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masterofdeath · 3 years ago

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HARRY POTTER’S NATAL CHART.

5:00 PM | JULY 31, 1980 | GODRIC’S HOLLOW, UK.

OVERVIEW

Harry is a triple fire sign, signifying someone with an abundance of creativity, courage, loyalty, and strength. Harry’s Aries Moon trining his Leo Sun explains why he is so often singled out for a leadership role, even before he would readily nominate himself for the role. It suits him, naturally, and is obvious to those around him. This fire primes him to be someone of action, with little patience for lies, Harry actively seeks the truth and doesn’t readily accept authoritative roles telling him no. In fact, he isn’t very inclined to follow rules at all. And while he may be dynamic, triple fire also leaves a path towards a lazy streak, something that crops up particularly in school. He’s not suited for a classroom setting, even when quite competent in the more physical demands of the wixen world.

SUN | LEO, 8°34'44" | EIGHTH HOUSE

The Sun determines conscious self, identity, and “role” in life. In many ways it is the core of who a person is, and what they most readily identify with. Harry’s Sun is in Leo, meaning he is fundamentally bold and proud. For the most part, he is self-assured in his abilities and how to use them. Harry’s honesty and refusal to compromise himself, coupled with an inability to give up on goals ( or fixations ) make him a natural leader. Occasionally this commitment to honesty can seem overly hardheaded, domineering, ostentatious or patronizing and we have seen instances in which he is at risk to lose the goodwill and admiration even from the people he trusts the mosts. ( This becomes most evident in his pursuit of the Horcruxes. )

The placement of Harry’s Sun in the eight house also indicates that he runs the risk of being fueled by a desire for revenge. It’s a tricky balance to ensure he is not building his entire identity around this driving force. The Scorpion streak also indicates that Harry tends to be secretive, and while it means his emotional depth is beyond the typical Leo it also gives way for him to self-isolate in pursuit of his highest goals.

Finally, his Sun is placed in the eighth house of death and legacies. A certain pull towards the afterlife is present throughout his life, marked initially by his first encounter with Voldemort. He’s born under a “lucky” ( read: prophesied ) star, indicting that he not only comes into great fortune - in fact, being a recipient of two but also a great legacy from the dead.

ASCENDANT | SAGITTARIUS, 9°14'59" | FIRST HOUSE

The Ascendant is the “mask” which is presented to people, the first impression typically falls in line with this. Harry’s Ascendant is in Sagittarius, he can come across as independent, optimistic, and confident, though sometimes overly blunt or critical. Generally a charming conversationalist, your free-spirited approach may come off as restless or easily bored. Sagittarius on the Ascendant also adds a certain risk-taking quality to Harry’s personality. When in pursuit of something he truly believes in, Harry is willing to lay it all on the line. Whether it be bodily harm during a Quidditch match, or his life while attempting to defeat evil as he sees it, Harry doesn’t often hesitate to do whatever it takes.

Sagittarius’s ruling planet ( Jupiter ) in the analytical sign of Virgo indicates that Harry’s mind is quite capable of detailed thinking, particularly when there is a mystery to solve. Without physical endeavors, Harry can become quite restless. There is also indicators of a deep inner life, leading way towards in-depth fantasy worlds or vivid dreams. ( Both of which are extremely prevalent in Harry’s life ). He can feel trapped, often, and really dislikes feeling helpless or aimless. He likes freedom of choice, and enjoys being outdoors. He’s also more inclined to be attracted towards physical / outdoor sport.

It also shows a sense of humor that leans toward the sarcastic and cynical end of the spectrum. Despite more introverted tendencies ( and inclinations ), Harry does enjoy socializing and in fact can get quite a great deal out of it. His preferences toward socializing with a selected few are exactly that - Harry enjoys being with people he knows will be honest with him, people he can trust. ( More on that in a second ).

MOON | ARIES, 0°40'34" | THIRD HOUSE

The Moon rules emotions, moods, and feelings. It reflects personality when someone is alone or deeply comfortable. Harry’s Moon is in Aries, meaning his emotional self is independent, energetic, and enthusiastic. He has a tendency to feel inadequate and being it is in his third house, he finds security and safety through the things he knows and is familiar with. ( Most notably his affection towards Hogwarts, despite it quite literally being a place fo death for him. )

High-spirited and courageous, Harry is a fighter. The degree of drive that Harry brings to any effort sometimes surprises others. He operates, more or less, on a hair-trigger reaction to certain stimuli, which sometimes means he acts in the heat of the moment which isn’t always the best thing. Similarly, Harry has a temper but rarely holds grudges. Very independent, with an extremely strong and forceful personality, he is known for being impulsive, careless, reckless, foolhardy, rash and daring.

MERCURY | CANCER, 19°11'26" | EIGHTH HOUSE

Mercury determines communication and the processing of information. It also indicates the way he learns. ( It is the mind’s planet. ) Harry’s Mercury is in Cancer, meaning his intellect is emotional and empathetic. He has a strong intuition and ( at times ) skill for diplomacy, but ( more times than not ) he tends to favor volatility and irrationality. Co-Star in particular came through with a good read, “ Sighing is a favored mode of communication. ”

Harry has difficulty seeing life objectively, his emotions ruling his thought processes. Harry’s rich inner life points towards having an excellent memory, especially when he has emotionally bonded with such a memory. He would do well to make his decisions with a clear-mind, but Harry’s restless nature rarely allows that. Mercury’s position also indicates that however confident, however popular, however brave Harry becomes a portion of his thoughts will always dwell on his losses.

Harry’s life is not dictated by sadness, however. He does have a tendency to brood, but his emotions usually feed into direct action. It lends to a certain sensitivity in him. Harry is kept from becoming too arrogant or power-hungry due to his attentiveness to others and care for their feelings. He possesses a very Cancerian need for a home and family, which explains why he loves staying at The Burrow. Harry desperately needs to feel familial warmth and acceptance, and Mercury’s link with Uranus in the eleventh house proves that the answer to Harry’s need for family can be found in his friends, who have become his surrogate family. This also indicates a willingness to befriend unusual or unpopular people and remain loyal to them, perhaps acting on a deep “misfit bond.”

