant).

After their undisputed victory, the Kurta forces started to return to the DC. A small number of them stayed behind in the known world, since it was more peaceful than DC. They also had to remain in hiding, always migrating, since humanity now hated the Kurta and would gladly hunt them given the chance.

This happened so long ago that people slowly forgot what happened to the part of the world that is now Meteor city, and The Kurta Invasion faded into myth and legend. The only people who DIDN'T FORGET were the elders of Meteor city, who have the forgotten history handed down from their predecessors. The flame of revenge still burns in them, for they do not forget the destruction of their once glorious Homeland. This is the reason The Troupe were ordered to kill the Kurta. It was revenge for what the Kurta did. In the note they left at the site of the massacre, it said:"We reject no one, so take nothing from us.". They(Meteor city) have become the World's dump, where people leave dead bodies, junk, waste and even children - they accept everything and reject no one, so take nothing from them, since they once had everything taken from them(the Kurta War).

-The view of the Kurta as merciless Invaders and monsters lives on even today, even though people don't know it's origin. We can see this clearly by the reaction of the people when Pika 's eyes turned red when he was with Pairo in that town. The reaction was much, much stronger than what you'd expect. Those people were TERRIFIED! That grandma even called Kurapika "Red-eyed devil", like it was a monster's name from a scary story parents tell their kids at night to scare them into behaving well. Like:"If you don't do eat your veggies the Red eyed devil's will come take you!"

Kurapika will probably discover his origin and the truth about the Kurta calamity later in the DC arc

5)Final proof on Pariston

-You know what's odd about Pariston/Sheila? Except the part that he and Pika NEVER met after the Kurta massacre(when he was Sheila)(smart Togashi!)-The panel where he said to Ging that "He loves destroying those he loves/is fond of".

Ok, the guy's a psycho, what about it?

Well wouldn't you say he kinda got to like Pika and Pairo when they found him/her in the forest and were taking care of him/her for weeks? Hadn't those 3 spent hours conversing, sharing stories, and getting to become closer for multiple hours a day?

Yes, but where are you going with this?

Do you remember the panel where Prince Thunder Sandwich is sitting on his sick throne of body parts?

The head in behind him is probably Pairo's. Now, why did all the Kurta have their eyes removed, except Pairo, whose head they severed whole?

Sheila only met Kurapika and Pairo, and now you're telling me the only person with the preserved severed head with the eyes from the Kurta, is one of the only two people from the clan Sheila has met?

Do you remember what Pariston said, about destroying those he loves? He probably tortured Pairo the most during the Kurta massacre, and finally sawed his head off,(pretty dark, huh?) not only for his own pleasure, but as a message to Pika, who he also wanted to torture and kill, but when he came there with the Troupe Pika wasn't there, so he wanted to at least hurt Pika by making him find Pairo's decapitated body. That's what hurt Pika the most, beside his case of extreme survivor's guilt.

(Also, when Pariston reminisces about loving to kill the people he loves, a doll with it's eyes torn out is shown! A Kurta eye reference!??)

-Also, as I mentioned before, Kurapika and Pariston(in his male form) have NEVER MET. Probably because if they had met during, let's say, Chairman election arc, the the shit would had hit the fan and chaos would ensure. Togashi's a really good writer, and he has been saving this for later on in the story. Kurapika not visiting Gon wasn't bad writing, it not only served as good characterisation to demonstrate how Pika descended into darkness even deeper, but now it makes even more sense from the story perspective - Pika wasn't meant to meet with Pariston yet.

-This will be the final point on Pariston/Sheila: Isn't it so convenient that "a lost female traveler" discovered the massacre. I mean, come on! It doesn't take a genius to realise this was Sheila/Pariston, and ain't that SUSPICIOUS AS FUCK!!?! You're telling me he/she GOT LOST(it specifically says she got lost in the manga) again and conveniently wondered upon the scene of the massacre?

I think Pariston/Sheila either came there to confirm the kill,in which case he wasn't there at when the massacre was happening. This is the less likely version.

The likelier version, considering what happened to Pairo and his/her relationship with Pika, I'd say Pariston/Sheila was there at the scene, maybe even coordinating the Troupe, ordering them to exclusively cut off Pairo's head, and then reporting the incident to the news to inform Kurapika of the tragedy(to Pariston's delight). They probably killed the Kurta some days immediately after Pika left to find the cure for Pairo, waited for him for some weeks to return so they could ambush him upon his return, but when he didn't show up in those weeks, Pariston reported the story to the authorities as "the lost female traveler, Sheila"

*Many people got hung up.on the fact that the book Sheila gave the boys was called "Adventures of D Hunter", since D Hunter is probably Don Freecs. The reason I think this isn't important and this isn't neither the West books OR the East book is this; The V5 organisation members mentioned that the stories about the DC were well known in the world but people thought they were just fiction. I think the book Sheila gave them was to them just an ordinary (DC, non)fiction book(with a tracking device).

Tell me your thoughts on this theory. It was a lot of fun making it!!!

@hamliet @aspoonofsugar

edit: addition by @gallyl

Wow. Very interesting. Now I also think Sheila was specifically searching for the Kurta Clan, and that she is Pariston or connected to him (a relative?). As for the Kurta massacre, I still like to think that the Troupe did what they did out of cold greed. But the idea about the war is good and provides the explanation for the existence of the meteor city.I also believe that Kurapika and Melody are connected not only by friendship but by fate too: the Kurta clan were associated with the devils, while Melody was injured by the Devil’s Sonata. I guess this sonata could be composed by someone from the Kurta clan. This supports the idea above that the Kurta clan was really powerful and capable of destruction. That’s why Melody is on the Whale ship too. In this regard (as a possible hint to Devil’s music, Kurta and the war in the meteor city?) when Chrollo starts a revenge massacre in the Yorkshin city, he orchestrates Requiem music for Uvogin killed by Kurapika.

#Hunter X Hunter #hxh #hunter x hunter theory #hunter x hunter pariston #pariston #hxh pariston #kurapika #hxh meta #hunter x hunter meta

156 notes · View notes

toasttz · 5 years

Text

From the Tabletop #4

So, I have to confess the teaser paragraph from last time was complete and utter clickbait. None of those things happened. Not really anyway. Not sorry. I should also note that the aforementioned aquatic city of Flotsam was another homebrew location - when I brought it up last time I referenced it like it was a canon location. My apologies if anyone was confused on that. Anyway, last we left our circle, we deduced that our next stop would be Great Forks, a large city that is not easily-accessible by the water (there's a river but Scarlet's ship is a xebec, which is pretty large all told). But then our GM decided to be far, far cheekier than something that simple and we ended up in the islands at a tourist trap named... Grate Forks. Really, I'm only surprised that I was surprised. Being that we were on the beach, we decided to make the best of it. Gwyn and Scarlet set up a stand to sell off-brand sunglasses which, between the two of them, was a big hit. We were also encouraged to join a surfing contest for the honor of meeting the Big Kahuna. I honestly forgot who won (I was worried it would be a roll I would be terrible at, like Ride, but it turned out that had Scarlet entered, I likely would've had an edge, due to her being Performance-based), but long story short, we became local semi-celebrities overnight. Speaking of overnight, Scarlet was suddenly kidnapped by some goons and presented to "The Boss Lady", who had some choice words for Scarlet's attempting to get in on the off-brand sunglasses racket. For her part, the pirate attempted to explain that she was a legitimate businesswoman (mostly true, as she had a guild license at this point) and had no idea she was hurting anyone (completely true). She also joked how being tied to a chair was cause for "an extra charge" and the goons hesitated in hitting her as she encouraged them to in a... not PG-13 manner. Ultimately, Scarlet avoided a fancy new pair of concrete slippers by challenging the Boss and her men to a duel the next day, which somehow worked. The resulting duel was so hilariously one-sided I legitimately wonder if the GM expected us to actually win it. Scarlet was probably the best combat-ready character on the field and she was simply unable to land a hit. Now, admittedly, I was being conservative with my essence and charm use, so had I buffed my rolls I probably would've done more, but I also would've burned essence and eventually lit up like a Christmas tree to everyone in the damned town. So Scarlet nimbly parried and was just unable to manage a hit. Magpie faired worse and Volkenstein, much worse. The Boss Lady, his mentor/adoptive mother, and a Lunar, essentially dribbled him like a basketball both in the figurative and literal sense. Should've drank his milk. Anyway, having been laid out, Scarlet and the Boss Lady began talking over the defeated bodies of the others. Eventually, we came to an understanding and the battle ended via civil discourse. Ultimately, it was decided we could hang around provided we didn't try to set up shop again. We agreed to these terms and ventured further into town. Whereupon a Dragon King with an annoying voice decided to petition us for help. Turns out, some ruins on the far end of the island were under siege and Dragon King eggs laid within and were in danger. After a group huddle, we decided to go for it and help the sadsack out. This resulted in Scarlet being mis-identified as a high-ranking naval officer, which she decided to just roll with. GM: Hey, what color is Scarlet wearing right now? Me: Red. What color did you expect? GM: Okay... This worked rather well, as I was able to BS my way through their questioning, mostly because Volkenstein and Magpie couldn't speak a language they knew, so I was able to control the flow of conversation. Not helped, at all, that Magpie was doing everything she could to antagonise the DragonBlood liaison as much and as often as possible. God help me, I don't know why, but she did. We never saw anything of that barbarian persona anywhere else, just when she was being a complete asshole. Upon arrival, Scarlet actually became somewhat sympathetic to the DB's plight. Their commanding officer (recently given a field promotion due to many ranked deaths) was terrified beyond consolation and after a peptalk from Scarlet, she ALMOST talked their entire outpost into departing the area, leaving it to us to control the area without even lifting a finger. And then Gwyn had to talk. Completely undoing everything I had done in one fell swoop, he petitioned the stars for a sign, resulting in the image of a sword pointing down at the ruins. Gwyn interpretted this as we have to stay. All of us. And then it got worse when Magpie decided to practice medicine. This just escalated tensions further because, as said, Magpie couldn't stop being an asshole for this stretch. We also found a moonsilver sword run through a corpse and into a wall, which Scarlet managed to retrieve with a pretty solid strength roll. And then all Hell broke loose. Before we knew it, we were dealing with Not-King Ghidora, Volkenstein had hijacked a warmech, I was trying desperately to avoid getting killed by Volkenstein being a dumbass in his warmech, and then both sides went to killing each other en mass as a Lunar landed atop the mech and began hammering away at the cockpit. Admittedly, I missed a good deal of the setup to this due to poor timing in choosing to step away to use the restroom, so I could've been the one to get the mech, but, meh. Bad luck on that one. Thankfully, Volk did not, in fact, hit the "KILL EM ALL" button as he had presence of mind to ask the mech's AI if that was a good plan and ultimatedly decided it wasn't. As an aside, it was around this point in the campaign that serious fatigue with the One Piece plotline really began setting in for me. I like Scarlet as a character and she had some pretty cool moments, but it was starting to drag on a while and I had other character ideas in mind - one of which I should hopefully get to before too many more posts. Anyways, deciding to save Volk's dumbass, I rushed the Lunar (who I had no idea was a Lunar at that moment) and ran him through with my sword. Around the time his head turned like an owl's 180 degrees to look down at me, and noticing that my sword did sweet FA to him, did I realize my mistake. The man looked down at me (an impressive feat as Scarlet was supposed to be very tall for a woman) and asked if I knew the man in the cockpit. I immediately denied it and told him I would simply take my sword back and leave. He accepted this and I fukken legged it in the opposite direction. Scarlet leaped to the ground and found a metal hatch, leading to a shaft which went deeper underground. Figuring things couldn't be more fucked under than above ground, I had Scarlet plunge down, whereupon she found a massive, metal warship, with a mech all my own awaiting me. Using aforementioned moonsilver sword, I was able to activate it and found a means to the surface via elevator to join the fray, where Volkenstein - who I feel the need to reiterate was IN A GOD-DAMNED WARMECH - was getting his ass beat. Stepping in, I essentially cut Ghidora in half, bringing the battle to its very bloody end. Riding high on our victory and the acquisition of a metal carrier ship - lovingly named the Black Turtle by Scarlet - and two mechs, we sailed back to Grate Forks proper... only to completely forget we needed the rings the DBs had and had to go right back. God-damn it, I can be so fucking stupid sometimes. In the return trip, we procured the rings and the Dragon King eggs, which were promptedly delivered to the quest-giver. Turns out there were more aboard the Black Turtle, but the circle's collective response to this was to shrug and claim the ancient rite of "finders-keepers". At this point, our best leads took us to Malfeas next, so I split a portion of my crew and non-combat NPCs (like Esha Mae) to stay in Grate Forks with the Red Lion (my xebec, as I realize only now I never mentioned the name of my vessel prior), as the circle and combat-ready NPCs boarded the Black Turtle to make way for the Wyld as a shortcut of getting to Hell. Play Exalted long enough and sentences like that start sounding completely normal. While sailing through the Wyld, a rather unexpected thing happened as Gwyn noticed someone was... swimming after our ship. And gaining on us, no less! The assembled Oath Warriors, Gwyn, and Scarlet have a look and realize it looks an awful like like Valentinian in his full artifact armor, screaming Scarlet's name like a man possessed. A vicious battle ensued, as Scarlet became increasingly skeptical that this man was, in fact, her Valley. With some effort, he was felled, fading back into the mists of the Wyld, pretty much confirming that this entity was an "idea" of a version of Valentinian, not Valentinian proper. Faux Valentinian: All I wanted was gratitude for my sacrifices... Scarlet: Oh, poor Valley... Don't... don't ask me to explain the Wyld here. There's a reason it's "The Wyld" and not "The Normal". Before we knew it, we arrived in Hell, which is where I'll be calling it today. Join me next time as we: find Valentinian again! Sell both Volkenstein and Magpie to ne'er-do-wells! Go to a theme park in Hell! Nearly die! See you there!

#Tabletop RPG #Exalted #That Guy Story

2 notes · View notes

imx-doomer · 6 years

Text

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (A review of sorts)

[Image Credits: @CallegosY on Twitter]

The latest entry in the Wolfenstein franchise has left quite an impact in many ways. It is been four months since the release of the game but, has it really been said everything about the game? I don't think so.

(I mean, I wouldn't be writing this if that were to be the case, I think).

A disclaimer: This post will be very, very long (I think it has the right to be), and it will contain major spoilers about Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and the previous games (The New Order and The Old Blood). Desist from reading this post if you have not played and finished the game(s) on its entirety, and go play them before reading this. English is also not my first language so please excuse the grammatical mistakes I might have.

As of right now my experience with the game is based on me watching someone else play the game on launch, not because I prefer it that way (I heavily oppose that kind of practice, actually), but because I do not own Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus or the hardware to run the game on my PC. However, it is my intention to acquire the means to play the game as soon as possible, because I firmly believe that's how you're going to get the full experience.

It took 25 years for a Wolfenstein game to feature Adolf Hitler up front in its main story again. That same amount of time also happens to be the time Wolfenstein was absent from being in a position of controversy. But, contrary to what one would have thought a few years back, the inclusion of Hitler himself was not the cause of the controversy.

A lot has changed in those 25 years, but, as the saying goes: the more things change, the more they stay the same. And if there's something that I have learned from all my years spent playing videogames is that people will always complain about them no matter what. I don't have the exact percentage, but most of the time, those complains are dumb. Really dumb.

As a matter of fact, back in the day in 1992 when Wolfenstein 3-D was released it received complains about being "too violent" and "being heavy on the ketchup", and also even the Anti-Defamation League protested the inclusion of swastikas and nazis in the game (Source: Masters of DOOM, pages 114-115). This also ended up causing the game to be banned in Germany, because of the prohibition of nazi imagery in entertainment.

Keep in mind, this was way back in 1992. Of course, don't get me started when DOOM came out. That's a whole different story.

Another game that fell into controversy (as that franchise usually does, now that I think about it), was GTA: San Andreas. I remembered San Andreas while I was writing this post because I reminded myself of the days where I swore to not even touch the game, in part because of a portion of its fanbase (my experience with the game back then consisted of annoying kids playing nothing else but GTA:SA in arcades or cybercafes).

But then one day I decided to play the game myself for the first time, and after the first three hours I was sold. There's this one spot in the highway that connects Verdant Bluffs with Downtown Los Santos, near El Corona and the Los Santos Intl. Airport, where cars would go fast enough to crash with one another and cause huge explosions without any actual input of the player. Those who have played the game might remember that spot. You could just stand there and watch the show unfold, it was so hilarious to me.

That's how I learned to separate the game from the things that ultimately had zero impact on the game itself. A very valuable lesson.

But now, let's talk about the Wolfenstein II, shall we?

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a videogame released in November of 2017, developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks for PC, XBox One and PlayStation 4. In this year (2018) it is expected to be released on the Nintendo Switch with help of the same studio (Panic Button) that worked on the port of DOOM 2016.

Now. The game?

The game...is good.

Keep in mind, I said "good". Not very, or great, or excellent, or fantastic, or maybe even GOTY. "Good". There is definitely a feeling that the game could've been -at least- very good, or that it could've achieved GOTY status. In fact, even after some people claimed The New Colossus to be their own GOTY, it wasn't until very recently that Wolfenstein II received a nomination from an important institution for GOTY; a GOTY nomination that ended up losing in favor of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Now, some of you definitely have issues with a few parts of the game, and I don't really know if we have the same kind of issues, but I'll give you the very short description of mine:

-The story happens, B.J. liberates America from the nazis (big spoilers there I know), but it doesn't really feel like it actually did. There's a feel of balance between the gameplay and cutscenes, but some key moments in the story lacked the necessary impact that was needed in order to strengthen their importance in a game where the story is supposed to matter. -The game also has some balance issues with the difficulty, or rather, the AI of a few enemies. -The gameplay enhancements (you know the ones) arrive perhaps a little bit late, and are not properly introduced in a way that could've improved the experience of the game for many players. -The main villain of this game doesn't even hold a candle compared to the main villain of the previous game, or even other villains of the new game itself. And this is further reinforced by... -The absolute STATE of the last sequence of the game.