VENUS | GEMINI, 25°40'6" | SEVENTH HOUSE

Venus determines indicates how affection is expressed and what qualities are sought after in a partner. Harry’s Venus is in Gemini, meaning his romantic side is dynamic, curious, and easily bored. He is drawn to wit but his near-blunt honesty finds hesitation in being forthcoming about his feelings for people. It’s in his seventh house, meaning love is usually expressed in close relationships and long-term partnerships. Harry is friendly, warm, open and tolerant toward others. He is also very witty and humorous, and he is able to amuse and please others especially those he shares a similar sense of humor with. To put it out there : he is very crushable.

What Harry seeks ( read : desperately needs ) is a stable influence to love him and be the recipient of all the love he has to give in return. However, given Pluto’s influence on Venus he’s is not likely to date around in pursuit of the right partner. Although men with Venus in Gemini can tend to casually date many different partners, the rest of Harry’s chart shows a bone-deep sense of loyalty and how serious he is about love to ever dole out his affections frivolously.

He is drawn toward assertive, spirited, and active ( read: jocks ) individuals. He prefers someone who is straightforward with their feelings and intentions, especially in an area where he feels most vulnerable and anxious. Harry craves long-term commitment and stability, so often riddled with social insecurity though it presents itself as being aloof rather than shy. He is endowed with innate charisma, so while people are often drawn to him he sometimes feels at a loss with what to do next. Mars in Libra gives us a hint that Harry is just not as aggressive in his love life as in other areas.

MARS | LIBRA, 12°7'36" | TENTH HOUSE

Mars is the planet of aggression. It determines how Harry asserts himself and how he presents himself when he’s angry. Harry’s Mars is in Libra, and while it may take him a minute to make a decision he often asserts himself in a way that is fair-minded and relativistic though he does trend towards being passive aggressive. It’s in his tenth house, meaning you put a lot of energy into goals, success, and responsibility. Mars is concerned with fighting unrelentingly, while Pluto presents it own formidable areas of focus. Paired with Mars in the tenth house, Harry’s status of “ Chosen One ” actually isn’t all that surprising. This placement also enables Harry with the determination to see this particular destiny through to the end, and makes him apt at handling the pressures he’s so often saddled with.

A Libran influence of harmony and kindness is bestowed upon this aspect, pointing towards Harry’s true nature. Harry’s temper may cause him to have ( occasional ) vengeful thoughts, but he is much more inclined to settle on more peaceful ways of resolving conflict. He seeks out cooperation, and thrives in a collaborative environment. Harry is drawn to finding new evils to conquer, meaning even in post-war life his sense of destiny will never truly be fulfilled. Harry is someone who will always be willing to fight for what is right, and given his aversion of holding / seeking power he is not at risk for being swayed towards a more tyrannically / murderous approach.

With Venus, Harry really does have love on his side, and his willingness to fight is his ultimate love language. Harry’s life’s work will always be viewed as being a labor of love, never of hatred. He seeks out friendly competition, very much enjoying the benefits of it. Harry has the ability to sense injustice and the desire to take corrective actions to make proper compensations. All in all, Harry’s approach to conflict is very even-keel, surprising for someone so driven by emotion.

JUPITER | VIRGO, 11°34'27" | NINTH HOUSE

One of the two social planets, Jupiter rules idealism, optimism, and expansion. It’s also very philosophical. Harry’s Jupiter is in Virgo, meaning he grows and finds understanding through careful thought, goal-setting, and hard work. It’s in his ninth house, meaning he finds success through the creation of meaning, rather than simply contemplating it. Again, with any relationship or social-leaning, Harry is drawn towards action as his language.

He feels most at ease and content with himself when he is doing something that he considers practical or useful. Responsibility, for Harry, brings about a certain amount of comfort in believing he is not burdening those around him. Harry is often disappointed when he is not trusted with enough responsibility and will even take on tasks that others seem to avoid. He demands very little for himself in life, and needs to be careful to temper his guilt over anything he can deem as too self-indulgent.

Harry is an analytical thinker, on a broad level. His function within his core relationships is typically to be the one who keeps his eye on the larger goal at hand, and as such Harry can often be looked to when people need guidance or direction in their lives. Harry’s ability to think deep and remain general optimistic about those around him allows him to see good in people, and he can often be a guiding force towards setting them on the right track ( even better, he can do this without even realizing what effect he has had ).

SATURN | VIRGO, 24°1'34" | NINTH HOUSE

The other social planet, Saturn rules responsibility, restrictions, limits, boundaries, fears, and self-discipline. Your Saturn is in Virgo, meaning you struggle with perfectionism, a critical eye, workaholic tendencies, and your need to be pure. It’s in your ninth house, meaning you have had difficulties with the creation of personal meaning.

Your life must be orderly and practical and full of known and familiar routines in order for you to feel comfortable with yourself. Be careful, however, not to let “order” become the be-all and end-all of your life, or you may become cold, crass and unfeeling. Doing useful, practical things boosts your self- esteem. Abstract concepts and reasoning seem frivolous and a waste of time to you. You are very critical of yourself (and others), indeed at times quite self-deprecating. Try to relax a bit and allow yourself the freedom to fail once in a while. However, you probably won’t fail very often because you are such a perfectionist.

URANUS | SCORPIO, 21°30'5" | TWELFTH HOUSE

Uranus stays in each sign for seven years, meaning it rules a generation more than a person. It rules innovation, rebellion, and progress. Harry’s Uranus is in Scorpio, meaning other generations are shocked by his peer’s intensity, passion, and hunger for power. It’s in his twelfth house, meaning that for Harry, this manifests in rebelling against dated expectations ( particularly around secrecy ).

Harry’s generation demands to confront life at its deepest and most meaningful levels. Harry tends towards being compulsive and obsessive in just about everyone, but through this he is unwilling to accept anything that is casual or superficial ( again, circling back to relationships ). This also means this generation will seek out and explore new methods of healing as well as different ways to deal with deep-seated emotional problems. Perfect for post-war healing.

NEPTUNE | SAGITTARIUS, 20°9'21" | FIRST HOUSE

Neptune stays in each sign for around fourteen years, meaning it again rules a generation more than a person. It also rules dreams, imagination, and the unconscious. Harry’s Neptune is in Sagittarius, meaning his entire generation finds inspiration through its expanded horizons, a desire for freedom, optimism, and curiosity. It’s in his first house, meaning that for Harry, this manifests in your ideal ( verging on unrealistic and impractical ) about his dreams, inner life, and self-image—and, because it’s his first house, his Neptune in Sagittarius is hyper-present in your personality.

Harry oftentimes found himself disappearing into a rich inner world through the various traumas of his life. It is hinted towards this being a key factor in what allowed him to cope, in any regard, to the abuses he faced as a child. However, this can also get away from him. Harry’s dreams and desires so often get tangled up that he mistakingly takes them as truth and finds himself wishing for the impossible, being let down when it doesn’t come to fruition. Despite all other evidence, Harry believes James was the one who saved him in Prisoner of Azkaban. His momentum and forward-thinking allows him to save himself at the last minute, but this sort of wishful thinking never exactly goes away.

Harry, and his entire generation, will be at the forefront of humanitarian attempts to improve the lot of those who are in need of assistance. They are comfortable with the idea that progress takes the work of groups, and so he finds himself in the company of like-minded peers throughout his life.

PLUTO | LIBRA, 19°16'21" | TENTH HOUSE

Pluto stays in each sign for up to thirty years, so it again rules a generation more than a person. It rules power, intensity, obsession, and control. Harry’s is in his tenth house, meaning he and his peers are fixated on transforming outdated definitions of success and responsibility.

#i had to repost because the read more was being a little bitch #anyway i'm sorry i missed the start of leo szn but here here is #triple fire sign potters only #study.#headcanon.#please don't steal this one thing from me okay i barely understand this shit and it took me so long to do

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deonideatta · 4 years ago

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hi hi i heard you like chief kim and i'm here to get all the intel on why it's a good drama 😊 and what you love about park jae bum's other dramas 😊 pls let me know if there's romance bc that's the oxygen i breathe when i watch a show 💕

Hello!!! Thank you for asking me about Chief Kim!!!! I can go on about it for ages lol. This got a bit long so i’m putting it under a cut

Chief Kim (aka Good Manager) is a comedy office drama with 20 eps, and it aired in 2017. There isn’t a main romance plotline, but don’t let that put you off! It’s an incredible drama in so many ways. (tho there is a subtle romance side plot, but it doesn’t involve the main character and it’s never the main focus, though it is cute). It does feature a bromance that was so great that the two actors literally won an award for it tho lol, so there’s also that!

In a way, the general premise is somewhat similar to Vincenzo in that it’s the main character and an unlikely team of others fighting a big corporation. The comedic tone is also more or less the same. The drama follows Kim Seong Ryong (the titular Chief Kim, played by Namgoong Min), a man with a talent for handling numbers who goes from running a seedy accounting firm to quite accidentally becoming a champion of employees rights in one of the biggest corporations in the country. He originally joins the company with the goal of embezzling a lot money and moving abroad, but he gets swept up in office politics surrounding high executives and the sinister goings on surrounding the position he was recruited for, as well as the shady things the higher-ups want him to do and the suspicion of the other members of his department. Eventually he starts to work alongside them to fight the corruption of the higher ups, and quickly becomes the bane of top management’s existence by being so incredibly annoying that they begin to regret hiring him.

It’s the kind of drama that really gets you to laugh, while still being incredibly heartwarming. The main character is so unashamedly funny, and the character dynamics are all so warm, and none of it ever seems forced. The first tag for the drama on MyDramaList is “character development”, and that says a lot! There’s so much growth that goes on for all the characters, even some of the villains! It’s especially funny because to begin with all the good things Kim Seong Ryeong does are completely by accident, and he’s annoyed but also pleased with all the attention it gets him. Over time he begins to own it, and begins to actively try to stand up to the corrupt people at the top of the company. The other highlight for me besides the humor is definitely the characters. From the eccentric main character, to the no-nonsense second in command in his department Yoon Ha Kyung, to the aggressive finance director Seo Yul who is always eating (one of my all time favourite characters, played by 2PM’s Junho), to the janitor lady who always roasts everyone, there isn’t a single dull character, whether good or bad. And Seo Yul gets one of the best character arcs I’ve ever seen in a kdrama. You get to watch the characters struggle and triumph, and you feel for them because their struggles feel so real, and the drama really gets you invested in them. You see the ways in which they fight to survive as normal working class citizens and you want them to win.

It differs from Vincenzo in that the main character isn’t considered evil and loses his less savoury traits over the course of the drama (his character arc is one of becoming a more upstanding citizen), and the message is one of fighting against corporate greed using the corporate system against itself in order to make things better for the average working citizen. But there’s the same plotting, and the same feeling of rooting for the protagonist team to win as you watch them plot and plan. I never rewatch things, but i’ve rewatched Chief Kim twice already and i’m looking forward to rewatching it again soon (just writing about it is making me want to rewatch it right now lol). It especially hits well for me because i love office dramas, and the humor and the bromance are just right. (Also, not entirely related, but it’s the first drama Kim Seonho was in!)

Another Park Jaebum drama i can definitely recommend is The Fiery Priest! It’s also a comedy action drama with 20 eps (released in 2019), and it follows Kim Hae Il (Kim Nam Gil), a catholic priest with a real temper, as he works to solve the mystery surrounding the death of a senior priest. No romance there either, but it’s got the same humor as Chief Kim and Vincenzo, and the same overarching found family trope (that really shines for this one). It’s darker than Chief Kim, but not as dark as Vincenzo. The plot is very intriguing, and it’s the kind of drama you feel compelled to keep watching to see what happens next. And the host of characters in that drama is still one of my favourites to this day. Every character was incredibly written, and they all played vital roles in the overall story. Again, lots of character development all round, and great character arcs not just for the main character (even for a few of the villains!). Plus it was lovely to watch the various characters interact, get closer, and build relationships. Such an iconic squad. Not to mention how funny it is?? And the fight scenes??? In fact, I enjoyed it so much that when I checked Park Jaebum’s page on MyDramaList after watching it around June last year and saw Vincenzo as an upcoming project, I added it to my plan to watch list immediately even though there was only a single line of synopsis lol. It’s also got an absolute banger of a soundtrack!