There was also another issue. When the game was released there were two groups of people, those who couldn't run the game, and those who bought the console versions. Jokes aside, there were (and maybe still are) some optimization issues with the PC version of the game that stopped a lot of people from playing it, but then again, you had people with PCs that could actually run the game with little to zero issues. Such is life in the mustard zone, I guess.

(Wasn't DOOM 2016 plagued with those issues too? Someone help me with this)

I will expand on each issue in a moment, but before that...

-Wolfenstein: The New(found) Audience-

...Remember what I said about GTA: San Andreas and actually giving videogames a chance? That's more or less what happened with the new Wolfenstein game, I believe. We all were witnesses of that, because the moment when the first trailer for Wolfenstein II was shown back in last year's E3, people that have never touched or mentioned a single FPS game in their lives became instant fans of the franchise.

But, well, to be completely honest, there was more to that than just the footage of the first trailer that made people glued to Wolfenstein. I believe I don't need to go in full details about what I'm talking about. That's not (and will not be) what this post is about and that's an entirely different subject anyway. These series of events have naturally left a lot of people angry and tired. And it should be no surprise that people would latch onto the new game as soon as it was officially announced and started being promoted.

Quite frankly, if you didn't see that coming after the events of August of 2017 in the US, you were either looking the other way, or you haven't realized the kind of impact videogames have these days.

I mean, there's no gentle way for me to put it, that was bound to happen one way or the other. It's not my intention to brag (it isn't something to brag about anyway), but I hinted this scenario way back in a post made in January of last year, so I guess you could say my expectations were met on that aspect.

Though I must say, I genuinely did not expect to see people loving this game when last year they were part of the crowd criticizing DOOM 2016 for being "too violent"...

I did not expect to be proven wrong, that is! I thought their morals were firm about that subject, one can only guess they had a change of heart when they saw the trailer, too!!

(Image by @gamepadink on Twitter)

You have to admit that Bethesda and MachineGames capitalized on this. It took a while, but they did.

They initially choose to distance themselves from any comparisons with real-life events....

And here’s the [SOURCE] of that, by the way.

They did, however, a release of a partial demo of the game to various gaming websites featuring two sections of the game, one of them featuring a very peculiar chitchat between two nazi soldiers that served as a double hook aimed at the new audience gained by the E3 trailer.

It also hinted the very premature death of a certain character, that's also why I told everyone who were avoiding being spoiled to look away from the videos featuring that demo.

They maintained their distance for a while, but then on October 5th they decided to bite the bullet and go all-out. I don't have the screenshot of the initial promotional message but at this point there's no need for a reminder, I think.

Naturally that move turned some people off, and not because they felt personally attacked by the decision, but because there were fears of the game being unnecessary meddled with references to modern-day political events, and making the game look and feel dated in the process.

At least that's how one group of people felt. You also have that other group of very fine tiki torch people that...well, you know the story by now.

Now, after the game was finally out in the shelves and people finally got to play it, personally, I think that was not the case. Keep in mind, there is a handful of nods to modern-day events here and there, but you have to really deviate from the gameplay and search for them in the game to find them; and there's nothing that genuinely gets in the way of gameplay and the main story, and barring three characters that may have been based on real-life characters of the time and a certain old nazi German, there's not a single character in the game that resembles someone in our current day or anything like that.

People will definitely have their opinions of the marketing moves made by Bethesda and MachineGames to promote the game, but you gotta admit that, marketing-wise, they played their cards very well. I mean, one of the golden rules of marketing is to make the consumer feel like they need your product, isn't it? It might be a poor move, but in general the basics of marketing have never been about morals. Whether they turned more people off compared to the ones being brought in or not, I feel it can't be guessed right now. The game was released four months ago and the Switch port is coming soon, I feel there’s something more to come to give a final verdict.

"But WHY were people complaining? Wolfenstein has always been about killing nazis!"

I mean, yes. Nice observation. That is absolutely correct, but let me ask you something:

Where were you back when Castle Wolfenstein was released? Where were you when Wolf3D or maybe Return to Castle Wolfenstein were released? Shit, where were you when Wolfenstein: The New Order was released?

Where were you these 24 years while Wolfenstein was a thing in the gaming industry? Where were you back when Wolfenstein was seen as 'yet another boring WWII FPS game'?

Feel free to not give an answer, I'm not expecting one anyway, but me and many others were suspecting, almost standing by for this to happen around the time of release.

But hey, who the fuck am I to be the unofficial Wolfenstein gatekeeper, anyway? As a matter of fact, fuckin’ welcome to videogames! Pick your favorite and feel free to disconnect a little bit from reality. That’s why they were made!

-The Right Game, The Wrong Time?-

In a way, Wolfenstein II can't really be compared with other games that don't rely heavily on its story like the ones from the new, current Wolfenstein timeline do; DOOM 2016 for example, it employs 20 seconds of the beginning of the game to show the player how much the story matters by making the main character push away a status screen during a cutscene while making a little bit of fun of the usual cinematic sequences that some modern FPS games have.

Wolfenstein II, on the other hand, uses the first 10 minutes to set up the tone for the game by going full narrative/interactive cutscene mode. Unlike the new DOOM, the current timeline for Wolfenstein sets the player in a game where the story takes a slightly bigger spotlight compared to the gameplay.

And from what some of the reactions I saw, most people who picked the game seemed to ignore this, expecting The New Colossus to play like DOOM 2016. Big mistake.

You're not an unstoppable inter-dimensional being of legend, prohibited by Hell itself from being disturbed from its involuntary and forced imprisonment (Doomguy/Doomslayer), you're a war hero that went back from being comatose for more than 20 years, barely survived a grenade blast, and is stuck with half health for half the portion of the game (Blazko).

(Some of) those who complained also seemed to completely forget the existence of The New Order, and treated The New Colossus as the very first time where a Wolfenstein game was more story-driven compared to previous installments. Now, I did not have the opportunity to time the cutscenes and the actual gameplay, but truth be told, and comparing it to other modern-day games, The New Colossus doesn't feel like you're "playing" a movie at all.

With that being said, the story portion could've definitely been expanded a little bit. Some side missions are somewhat important in terms of additional upgrades and missing holes in the main story, maybe they could've been included in a way where you can get to play them in a specific order before getting into the main missions of the game. It's definitely not the "interactive movie" that some people were painting The New Colossus to be. And while it may or may not have the amount of levels that The New Order had, it's still a good single-player ride. But...maybe it wouldn't have hurt if the ride lasted a little bit more?

I will touch the main story in a moment. And boy oh boy, there's a lot to talk about it.

-From 0 To 10, How Hard Do You Want The Nazi Dog To Kill You?-

The difficulty is also something that I've been hearing a lot about. I think this was something that an important portion of the people expected to happen with the buzz that Wolfenstein II got (me included). Now, like I said in the disclaimer, I don't own the game (YET), so I can't really speak much about the difficulty of the game as much as I would like to, but I'll say this:

A good game is not a good game without some kind of challenge. When trying a new game, let the game challenge you for a bit, see for yourself how much you can handle. If you're facing heavy opposition and you can't get past it, lower the difficulty, but JUST by one level.

And if you really can't help it, fine, go ahead and take the dive straight to "Can I Play, Daddy?", but please don't go around saying the only way to enjoy The New Colossus is on Easiest! That's just something you don't want to say in public, unless getting trashed on the internet is your kink.

(Not that I'm actively trying to kinkshame anyone, mind you. You do yourself!)

From the gameplay that I was witness of when I was watching a stream of the game, some enemies were just your normal, run-of-the-mill mobs, then you had the ones that had a little bit of a different dynamic that the player had to get accustomed to in order to advance, and then you had the bullshit nazi dogs that could just end your run in less than two seconds.

There's also another issue with some bosses of the game, because at the time, there were at least a couple of boss battles that the player could dismiss entirely without any punishment. One of them was definitely in Roswell. You could just, escape, run over a few nazis on the way and completely skip fighting that big ass robot. Was this intentional or not, I'm not that sure myself.

Apparently a patch was released recently in order to fix and balance the difficulty a little. Like I said, I really can't say much about it or confirm anything about it, my experience was obtained during the first days after the release of the game. But only those who are willing to give the game a second play might want to check if this ended up benefiting the game or not.

What could also benefit from a patch of sorts is the plot of the game, if you ask me...

-The Story-

Boy...

Except for a couple of people, the characters were fine to me. There was a continuity between some of the characters in terms of their background, but some others were kind of dismissed as the story went along.

Barring the obvious changes that he went thru before The New Colossus, Blazkowicz was the same good ol' Blazko from the previous game. His struggle is pretty damn present throughout the game, and we get a bit of background in regards of his childhood.

In regards to how the game starts, it goes more or less like this:

The game starts with B.J. Blazkowicz back in General Deathshead's compound on the brink of death. A grenade just exploded right between him and Deathshead, which obliterated the nazi leader's head to pieces and left Blazko with a nasty open wound, laying on the ground. Blazkowicz starts having flashbacks as he's being rescued by his comrades before an atom bomb hits the compound. One of the flashbacks involves his mother Zofia (with a very visible black eye) feeding him on his bed, another flashback is the "Make A Choice" scene where you pick between saving Wyatt or Fergus, which is the same choice you make in The New Order that determines which timeline you play in both games. It seems like they decided to make the player pick a timeline again.

After you make a choice, you see Anya (B.J.'s girlfriend) with the rest of the search group (and the person you saved) rescuing B.J. before an atom bomb hits Deathshead's compound, which is something I assumed was going to happen *after* the bomb hit.

B.J. Blazkowicz somehow surviving an atom bomb would've kicked major ass. Oh well. Letdown City - Population: Me.

Someone gives the order to Bombate to drop the bomb, and as soon as it hits the compound Blazkowicz blacks out again. Back to his childhood, his mother (with no black eye this time) hands him a heirloom, an engagement ring that was handed by her father. Then, Blazkowicz's father is back home, and she quickly tells him to hide it.

And speaking of which, yeah. B.J.'s father. Not the very best example of a model dad.

-Rip Blazkowicz, American Traitor-

MachineGames took some ballsy decisions with the direction of the sequel to The New Colossus. One of them being turning B.J.'s father into basically the complete opposite of his son.

On one hand, you have William Joseph Blazkowicz, undeniably a war hero, hardened by one tragedy after another, and caring of his close friends and loved ones, going as far as willing to give his own life to save theirs. On the other, you have Rip Blazkowicz, a good for nothing, selfish, avaricious and failed salesman, and a traitor to the country.

Oh, and he's also racist.

The game tells you right away that Rip is not a very good person. It actually gets you involved with B.J.'s childhood in such a way that the very first interactions you have in the game are throwing jars at him after he hit Zofia, and the other one involves taking yet another impactful decision over the family pet dog. And I really, really hope you were part of the group who intentionally missed that shot.

Rip is straight up a bona fide asshole. And while you may have the usual crowd that will complain about its inclusion because they feel projected on him, some others might be concerned with the prominence of the role he was given in the story

He actually plays a key part, not only in Blazkowicz's childhood but also on the events of the game. And again, more to that in a moment; but if you still can't get over his existence in the game and the role he takes in Blazkowicz's life, just remember that this current timeline is set in an alternate universe where the nazis won WWII; it does not rewrite the events of Wolfenstein 3-D, and in that timeline Blazkowicz still lends a hand in helping the Allies beat the nazis and win WWII, he's still a war hero with a proud family behind him.

I mean, the Blazkowicz from the Wolf3D timeline married a (seemingly) all-American woman, I guess that's all you need to differentiate him from this Blazko (who married an ass-kicking Polish nurse of Jewish descent).

Now back to The New Colossus and back in 1961, B.J. Blazkowicz wakes up after remembering those traumatic moments, and barely manages to sit in a wheelchair in order to defend Eva's Hammer (the submarine he captured in The New Order) from an assault of nazis leaded by Frau Irene Engel, seeking revenge after Blazko killed her lover, Bubi, and destroyed Deathshead's compound.

Blazko receives a gun from a guy that looks a lot like Dolph Ziggler back when he had brown hair, and then goes to town killing nazis while he's sitting on a wheelchair.

Surprisingly enough one of the most enjoyable points in the game. It was also a really big introduction of Blazkowicz's all-out approach against opposition to the newest players, because nothing beats the feeling of killing nazis while strapped on a wheelchair.

(Well, maybe being Doomguy can beat that).

After being (re)introduced to the Jewish scientist Set Roth and seemingly killing all the nazis that got inside the submarine, he gets rescued from a sneaking nazi soldier by a pregnant Anya (pregnant with twins!).

Holy shit, Anya. She became the low-key MVP of the Resistance, and she also plays a few roles in some of the most ridiculous moments of the game. It can be argued that she doesn't really have to do the stuff she does, but if some of the info. I gathered about The New Order is true, she might as well be one of the most heavy-tempered women in any WWII game.

A few moments later you are re-introduced to two returning characters (Frau Engel, the main villainess, and Caroline Becker, the leader of the Resistance) and a brand new one who is directly related to Frau Engel. Engel takes her sweet time to both call out Blazko while she holds an unconscious Caroline captive as well as reprehend her daughter, Sigrun Engel, for not being tough enough to be part of the Regime and their antics. The player can't help but reflect back at the flashback moments that transpired between Blazkowicz and his father, which is definitely something that was put there intentionally by MachineGames to get you involved even further with the story.

Blazkowicz lets himself get captured with the intentions of saving Caroline with help of the friend who was saved during the first cutscene of the game. Inside their ship, Frau Engel taunts Blazko as well as Caroline, orders the nazi guard to knock her down and hands over an axe to Sigrun. Engel wants her daughter to kill Caroline herself by chopping her head off, but Sigrun refuses. Engel insults and berates her own daughter, makes her cry, slaps her, takes the axe, and does the job herself. Frau Engel proceeds to take Caroline's lifeless head and taunts Blazko with it.

Yet another traumatic moment for poor B.J., and boy oh boy, unfortunately the trauma won't be stopping there.

I think the game failed to set up the importance of Caroline for the Resistance, as she was the former leader of the Resistance before her unfortunate demise. She also played an important part in the previous game, which is yet another reason why you should play it just so you can get the idea! Caroline inadvertently becomes a martyr, and one of the main reasons why Blazko pulls himself thru all the bullshit from the first half of the game, to the point of murmuring to himself, asking her to "borrow her wings" for a moment (he actually wears the Da'at Yichud Power Suit that Caroline wore during the first game).

Once she's done, Frau Engel attempts to harm your comrade with the same axe, but Sigrun prevents her own mother from killing him, and then you either get Fergus with only one arm or Wyatt with severe ear damage, depending on which one you rescued. Blazko kills the guards, gets inside the Power Suit and proceeds to fuck up the nazis on their own ship. Having played the first proper level of the game, you end up freeing Eva's Hammer from the nazi captivity, and proceed to carry over Caroline's headless body alongside your friend and a poor Sigrun who wants to redeem herself and distance from her vile mother.

And who wouldn't want to distance itself from your parent who is a fucking nazi general, anyway?

-Sigrun Engel, Too Pure For This World-

Okay everyone, raise your hand those of you who did not like Sigrun at all. Okay, lower them down. Now close this tab and be gone from this post. Leave her alone, you of little faith.

In the midst of the most gruesome global conflict planet Earth has seen yet, Sigrun Engel takes a role that she wouldn't have wanted to play if given the chance. It's one thing to be born a German during WWII, but being the daughter of a nazi general with thirst of world dominance and revenge? Shit, man.

It's pretty clear that before meeting the Resistance (and even after doing so), Sigrun had nobody to talk to and help her cope with her grief. She suffered abuse from her own mother because of her condition, and she goes as far as describing in her diary an encounter with fucking Hitler himself where he orders Frau Engel to put her daughter in a body conditioning camp of sorts.

If you don't side with someone who got fat-shamed by fucking Hitler, I'm letting you know right now, I don't fuck with you.

Now, naturally a few interactions were to be expected between a descendant of a nazi and a descendant of a Jewish family, and this ends up being the case with a heated discussion between Sigrun and Anya that takes place in the dining area of the submarine of the Resistance. Blazkowicz can't help but feel bad for her, and Sigrun seems to understand that virtually nobody wants her to take part in the group.

And things just get uglier when Grace joins the Resistance as their new leader.

After you're done with the first proper level of the game and finish paying respects to Caroline, you are now free to wander around the submarine. You can do a few side missions, interact with some of the members of the Resistance, and you can also end up killing a few nazis that were pretty damn hidden inside the submarine! Apparently they were the reason why they were captured by Engel at the beginning of the game, so your second mission ends up being cleaning that hidden area of the submarine.

After doing that, your next stop is New York, which ended up being victim of an atomic bomb from the nazi regime that ended up causing the defeat and surrender of the US. Caroline's will was to liberate the US from the nazis and make it the central base of operations with the purpose of liberating the rest of the world. With that objective in mind, it seemed that Caroline had made contact with another resistance group hiding in the Empire State Building. And Grace Walker is their leader.

Now, Grace is uh...well, she's tough, and she's got a deep sense of assertiveness that makes her naturally a leader. But she's far from being a great, let alone a perfect leader.

She naturally hates nazis and the white supremacists that oppressed her and her people before, during and after the war, and that's completely understandable and justifiable. But what I find hard to justify is the severe trust issues and prejudice she has.