When you think about it, all three (Chief Kim, TFP and Vincenzo) can be simplified to “guy with dubious past sets out to fight corruption and creates a great support circle in the process”. All three are dramas of finding people who care about you and are willing to fight alongside you, and fighting for your convictions/what you think is right. Each main character starts out as a somewhat solitary figure, and you get to watch as they each find people who are willing to fight alongside them and support them. What exactly those specific convictions are varies in each drama, but Park Jaebum writes the character development arcs incredibly each time, and the relationships between the characters are so real and so satisfying to watch. And yet the integrity of the main character in each drama is never compromised either, it’s shown that they can grow and become better without losing themselves. The growth is also in the way that they learn to work with and rely on others, because teamwork makes the dream work. And then to cap it all off he lets them have victories, and he makes it SO satisfying??? There are highs and there are lows, and you feel all of those right there with the characters, which makes the victories feel so so good. In each we see the ensemble cast get involved with the fight and the plotting, and we get to see all their epic plans and their execution, and the victories they win that build up over time. And it’s so satisfying to me! I love it a lot, just thinking about it is making me smile lol. It also shows how well humor and darker/more serious plotlines/events are balanced in the dramas, neither is compromised in favour of the other, but it always works so well that the humor never feels forced or out of place. As someone who doesn’t like overbearingly dark shows, I really appreciate that. They all give you lots to laugh at, while not losing any of the plot to the funny.

Of course there are differences, notably the romance, and the fact that Vincenzo is bad vs bad rather than good vs bad like the other two. They deal more with redemption (especially The Fiery Priest), but that works for the stories that are being told, and it’s very well executed.

It’s worth noting that Park Jaebum also wrote Good Doctor and 4 seasons of God’s Quiz. I haven’t checked those out yet, but I’ve heard good things about all of them. He also wrote Blood, I haven’t seen that one either but opinions seem to be split on how good it was. All of those are medical dramas (which is the reason I haven’t watched them lol, i can’t stand medical dramas) from before 2017, when he wrote Chief Kim. It seems he’s been on a roll since then, good for him and good for us lol. You can see everything he’s written on his MyDramaList page.

Overall I enjoyed the Park Jaebum dramas I have seen for first and foremost the comedy, but also for the warmth of the character relationships and for how well developed/written each character is. And I love how he balances the humor with more poignant/darker moments, I laughed a lot watching all three dramas, but I’ve cried over each of them as well. It’s a good balance to have, it gives you a good plot to be interested in, but doesn’t keep you stressed and sombre the whole way through. I’ve seen people say that Vincenzo wouldn’t be as good if it wasn’t so wacky, and I fully agree. It’s the same for both TFP and Chief Kim, and that balance is definitely what I appreciate most in Park Jaebum’s dramas. I know I will laugh, but I also know I will get an incredible plot and incredible characters, and that’s really important for me. Plus I know I can trust that there will be a good ending because the writer cares about his characters.

I definitely recommend checking out both TFP and Chief Kim after Vincenzo is done, especially since they’re so similar in terms of comedic tone and basic plot direction. If you ever get to watching either of them feel free to hmu to chat about it!! There’s lots of plot stuff that can be can discussed.

lol this got v long (i have lots to say about how much i love these dramas haha), but I hope it’s helpful!!!

#a breakdown on why i love the park jaebum dramas i've seen so far #it was nice to sit and actually think about it/write the reason out lol #im very passionate about it sdfsdf #chief kim and the fiery priest are perhaps my favourite dramas ever #and vincenzo is looking to join them #vincenzo #the fiery priest #chief kim #kdrama #no spoilers

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thecatsaesthetics · 3 years ago

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Anne Boleyn 2021 Review

Okay, so I want to start this off by saying I am a day late and a dollar short. I know that. Who wants my, over thousand-word, essay on this... but I've gonna give it to you. So please keep reading and leave me comments with your thoughts about this show.

So I will start this off with the positives:

I think Jodie Turner-Smith was excellently cast as Anne Boleyn. Jodie has a remarkable range as an actress. Especially since this version of Anne Boleyn, she is both victim and villain Jodie was able to pull it off flawlessly. She jumped from being a heartbroken wife to manipulating Henry VIII very well. Two scenes that really highlight this are:

The one after her miscarriage and Henry riding off; showed Anne’s desperation and sorrow very well. “Won’t you say goodbye to your wife?” was a heartbreaking line and I very nearly lost it when she collapsed.

The second was in the next episode where she manipulated herself back into his “good graces” by proposing Cromwell had been double-crossing him. This didn’t come across as villainous to me, it came across as a woman in a struggle for survival. Playing the game to keep her station after miscarriage.

I will say this about the show Jodie carried it on her back. She made Anne very sympathetic but highlight that she had this temper that harmed her. However, unlike Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn I never felt this Anne was unlikable. She came across as someone struggling to survive. The scene with Mary after she learns of potentially Mary being reinstated in the line of succession also highlighted this. The whole "The King never likes to be without me for long" was a lie given he had left her but it was to puff up her station. Reminding Norfolk that she helped his daughter marry the King's son. Forcing Chapuys to kiss her hand. These weren't just power moves, they were survival moves.

This Anne was similar to Natalie Dormer’s Anne in season 2 of the Tudor and Geneviève Bujold in Anne of a Thousand Days. I enjoyed how Jodie both made the performance utterly her own but also obviously drew inspiration from the others.

Moving on,

Another positive was George and Anne’s relationship. I did like how touching their scenes were. The final meeting between George and Anne was heartbreaking.

The horse symbolism, while oddly ripped off from The Tudor’s swan symbolism what I liked. Also, the clock from King Francis implying the ��Her time is up” I truly enjoyed. I am just a sucker for symbolism

The Norris Comment

I LOVED THIS. I loved how not only it was said, Anne being flirtatious and joking but the immediate drop. This was the moment Anne truly screwed up. I loved how Norris reacted and the reactions of everyone in the room. This comment is oddly overlooked by most productions of Anne Boleyn or Henry VIII. From what I have read it was an incredibly important comment that was made by Anne. This in combination with her final miscarriage left her in a dangerous position.

Now to a more mixed feeling:

Henry and Anne’s relationship:

On the one hand, I liked it, it showed they were still into each other a lot. This is unlike The Tudors where Henry VIII weirdly loses all sexual interest in Anne (but somehow still expects her to have a baby). Most productions show Anne and Henry’s marriage crumbling the second she has Elizabeth which just isn’t true. I also liked how the miscarriage alone didn’t cause Anne’s downfall, which is usually how it’s done.

That being said the physical violence… Henry VIII was a lot of things but he really wasn’t a physically violent guy himself. He’d execute you but he was a coward about it. I think the one notable time Henry got physically violent with a wife is when he ordered a sword after discovering Katherine Howard’s prior “relationships” and people thought he was angry enough to execute her himself. Even with Jane Seymour, he seems more degrading of her at times than physically violent. Emotional violence was more Henry’s style.

I do understand that they were trying to show the relationship as chaotic, volatile, and unhealthy. However, I just didn’t think it was necessary to add physical violence to do this.

Now with the petty:

The costumes… were so god damn ugly. Just as a side note before we pass from the positives to the true negatives. I just don’t understand what goes through the minds of costume designers. Jodie is a beautiful actress and they put her in the ugliest of clothing.

I mean I have seen worse costumes. They weren't as bad as The White Princess or Wolf Hall. But I would put them alongside The White Queen honestly.

I don't think costumes must be accurate, but I want them to be pretty at least. If you aren't going to make them accurate can we at least have something interesting to look at?

The Negatives:

Jane Boleyn: Ummm I don’t know what to say other than this is fucking dumb. I mean I guess we should be glad there was no physical violence between George and Jane this time around. Other than that I don’t get it. We literally are three mins into episode one and they have Anne call Jane a “spiteful little bitch” why? Because she’s upset her husband is cheating on her? Like Anne is upset her husband is cheating on her? Why wouldn’t Anne sympathize with Jane if that were the case? Even if they wanted to make Jane Boleyn evil they did a bad job. Am I not supposed to have sympathy with the wife getting cheated on?

Also, Dan Jones should have his degree ripped from him. Dan Jones is an actual historian who is an executive producer on this show and he allowed them to have Jane be brought as a witness to Anne’s trial.

On that note let’s move to the Jousting Head Injury thing. Again Dan Jones should have his degree ripped from him. This event did not happen, at least not like this. You can watch Claire Ridgeway’s video on this but the historical records do not support Henry VIII being unconscious at all after this fall. And it was funny they had Chapuys heavily involved in these scenes since he never even wrote about this event. You’d think if it was that important he would have.

That gross miscarriage scene… for all that is holy I do not understand why we are getting these intense miscarriage scenes. The camera was literally between Jodie’s legs at one point. It was so nasty. The sounds… I just can’t. I won’t go into it further but I’d rather have Natalie’s Dormer’s implied miscarriages with just some bleeding then this shit any day.

Now before I tactical the racism I want to say the final episode was probably the weakest one. Anne’s trial… I hated it. I hated Anne speech it was way too much Feminism™. I would have rather had her execution speech or her confession with Crammer. I do get why they only chose to have one of these in the episode, it would totally over crowd the episode. That being said… not only was the directing weird in this scene the speech they wrote just was subpar at best.

The Racism:

Okay, I am going to try my best to tactical the racism in the show. Now I am white and I don’t want to say I should be speaking over ANYONE. Plenty of black Tudor fans have written this better than me.

However, two plot points on this show really struck me as racist.

Jane Seymour: the odd predator behavior Anne has around Jane Seymour. It must be noted that the age gap looks apparent on the screen. Jane’s actress is 25 and Jodie is 34. Jane looked like an innocent schoolgirl and the aggressive scenes with Anne made these seem incredibly predatory. In ALL other productions, I’ve seen this is never how Anne and Jane come across.

The weird kiss between them was both racist and homophobic. I think they said it was about Anne wanting to see the “appeal”. Again it just made her look predator. The worst scene was when she was circling Jane as she spoke a hymn. Honestly, they made Jodie look like a fucking shark in that scene. It was so nasty.

The second and less talked about was Anne and Kingston. I don’t get why nobody is talking about that disturbing scene where Kingston physically pushes Anne onto the bed and holds her there. It was utterly disturbing, and quite frankly I am shocked anyone found that appropriate. You cannot separate Anne being portrayed by Jodie, a black woman, and having a white man grip her head down on a bed saying “She’s only a woman” as an insult. It was incredibly disturbing.

Also in general having Kingston treats Anne so awful… when all other productions of Anne Boleyn have Kingston treat her remarkably well. Racism is implied here. Why in every other production Anne's ladies are kind and gentle to her, and Kingston is moved by her, but when it's Jodie he's physically brutalizing her?

I think there were obviously other incidents, including all the shit with George and Jane but I don’t feel that equipped to handle them. I just wanted to bring these two to light.

Overall:

Jodie was amazing, carried the show on her back. That’s kind of it. It was very subpar. For a show that claims in the beginning inspired by “The Truth… and lies,” it seems more inspired by lies than by any sort of truth.

I mean did we need another Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn TV show. Probably not. Which makes me feel sad. Jodie was so good. She truly pulls off regal. I want to see her in more period dramas. But other than that… 5.5 stars maybe?

#anne boleyn 2021 #anne boleyn #henry viii #jane seymour #tudors #jane boleyn #george boleyn

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kcwcommentary · 6 years ago

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VLD2x03 – “Shiro’s Escape”

2x03 – “Shiro’s Escape”

Shiro’s in a healing pod recovering from being “blasted by a space witch and mauled by giant lizards.” As he does so, we get a flashback to when he was captured by the Galra. “You took my hand, what more do you want?” he asks. That suggests that his amputation wasn’t a necessary medical procedure but a direct violation. It would have been nice (and necessary writing) if the show had fully explained the situation that led to Shiro’s amputation. Someone having to have an amputation is a traumatic event; you don’t do that to a character just because you think it would look cool.

A Galra named Ulaz in the room attacks the others and helps Shiro escape and get back to Earth, telling him that the Blade of Marmora is with him. Ulaz is clearly very different, and far more interesting, than other Galra we’ve seen before.

Haggar converts Prorok, against his will, into a Robeast. Haggar can definitely be creepy and cruel, but I don’t find her compelling at all. I know VLD is a sort of reincarnation of DotU from the 80s, but this is now, not then. Haggar and Zarkon behaving like 80s cartoon villains in VLD gets old after a while.

Shiro calls Allura out on her proclaiming one cannot trust any Galra. Her distrust is understandable, but I’m glad the show is trying to not make Galra monolithically villainous. It seems, of the Paladins, only Shiro and Keith at this point have realized that Zarkon was the original Black Paladin. I guess this is the first time the team has had since the battle at the end of season one to decompress and think about what happened then. I love that Keith refers explicitly to the black bayard as “Shiro’s bayard.” (Too bad the show decides to take it away from Shiro because the EPs wanted Shiro gone and Keith as Black Paladin. It would have been nice if the EPs had believed in Shiro as much as Keith does in these early seasons.)