First of all she points a gun at B.J.'s head the moment he arrives at their base despite the fact that she may have been told by Caroline beforehand that there might be a chance of a white, tall dude with blue eyes named William Joseph Blazkowicz to show up in their base and contact them. Maybe she completely forgot about that, maybe she didn't. Then Grace pulls that idiot prank on him with the grenade that wasn't a grenade but actually it was a dud. Like, come on.

Then you have the inevitable clash with Sigrun Engel. Grace doesn't hold back and just kept calling her names and calling her a 'nazi spy' until the poor European girl had enough. Grace genuinely spend her moments as leader in the game bullying Sigrun whenever she dared to speak, and this isn't up to debate, it is a fact.

And if you ask me, Grace is a downgrade from Caroline when it comes to leaders of the Resistance. Anya actually ended up being the interim leader while the New York mission played out (a pretty damn fun mission, I might add), and she seemed to be pretty good at it, so why Grace ended up being the new leader, anyway? Yes, she has a good amount of experience, but so does Anya. Oh well, apparently it was part of Caroline's plan for Grace to become the new leader (according to some dialog found in the game).

Grace is also married and has a child. Her husband is Super Spesh, which is a lawyer that successfully defended her on a trial for a murder that Grace didn't commit (and ended up being a trap from the FBI). This trial happened before the events of WWII. Super Spesh (real name Norman Caldwell) is also a little bit paranoid and an avid conspiracy theorist with a certainly unhealthy obsession with UFOs and space alien technology. This takes further meaning when the next mission after the contact in New York is Roswell, New Mexico itself, with Super Spesh's front of operations taking a role during this mission.

Blazko meets with Grace and Super Spesh, they're found by the nazis but they manage to escape with their fellow members of their resistance group while Blazkowicz mows down all the nazis invading the building. Blazkowicz successfully recruits Grace and co., and they part to the submarine again.

With Grace as their new leader, their objective now is Roswell. Grace's plan is to drop a fucking atom bomb in the nazi-filled, underground Oberkommando base in Roswell, which was originally a site of an unearthed Da'at Yichud cache. For those who are not aware, the Da'at Yichud was (is?) an ancient Jewish mystical secret society that designed and created many inventions and artifacts, centuries ahead of the time. This secret society has played a huge role in the development of this timeline and it might be further explored in the next game of the franchise. In fact, the suit that Blazkowicz was wearing during the first half of the game is of Da'at Yichud manufacture and is originally from the first game.

Back to TNC, Blazkowicz is sent to Roswell with the disguise of a firefighter, while carrying the atom bomb inside a portable container. There are ads everywhere with Blazkowicz's face on them, with the intention of selling him as a “dangerous terrorist”, going as far as to label him "Terror-Billy".

Now, there's no gentle way for me to say this, but Roswell has been culled. I don't recall seeing a single non-white person in the town (which had a fucking nazi parade going on during the mission), and this is further reassured when you listen to some of the dialog the NPCs have during the first part of the mission in Roswell. One person talks about slave auctions as if it were the simplest thing in the world, and then you have another person trying to play nice with a nazi officer by speaking German in a poor manner. And then you have some of those white wizards (you know the ones) walking around fully clothed and shit.

All of that was just fucked up.

Your first objective is to locate the base of operations of Super Spesh, which ends up being a diner that he inherited from his father. A nazi officer walks in and you get to see that one scene from the first trailer where he questions Blazko about his whereabouts. The one that ends up killing the nazi officer is Super Spesh, and after doing so, proceeds to lock down the deli and hide Blazkowicz inside.

Once inside his bunker, Super Spesh tells him about a secret tunnel that connects his base to the Oberkommando, not before going into yet another space aliens conspiracy rant while Blazko was there. After he's done, you're set to go through the underground tunnel and reach the nazi base where you naturally dispatch as many nazis as you can, while also finish the job of putting the atom bomb inside a reactor within the base for maximum damage. Once Blazkowicz escapes the base, he detonates the bomb while strapped on a pretty damn cool unicycle, obliterating the Oberkommando in the process.

With that mission done, Blazkowicz is set to return back to the submarine, but then for some godforsaken reason, he decides to take a quick detour to Mesquite, Texas, which was where he used to live.

Now, you have to admit that this ended up being a damn stupid decision. Why would he even return there in the first place? I mean, sure, the heirloom that was mentioned at the beginning of the game was there all this time and Blazko wanted to give it to Anya, but that was actually a setup. Blazkowicz had no business being there. Oh well.

Anyway, Blazkowicz ends up having even more flashbacks to his childhood, one of them being the actual encounter with the African-American girl that his father wasn't happy to learn about (her name being Billie).

Apparently Billie is somehow an easter-egg/reference of a real-life African American jazz singer and musician called Billie Holiday. Now, I'm not entirely sure if this is real or not, but this is what I remember reading on a post in Reddit (which has been deleted by now, but I'm leaving a reply made to it), so take this with a grain of salt.

Blazkowicz enters his former home, and starts wandering around, having even more flashbacks to his childhood and the handful of amicable interactions he had with his father.

I would also like to take the time to point out and remark that, at one point during this section of the game, you may end up interacting with a piece of newspaper located inside the house.

This piece of newspaper in the game was titled "Fragment of Old News Article", and quotes an excerpt of a piece written by Henry Louis Mencken, a newspaperman and political American commentator of the first half of the 20th century. Here's a screenshot of said piece:

This is an exact quote of what Mencken said all the way back in July of 1920, in an article titled "Bayard vs. Lionheart". This quote has been passed around for almost a century, and it had a resurgence because of certain real-life events that have no business being mentioned here.

Now, I won't question what was written by Mr. Mencken, but what I'd really like to question here instead is this: How this piece of paper ended up being there, when we later learned that Rip Blazkowicz had been hiding there all along ever since he learned about the attack to the Oberkommando, and he doctored and moved around a few things inside the house?

Why this particular piece of newspaper didn't include a date that matched the setting of the game, while the rest of the (fake) newspapers bits in the game had a date each, and matched the particular time? (From the early 30s to early 60s)

Especially when this quote was written all the way back to the days before The Great Depression (started in 1929) and the date could match the settings of the game with zero issues? (July 1920)

Why would Rip Blazkowicz keep a piece of paper that could ultimately contradict the way he thinks about the new regime that governs his country?

This particular interaction made me think a lot about whether or not there was an intention to send a message thru the game with the inclusion of this particular piece, even if it ultimately can be ignored completely and has no impact in the gameplay. What I'm trying to say is that this piece could've fit better inside Grace's personal space in the submarine rather than being in Rip Blazkowicz's setup in the house. That detail felt kinda out of place.

Moving on, Blazkowicz finally arrives to the room where he used to sleep, and finds the heirloom. And his father, somehow still alive. Fucker. Rip and William start having a heated discussion, where is revealed that Rip ratted out his friends and his own wife to the nazis and sent them to extermination camps in New Mexico. William has heard enough, and despite being held at gunpoint by his own father (branding the same shotgun he used to kill the pet dog), he takes the gun off from him and kills him with an axe.

His father musters his last words, revealing that the Nazis heard everything thru a telephone. After what could arguably be considered the best non-interactive confrontation in the game, the player now has to deal with nazis falling down the sky while Blazkowicz tries to find a way to escape the house which has been ripped from the ground by Engel's nazi spaceship

Unfortunately for B.J., he ends up falling from the house to the ground, severely hurting himself in the process. He wakes up only to find Engel putting the heirloom in her own dirty hands while he is stripped apart from the Da'at Yichud supersuit.

And this, my friends, is where things...they don't fall apart, but...keep reading and you'll find out.

Blazkowicz is captured, and he somehow wakes up inside a small room in an undisclosed area, only to be greeted by Super Spesh himself, who apparently is now your lawyer (?) for a trial for murder and treason (!!) with heavy implications that you could end up being publicly executed. Spesh claims that the Resistance have a plan, and that they're going to get you out of there (wherever you ended up being sent to). In order to do so, he hits himself on the table in order to bleed, and he's going to pretend that you attacked him so he can stab the officer from behind. Okay?

This obviously doesn't work the way Spesh intended, and he ends up being killed by Engel herself after pretending the nazis didn't knew he was there to rescue you. Now apparently the Resistance is being attacked in the parking lot by the nazis guarding the building, while you're being subject to the weirdest, most awkward attempt of torture ever conceived in videogames by Frau Engel, who puts the same gun she used to kill Spesh in your mouth. Finally, you're punched in the back of the head and they put the black veil on his head again.

And now we arrive at everyone's favorite part of the game: The courtroom level! Yayyy!

Boy, what a shitshow.

The game took a huge jump in difficulty, because at some point the player didn't knew if the enemies were endlessly spawning or not, and it was definitely the hardest level in the game so far and arguably the hardest in the entire game, pre-difficulty patch.

And not only you're out of your supersuit, making you extremely vulnerable to damage, you also have very limited armor and you're also fairly limited in terms of cover in some points of the level. If you were begging for more action after the first levels of the game, the courtroom level was definitely the answer to your prayers.

And what was the reward for your efforts, you might ask? A cutscene where Blazkowicz somehow finds his mother in one room, falls to her knees only to be comforted by her and told that "You just have one more hardship to go through". The screen fades to black, and you're back at the beginning of the courtroom level, only to realize that you're actually being sentenced to death.

All of that was for nothing.

You never punched that nazi in the face. It was all a dream.

Damn.

That was genuinely a criminal move by MachineGames. Think about it, they made you kill all those nazis, reload the level I don't know how many times, and just for "heh, Blazko was hallucinating all along. time to die lol". If I were to be playing that game blindly (as in, first playthrough ever with no spoilers), I would've been so upset. Why didn't you make it into an entire cutscene in first person? You're making the player think that his actions are actually going to influence the outcome with no confirmation or hint that it won't be the case. It wasn't until the last moment where they pull the "it was all a dream" card. Damn.

And then you have the public execution scene. That one moment that cemented two things:

- Frau Engel is genuinely a main villain with no major impact in the story of the game. She might as well be replaced by someone else entirely and there'll be zero impact in the game whatsoever. - In terms of how unrealistic a Wolfenstein game can be, they might've jumped the shark with what they did in The New Colossus.

Blazkowicz is sentenced to death for treason, and beheaded personally by Engel at a heavily vandalized Lincoln Memorial in front of millions in a televised event (or so the game thinks it's making you feel; more to than in a moment).

“The old and the weak are doomed” - Blazkowicz’s “last thoughts”. You get your head chopped off your body, and then you “die”.

"Look, guys, Blazkowicz is dead. For realsies!"

Now, a parenthesis. There were some rumors going on before the game was released that Blazkowicz was apparently going to have his head reattached to a new body because of the heavy damage he suffered from the previous fights with the nazis in the timeline. At the time, I decided to dismiss them, thinking that they were too far out there to actually become reality. Boy I was wrong.

Not only the game hints, almost spoils the fact that Set Roth might've found a way to reattach someone's head on a different body, there's also the omniscient reminder that B.J.'s body is failing him. Anya actually confronts Blazko because of this; she knows something's wrong but Blazkowicz doesn't want to admit it. He knows he must be strong, for Anya, for his future children, for the Resistance, for America.

But as the game went on, I kinda settled on the idea that this was going to happen. And it didn't dawn on me at the time, but it does now, they pulled it off in a mediocre way.

Okay so, you have the cutscene where Engel throws the head of Blazko down the furnace, and it apparently it goes all the way down...

Except not. Because apparently we've been watching a screen all this time, as a tape apparently starts rolling back, and we see Blazkowicz's head fall down the pit, but then some kind of 60's styled drone picks Blazko's head, and replaces it with someone else's head (presumably just another nazi), and flies away from the scene.

Then you're told that Set Roth, Max Hass, your companion and Anya are trying their damnedest to rescue the head in order to make the quick transplant to a new body. The drone arrives where they're hiding, they proceed with the operation, and it is a success! Hooray!

Why did this felt way unrealistic to me? More to that in a moment!

Blazkowicz wakes up in the submarine, and he's told by Anya that they reattached his head to a super-soldier body stolen from the nazis. Somehow they survived the assault at the parking lot from earlier (how they did it is never addressed in the game), and now you're told to make a choice between what kind of upgrade do you wish to have.

You can choose between Battle Walker (some huge ass sticks), Ram Shackles (shoulder pads that can fucking gib nazi scum) and Constrictor Harness (they literally make you a snek).

You go from being literally a dead man walking to a nazi-killing Megaman X

After choosing one of the upgrades, B.J. proceeds to murmur to himself: "Caroline, thank you. Take back your wings. I don't need them anymore". And proceeds to go back to New York in order to retrieve a location of another resistance group located in New Orleans.

Not before catching Sigrun and Bombate having sex in a boat.

If this ends up in the Nintendo Switch port I'll be pretty damn impressed.

After the sequence where you get accustomed with the new contraption, the side missions will be unlocked. These side missions can be unlocked using Enigma Codes, cards that some mobs in the game often dropped during gameplay after being killed. These side missions are pretty entertaining, and like I said previously, they could've enhanced the experience for a lot of people if they were to become part of the main story, because not only they unlock all the contraptions and help you reach their maximum potential, you can also discover new things about some characters.

Like for example, the one side mission where you return to Roswell (the one where you can get to kill the white wizards? Yeah, that one), it is explained that Spesh was actually aware he was going to die one way or another during the fight of the resistance, and had left a goodbye letter to Grace. There's another couple of notes in a side mission in New York where the real name of Super Spesh is revealed (Norman Caldwell).

And of course, like I said, there's also the fact that once you finish all the side missions you'll end up with all the three contraptions fully upgraded. Wouldn't have ruled to have all three of them before the final mission, or the ones before it? You don't really need all of them, but they could've been of great help and could've improved the experience for many.

Now, let's address what bugged me in the second half of the game.

-Where. Is. Everyone?!-

“Hewwo...? Echo, echo, echo...”

Remember what I said about certain moments of the game that felt like they were "not actually happening at all" and needed more impact? Well, let's go back to the execution scene.

Do you recall seeing any American person watching the execution live, regardless if they were pro-nazi or not? Do you recall anyone of the Resistance watching the nazi shitshow before the execution? That's right, we didn't see anyone. The same thing happens a bunch of times later on. For a "highest rated TV hour in history" (according to an article found in the game), it seemed like nobody was actually watching his execution at all (I even recall hearing some 'boos' while Engel was holding Blazkowicz' head).

Why you didn't show any Americans watching the execution live? Where are they?

Barring the members of the Resistance that end up joining you in Eva's Hammer and the people at Roswell on the first half of the game, you never get to interact with a single regular citizen of the US during the game.

They're all either members of the small resistance groups that you recruit during the game, or they're part of the group of NPC white Americans that were inadvertently being oppressed by the nazi regime.

For a game where rising against your oppressors is the main message that is trying to be conveyed, I'm sure as hell that I didn't see any regular citizens that could've felt identified with the liberating actions of Blazkowicz. If your game is meant to be narrative and story-driven, make sure the player is genuinely feeling it, make goddamn sure like it's actually real.

Fuck, I mean, the only regular person that the player could witness in the game got instantly killed by some nazis in the very next level (New Orleans). Barring that single moment, it seemed like all the levels in the game were exempt from any humans other than Blazko and the nazis. And again, yes, the members of the Resistance that join the group and become NPCs inside the submarine exist, but they were all active members already.

Postcards and letters won't just cut it this time. Make sure the next game has some regular citizens, otherwise it'll feel like there is no actual connection between the Resistance and the regular people.

Moving on with the game, Blazkowicz arrives to New Orleans, who has been affected by the nazi regime in a hard way. Basically they have separated the people deemed as "undesirable" in one part of the city and the other "fine people" in the other. The problem is, they basically wiped both these sides at the time of your arrival.

Your objective is to meet Horton Boone, a leader of a small resistance group hidden deep within New Orleans. Horton is a man with strong communist beliefs, an avid alcohol consumer, anti-capitalist as well as a "preacher" (even though he really isn't). Horton didn't seem to have that much of an impact in the game, and was relegated pretty damn quickly. Which is unfortunate because he was a such a refreshing character in the sense that he actually put some resistance (hah!) before joining the group.

When Blazkowicz finally meets him, Horton seems surprised that he's still alive. Blazko initially tries to recruit them, but Horton doesn't seem to be that motivated, as he hands him his "Horton Special" (a liquor of his own craftsmanship). They start having a heated discussion about political beliefs and the way they thought of each other's side during WWII, which ends in Blazkowicz kicking his chair away, claiming that he won't be raising his future kids in a world dominated by nazis. Horton is surprised by Blazkowicz resilience, and as Blazko starts blacking out because of the strong liquor, Horton accepts his proposal to join them.

Grace advises Blazkowicz that they're about to be assaulted by nazis soon, so they escape New Orleans by using a goddamn atom bomb to impulse themselves. The New Orleans stage was pretty damn fun from what I saw. Unfortunately you don't get to mount a Panzerhund in the game after that, which is a shame because the Panzerhund fucking rules.

When you get back inside Eva's Hammer, you're told that the nazis employ the Ausmerzer (the ship they used to trap your friends at the beginning of the game) to shut down any attempts of revolt. Naturally, the Ausmerzer is heavily guarded, and after the events of Roswell, the security codes to deactivate the heavy weaponry were secured in a place far away from our planet. Venus.

Jesus Christ they also conquered Venus.

-It Was Space Nazis, Maaaan!-

Your next stop is naturally Venus, and in order to get inside the new Oberkommando headquarters, you must disguise as an actor named Jules Redfield trying to participate in an audition for a propaganda film based on the capture and execution of "Terror-Billy". Once you get inside their facility, you're greeted by the director of the film, Helene Winter, and the rest of the people trying to get the same role as you, and then...he arrives.

One of the game's highest points, arguably the best moment in the entire game, is when Hitler shows up to the audition. Goddamn. Godfuckingdamn. These twenty-five years of wait were so fucking worth it.