“I wanted to protect you from the dark history of the Paladins so that you would have a chance to bond with the Lions on your own,” Allura says. Good characters have character flaws, and this is showing some of Allura’s. She knew the huge responsibility that was being asked of Shiro and crew, but by withholding information like this, she wasn’t giving them everything they need to become who they would have to be as Paladins. They can’t find their place in this struggle, understand their relationships with their Lions, without knowing the history of what has come before.

“The Black Lion might have a different take on the matter,” Shiro says in response to Allura proclaiming him to absolutely be the Black Paladin now. There’s so much long-term tension in the doubts Shiro expresses right then. It makes that Shiro’s character arc and story is about being the Black Paladin. I hate that this show eventually takes that away from him.

I love that Coran still calls Pidge “Number 5,” reflecting back to his ranking the Paladins by height in early season one. It feels like he’s using it kind of like a term of endearment, and it makes me wish there had been some notable character bonding between the two of them. He could have become a supportive uncle type character for her or an unexpected science bud type character. A cross-generational friendship, which is a dynamic that I don’t think gets explored enough in fiction, could have been really nice to add to the show.

Haggar can make Zarkon magically able to know where in the universe Team Voltron is, and the process to gain that knowledge takes very little time. This feels way overpowered to me. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be able to find Voltron, but just that gaining that knowledge is too easy and convenient here.

The Castle of Lions has an intruder who is able to evade/handle the Paladins easily. It’s Ulaz, and he only stops when Shiro takes him on. Because we viewers have seen Ulaz help Shiro and specifically how he talked about Shiro being a source of hope, it makes it hard to continue to see Allura being so aggressively against the idea that some Galra are against Zarkon, even if it’s understandable where her anger comes from.

“I’m not trying to win your trust,” Ulaz retorts to Allura, “I’m trying to win a war.” Boom.

That some of them, particularly Allura, are acting like if the base isn’t easily observable then it can’t exist is a bit annoying since they’ve already dealt with Galra bases that they initially had trouble observing. At least they do eventually follow through on Shiro’s urging to trust Ulaz and go into the pocket of space to the base.

Did they really have to have Hunk compare the pocket of space to food? Why does this show so often reduce him to nothing more than the fat guy who likes food? Ugh.

Allura doesn’t want to go with Shiro and Ulaz (and anyone else who wants to go) to the base. I can respect that. I don’t in any way respect Lance’s response that he’s going to stay with Allura to “protect the Princess.” Allura herself responds to him saying that with an “ugh.” I’m right there with you, Allura. If this show was going to have Allura and Lance end up together by the end of the show, then the show really needed to do a lot of work of character development on Lance to show he learned this behavior of his is rude and insulting. I never felt the show did much of any such character work with him though.

Slav is namedropped, here as the person responsible for the technology that allows the base to hide in a pocket of space.

Ulaz gives voice to the reasoning behind the Galra who are opposed to Zarkon, saying that the initial idea of expanding the Empire was in thinking it would provide stability, but that a tyrant like Zarkon only seeks power, not stability. This is doing some really nice world-building work for the show. Ulaz proposes the Blade of Marmora work with Team Voltron in coordinated actions. He also lets them know that they would not have been able to escape at the end of season one if a member of the Blade hadn’t acted to bring down the Galra shield. He also offers Pidge some information on other prisoners the Galra have taken to help her in finding her family.

The Robeast shows up. Ulaz gives Shiro information about how to get to the Blade’s headquarters, but he cautions that Shiro needs to figure out how Zarkon has been able to track him to this location before going to the headquarters so he won’t lead Zarkon there.

Once the pocket in space is pierced by the Robeast, the facility generating the pocket is either damaged and loses power, or by the pocket being discovered ceases to be a safe location, so Ulaz jets away while Voltron is fighting. I get that Voltron wants to avoid being blasted by the Robeast, but they spend a lot of time not doing much to attack. The Castle Ship doesn’t do anything to attack either. I don’t get why so much of the battle is them just sort of being there and nothing else. They do eventually try to block the Robeast’s blast with Voltron’s shield and try to use the magic space crystals to blow it up in one action after their big period of no action, but it’s not successful.

Ulaz swoops back in to sacrifice himself by plunging his craft into the blaster/mouth of the Robeast and turning on his spacial rending system to destroy the Robeast. I had thought that system was part of the base, not his ship though. The narrative head-fake of him leaving only to return makes his leaving pointless; it’s not like his return was the result of him undergoing any character development. He might as well have just remained there with them during the fight and then sacrifice himself to win the battle. It makes it seem like the writing was trying to make us think Allura could have been right in not trusting Ulaz, but we’ve seen too much of him being genuine to think that.

Pidge, Hunk, and Lance smile at Ulaz’s death. This isn’t a happy victory, so their smiling annoys me. Keith’s surprised, but at least isn’t smiling. Only Shiro seems to truly respect the loss of Ulaz’s sacrifice. Ulaz was such an interesting character. I really don’t like that he’s killed off in the same episode he’s introduced. He could have added so much more to this show.

I really like that Keith has a tender moment with Shiro after this battle. Characters need quiet moments to reflect on the events of a story so that the narrative can create meaning for those events. Allura’s continued distrust and aggression still annoys me, but, again, I think it’s a reasonable application of character flaws for her to act this way. She’s not being badly written here. I’m glad that Shiro explicitly states that the Blade of Marmora are their allies. The episode ends with Keith reflecting on having seen Ulaz’s blade and then revealing a mark on his own knife/shortsword, setting up the eventual reveal of Keith being half-Galra.

I can’t help but feel let down that the show introduced a character as interesting as Ulaz only to kill him off so soon, while characters that are far less interesting get way too much screen time while adding far less to the show.

#voltron legendary defender #voltron #vld #voltron criticism #vld criticism #voltron critical #vld critical #vld season 2 #vld 2x03 #commentary

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kaisteroid-blog · 7 years ago

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ASTROLOGY READING - Jackson Wang 28.03.94

NAME : JACKSON WANG

SEX : M

BIRTHPLACE : Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

MARCH 28, 1994.

NOTE - I only analyzed up until Mars, the reason for this is because planets after Saturn are all the same for people born in the same generation as him. (These planets take longer to pass from sign to sign because their orbit around the sun is much longer.) I’ll do his planets of Jupiter and Saturn in a separate post !

Sun in Aries - Jackson’s energy will shine through because of his sun in aries placement. Like… this man is bursting with energy once you get to know him.

His ability to socialize and interact also stems from this placement. He’s remarkably outgoing and is basically the life of the party. His fun, charming nature all comes from his sun (+venus which also falls into the same sign). He really tries to make everyone happy in the group through all odds.

Aries can also be known for being competitive and angry some of the time. They also display an exuberance of confidence… which if that doesn’t scream “Jackson” to you, I don’t know what will.

Because he is a fire sign, he’s very independent and though i cannot stress this enough - he simply wants everyone to be happy and enjoy life to the fullest. He also gets bored easily! This is why you constantly may see him doing something, he never seems to settle down and r e l a x. He overworks himself at times to the point of exhaustion, where he has collapsed on stage. Jackson, take a break, god damn.

Moon in Libra - An interesting aspect we have here is that his moon and sun are opposing signs. In many ways this balances out, but the downfall to this is that because Aries and Libra are such people-pleasers, they kind of tend to forget about their own well being. He truly really wants to make people’s days despite what he himself may be going through. He is a fighter however, and anything thrown in his path, he believe he will get through. An optimist at that.

He also strongly believes in equality and justice for all! Hence why we constantly see him being in support of socialist issues, for example, LGBT issues. The fact he had to do a gay kiss for a scene and didn’t see the big deal of it - why people were making such a fuss over a topic.

He merely sees people for who they are, at his core he is a true believer of equality. I feel like in a different life, he would’ve been an activist if not an artist. He really voices his opinion out.

He really is a sunshine who wants to comfort everyone and let them know they’re doing great.

Mercury in Pisces - Very sentimental in the way he talks about things he’s passionate about. Often times you can see this placement of his shine through in his instagram captions about people/things that mean dearly to him.

His emotions really get the best of him when writing lyrics as well. They just really shine through. He wants a message to be sent across to everyone when writing these lines, to have his emotions known. (Though take note that a normal mercury in pisces w a feminine sign will act indecisive with their words, but because he is an aries sun, and libra moon, he’s already very direct, so it cancels the indecisive part of the pisces side in mercury)

Also not to mention, musicians are known to have mercury in water/earth signs (or signs that are known to have wisdom), as their emotions and messages are more notable through writing.

As for Jackson because both his sun and moon are masculine signs, he finds it very hard to express his feelings when you put him on the spot. He’s known to be such an upbeat, hilarious person so when someone asks him to be sentimental for a second, he has to take a couple moments to respond back and in a way “shut off” that side of him.

Because of this placement, if one of his members feels down, he will very much likely handle the situation calmly and softly. Careful of every word he picks out to say to them, as he knows they’re probably going through a difficult time. It pains him to see his members sad.

Venus in Aries - A reaaaaaaaallllllyyy passionate feisty lover. When he falls in love, he likely falls hard. He wants a lover who’s similar to him in a way -- adventurous, determined, and confident. However, at the same time, he’s closed off to love. If any of you recall him saying the one time he fell in love, the girl broke his heart by running off with some other guy (correct me if I’m wrong please, got7 aren’t in my top 3 so ^^)

A relationship with him will oftentimes feel childlike, like a first love almost. His relationships are in a bubble of fun and spontaneity. He enjoys his freedom and if his partner keeps him on a leash, he will likely end the relationship. This placement also explains his hella flirty side like goddamn boi keep it down.

However, venus doesn’t necessarily have to mean your love to others. It can definitely display the love for yourself! (which Jackson makes us very aware of how full of himself he is).

He’s clearly very confident, and shows a lot of love for himself, which could result into why he thinks he doesn’t need a relationship. (other than the fact that lol he doesn’t have time and he’s too busy). He believes it’s fine to be content with you and yourself only. We all don’t need someone in our lives, and that’s ok!

Not only that, but along with this placement, he is very grateful and appreciative for all that he’s been given.

Mars in Pisces -

I actually have this placement, so this would be easier for me to explain. Mars in Pisces signifies that when angered or upset, Jackson is probably not as aggressive and straight forward as he usually appears. The usual way we see him “upset” when the other members is when he’s joking around, and he acts like he is, but of course we all know he isn’t actually upset. Rather I feel like when he really feels angry, he’s the type to bottle it up, or react passive-aggressively.

If any of you recall, a long time ago, he commented on a markson account/post on instagram saying “Please stop.” -- which was out of nowhere. He didn’t say why, rather before he’s mentioned you could ship him with any member of got7 and he couldn’t care less. So why the sudden comment? Lots of people say that it was b/c he didn’t want to be tagged in it - which is understandable. But note he didn’t say “Please stop [reason]” or “Can you stop tagging me,” rather a cryptic passive-aggressive “please stop.”

Additionally, on his instagram posts of his raps, if you squint hard enough, he’s angry over something, but it comes across so passive-aggressive.

He’s likely indecisive, and doesn’t know what he wants to gain out of life, as a lot of people who hold this placement usually don’t have a set plan or final destination. Rather, he lets life take him in for a ride whether he’s prepared or not.

-fin-

hi guys this is my FIRST kpop reading that im going to be posting, so of course by all means it will not be my best reading!! if you have any comments on my reading don’t hesitate to msg me on my main acc @kookaiinee

let me know who you guys think i should do next! it could be a person or a ship. (: (excluding bts as plenty of blogs already cover them)

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mikegranich87 · 3 years ago

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Why is Facebook so bad at countering vaccine misinformation?

It’s been six months since Facebook announced a major reversal to its policies on vaccine misinformation. Faced with a rising tide of viral rumors and conspiracy theories, the company said it would start removing vaccine mistruths from its platform. Notably, the effort not only encompassed content about COVID-19 vaccines, but all vaccines. That includes many of the kinds of claims it had long allowed, like those linking vaccines and autism, statements that vaccines are “toxic” or otherwise dangerous.

The move was widely praised, as disinformation researchers and public health officials have long urged Facebook and other platforms to treat vaccine misinformation more aggressively. Since then, the company has banned some prominent anti-vaxxers, stopped recommending health-related groups and shown vaccine-related PSAs across Facebook and Instagram. It now labels any post at all that mentions COVID-19 vaccines, whether factual or not.

Yet, despite these efforts, vaccine misinformation is still an urgent problem, and public health officials say Facebook and other social media platforms aren’t doing enough to address it. Last month, the Surgeon General issued an advisory warning of the dangers of health misinformation online. The accompanying 22-page report didn’t call out any platforms by name, but it highlighted algorithmic amplification and other issues commonly associated with Facebook. The following day, President Joe Biden made headlines when he said that misinformation on Facebook was “killing people.”