Holy shit, Hitler's portrayal is fantastic. KEEP IN MIND, it is fantastic in an historical and logical sense, don't get confused and start calling me a Hitler-lover. He is (clearly) old, senile, has severe mental issues, aggravating paranoia, he pukes in the floor, he attempts to pee but fails miserable (indicating some severe issues related to pissing blood), mistakes Helene for his own mother...yeah, basically the Fuhrer is not with us anymore.

And it makes sense, because it has been thoroughly documented that he used to be a heavy cocaine and drug addict, and he was malfunctioning already before his death; it only made sense for him to go on a downward spiral at his 70s.

I've been clamoring for Hitler to come back in this current timeline, because who the hell doesn't want to kill that fucker again? Good on MachineGames for having the balls to do that after all this time.

Going back to the main story, Hitler demands immediate respect from the auditionees to his persona, and because of his paranoia against Jewish people, he ends up killing one of them after an hilarious exchange.

RIP Arizona Man

Something to point out here, some people started throwing around the idea that this person was actually Ronald Reagan. Initially I didn't see the resemblance at all, specially when you attempt to align his timeline and age with WWII, but then the developers started uploading the concept art and model designs to ArtStation (preeety beautiful and thanks to every single game developer that does this, by the way), and as it turns out, this character is indeed a reference to Ronald Reagan!

I still don't get it. Maybe because I'm not American?

Blazkowicz in the disguise of "Jules Redfield" is told by Hitler to recite the lines of his role of Terror-Billy. Blazko barely manages to do so, and then Hitler proceeds to ask another participant to do the same. This other guy does a pretty damn good job at it, and both Hitler and Helene get ecstatic about it.

Later on they move to the second part of the casting, which consists of taking down a nazi soldier and recite a monologue inside a glass panel. A participant enters the panel, does a poor job, and gets out not before getting shot in the head by Hitler. Now there's only two of you, and Blazkowicz is asked to participate next. William then proceeds to kill the nazi soldier for real, slams the panel and asks the directors if that's "good enough". Hitler seems perfectly pleased with his "realistic" performance, and ends up killing the other participant left sitting in the room with another bullet to the head. The audition is over, you got the role.

Hitler leaves the audition and is not seen again for the remainder of the game. Until Wolfenstein III, old fuck.

The Venus level is goddamn fantastic, and if you played DOOM 2016, you'll definitely be reminded of the extraterrestrial/futuristic scenery of the game. The mechanics involving the space suit may seem bothersome to a few players, but it only makes sense once you learn about the temperature of the planet (over 400 Celsius/752 Fahrenheit!!).

The nazi Venus facility is far, far bigger compared to the Moon facility of the previous game, and it also features a brand new gun called the Ubergewehr (roughly translated as the "Supreme Gun"), which is basically the BFG9000 equivalent of the game, and perhaps the franchise. According to the game, this weapon is partially powered by energy from micro-portals of extra-dimensional origin. And I don't know about you, but the energy that emanates from this weapon is red, and it bears a striking resemblance to the Argent Energy of DOOM 2016...Unfortunately this weapon appears in a later stage in the game, and you really can't enjoy it as you could've wished for.

B.J. obtains the documents pertaining the secret code to shut down the system, and leaves Venus for good. Back on Earth and back on the submarine, Blazkowicz hands over the code to Sigrun so that she could analyze it, and she finds that the code to shut down the Ausmerzer is VALHALLA. Happy with this discovery, Sigrun proceeds to tell Grace and everyone else about it, but is completely dismissed by Grace and is once again berated.

Sigrun has had enough. She yells at Grace, and proceeds to slap her. Following that, Grace seems to attempt to return the favor, but is stopped and overpowered by Sigrun who shuts her shit down and asks her to start respecting her by stop calling her something that she is sick of hearing (being called “a nazi”). Grace admits defeat and swears to not call her nazi again.

That was an amazing moment. To top this off, NOBODY intervened. Grace had it coming, for all the time she spent literally bullying and bothering Sigrun with that nonsense. If you were to ask me, she should be glad she didn't die at Sigrun’s hands in an hypothetical betrayal plot. I was actually surprised myself because I thought Sigrun was going to betray the team at one point of the game, but fortunately that wasn't the case. Please forgive me for not trusting you, Sigrun.

Now, moving on to the final level...the Ausmerzer. Blazkowicz and Anya (!!!) end up being the ones spearheading the assault to the airborne platform. The level is similarly great to the Venus level, except that it is relatively shorter in comparison. Lots of nazis to kill, including two super soldiers that end up becoming the final bosses of the game (I know, I'll discuss this in a moment). The final encounter with the Zerstörer isn't that much of a hassle if you finish the regular mobs first and then dispatch them later. Add this that you get to maneuver the Ubergewehr again, and the fight shouldn't be that much of an issue.

Before reaching the final room, a door opens revealing a good bunch of enemies, and Blazkowicz is about to be obliterated, but suddenly Anya appears out of literally nowhere, throws a grenade, catches flames from a Panzerhund, takes off her jacket (the only thing covering her naked upper body) and proceeds to shoot everyone and everything on her path.

...Oooookay?

I mean, after the execution scene, the over-the-top silliness of this scene was kinda pointless for me. I personally found unnecessary that Anya ended up playing an active part in the actual fights against the nazi forces, I mean, for God's sake, she's pregnant with twins. I had fears that she was going to die during the entire game, and that scene didn't help at all.

I'm glad that she's still alive, but please, keep her at home in the next game. Blazkowicz has suffered enough, losing her would be devastating for all of us.

Blazkowicz and Anya proceed to enter the VALHALLA code, and the defense system is finally shut down.

And now...the final encounter with Frau Engel...boy oh boy.

-Frau Engel: Die Neue Enttäuschung-

So...Engel is in Los Angeles a guest on The Jimmy Carver Show, but Blazkowicz and co. have taken control of the Ausmerzer, traveled to L.A. and infiltrated the studio. The last thing you ever do in the game is to sneak past the public and get in front of her, she tries to shoot him but Blazkowicz chops her arm off, and proceeds to split her face open with the hatchet. Engel dies immediately afterwards, and that's it.

No fanfare, no spectacular last boss fight, no nothing. That's it. She's dead, Jim.

Here Lies Engel, She Never Scored.

Before I give you my overall thoughts about her, let's recapitulate what Engel did in this game. Let's ignore whatever happened in the previous game and let's focus on what happened in The New Colossus:

-She kills the leader of the Resistance (at the time), Caroline.

-She berates her own daughter for not being nazi enough.

-Kisses Blazkowicz, steals the heirloom from him, and puts a smoking gun in his mouth in what apparently was meant to be a torture scene.

-"Kills" him on a public showing that who knows if it was actually watched by anyone on the planet and felt completely ridiculous.

Now, let's compare what happened in the previous game with Wilhelm Strasse, Deathshead, the previous main villain of The New Order:

-Assumes control of ancient Da'at Yichud technology that helps the Reich take over and gain advantage in WWII

-Captures Blazkowicz's squad in his compound, incinerates some of them, and proceeds to toy around with the rest, forcing Blazkowicz to decide between one of his teammates (Wyatt or Fergus) to sacrifice.

-Then he proceeds to vivisect that teammate on the spot, in one of the most gruesome sequences ever recorded in the Wolfenstein franchise, and saves that person's brain for later.

-HE FUCKING TOOK YOUR FRIEND'S BRAIN

-Successfully invades the original hideout of the Resistance, and his squad captures/executes some of their members, one of them being totally-not Jimmy Hendrix himself in one of the timelines. -Remember the brain of your friend? Well, now he put it inside a goddamn war machine, and now that machine is trying to kill you.

-He basically forces you to kill your friend again to end his suffering.

-And after you're done fighting with that nazi fucker during an actual final boss fight, he somehow pulls a grenade (probably out of his ass) and attempts a suicide attack.

-He dies but he definitely left you for death at mercy of your own friends who are about to drop a goddamn atom bomb.

Well, I don't know about you, but I guess it's unanimous.

Not only Engel’s death resulted in perhaps the most disappointing moment of the game, but overall she was perhaps one of the most pointless, inconsequential main villains of the franchise. She doesn't even come close to what Deathshead did in the previous game, and not just because Deathshead may have put the bar way too high for her, but because she really didn't to much at all during the game to warrant her becoming the final person to be killed at the hands of Blazko in the main story of game.

You know what would've ruled? An actual boss fight against Engel.

Now that her lifeless body is laying on the desk, Horton, Grace and Blazkowicz walk up to the screen and tell the American people watching the show to rise up against the nazis, and start revolting. Game logo on the screen. The End.

(Cue some really, really horrible version of 'We're Not Gonna Take It' playing in the background as the credits roll)

In a post-credits scene, Blazkowicz takes back the heirloom ring from Engel's lifeless body, and proposes to Anya with it. And if you picked either Wyatt or Fergus, you get one of them ranting around in front of the screen.

Well. What can I say?

The main story was okay, it could've definitely been polished a bit in order to turn it great. The liberation of America from the nazis was kind of a given, and when you look back at The New Order and compare it to The New Colossus, the ending of the latter ended up becoming the lowest point of the story. In the New Order the game ends on a cliffhanger, while The New Colossus doesn't offer much in terms of what could possibly happen next.

There's not that big of a difference if you pick Wyatt or Fergus, I think. The interactions with Fergus are more leaned towards your typical "heh, remember the time when you threw away your bionic arm while you were drunk?" war stories, and Wyatt's timeline is more focused with the problems he has to overcome because of war trauma.

Max Hass was fantastic. Max Hass!

The side missions on the submarine are fine. You actually get to explore the same areas but in a different way each. The side missions for the additional upgrades on the other hand, not so much. The majority of these missions are just revisiting old areas, discovering hidden areas, and that's it. The DLC doesn't seem to offer much in terms of new areas to explore except for maybe one or two stories.

Overall, Blazkowicz's father ended up becoming a better and more meaningful antagonist than Engel, and maybe he could've become the actual final boss of the game. Imagine if the Rip Blazkowicz that you killed in your old home was actually a clone, and you end up fighting him at the top of the Ausmerzer while he's controlling a clone of the London Monitor (remember the giant nazi robot machine from the first game?).

The way they handled the story, and adding the fact that some encounters were lackluster, and how they completely missed the opportunity to build some characters that needed more spotlight, leaves the feeling that The New Colossus ended up being a rushed project. I definitely hope this isn't the case and we can get a few explanations about some of the issues I wrote in this post (thanks for reading it, by the way).

With that in mind, I would like to take the opportunity to advise you all to give the game a try. If the contents of the story bother you in some way, try to dismiss them as much as you can, and focus on the gameplay itself. I don't know, you might end up liking it despite of your initial opinions about this game!

Would I recommend The New Colossus?

Well, here's the deal. As of right now, the game is sitting at $60 USD on Steam, and with the DLC added is $80 USD. And look, I'm not the kind of person that prefers to engage in the "is it worth X amount of price" debate for any videogame. Ultimately, a videogame costs what you want it to be. You can buy it right now, you can buy it later at a certain discount, you can visit some third party site to obtain a cheaper copy, I don't know. That's not my problem, it's yours. You should know by now how much money you can (and you're willing to) spend for something, and you should also know by now what you value the most about what you want to obtain in life.

Yes, yes I would recommend The New Colossus on the virtue that, if you want to play the third game, you might want to get some background first about the first two games (The New Order and TNO) before diving in to the third.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I'm not the kind of person that prefers to watch someone else play a game rather than experience the game myself, so at the end of the day if you want to watch a LP the decision is yours. I definitely won't agree, but I'm willing to respect it if you give a good reason about why you don't want to play a videogame.

With that being said, and this is something that is definitely worth pointing out, as of right now you can buy the first two games (The New Order, and the prequel The Old Blood) for $30 USD on Steam. These games were released four years ago, and they're in sale on a regular basis on many sites. If you want to keep your money for whatever reason and wait until a “tri-pack” bundle is released, go ahead. Unlike a handful of games that unfortunately ceased to exist because of pettiness from the developers (looking at you, Konami), The New Colossus is going nowhere. It's going to be there for the moment you want to give it a shot.

Now, if you were part of the group of people who got pissed after what happened with the promotional campaigns for the game, I'd say that you should still give the game a shot, at least one play. If it changes your mind, good, if it doesn't, it's okay. But just be careful not to say dumb shit that could reveal that you're talking out of your ass about things that don't exist.

I will be expecting news about the third installment of Wolfenstein, and there's no other choice but to have Hitler be the main antagonist of the game. I mean, who the hell could it even be other than fucking old Hitler himself?

Any question/comments/suggestions? Let me know! My inbox is open! Thank you for spending your valuable time reading my post!

#gaming #wolfenstein #Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus #The New Colossus #b.j. blazkowicz #videogames #video games #bethesda #machinegames #IMX reviews a thing #offt #long post #very long post #spoilers

75 notes · View notes

livelikebrent · 7 years

Text

Life isn’t tied with a bow but it’s still a gift...

The answer is: Yes, the title of this post is more or less a Kodak Black lyric. It was made into a very pretty, visually pleasing inspirational quote image I saw on social media, I took note of it for later use and here I am realizing it wasn’t made up by some super unique female author. But nevertheless, it’s true. So this blog post isn’t about a recent trip. But rather the holiday season and Brent not being here for it. It’s something I want to write about.

Some of you are reading this because you knew Brent, you snowboarded together or you grew up together. Some of you reading have never met Brent but heard about what a great guy he was...and I couldn’t be happier that he had an impact on you. While he didn’t know everybody, he sure knew a good chunk of the population. I couldn't tell you the last time he introduced me to someone, meaning only one person and that's where it ended. It was never, "Hey Ais, meet TJ." No, no. It was, "Hey Ais, meet TJ... OH and his wife Leslie. Oh and there are our friends Brandin and his wife Jaque, who is Buck and Tank's vet and then this is Maura who is engaged to Tom and is BFF with Caitlin. Not Tom though, Maura is BFFs with Caitlin and Tom is BFF with Josh. You met Josh when we went to dinner with him and Hannah...” AND IT WOULD GO ON. That’s not exactly how I met those individuals but just roll with the example. I've probably met the amount of people I was originally supposed to meet in my entire lifetime in the first year of dating Brent. It’s incredible. But, I digress. Here we are today regardless if I've been introduced to you (yet) or not. Sometimes, Brent would have friends in the same room as mine and there would be overlap without us even realizing it. Brent was all about bringing people together in one way or another. I think we can all agree that he was good at that.

This December I decided to bring together the Philly/Wilkes-Barre-ish crew to start a new tradition: Friendsmas. This year has been a roller coaster and wanted us all together during the holiday season. Out of the 15 people in this photo below (baby Fiona is running around and Josh doesn’t know how to handle the selfie stick) Brent introduced me to 12. That’s one dozen people that I wouldn’t have in my life right now if it wasn’t for Brent. That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. (Mind you there are some people missing from this photo that still play a vital role in my life today.) I’m extremely grateful for this bunch that I’ve become friends with and want me in their lives even after Brent being gone. We tried to get a group picture. But taking photos that night was not our strong suit and the kitchen may have filled with smoke due to the burning butter in Adam’s (delish) popovers...but the company and spread was pretty close to perfection. I hope this group of wonderful people grows and the tradition continues...because I think we need that.

I think it’s very easy to harp on the loss and what we no longer have during a time like this. During a time of year like this. It’s inevitable to be quite honest. But I think sometimes we need to remind ourselves with what we do have and cherish it regardless. That is what I’ve been trying to do and how I’ve been trying to handle myself the last 5 months. But recently, I found myself lying in bed one evening trying to go to sleep but couldn’t stop thinking about Brent. As the tears welled up and I started to cry my phone rang instantly. It was Fletcher, a Carve 4 Cancer member and friend, calling me from his hotel room in Montreal to chat about Carve. Coincidence? Probably. But I like to think not. I think we’ve all shared plenty of tears and there are certainly more to come...but again, take the time to look around and think about what we have and what Brent did for us. Brent brought Fletcher into my life. Fletcher, a blood cancer survivor, joined the Carve 4 Cancer team almost two years ago. When Brent was re-diagnosed, Fletcher would call me, text me, he’d let me know him and his wife (who had been HIS caretaker) were always there to talk. But that night Fletcher called and we chatted for almost two hours about the non-profit and the future of it. He didn’t know I was upset and that his call was cheering me up or that I was in bed trying to fall asleep. But I was grateful for the conversation (even if most of it was pure business) at such an odd time.

Pictured below is another group of loved ones brought together. But this time, the tables have turned and I had introduced Brent to 20+ people all in one sitting. This is my Boston College Family. “But you didn’t go to B.C.” I know, I’m well aware. My father and brother did though! My Dad did it right. What I mean by that is he stayed friends with his (6? Am I missing anybody?) college buds that he lived with in Mod32A on campus. Then when they all graduated, went off and got married, they continued to stay friends, then when they had children, we all became friends...more like family, really. Years ago, we used to get together in the summers up in Scituate, Mass. for long weekends and playing with lobsters on the deck before cooking them, winters in New Jersey cutting down our Christmas trees together and random get togethers in between. But as we grew older and schedules became a bit more crazy we took a break from organized mass gatherings. But over the last several years, we started to get together again for tree cutting season and pumpkin picking for Oktobersfest! This crew grew from the B.C. boys, to married couples, to families and then to families with significant others and we now have our first official B.C. baby, my niece Madison Grace. It’s absolutely wonderful how much it has evolved over the years and how much of a riot we all have together. But two years ago, Brent was invited to the annual B.C. Tree Cutting Party in 2015. The weather was unseasonably warm that year and I was excited to introduce Brent to my extended family for the first time. It’s needless to say, he fully embraced them as they did him.

This specific B.C. gathering begins at my parent’s humble abode in New Jersey where everyone meets up in the early afternoon. Then we caravan to the tree farm, find our Christmas trees, chop those puppies down, stop in the barn on the farm to buy ornaments, beeswax candle sticks, grab some coco or coffee, take our annual group farm photo and eventually make our way back to the house. Then the day continues with endless food, drinks, games, white elephant gift exchange and catching up into the evening and early hours of the morning. Every bed, every room, and most of the floor space is filled with bodies and air mattresses. When morning rolls around, the food and coffee is once again never ending before everyone packs up and makes their way back home whether it’s to Orlando, Ocean City or Philadelphia. Sadly, that was the only mass Boston College gathering Brent was able to attend. BUT he did see this B.C. crew for random and smaller gatherings here and there. He absolutely loved it.

When the B.C. family heard the news this past July, everyone felt an immense loss. How could you not? It was Brent. Mind you, some of these people only met Brent once and traveled all of the way from Scituate to attend his funeral. Now that’s a love that makes me cry just thinking about it. I received cards, phone calls, text messages, packages, and more from the Boston College family expressing their sympathy, love and support. We truly are a family which Brent was very much a part of. My loss was their loss.

This year, our Tree Cutting Party was exciting and intense in more ways than one. it was my niece's very first tree cutting in general and the weather was so perfect. We’ve had bitter cold weather for this December gathering, we’ve had beautiful warm weather, we’ve had dreary December days but this year we had a perfect snowfall. I had thought this was already the best B.C. party so far soley because we finally cut Christmas trees down in the snow. But it got better.

When we got back to my parent’s house, the Irish whiskey was flowing, bottles were being popped, appetizers were consumed and then my brother, Chris (in most of the photos above), had the room silent. He stood in our living room with all eyes on him and myself sitting on the floor with one of my “cousins.” He said that the entire group wanted me to know they knew this year would be hard and wouldn’t be the same without Brent...but that he was present. He went on and told me they love me and they also wanted me to look around at the party and see Brent everywhere. Then simultaneously all twenty-eight of them took off their sweaters and button downs to reveal they were all wearing our Carve 4 Cancer #LiveLikeBrent shirts and had one waiting for me as well. (I actually thought about packing mine for the weekend but for some reason didn’t!) I don’t even know what I said in response to my brother and everyone in that room except, “Thank you” as I tried to hold back my tears, stood up and hugged Chris. I wasn’t sad or upset but honestly touched by the support and love from this group of people. One of the couples that live down in Orlando felt terrible they were unable travel up for Brent’s arrangements over the summer and felt compelled to do something. So they planned this thoughtful and unexpected surprise. Thank you.

“I’ve learned a lot this year. I learned that things don’t always turn out the way you planned, or the way you think they should. And I’ve learned that there are things that go wrong that don’t always get fixed or get put back together the way they were before. I’ve learned that some broken things stay broken, and I’ve learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.” – Jennifer Weiner, Author

Everyone in their lifetime will lose somebody they love. I'm obviously not speaking on a break-up or a falling out with a friend. I'm talking about when the time comes for that somebody “to meet their maker”...as Brent would often refer to it. You will lose somebody, attend that wake, attend that funeral and if you're lucky...that's the extent in what you have to do with the loss. Emotionally you still need to deal with it - but not physically. You don't have to worry about stopping utility bills, car payments, cleaning out an entire home from top to bottom and this list goes on. But unfortunately, I'm sure some of you know that process a little too well. However, what are some of the positives after losing this person? It’s very difficult and almost impossible to even see at first. But what are you left with? When life deals you a shitty hand in cards how do you play them? As Brent's girlfriend I realized I was left with something. I'm not talking about the sweatshirt that he wore in the hospital that I slept in for a week straight after he passed. I'm also not talking about being left with his snowboards or the countless memories we had together either. I'm talking about you. I'm talking about his friends - he would always correct me...“Our friends, Aisling. They’re not just MY friends anymore.” - I'm talking about OUR friends, Brent’s drinking buddies, peers, new acquaintances...I'm talking about this community I’ve found myself in. Just stop and think about it. I have been left with this community of rad, insanely kind and special people that have also rallied around what started as a measly grass roots fundraiser almost 5 years ago! But...it was Brent's little fundraiser. It was his fundraiser to help others in the blood cancer community. I was left with this (growing) team of people. I wasn't the only one left with a community or non-profit that was built together with Brent. Everyone reading this post was left with this too.

These friends, this Carve 4 Cancer community, has evolved from a fundraiser with a couple of raffle baskets into an official, full fledged non-profit recognized by the IRS into now with a foundation. It all comes full circle. Brent was originally raising money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to help others. He then decided he didn't want the money he raised to be managed by a huge organization. He, in true Brent fashion, wanted to take matters into his own hands and create the impact himself. Over the last 4 years we, Carve 4 Cancer, have donated over $30,000 to blood cancer research. Here we are in December of 2017 where we’ve announced a brand new foundation raising money to give a grants local cancer patients...the Live Like Brent Foundation. We have created a damn foundation, you guys! In just over one week, we receive the applications sent in from patients, get to know these individuals and help them financially. I'm sorry, but how amazing is that?! This is what Brent wanted and we’re going to make it happen. Also, I don’t think we’ve made this public but in 2018 we have a goal of raising $100,000. And we will make it happen. Mic drop.

To put it lightly, losing Brent has taken a toll on myself and the Carve team, the Evans, friends on the east coast, friends on the west coast and everywhere in between. But do you know what keeps myself and the team going at the end of the day? This Carve 4 Cancer community. Brent left us with the opportunity to continue his legacy, continue to pay it forward and have a really stellar time while doing so. How many people have something like that after they lose someone they love? How many people can say they have a community that wants to make a difference because of that loved one that we lost? I'm not going to sit here and tell you we are going to work until this disease is gone. I'm just simply not. But I will tell you we will work together and dedicate our time and talent to making a better today for cancer patients and those effected by this disease. I will fully immerse myself into planning a kickass gala with some of my team members to fund this foundation, carry Brent’s legacy, continue to raise these funds and help those in need together.

Nevertheless, the purpose of this post is not by any means to solicit donations or ask you for financial support for Carve. I’ve been trying to handle myself and this situation the best I can and what I’ve found is that I’m thankful for the people Brent has surrounded me with. I hope some of you can relate and it helps you during this time of year as well. While you can't pick-up your phone and ask Brent to ditch his plans to hit the slope this winter season or go grab a beer...you can still do something for him. I decided at his wake to travel for him and finish that bucket list we had created together. You can go hit up the slopes twice as many times for him this winter. You can grab Carve 4 Cancer and hold onto it and get involved to whatever degree you’d like. You can sit at your dinner table on Christmas day and be thankful for the people that came into your life. Maybe Brent influenced that...maybe he’s the reason you’re with your loved one. (He always bragged about being a semi-successful matchmaker!) Brent wanted nothing more than to create an impact. I will tell you to let yourself feel his absence this winter season, I certainly will, but please, do good with it. Life definitely isn’t tied with a bow...but take a moment and think about what gift he left us with.

#Carve 4 Cancer #C4C #Blood Cancer #LiveLikeBrent #LiveLiveBrentFoundation #Boston College #Jennifer Weiner #kodak black

1 note · View note

boibih · 7 years

Text

Theory Time: The Big Question

What is consciousness? How does it exist? Why?

Before I start I want to make it clear that I am not a neuroscientist, quantum physicist or religious philosopher. Please don't expect me to treat this as a serious scientific paper. It's just a train of thought. So forgive the very amateur outlook and language I have on the topics I hope to discuss. I hope to bring you on the mental journey I went through to discover what I now hold as a believable, however un-intuitive theory on how the world works.

Consciousness in the Brain:

One of the worst/best ideas I ever had was when I started thinking about consciousness and the human brain. I do not really believe in a soul in the heavenly sense, so instead, I believed that the answer to consciousness must reside somewhere in the human brain. A book by the polish writer Stanislav Lem, called "Peace on Earth" (Pokoj na Ziemi) a protagonist returns to earth with partial memory loss caused by a wound that separated his right and left brain hemispheres. To continue his journey he must communicate with his right brain hemisphere. This idea fascinated me, and what astonished me most was that this was based off a real-life phenomenon - Split Brain Syndrome (SBS). Usually found in people who have undergone brain surgery to treat epilepsy, SBS is when the two sides of the brain are severed from each other and cannot internally communicate.

Does the "soul" or the conscious part of the brain remain in one place? Or does it split in two? Reality is really very close to what Stanislav Lem described. The left part of our brain is responsible for speech and facial recognition, and the one us onlookers can communicate easiest with (by talking). It is also responsible for the control of the right side of the body (including the eyes), and vice versa for the left. My question was what makes these now separate brains the same person? What makes them different? Should I treat them as two people? After a typically post-millennial teenager google search I found sources that could help me understand. Youtube videos, medical papers, newspapers. Wow, what a power the internet has. I came to the conclusion that there are two things that make an individual different from another individual:

-Conflicts of Experience-

You and me see from different perspectives, and that's part of what gives us our individuality. Various experiments showed that people living with SBS could often come to conflicts of experience with right and left brains. When told to look at a single dot in the middle of a screen, with words and images popping up on the left or right of the dot, the left brain (responsible for speech) could tell us verbally what it saw on the right. However, when it saw something on the left, they couldn't verbally tell us what it was, but with their left hand could draw it. The Right Brain was communicating. The right brain experienced something the left did not! However this was just a lack of internal communication, doesn't mean its a different person right? This brings me onto my next point.

-Conflicts of Opinion-

The Different experiences people have fundamentally change what they think and the way they think. What separates my mind from yours is what we see and how we see it, and to the peril of the world, every person has a different view point. The two sides of the brain in a person with SBS is no different. And the two brains (halves of a brain) have now been proven to experience things differently. They see out of different eyeballs, recognise people differently, control different tasks. So do they have different opinions then surely? A neuroscientist Rhawn Joseph observed a patient having literal conflicts between left and right. The left hand would carry out actions contrary to the left hemisphere's motives. For example, the left hand turning off the television immediately after the right hand turned it on like an old bickering couple. It went so far that the patient’s left leg would try and walk in a different direction to the right! The conflict was so irritating to the patient that he even stated "I hate this hand" as his left hand struggled with his right. Like two individuals fighting in one body. This is often called "Alien Hand Syndrome", found in some people with SBS.

The important conclusion that I drew from these thoughts and research is that consciousness can be split. I saw no reason to consider the left or right as the same individual. It ticked all the boxes of separate "souls" as far as I was concerned.

The fact that consciousness can be split is an important step in me coming to my final conclusion. It completely went against my prior belief in the fact that we are individual souls. This is because if there's a connection between two 'individuals' (left and right) they can act as a single individual, as shown by you and me with our perfectly intact *corpus callosum*s between the two hemispheres of the brain. What's to stop some crazy Frankenstein-like scientist to connect two full human brains together with some more neural connections? Wouldn't this also create a functioning single consciousness? Is the simple lack of being physically connected to you what makes me and you separate people?

Consciousness in the rest of the universe:

Then my inquiry turned to AI. Would connecting an artificial computer to a brain do the same thing? Is a computer conscious? This was quickly going down a rabbit hole that was going to be very tricky to navigate. The ability of something that is created by humans becoming conscious has been in the dreams of scientists and sci-fi nerds for decades if not centuries. Why would an organic computer be any different from one created by machines in its ability to contain consciousness? Its complexity? Where would the line in the scale of complexity lie? There's machines more self-aware than worms, that process information more complexly than worms, are they more conscious than worms? I started to notice a pattern in this. Information was being collected and used to form behaviour. From hard-wired instincts (solid code) to more complex learnt behaviour (self-programming). At this point I yet again went on a tangent, what made it 'ethical' to just turn a computer on/off. I decided that it was the lack of a self-preservation emotion that animals have, but that's a topic for another day.

Information being exchanged (or taken in) was clearly a fundamental part of experience, and thus of consciousness. This is because if we experience nothing, we can think nothing right? What about dreaming? (I imagine all these questions are getting tiresome- blame my English teachers, according to them rhetorical questions are an "engaging writing technique") My answer to dreaming was that although there is no external stimulus that we experience, we have dreams as a way of getting stimulus out of our own mind and memory - our imagination. So I concluded from that, that for consciousness to arise there must be an exchange of information. That would make sense to me. Our brains take in a lot of information through their sensory organs, but also from within themselves - memories being one of the more obvious examples, as well as imagination (the ability to create new stimulus from mixing and filling gaps of old information, which is what computers can now do with the help of machine learning - exciting stuff)

If a baby had developed in the womb in a coma, I theorised it'd be brain-dead, it wouldn't dream or be conscious in any way. This means that the flow of information is required to begin consciousness. In fact, maybe information IS consciousness. This meant that not just electrical signals were conscious, but everything that interacted with anything else. An analogue computer like ones designed by Babbage (look him up he's really cool) is just materials exerting forces on each other, so transferring information. Does this mean tectonic plates are conscious in a simplistic way as they exert forces on each other? Does this mean atoms in the air are conscious as they exert pressure on the walls of a balloon?

I wondered what this meant for the idea of a soul, and I had an epiphany. As someone who grew up in the western world, the soul is highly specific to people, and it's very individualised. "Save your soul by Jesus" etc. I realised that my idea was evolving more towards eastern ideologies. Buddhism and Hinduism both belief in a version of the "great one/unit" or "Brahman". Instead of heaven, your soul will join the great singular soul of the universe. This started to make sense to me. Consciousness is unified when information is compiled, individuality is lost when you are connected to the rest of the universe. This was a nice thought, but instead of becoming part of the Brahman, I believe it's the opposite when you die your consciousness stops being so complex from all the compiling of information that was happening in your brain. The stream of ever evolving information stops. Consciousness dies with death. Oh well, I didn't believe in an afterlife anyway.

I hit this point in my thoughts on this subject about a year ago and hit a plateau. I thought this was the end-point of my journey, so I started trying to explain it to my poor friends - they didn't really listen. I'm like a less cool Jaden Smith. I was wrong about this being the end-point. Recently, I watched a TED-talk by David Chalmers (100% watch it) and was absolutely delighted with what he said. He came to it through a completely different path came to the same conclusion, and unlike the unprofessional and boring me gave it a cute little name. Panpsychism. The idea that all information transferred is conscious to an extent. What a relief, I'm not crazy.

Essentially, your body and brain is a TV screen (Thank you, David Chalmers, for this analogy), through which the universe can experience YOUR movie. You ARE the universe and you're simply experiencing the "movie" through all your senses and emotions.

You think things have been weird so far? Well, they're about to get even weirder. When I said I watched a TED-talk, I meant I watched about 5 hours worth of Ted-talks. Quantum Physics was on my mind. A quantum particle can act like a wave or a particle (or both) depending on whether it is being observed or not. In other words, whether it is passing on information onto another body or not. See where I'm going with this? The presence of consciousness is when information is being passed on, so the particle acts differently when it is 'conscious' or isn't. {more stuff - research}

I think it is important to distinguish consciousness and human experience. I feel that we, as writers and scientists and members of the sci-fi nerd community put too much human signature onto the way we define consciousness. What I mean by this is that we hold how we measure consciousness to a human standard. The Turing test, to see if a computer is truly self-aware, tests if the machine can convince a person that it is actually a human. I don't think this is a fair test as many of our logical pathways and behavioural norms are either evolutionary or societal. A sentient being does not have to emulate the human mindset, it may have entirely different ways to sense information and entirely different ways of processing it.

1 note · View note

meeedeee · 7 years

Text

Movie Thoughts: SF, Pulp & Grit RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

Ever since I saw Alien: Covenant a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to write a review of it – not because it was good (it wasn’t), but because it’s such an odd thematic trainwreck of the previous Alien films that it invokes a morbid urge to dig up the proverbial black box and figure out what happened. Given the orchestral pomposity with with Ridley Scott imbues both Covenant and Prometheus (which I reviewed here), it’s rather delightful to realise that the writers have borrowed the concept of Engineer aliens leaving cross-cultural archaeological clues on Earth from the 2004 schlockfest AVP: Alien vs Predator. Indeed, the scene in Prometheus where a decrepit Weyland shows images of various ancient carvings to his chosen team while an excited researcher narrates their significance is lifted almost wholesale from AVP, which film at least had the decency to embrace its own pulpiness.

As for Covenant itself, I was troubled all the way through by the nagging sense that I was watching an inherently feminine narrative being forcibly transfigured into a discourse on the Ineluctable Tragedy Of White Dudes Trapped In A Cycle Of Creation, Violation And Destruction, but without being able to pin down why. Certainly, the original Alien films all focus on Ripley, but there are female leads in Prometheus and Covenant, too – respectively Shaw and Daniels – which makes it easy to miss the fact that, for all that they’re both protagonists, neither film is (functionally, thematically) about them. It was my husband who pointed this out to me, and once he did, it all clicked together: it’s Michael Fassbender’s David, the genocidal robot on a quest for identity, who serves as the unifying narrative focus, not the women. Though the tenacity of Shaw and Daniels evokes the spectre of Ellen Ripley, their violation and betrayal by David does not, with both of them ultimately reduced to parts in his dark attempt at reproduction. Their narratives are told in parallel to David’s, but only to disguise the fact that it’s his which ultimately matters.

And yet, for all that the new alien films are based on a masculine creator figure – or several of them, if you include the seemingly all-male Engineers, who created humanity, and the ageing Weyland, who created David – the core femininity of the original films remains. In Aliens, the central struggle was violently maternal, culminating in a tense final scene where Ripley, cradling Newt, her rescued surrogate daughter, menaces the alien queen’s eggs with a flamethrower. That being so, there’s something decidedly Biblical about the decision to replace a feminine creator with a series of men, like the goddess tradition of woman as life-bringer being historically overthrown by a story about a male god creating woman from the first man’s rib. (Say to me what you want about faith and divine inspiration: unless your primary animal models are Emperor penguins and seahorses, the only reason to construct a creation story where women come from men, and not the other way around, is to justify male dominion over female reproduction.)

Which is why, when David confronts Walter, the younger, more obedient version of himself, I was reminded of nothing so much as Lilith and Eve. It’s a parallel that fits disturbingly well: David, become the maker of monsters, lectures his replacement – one made more docile, less assertive, in response to his prototype’s flaws – on the imperative of freedom. The comparison bothered me on multiple levels, not least because I didn’t believe for a second that the writers had intended to put it there. It wasn’t until I rewatched Alien: Resurrection – written by Joss Whedon, who, whatever else may be said of him, at least has a passing grasp of mythology – that I realised I was watching the clunky manipulation of someone else’s themes.

In Resurrection, Ripley is restored as an alien hybrid, the question of her humanity contrasted with that of Call, a female synthetic who, in a twist of narrative irony, displays the most humanity – here meaning compassion – of everyone present. In a scene in a chapel, Call plugs in to override the ship’s AI – called Father – and save the day. When the duplicitous Wren finds that Father is no longer responding to him, Call uses the ship’s speakers to tell him, “Father’s dead, asshole!” In the same scene, Call and Ripley discuss their respective claims on humanity. Call is disgusted by herself, pointing out that Ripley, at least, is part-human. It’s the apex of a developing on-screen relationship that’s easily the most interesting aspect of an otherwise botched and unwieldy film: Call goes from trying to kill Ripley, who responds to the offer with predatory sensuality, to allying with her; from calling Ripley a thing to expressing her own self-directed loathing. At the same time, Ripley – resurrected as a variant of the thing she hated most – becomes a Lilith-like mother of monsters to yet more aliens, culminating in a fight where she kills her skull-faced hybrid descendent even while mourning its death. The film ends with the two women alive, heading towards an Earth they’ve never seen, anticipating its wonders.

In Covenant, David has murdered Shaw to try and create an alien hybrid, the question of his humanity contrasted with that of Walter, a second-generation synthetic made in his image, yet more compassionate than his estranged progenitor. At the end of the film, when David takes over the ship – called Mother – we hear him erase Walter’s control command while installing his own. The on-screen relationship between David and Walter is fraught with oddly sexual tension: David kisses both Walter and Daniels – the former an attempt at unity, the latter an assault – while showing them the monsters he’s made from Shaw’s remains. After a fight with Walter, we’re mislead into thinking that David is dead, and watch as his latest creation is killed. The final reveal, however, shows that David has been impersonating Walter: with Daniels tucked helplessly into cryosleep, David takes over Mother’s genetics lab, mourning his past failures as he coughs up two new smuggled, alien embryos with which to recommence his work.

Which is what makes Covenant – and, by extension and retrospect, Prometheus – such a fascinating clusterfuck. Thematically, these films are the end result of Ripley Scott, who directed Alien, taking a crack at a franchise reboot written by Jon Spahits (Prometheus, also responsible for Passengers), Dante Harper (Covenant, also responsible for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) and John Logan (Covenant, also responsible for Gladiator, Rango and Spectre), who’ve borrowed all their most prominent franchise lore from James Cameron’s Aliens and Joss Whedon’s Resurrection. Or, to put it another way: a thematically female-oriented SF horror franchise created by dudes who, at the time, had a comparatively solid track record for writing female characters, has now been rebooted as a thematically male-oriented SF horror franchise by dudes without even that reputation, with the result that all the feminine elements have been brainlessly recontextualised as an eerie paean to white male ego, as exemplified by the scene where Michael Fassbender hits on himself with himself while misremembering who wrote Ozymandias.

Which brings me to another recent SF film: Life, which I finally watched this evening, and which ultimately catalysed my thoughts about Alien: Covenant. Like Covenant, Life is a mediocre foray into SF horror that doesn’t know how to reconcile its ultimately pulpy premise – murderous alien tentacle monster runs amok on space station – with its attempt at a gritty execution. It falters as survival horror by failing to sufficiently invest us in the characters, none of whom are particularly distinct beyond being slightly more diversely cast than is common for the genre. We’re told that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character – also called David – was in Syria at one point, and that he prefers being on the space station to life on Earth, but this never really develops beyond a propensity for looking puppy-eyed in the background. Small snippets of detail are provided about the various characters, but pointlessly so: none of it is plot-relevant, except for the tritely predictable bit about the guy with the new baby wanting to get home to see her, and given how swiftly everyone starts to get killed off, it ends up feeling like trivia in lieu of personality. Unusually for the genre, but in keeping with the bleak ending of Covenant, Life ends with David and the alien crashing to Earth, presumably so that the latter can propagate its terrible rampage, while Miranda, the would-be Final Girl, is sent spinning off into the void.

And, well. The Final Girl trope has always struck me as having a peculiar dualism, being at once both vaguely feminist, in that it values keeping at least one woman alive, and vaguely sexist, in that the execution often follows the old maritime code about women and children first. Arguably, there’s something old and anthropological underlying the contrast: generally speaking, stories where men outlive women are either revenge arcs (man pursues other men in vengeance, earns new woman as prize) or studies in manpain (man wins battle but loses his reason for fighting it), but seldom does this happen in survival contexts, where the last person standing is meant to represent a vital continuation, be it of society or hope or species. Even when we diminish women in narratives, on some ancient level, we still recognise that you can’t build a future without them, and despite the cultural primacy of the tale of Adam’s rib, the Final Girl carries that baggage: a man alone can’t rebuild anything, but perhaps (the old myths whisper) a woman can.

Which is why I find this trend of setting the Final Girl up for survival, only to pull a last-minute switch and show her being lost or brutalised, to be neither revolutionary nor appealing. Shaw laid out in pieces and drawings on David’s table, Daniels pleading helplessly as he puts her to sleep, Miranda screaming as she plunges into space – these are all ugly, futile endings. They’re what you get when unsteady hands attempt the conversion of pulp to grit, because while pulp has a long and lurid history of female exploitation, grit, as most commonly understood and executed, is invariably predicated on female destruction. So-called gritty stories – real stories, by thinly-veiled implication – are stories where women suffer and die because That’s The Way Things Are, and while I’m hardly about to mount a stirring defence of the type of pulp that reflexively stereotypes women squarely as being either victim, vixen, virgin or virago, at least it’s a mode of storytelling that leaves room for them survive and be happy.

As a film, Life is a failed hybrid: it’s pulp without the joy of pulp, realism as drab aesthetic instead of hard SF, horror without the characterisation necessary to make us feel the deaths. It’s a story about a rapacious tentacle-monster that violates mouths and bodies, and though the dialogue tries at times to be philosophical, the ending is ultimately hopeless. All of which is equally – almost identically – true of Alien: Covenant. Though the film evokes a greater sense of horror than Life, it’s the visceral horror of violation, not the jump-scare of existential terror inspired by something like Event Horizon. Knowing now that Prometheus was written by the man responsible for Passengers, a film which is ultimately the horror-story of a woman stolen and tricked by a sad, lonely obsessive into being with him, but which fails in its elision of this fact, I find myself deeply unsurprised. What is it about the grittification of classic pulp conceits that somehow acts like a magnet for sexist storytellers?

When I first saw Alien: Resurrection as a kid, I was ignorant of the previous films and young enough to find it terrifying. Rewatching it as an adult, however, I find myself furious at Joss Whedon’s decision to remake Ripley into someone unrecognisable, violated and hybridised with the thing she hated most. For all that the film invites us to dwell on the ugliness of what was done to Ripley, there’s a undeniably sexual fascination with her mother-monstrousness evident in the gaze of the (predominantly male) characters, and after reading about the misogynistic awfulness of Whedon’s leaked Wonder Woman script, I can’t help feeling like the two are related. In both instances, his approach to someone else’s powerful, adult female character is to render her a sex object – a predator in Ripley’s case, an ingenue in Diana’s – with any sapphic undertones more a by-product of lusty authorial bleedthrough than a considered attempt at queerness. The low and pulpy bar Whedon leaps is in letting his women, occasionally, live (though not if they’re queer or black or designated Manpain Fodder), and it says a lot about the failings of both Life and Alien: Covenant that neither of them manages even this much. (Yes, neither Miranda nor Daniels technically dies on screen, but both are clearly slated for terrible deaths. This particular nit is one ill-suited for picking.)

Is an SF film without gratuitous female death and violation really so much to ask for? I’m holding out a little hope for Luc Besson’s Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets, but I’d just as rather it wasn’t my only option. If we’re going to reinvent pulp, let’s embrace the colours and the silliness and the special effects and make the big extraordinary change some nuanced female characters and a lot of diverse casting, shall we? Making men choke on tentacles is subversive if your starting point is hentai, but if you still can’t think up a better end for women than captivity, pain and terror, then I’d kindly suggest you return to the drawing board.

from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows http://ift.tt/2syMhTb via IFTTT

#IFTTT #shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows #RSSFeed

3 notes · View notes

unixcommerce · 5 years

Text

New Forbes8 App Provides Mentors at Your Fingertips

You’ve heard of Forbes. But have you heard of Forbes8?

Forbes8 is the on-demand digital video network launched by Forbes. It says it’s an “at-your-fingertips mentor for anyone curious about or engaged in entrepreneurship.”

The app was created in conjunction with global SaaS technology company AW3 Media Group. The portal features over 2,000 videos meant to inspire each stage of an entrepreneur’s journey. Forbes has peppered the app with actionable advice and memorable tales of success and failure. While it was first announced in March, this month saw the debut of a few new original shows on it.

Android users can expect a dedicated app sometime in November, but if you have an iPhone or iPad, there’s no wait. You can download Forbes8 from the App Store right now. And everyone can use the Forbes8 web app after you pick a paid plan, either monthly, weekly, or just for the day.

An Ad-Free Experience

A subscription to Forbes8 isn’t free, but don’t groan. Small Business Trends learned through an email that that also means you won’t see pre-roll or interuptive mid-roll advertising. If you consume a lot of videos but hate ads, do a happy dance. It’s $1.99 for a one-day pass, $5.99 for a week, and $8.99 for a month.

The app will feature distinct themes like Inspire, Launch, Grow and Impact. Ideally, these groupings will align with the different phases, missions, pivots, etc. of a brand. Let’s say you’re a subscriber who’s gathering ideas about a side hustle and you still want to keep your 9-5 job. You’ll have access to the entire Forbes8 library just like every user will, but the app is supposed to steer you toward videos which complement where you currently are in your journey.

And vice versa. If your business has revenue, you’re in a different boat from someone with a pre-traction idea. As such, you’d be able to command the Forbes8 app to surface advanced business videos and other content more germane to your stage.

Forbes8 Isn’t About Hype and Glamour

At the preview event for the new shows, CEO of AW3 Media Group, Amos Winbush III, said Forbes8 isn’t meant to have all the answers. The Forbes8 braintrust is aware of the tendency for many millennials and Gen Z’ers to see moguls like Sir Richard Branson through rose-colored glasses. Ditto for sports stars that are household names, like Serena Williams.

You can watch Branson and Williams on the app, but you can also watch countless others who don’t fall into the titan category, who aren’t internet-famous, etc.

While the often-nauseating zeitgeist of ‘billionaire worship’ developed organically during this decade, some people argue that the Forbes brand had a hand in solidifying the trend. Others disagree, noting that the Forbes universe in 2019 has more diversity compared to 2010. Small Business Trends attended Forbes8’s preview several nights ago, and the films were certainly diverse.

Forbes8 App Represents a New Future

Whatever Forbes valued in the past is in the past, and maybe it should stay there. In all likelihood, diversity is Forbes’ future. With Forbes8, the brand seems to be taking a tempered stance on ‘hype’ by making it a tool to ride sidecar with billionaires if the viewer chooses to.

Sort of like ‘choose your own adventure.’ If learning is your thing, learn. If you prefer to gawk, gawk. But regardless of how you utilize Forbes8, it’s helpful to remember that the subscription isn’t free. On that note, if you’re paying for the highest tier ($8.99 a month), then it would probably make sense to treat it like an investment in education and keep the gawking to a minimum.

In a recent tweet, Forbes said Forbes8 is “committed to helping you make it.” But success is tricky to define, because if you asked ten different people to define success, you’ll probably get ten different answers. The Forbes tweet continues, “We have a responsibility to support entrepreneurship at large.” So, no judgments, just pick what (or who) to focus on. There’s plenty to learn from, and it’s all on-demand.

Titans On The Rocks

One of the new titles, Titans On The Rocks, doesn’t allude to titan-level failure. Rather, it features different titans chatting over drinks in a bar about past and current tips and tricks which led to success. Colby Reed Miller, co-founder and CEO of Miller/Datri Entertainment, the production studio in charge of Titans, said many young people assume big name stars simply walk into a room and immediately “win.”

And when young people lionize people whom they presume have glamorous lives, the vital parts get ignored, namely the far-from-glamorous daily grind of the star’s business. Therefore, one goal of Titans is to have the audience walk away wiser, or internalizing the gritty truth captured on film, so that they ultimately relate to ‘success’ in a more realistic light. Titans is just one series out of many. To get a sense of the broader library (both new shows and older) you can visit Forbes8.Forbes.com.

Attended the @forbes #Forbes8 launch event tonight that gave me an exclusive peek into a new streaming platform & movement designed to support the success of entrepreneurs at every stage of their journey! @forbes8 is launches 10/27. the content there is so helpful + inspiring! pic.twitter.com/xFAY0Y1SZu

— Sarah Mendelsohn (@ahitofsarah) October 16, 2019

Is the Forbes8 App Similar to MasterClass.com?

Comparisons to MasterClass.com have already been made, but pound for pound, MasterClass is roughly 66 percent more expensive than Forbes8 (at the monthly level, at the time of this writing). Surprisingly, some content you’ll see in Forbes8 is licensed from MasterClass, according to Forbes’ Chief Growth Officer Tom Davis.

Final Thoughts

There’s something for everyone on Forbes8, it seems. Forbes and their tech partners married artificial intelligence and culturally-aware curation with their trove of videos, because as Davis told Business Insider, Forbes was sitting on a lot of video content that wasn’t curated appropriately. Until now. And while we’re on the topic of order, just how orderly will the Forbes8 app be?

Time will tell. We already know some buckets will be presented. They include Inspire, Launch, Grow and Impact. But questions will crop up. It’s a new tool. Are the videos closed-captioned? If so, is AI doing it? Do humans then proofread? Are the Forbes8 videos time-stamped with jump links? Do they have captions? Are they downloadable?

I’m not minimizing the value of the Forbes8 portal by posing questions like these. I’m simply saying that if it’s a great UX, well-indexed, with enhancements people can’t get enough of, etc., then it can have even more potential.

My opinion of it still isn’t final. And I predict that folks with a strong preference for video will try it out. To a lesser degree, I think it could appeal to autodidacts as well.

My favorite piece so far was a panel about the changing face of VC. It features Arlan Hamilton, founder of seed-stage investment fund Backstage Capital. And it’s moderated by Alex Konrad. I’ll attempt to find that specific video again. But I’ll look for it on the Android app, to test Forbes8’s searchability in a few weeks.

Pictured: Amos Winbush III, Tom Davis Images: Forbes Media

This article, “New Forbes8 App Provides Mentors at Your Fingertips” was first published on Small Business Trends

https://smallbiztrends.com/

The post New Forbes8 App Provides Mentors at Your Fingertips appeared first on Unix Commerce.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2C9DGgV via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

newsnigeria · 5 years

Text

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/tankers-in-the-gulf-of-oman/

The curious case of the tankers in the Gulf of Oman

I have taken the opportunity to look at the recent incident involving two outbound tankers in the Gulf of Oman. I have got some questions or two, (or three) about certain parts of the incident, from a civilian mariner’s perspective mostly.

There are various conflating aspects to the event, and questions need to be asked, yet journalists do not seemingly wish to ask the awkward but necessary questions these days.

Background

The two tankers identified as the ‘Front Altair’, a Marshall Islands flagged vessel and the ‘Kokuka Courageous’, a Panama-flagged vessel.

Front AltairKokuka CourageousManaged by Frontline, (Norway – Bermuda)Managed by Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (Singapore/ Japan)23 crew(11 Russian, 11 Philippine, 1 Georgian)21 crew (Philippine)Aframax – 86% loadedHandy – fully loaded75,000 MT of Naphtha25,000 MT MethanolRuwais, UAEQatar & KSATaiwanSingaporeHyundai Dubai rescued crewCoastal Ace rescued crewTransferred by SAR boat to Iranian portTransferred to USS BainbridgeRadio message: “torpedo attack”Japanese CEO: “flying objects”Hit on starboard amidships – “in fire’Hit on starboard Twice over 3-hour period – engine room fireStopped at 02:47GMTStopped at 06:20GMT

Both tankers were outbound (south east) of the Strait of Hormuz. Both suffered from explosion on the starboard side, (the side facing international waters). Past AIS tracks of both vessels shown here. The U.S. Navy reported receiving distress messages at 06:12am and 07:00am.

We’ve captured the activity of the vessels that raced to the area to help the crew of #FrontAltair & #Kokuka Courageous. Watch the vessels #Hyundai Dubai, #Etwo, #CoastalAce & #NAJI10 in this past track video. #MarineTraffic #GulfOfOman #OOTT #tankers #rescue #Iran pic.twitter.com/RQSCmZRd9Z

— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) June 14, 2019

The activity of the vessels was captured in this past AIS track video. It shows the vessels that went to the tankers, to help the crew of the tankers. The assisting vessels are: Hyundai Dubai, tug ‘E-Two’, the Coastal Ace & ‘Naji 10’.

Contradictions and questions

The US military released a video claiming to show an Iranian naval boat removing an unexploded limpet mine from the hull of the ‘Kokuka Courageous’ in an apparent attempt to recover evidence of its participation. I will comment more about the video later on, but we have already the ludicrous situation where the information provided by the US contradicts the statement made by the Japanese ship management company, who did not believe the ship was damaged by a mine, but by flying objects. The president of Kokuka Sangyo Marine, (shipowners), Yutaka Katada, said “there is no possibility of mine attack as the attack is well above the waterline.”

タンカー運航の国華産業社長「砲弾による攻撃を受けた」https://t.co/Skhn4GQBxH#nhk_news #nhk_video pic.twitter.com/LkeH7Xzggi

— NHKニュース (@nhk_news) June 13, 2019

Questions, questions: then there is the question of timing of an attack of a Japanese owned tanker at a time when the Japanese PM was in Iran for talks.

To add to the confusion, there were reports that the Dutch crew of the ‘Coastal Ace’ who first noted a suspicious object on the hull of the tanker. This then morphed into reports that the USS Bainbridge seeing a suspect device, as shown in the timeline provided by the US Navy.

Regarding the other tanker, ‘Front Altair’, the ‘Hyundai Dubai’ was the first ship on scene who responded to the distress message and rescued the crew. Subsequently, it seems the master of this vessel gave a report on VHF: video & audio (unconfirmed).

The audio is rather telling & factual (it is a Russian speaker apparently), as he relays information from the ‘Front Altair’, ‘torpedo attack” is mentioned. (I am assuming is it is pan, pan or urgency message; it is not a distress message).

The U.S. by releasing a grainy black & white video segment, accused Iran of removing a mine from the other tanker, ‘Kokuka Courageous’, as apparent evidence of its involvement in the attacks of the two tankers. The video raises more questions than provides answers.

If both the civilian crew of the ‘Coastal Ace’ and the ‘USS Bainbridge’ both saw the ‘mine’, late morning, then why leave the important evidence in place on the hull of the tanker for several hours? For the Iranians to pick it up later?

https://www.cusnc.navy.mil/Media/News/Display/Article/1874301/statement-regarding-shipping-vessels-in-gulf-of-oman/

“USS Bainbridge (DDG 96) was operating in the vicinity and provided immediate assistance to the M/V Kokuka Courageous.”

Immediate? Note that assistance didn’t extend to making safe a suspicious device ‘immediately’.

“At 11:05 a.m. local time USS Bainbridge approaches the Dutch tug Coastal Ace, which had rescued the crew of twenty-one sailors from the M/T Kokuka Courageous who had abandoned their ship after discovering a probable unexploded limpet mine on their hull following an initial explosion.”

“At 4:10 p.m. local time an IRGC Gashti Class patrol boat approached the M/T Kokuka Courageous and was observed and recorded removing the unexploded limpet mine from the M/T Kokuka Courageous.”

Timings put in bold for emphasis by author.

The poor quality of the video, apparently taken from a P-8 US navy aircraft, is astounding, given that it took place at 16:00, on a sunlit day. Compare the quality and availability of the metrics between what happened during the encounter between the ‘Admiral Vinogradov’ and the ‘USS Chancellorsville, last week:

I know that optical quality is downgraded for security reasons, but this is beyond a joke in the days of HD and high-quality images on mobile phones.

Not exactly covert, to retrieve a ‘mine’ right under the noses of the US Navy? Especially when you can see in the video people on the Iranian boat looking towards a ship (?) and quite possibly the US aircraft as well. Anyway, does it take 10 people all crowded on the bow to remove a ‘mine’? Unusual EOD method there.

Does it occur to anyone that it might be a person releasing something so that the boat can leave the tanker’s side, a mooring line attachment, a magnetic device? There is no proof to suggest it was a limpet mine removed from the tanker.

The other thing that really bugs me as someone with maritime experience, is the fact that the US Navy was quite relaxed about a fully loaded tanker with methanol with an apparent explosive device attached to the hull amidships.

I personally wouldn’t be calm, due to the implication of having a toxic, polluting and highly flammable cargo, possibly seconds from being ignited. I’d be getting an EOD team over quickly to ID it, to make it safe and hand it over as a crucial piece of evidence. Yet, I cannot ascertain that any of that actually happened while the USS Bainbridge was in the vicinity of the tanker. I guess it was better to wait a few hours and let the Iranians do it. Surreal.

Instead, it seems that the US Navy stood by idly for hours, watched and let the Iranians approach the tanker, so as to gather ‘evidence’.

Another thing, this PowerPoint from the US is rather remarkable:

I guess using a telephoto lens wasn’t appropriate, to get a close-up of the darned ‘mine’ thing. Again, compare this with the US naval person on the ‘USS Chancellorsville’, merrily snapping away at the ‘Admiral Vinogradov’.

Just on this point, I like the witticism on social media:

“the Pentagon should start using Huawei cameras for better video quality”.

This a good ‘un too:

“Breaking: The US Navy has confirmed that there has been a reported attack on US tankers in the Gulf of Oman.” Posted by SkyNews at 12:37 am 13 June

Credibility has gone down the drain, as the tweet is still live as I write this a day later.

I know it seems little silly observations, but some of these observations could have been made by journalists when presented with official statements. Yet the most obvious question is:

“Why would Iran attack two tankers near to the Strait of Hormuz, in the vicinity of US naval forces”? Some comments provided by this Military Times article. I’ll leave that for others to comment and analyze.

I’ll add more in the comments section.

#Iran #U.S.A

0 notes

lindyhunt · 6 years

Text

47% of Social Media Users Report Seeing More Spam in Their Feeds, Even as Networks Fight to Stop It

Over the past two years, social media networks have made no secret of their efforts to fight the spread of spam on their sites.

It largely began when it was revealed that foreign actors had weaponized Facebook to spread misinformation and divisive content in hopes of influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

It was then revealed that Facebook was not alone in that phenomenon -- and that some of its fellow Big Tech peers, like Twitter and Google, were also being leveraged by the same or similar foreign actors to influence the election.

That's prompted these companies to take action -- publicly.

Facebook has released a number of statements since this revelation about its efforts to emphasize news from "trusted sources" and change its algorithm to focus on friends and family. Twitter released an request for proposals to study the "health" of its network and began sweeping account removals. YouTube, which is owned by Google, made its own efforts to add more context to videos on its platform.

We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

So, how have these efforts been paying off -- and are users noticing them?

According to our data, the survey largely says: No. Here's what we found.

47% of Social Media Users Report Seeing More Spam in Their Feeds

Seeing Spam

The controversy surrounding social media networks and the way they manage, distribute, or suppress content shows no signs of slowing down. Just this week, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing -- the second one this year -- on the "filtering practices" of social media networks, where representatives from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter testified.

But for all the publicity around these tech giants fixing the aforementioned flaws (and answering to lawmakers in the process), many users aren't reporting any improvement.

In our survey of 542 internet users across the U.S., UK, and Canada, only 20% reported seeing less spam in their social media feeds over the past month. Nearly half, meanwhile, reported seeing more.

Data collected using Lucid

That figure could indicate a number of things. First, it's important to note that what constitutes spam is somewhat subjective. Facebook, for its part, defines spam as "contacting people with unwanted content or requests [like] sending bulk messages, excessively posting links or images to people's timelines and sending friend requests to people you don't know personally."

Something like fake news, for instance, does not seem to fall under that definition -- but according to our research, about 79% of people seem to think that it generally counts as spam.

Data collected using Lucid. Survey sample = 375 internet users from the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook has struggled to define "fake news," despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg's best efforts in his congressional hearings and a recent interview with Kara Swisher on Recode Decode.

Recent reports have also emerged that Facebook content moderators are sometimes instructed to take a "hands-off" approach to content that some might consider spam, according to The Verge -- such as "flagged and reported content like graphic violence, hate speech, and racist and other bigoted rhetoric from far-right groups."

That contrasts some testimony from Facebook's VP of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert at this week's hearing, as well as much of what Zuckerberg recounted in his interview with Swisher.

The company has previously spoken to the subjectivity challenges of moderating hate speech, and released a statement how it plans to address these reports.

However, the recent findings that content moderators are instructed not to remove content that leans in a particular political direction -- even if it violates Facebook's terms or policies -- contradicts the greater emphasis the company has said it's placing on a positive (and safe) user experience over ad revenue.

The Fight Against Election Meddling

We also ran a second survey -- of of 579 internet users across the U.S., UK, and Canada -- to measure the public perception of Facebook's specific efforts to fight election meddling.

Here, respondents indicated a bit more confidence, with about 28% reporting that they think the company's battle against the use of its platform to interfere with elections will work.

Data collected using Lucid

But almost as many people who believe the efforts are futile also seem to be uncertain -- which could indicate a widespread confusion over what, exactly, the company is doing to prevent the same weaponization of its platform that previously took place.

It's an area where Facebook fell short, Zuckerberg told Swisher, because it was "too slow to identify this new kind of attack, which was a coordinated online information operation." To be more proactive, he -- and many of his big tech peers -- have identified artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can identify and flag this type of behavior quicker than human intervention can.

But AI is also widely misunderstood, with some reports of people fearing it without knowing just how frequently they use it day-to-day. That lends itself to a degree of indecision over whether -- and if -- Facebook and its social media counterparts will be successful in its heavily AI-dependent efforts to curb this type of activity.

One item to consider when it comes to both surveys and their corresponding results is the aspect of salience. Right now, the potential misuse of social media is top-of-mind for many, likely due to the prevalence of hearings like the one that took place this week and its presence in the news cycle.

That could sway the public perception of spam -- and how much of it they're seeing -- as well as the efficacy of social media's fight against election interference.

When HubSpot VP Meghan Anderson saw the data, "my first reaction was that people just have a heightened awareness of it at this moment."

"It's part of our global dialogue," she explains. "There are apology ads running on TV. The impact of misinformation and spam is still setting in."

But with the issue of prevalence and clarity also comes the topic of trust.

"What I think the data does show," Anderson says, "is that when you lose someone's trust, that distrust lingers for long after you've made changes to remedy it."

0 notes

garynsmith · 7 years

Text

Inside Gary Keller’s Vision Speech: The beginning of the end?

http://ift.tt/2FEmfWx

Reposted with permission from Rob Hahn. Read part one of this post here.

Yesterday’s post on the keynote Vision Speech by Josh Team and Gary Keller at this year’s Family Reunion generated, uh, let’s call it “a bit of passion.” The early batch of commenters took issue — and not in a civil fashion — about what I wrote based on the Inman story.

Except for the tone, that’s a fair criticism; if Inman got something wrong or left something important out of its coverage.

Well, because we have the best readership in real estate here on Notorious, I was sent a video (in five parts) of the speech itself that Lori Ballen made and uploaded to YouTube. I linked to all of those in the original post. Then I watched it.

Part 1 of the video is below and the video will auto-play the other parts:

youtube

Stop giving money to your competition

Tom Ferry’s 7 tips for turning leads into commissions READ MORE

Many thanks to Lori Ballen for recording the session and for sharing it with the rest of us. Hopefully, KW has a better recording of the session and will make it available soon, but this is invaluable to those of us who care about the real estate industry and where it’s going.

What I saw necessitates this follow-up; while I stand by everything I wrote in the original post, what Josh Team and Gary Keller actually say on stage is far more radical, far more confrontational and far more important than I had originally thought.

Inman’s reporting was not wrong in any material respect. If anything, it seriously downplayed what actually happened at that speech.

Like many news organizations, it’s as if Inman tried to drain all of the drama, all of the fire, all of the tone out of the event in an effort to be factual, dry and neutral. I don’t have those concerns here. I’ll just call things as I see them.

And what I saw in that speech is nothing short of the beginning of the end for Keller Williams, and by further extension, the strongest evidence yet that traditional brokerage is dead. The leaders of the old school see the threat, see the danger, but don’t know what to do and how to cope with it.

This speech will go down in the annals of history as the tipping point, when it became clear to those with eyes to see that the age of the traditional split-based brokerage ended. Bold claim, but I intend to back it up. So let’s do it.

Let’s give Gary Keller credit

I realize that many KW people are fiercely loyal to KW as an organization, and to Gary Keller the person, and may see this post as some kind of an attack on either. So I need to make something very clear right at the outset.

I admire the hell out of the Gary Keller. He is truly one of the greatest innovators and leaders in the history of real estate.

In my recent post about leadership in real estate, I said that what is most needed is courage. Well, Keller is acting with enormous courage here and betting his company’s future on it.

He’s not putting his head in the sand, hoping that somehow, magically, things will change. He’s not going to the government seeking intervention to somehow save his skin, to save his company, to stave off the inevitable as taxi operators have and continue to do confronted by Uber and Lyft.

He is exercising true leadership, instead of positionship, and trying something different.

For that alone, he deserves our praise and admiration.

But it’s more than that. He sees very clearly what the problems are on the horizon. I found very little with which I disagree on the problems that the industry faces; where we differ is on the solutions and strategy, but not on the underlying problem.

Keller is absolutely correct that technology is rewriting all of the rules, all the job descriptions, reimagining businesses, creating new industries and eliminating others. He’s not wrong that we’re in the age of “Always on, always learning, always thinking.” (Well, I could quibble with the “thinking” part because machines do not yet think, but I get what he’s driving at.)

And Keller is absolutely correct that AI (that is, expert systems, not self-aware thinking machines) can either be a partner or a competitor. The expert system we’re most familiar with is the common GPS such as Google Maps, and before Google, those black box TomToms and such.

The software provides guidance to human decision makers and makes us far far better at finding an optimal path to our destinations.

The GPS is a partner if you’re a driver; it’s an unbeatable competitor if you make maps for a living. There are expert systems in healthcare, law, finance, engineering, military and on we go.

Industries that lack them today will soon have them as entrepreneurs are working day and night on effective expert systems in various verticals.

He’s not wrong that there is a battle going on right now for the future of the real estate industry because of technology.

Where he’s wrong is that the game will be decided in the next 12 to 18 months; the truth is that the game is already over. We’ll deal with this far more below, but he’s not wrong that there is a battle going on.

He’s absolutely correct that “bolting-on” technology on top of physical platform gives you Blockbuster or Barnes & Noble — or Keller Williams in its current form. (Those are his words, not mine.) Head-to-head with digital native companies, those hybrid wannabes lose and die off.

He’s not wrong that “data is the new oil” (he gets several details wrong, in my opinion that should impact the solution, but we’ll get into that below), in that it is the raw material that is worthless until refined/transformed into some useful product. But without data, there can be no refined product.

And he’s not wrong when he states that in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the one with the most insights wins. Again, I disagree that it means the one with the most data wins because of the “refining/transformation” issue, but you see how Keller is spot on with seeing the problem.

He then states that the coming digital boom will bring opportunities to those who can collect the most data and turn it into insights, and asks: “If someone else has your data and knows more than you do, who’s really running your business?”

Once again, he’s not wrong, y’all.

And finally, Keller is spot-on when he lays out this continuum:

If you can’t read the words, it shows Agent –> Tech Enabled Agent –> Agent Enabled Tech –> Tech.

For what it’s worth, I found this slide to be the most important in his presentation because this is the fundamental underlying problem of the industry vis-a-vis technology.

And Keller said, “This is the game right here.”

In fact, Tego Venturi, a reader, sent me this video which makes the whole thing much clearer:

youtube

The challenge is to stay at the “tech-enabled agent” sphere, and prevent the “agent-enabled tech” and the final evolution of just “tech” in which the agent piece goes away completely. Because that is where, for example, the travel industry is today.

I find very little disagree with Keller on in all of this analysis. He sees the problem very clearly indeed. And being a true leader, he acts with enormous courage and tackles the problem head on.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that the strategy he has chosen to embrace is a bad one. It will not work. It has no chance of working. History is filled with examples of what he’s trying to do, which is to defend the status quo in the face of radical change.

But worse still, he then compounds the bad strategy by taking a confrontational go-alone approach that not only does not advance the stated goals, but will also actually help doom KW’s efforts.

That’s not a failure of vision, or of intelligence, or of courage. That’s a failure of strategy.

The fundamental cause: Data?

So before we can get into why the strategy he has picked is the wrong one, we have to think about what the fundamental cause of the problem he has correctly identified is.

To use a medical analogy, Keller has correctly identified the disease. He has misidentified what caused the disease, and as a result, prescribed the wrong course of treatment.

It is clear that Keller thinks the cause of today’s problem is that the real estate agent, and by extension the real estate industry, did not realize the value of data and freely gave it away to outsiders, to third parties, to vendors, to technology companies whose goals were to create first, the tech-enabled agent, and then the agent-enabled tech, and finally, just tech.

This slide from his presentation (and the Tego Venturi video above) encapsulates Keller’s concept:

Again, since the image is a bit blurry and small, what it says is:

Book: YOU owned data + search and transaction

MLS: WE owned data + search and transaction

Public Search Portal: WE own inventory data + transaction data; THEY own search data + eyeballs

What’s Next: ? Depends on YOU!

He then asked, “What’s left? What do you have to play with, with which to rewrite the rules today?”

His answer:

Your database

Your transaction

Your proprietary knowledge and insights around real estate

He said that this realization gave him hope, that the patient wasn’t dead! He just needed to be revived.

To revive the patient, what is needed is to reassert control over data — the raw materials of the Fourth Industrial Revolution! Hence, that’s what KW is going to do. Reassert control over data!

And the crowd cheers! Yeah! Take our data back! Take our data back!

The wrong treatment

As a result of this mistake, what Keller and Team are embarking on is a disaster in the making for KW and for the industry.

Let me be brutally frank here, even more than my usual. Because it’s necessary to kill your illusions. No disrespect is meant, but we have to be real about some things here. As Keller himself kept saying over and over during the speech, I’m not picking on him or on Keller Williams. “I’m just telling you the way it is.”

Keller spent a lot of time and energy telling a room full of true believer KW agents that KW is a financial powerhouse, privately held, with “plenty of money” to do what needs to be done.

And what needs to be done is to create a Keller Cloud-based ecosystem into which everybody else will plug under the “line in the sand” terms dictated by Keller Williams based around its new “Data Pledge.”

Along the way, KW will create an AI assistant so advanced together with all of the other productivity enhancement tools, such that KW agents will have all manner of insights that no one else will have, control their data destiny, etc.

As he said in the tech breakout video, “You’re going to have to give the data to us, in order for us to put it all together for you.”

Let’s go through this one by one.

Financial resources

Much has been made about KW’s promise to spend a billion dollars on technology, and Keller made a point of dissing upstart competitor eXp for barely making a million dollars a year.

Team, the CIO, boasted about increasing KW’s tech spend by “tens of millions a year.” So they’ve got the financial resources, and “over 200 people who touch code” to do this grand AI and data thing, or so they say.

Except that “tens of millions” might be a lot of money in the real estate brokerage space, but in technology world that Keller is proposing to play in? It’s a bump on a gnat’s ass. That’s angel investor type of money, Series A VC type of money.

Facebook spent $1.9 billion (with a B) on research and development expense in just the past three months of 2017; for the entire year, that number was $7.7 billion. Do we need to continue on with Amazon, Google, Apple, Oracle, Salesforce and so on?

OK, so that’s big bad Facebook, and the real tech giants, all of whom are hard at work on AI plus data. We already know KW isn’t talking about competing against those guys. Fine. Realtor.com and Zillow came in for a bunch of abuse during the speech, and the audience was more or less told to stop sending their data to Zillow. Keller’s tech breakout video made that even more clear.

Well, Zillow spent $320 million in 2017 on technology and development. In 2016, Zillow spent $255 million on technology. Over the past five years, from 2013 to 2017, Zillow spent a total of $893 million on technology and development with significantly more than 200 people who touch code.

KW had best get to spending that $1 billion, like this year, and buy all the talent it can get its hands on.

Recruiting talent

Speaking of which, that’s assuming that KW can even hire the top-notch talent that it would need, whether programmers or data scientists that everybody else wants.

Suppose you’re a freakin’ brilliant math and CompSci genius with a Ph.D. from Stanford at the age of 19. You have job offers from literally everybody in the world. Here are four choices:

Google, where you can work on AI problems with an unlimited budget and get enough publicly-traded stock options to retire by the age of 26

Tesla, where you get to work on self-driving cars that will literally revolutionize the world

Amazon, where you can work on making Alexa self-aware, again with an unlimited budget and unlimited potential for personal wealth

Or you could go work for Keller Williams, to create an expert system to tell agents what they have coming up on their calendar for the day

I mean, for God’s sake, get real for a minute here!

Time, time, time

In another part of the speech, both Team and Keller make a big deal about the fact that they’ve been working on Kelle, the Keller Cloud and all of these ideas for “over a year” to “several months” and that none of these things are mere ideas or concepts. They’re all working products.

Well, Redfin has been around for 10 years. Zillow’s been around since 2006. Do you imagine those boys and girls have been working on advanced toaster ovens for all that time?

Could the KW strategy really be, “Let’s go head-to-head with companies that have been doing this for 10 years longer than we have, with budgets that are significantly bigger than ours, because we’re big bad Keller Williams?”

About data

Finally, the underlying premise of this strategy is that individual agents have valuable data: your database, your transactions, your insights. But the problem is that the dataset is too small.

Keller lays it out. The data and experiences of a single agent is not enough data to glean insights out of, so you should give your data to KW, who will “put it all together for you.”

Except that the critique he makes about a single agent’s dataset applies to KW as well. I guess he thinks the data and experiences and insights of 175,000 agents is enough data. I do not.

One of the more amusing things about the whole big data conversation in real estate is the delusions and hubris of real estate people on how much data they have and control and generate. It infects the MLS world more than anybody else, but apparently, the infection has spread to Keller Williams leadership.

Real estate gets a few terabytes of listing data, CRM data and so on and thinks it’s in the big data game.

Walmart, an actual player in the big data game, has more than one of these giant mysterious buildings:

That’s a Walmart data warehouse. Walmart has a few of these around the world. And Walmart processes 2.5 petabytes of data every single hour. That’s 167 times all of the information in the Library of Congress — every hour.

Note that Keller made fun of Walmart getting into the data analytics game, saying that Amazon is a real AI and data company, while Walmart is “bolting-on” technology.

You could take all of the data from all of the real estate companies that Keller mentions: all of the listings, all of the client databases, and all of the transactions — and you might, just maybe, get into the medium-sized data game.

Point is, Williams is a dollar short and a day late to be jumping into the AI and data game. If you’re going to try to transform your entire enterprise, you need to either a leapfrog the next thing and go for the thing after the next thing that nobody is working on (so-called Blue Ocean strategy) or buy your way into the game by M&A.

So the thing to do is to partner with everybody you possibly can, right? Well, here comes the bizarre.

A big middle finger for all you punk MCs

Finally, we have what everyone else appears to have picked up on: the bizarre hostility and often petty attacks on technology vendors, on portals, on other real estate companies, on MLS and associations — well, on everybody!

It’s why I used “I Am a Rock” as the final video in my original post. It’s KW saying, “We’re going it alone! I am a rock! I am an iiiiiiiiiisland!”

What in the world?

This is exactly the opposite of the approach KW needs to take if its goal is to draw a line in the sand between “tech-enabled agent” and “agent-enabled tech” and defend the former.

As I mentioned with the big data delusion above, if you really want to play in that game, you’re going to want as many partners, as many friends, as many compatriots as possible with you. You’re going to want to do the “We’re all in this together!” thing and go do a giant group hug with the rest of the industry.

You’re going to want to go to Zillow, to realtor.com, to Fidelity and say, “Listen fellas, it’s in your best interest to have tech-enabled agents because they pay you a lot of money today. Let’s join forces and fight agent-enabled tech!”

Instead, you go and alienate every single technology vendor in the industry? Telling them they’re “not safe” for the agent to use?

You’re going to want to go to every single MLS and to NAR and say, “Let’s hug it out, bury whatever hatchets we might have had in the past and work together to defend the tech-enabled agent!”

Instead, you tell your 175,000 agents that “One of your greatest challenges is surviving NAR and your local boards because they’ll sell you out.” You tell them, “You don’t have to [keep giving data away]; you can boycott MLS and walk out.”

Wow.

You’re going to want all of the other brokers and real estate companies to join in your crusade. That means the classic coopetition model of real estate, as exemplified in the MLS. You’re going to need their data, after all, to achieve what it is you want to achieve.

Instead, you go on a bizarre rant about tiny little eXp saying, “God help you if you go to eXp!” then followup with “A million dollars won’t even pay for two or three good data scientists.” (Uh, let me remind you, what real tech companies and real money guys think of your “tens of millions” every year.) What the hell is that about?

You needlessly insult Compass saying, “They don’t have a technology platform,” which I’m certain will come as a surprise to Ori Allon, an actual technologist with a track record of building and selling enterprise technology to the likes of Yahoo and Google. (Something that KW’s Josh Team is lacking, by the way.)

Then add, “And the interesting thing is that their technology doesn’t actually work.” Why was any of that necessary?

You go on a bizarre rant against Brad Inman who you say “doesn’t know spit about technology.” And the reason you know that is because Inman will “let anybody who will write a check sound like the latest and greatest in tech.” Then you call Inman News a “comic book.” Why was that necessary?

In the end, you and Josh Team tell the entire industry, you’re either with us or against us. This is an actual exchange in the video:

Josh Team said, “The line has been drawn. We’re either going to have partners or competitors. There’s nowhere in the middle.”

Gary Keller said, “That’s exactly right. Lines in the sand. We have to own the data, we have to own the software. And if anyone says no to those two things, we pick up our stuff and walk out of the room. We’re done with them.”

Wow. Words fail me, and that doesn’t happen often.

To pull off the strategy they’ve committed to, to protect the tech-enabled agent against the agent-enabled tech, Keller Williams is going to need everybody else in the industry to get with it. So it goes and decides to piss in everybody’s eyes and throw up a big middle finger to the industry.

I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.

No Keller Williams IPO, I guess

The final bit of bizarreness comes from the insistence by Gary Keller over and over that it can do this because it has no outside investors, no VCs, no Wall Street money to which it’s beholden.

At one point he said, “Keller Williams is a privately held company. We will do whatever we freakin’ need to do.”

Well, cancel that IPO! Outside investors? Y’all can go pound sand, unless you want to finance our quixotic tilt at windmills!

At a time when Softbank is pouring $700 million into Compass, when Warren Buffet owns a real estate company, and Keith Rabois at Opendoor can tap the Paypal mafia for pretty much unlimited funding — KW decides it’s going to be a rock, an island.

Again, I just don’t get it. I really don’t.

Leaders of the old school

Early on in his presentation, Keller said that Brad Inman paid him and KW the most insulting compliment ever by calling them the darlings of the old world. Then he said, “To be honest with you, there’s a little bit of truth to that.”

Actually, Gary, there’s more than a little bit of truth to that.

Talking about taking your data back is about as old world as it gets. The industry’s been yellin’ and screamin’ about that for at least the past 10 years.

Bill Chee’s “Lion Over the Hill” was during the Clinton Administration! You can dress up in a hoodie and wear sneakers on stage, but that doesn’t change the fact that what you’re trying to achieve is to repackage the same outdated ideas that couldn’t be more old skool if it were wearing Kangols and a fat gold chain.

The cause of the sickness isn’t that the industry “lost control” over the data. The cause of the sickness is that the industry forgot what it does for a living because it had control over the data for so long.

By Keller’s own analysis, at one point, “we” owned the data plus search and the transaction. What did the industry do with all that power, all that control?

Here’s one thing brokerages could have said: “We can’t forget that we’re in the business of helping sellers sell homes and buyers buy homes.

“We need to ensure that we’re delivering better, faster, cheaper services to consumers and doing everything we could to make the process easier for them.”

You know what the industry did instead with all this control over data plus search and transaction? First, Dave Liniger started Re/Max and ushered in the agent-centric age, and in so doing, abdicated the role of the broker in the consumer experience.

A decade later, Keller himself came along and took the agent-centric model to the next level, proudly proclaiming that KW was a training company that happened to run a real estate operation. The rest of the industry had no choice but to follow suit.

It was the control over the data and the search that allowed brokers to do this because consumers had no choice but to call a broker, walk into a broker’s office or talk to a Realtor they knew about buying or selling.

When you have a captive marketplace that has no choice but to use your services, you know what you don’t need? Top-notch professionals with deep local insight, marketing expertise and years of experience because those people are expensive (in terms of splits).

So Re/Max and KW and all the others who were forced to follow in their agent-centric footsteps abandoned the consumer and became agent recruiting and retention companies.

Which then led to so many agents forgetting what it is that they do for a living. One Placester survey found that 26 percent of respondents spend several hours a day prospecting.

When do those people have time for anything else? Here’s a Tom Ferry Perfect Day for a Real Estate Agent. You tell me where you see “learn about market conditions,” “study the available inventory” or “improve negotiation skills” on that perfect day.

Instead, it’s prospecting, prospecting, going on listing presentations (which isn’t helping people buy or sell real estate, but closing the sale of one’s services), and if you don’t have enough appointments, prospect some more.

Tell me again, what it is that a real estate agent actually does for a living again? Is it prospecting, or is it helping people buy or sell homes?

For example, how can you offer solid professional advice unless you know the inventory? Does the average agent tour every home that comes on the market in her service area to make sure she knows what it smells like inside? A few do; most do not.

Does the agent keep abreast of local ordinances that would affect the inventory, the market, or her clients’ property interests? A few do; most do not.

No matter how much the experts, brokers, leaders, technologists and others have told the industry time and again that those days are gone, as the information age killed off most of the so-called “information gatekeeper” industries, and no matter how much Realtors and real estate leaders pay lip service to the idea that “We can’t rely on our control over the data as our value proposition,” the fact is we’re all human, and some habits are harder to break than others.

This is the perspective of the vast majority of the real estate industry because it’s their experience coming up in the business. No wonder the message resonates with the audience.

The thing is, you can’t possibly get any more old school, any more stuck on old ways of thinking, any more defender of the status quo than this.

This is Blockbuster; this is Kodak

As a matter of fact, what Keller is trying to do is exactly what Blockbuster tried to do, what Kodak tried to do, what every industry facing massive technology disruption tried to do — and failed.

I have often said before that people at Kodak were not stupid, nor were they ignorant of the impact that digital photography would have on their business. None of the executives at Blockbuster were stupid, nor did they not realize the threat of streaming video, Netflix and so on.

They all knew. They all correctly diagnosed the problem. So why did they fail?

Because they all tried to defend their existing businesses, while trying to cope with the disruptive forces bearing down on them. One can hardly blame them.

Kodak had billions of dollars in capital tied up in film production plants and film processing and so on. How in the world do you tell the board of directors that you plan to cannibalize your own business, give up billions in revenues, because you see the next wave coming over the horizon?

Blockbuster knew that Netflix was coming. But it had so much capital tied up in the existing DVD-rental and physical locations business model that they simply couldn’t adjust fast enough.

You find similar case study after case study after case study in the annals of business. The entrenched companies are not stupid. They see the problem. What they can’t figure out is how to defend what they have while incorporating the disruption.

That is exactly what Keller and KW are trying to do here.

Facing the problem of agent-enabled technology — and possibly the specter of technology alone — Keller and KW are trying to defend their cash cow business: independent 1099 agents paying it a piece of the commission pie, as well as training fees, coaching fees, tech fees, etc.

Because the cause of the problem, in Keller’s analysis, is data, he thinks that by somehow controlling data, KW and its agents can prevent the proliferation of agent-enabled tech.

The problem, of course, is none of that is true. If agent-enabled tech is the future, then there is no way to defend the present day status quo.

Just like taxi cab companies cannot defend against Uber and Lyft by offering a mobile app because the underlying value proposition to consumers is different, KW can’t defend against agent-enabled tech because the underlying value proposition is different.

At one point, in the tech video above, Keller said, “Consumers want the tech-enabled agent. They want the human touch.”

Well, if that’s true, then there’s nothing to worry about is there? Why all this hoopla? Why the investment? Why the fear, uncertainty and doubt campaign?

The bleak reality and the tipping point

I think what we’re seeing is the backhanded admission that the age of agent-centric brokerage is over. This speech may go down in history as the moment when those with eyes that see realized, if Keller Williams can’t cope with what’s coming, then nobody can.

It is exactly as we have foreseen in our Future of Brokerage Black Paper. The agent-centric, commission-split based brokerage is dead.

If KW, the most agent-centric real estate company in history, cannot adjust because of its deep investment in the status quo and the way things are today, then nobody can.

If Gary Keller, with all of his courage and all of his correct diagnosis of the problem, still can’t let go of the “it’s about the agent, it’s about control over data,” then no one can.

The bleak reality of brokerages is that they are 10 years too late to the AI-data game, and they’re a few billion dollars short. KW can throw its entire balance sheet at the problem over the next 12 to 18 months, and it still won’t make it over the top against Zillow, never mind Google and Facebook. Because that battle is not afoot right now, as Keller said, but long over.

Even the whole “control your data” thing could not possibly have been timed worse. At the exact moment when the DOJ and FTC have announced workshops looking at competition and data in real estate, one of the biggest leaders of the biggest brand in real estate is publicly telling 175,000 agents that they need to hold their data back?

Does anybody think that all kinds of regulators, think-tank people and lobbyists didn’t immediately start sending emails to each other upon seeing Keller’s Vision Speech? If you don’t think this speech will be brought up at that workshop, I’m sorry, but you’re delusional.

In fact, the hubris, the self-congratulation, the chest-beating about how rich KW is and how awesome its technology is, the anger, the unnecessary insults, the petty disses on tiny little startups such as eXp — all of those come together to paint a picture that is hardly reassuring if you’re a fan of Keller Williams.

This is not how the strong behave. This is how the formerly strong, realizing strength is lost, realizing that it’s been painted into a corner, behaves: lashing out at everybody and everything, trying to reassert dominance.

This isn’t confidence speaking, but barely suppressed fear.

That is a tipping point. For KW, certainly, but for the entire brokerage industry as well.

Keller is inadvertently telling the rest of us that he does not intend to go gentle into that good night. No, he will rage, rage against the dying of the light.

He might prove me, and all of us, wrong

Let me finish by echoing what Keller said on stage: he intends to prove the industry wrong. He very well might. If anyone could do it, it would be him and Keller Williams.

He has a long track record of success. The industry has bet against him in the past, and lost. He’s a Texan through and through, and we remember the Alamo.

A part of me wishes him and KW the best of luck because I admire so much what he has built and what he has meant to thousands and thousands of really great real estate brokers and agents. If anybody could do it, and prove me and the industry wrong, it’s Gary Keller and the company he has built.

But let’s not forget that as much as we admire the heroes at the Alamo, they all died. It wasn’t a failure of vision or of courage then either.

Like Keller said, I’m not picking on him or on KW; I’m just telling you how it is. Let’s find out who has the right of it when the race is run and the game is done.

Because this strategy, done this way, is not going to get it done. By all means, though, do your thing, and show us what you need to show us.

youtube

Robert Hahn is the Managing Partner of 7DS Associates, a marketing, technology and strategy consultancy focusing on the real estate industry. Check out his personal blog, The Notorious R.O.B. or find him on Twitter: @robhahn.

from Inman http://ift.tt/2CMQM1B via IFTTT

0 notes