While Facebook has pushed back, citing its numerous efforts to quash health misinformation during the pandemic, the company’s past lax approach to vaccine misinformation has likely made that job much more difficult. In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said vaccine hesitancy has decreased among its users in the US, but the company has also repeatedly rebuffed requests for more data that could shed light on just how big the problem really is.

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have removed 18 million pieces of COVID misinformation, labeled hundreds of millions of pieces of COVID content rated by our fact-checking partners, and connected over 2 billion people with authoritative information through tools like our COVID information center,” a Facebook spokesperson told Engadget. “The data shows that for people in the US on Facebook, vaccine hesitancy has declined by 50% since January, and acceptance is high. We will continue to enforce against any account or group that violates our COVID-19 and vaccine policies and offer tools and reminders for people who use our platform to get vaccinated.”

Facebook’s pandemic decision

Throughout the pandemic, Facebook has moderated health misinformation much more aggressively than it has in the past. Yet for the first year of the pandemic, the company made a distinction between coronavirus misinformation — e.g., statements about fake cures or disputing the effectiveness of masks, which it removed — and vaccine conspiracy theories, which it said did not break the company’s rules. Mark Zuckerberg even said that he would be reluctant to moderate vaccine misinformation the same way the company has with COVID misinformation.

That changed this year, with the advent of COVID-19 vaccines and the rising tide of misinformation and vaccine hesitancy that accompanied them, but the damage may have already been done. A peer-reviewed study published in Nature in February found that exposure to misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines “lowers intent to accept a COVID-19 vaccine” by about 6 percent.

People are also more likely to be unvaccinated if they primarily get their news from Facebook, according to a July report from the COVID States Project. The researchers sampled more than 20,000 adults in all 50 states and found that those who cited Facebook as a primary news source were less likely to be vaccinated. While the authors note that it doesn’t prove that using Facebook affects someone’s choice to get vaccinated, they found a “surprisingly strong relationship” between the two.

“If you rely on Facebook to get news and information about the coronavirus, you are substantially less likely than the average American to say you have been vaccinated,” they write. “In fact, Facebook news consumers are less likely to be vaccinated than people who get their coronavirus information from Fox News. According to our data, Facebook users were also among the most likely to believe false claims about coronavirus vaccines.”

The researchers speculate that this could be because people who spend a lot of time on Facebook are less likely to trust the government, the media or other institutions. Or, it could be that spending time on the platform contributed to that distrust. While there’s no way to know for sure, we do know that Facebook has for years been an effective platform for spreading disinformation about vaccines.

A spotty record

Doctors and researchers have warned for years that Facebook wasn’t doing enough to prevent lies about vaccines from spreading. Because of this, prominent anti-vaxxers have used Facebook and Instagram to spread their message and build their followings.

A report published earlier this year from the CCDH found that more than half of all vaccine misinformation online could be linked to 12 individuals who are part of a long-running, and often coordinated, effort to undermine vaccines. But while the company has banned some accounts, some of those individuals still have a presence on a Facebook-owned platform, according to the CCDH. Facebook has disputed the findings of that report, which relied on analytics from the company's CrowdTangle tool. But the social network’s own research into vaccine hesitancy indicated “a small group appears to play a big role” in undermining vaccines, The Washington Postreported in March.

There are other issues, too. For years, Facebook’s search and recommendation algorithm have made it extraordinarily easy for users to fall into rabbit holes of misinformation. Simply searching the word “vaccine” would be enough to surface recommendations for accounts spreading conspiracy theories and other vaccine disinformation.

Engadget reported last year on Instagram’s algorithmic search results associated anti-vaccine accounts with COVID-19 conspiracies and QAnon content. More than a year later, a recent study from Avaaz found that although this type of content no longer appears at the top of search results, Facebook’s recommendation algorithms continue to recommend pages and groups that promote misinformation about vaccines. In their report, researchers document how users can fall into misinformation “rabbit holes” by liking seemingly innocuous pages or searching for “vaccines.” They also found that Facebook’s page recommendation algorithm appeared to associate vaccines and autism.

“Over the course of two days, we used two new Facebook accounts to follow vaccine-related pages that Facebook suggested for us. Facebook’s algorithm directed us to 109 pages, with 1.4M followers, containing anti-vaccine content — including pages from well-known anti-vaccine advocates and organizations such as Del Bigtree, Dr. Ben Tapper, Dr. Toni Bark, Andrew Wakefield, Children's Health Defense, Learn the Risk, and Dr. Suzanne Humphries. Many of the pages the algorithm recommended to us carried a label, warning that the page posts about COVID-19 or vaccines, giving us the option to go directly to the CDC website. The algorithm also recommended 10 pages related to autism — some containing anti-vaccine content, some not — suggesting that Facebook’s algorithm associates vaccines with autism, a thoroughly debunked link that anti-vaccine advocates continue to push.”

Facebook has removed some of these pages from its recommendations, though it’s not clear which. Avaaz points out that there’s no way to know why Facebook’s recommendation algorithm surfaces the pages it does as the company doesn’t disclose how these systems work. Yet it’s notable because content associating vaccines with autism is exactly one of the claims that Facebook said it would ban under its stricter misinformation rules during the pandemic. That Facebook’s suggestions are intermingling the topics is, at the very least, undermining those efforts.

Claims and counterclaims

Facebook has strongly opposed these claims. The company repeatedly points to its messaging campaign around covid-19 vaccines, noting that more than 2 billion people have viewed the company’s COVID-19 and vaccine PSAs.

In a blog post responding to President Biden’s comments last month, Facebook’s VP of Integrity Guy Rosen argued that “vaccine acceptance among Facebook users in the US has increased.” He noted that the company has “reduced the visibility of more than 167 million pieces of COVID-19 content debunked by our network of fact-checking partners so fewer people see it.”

He didn’t share, however, how much of that misinformation was about vaccines, or details on the company’s enforcement of its more general vaccine misinformation rules. That’s likely not an accident. The company has repeatedly resisted efforts that could shed light on how misinformation spreads on its platform.

Facebook executives declined a request from their data scientists who asked for additional resources to study COVID-19 misinformation at the start of the pandemic, according toThe New York Times. It’s not clear why the request was turned down, but the company has also pushed back on outsiders’ efforts to gain insight into health misinformation.

Facebook has declined to share the results of an internal study on vaccine hesitancy on its platform, according to Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine’s office, which has launched a consumer protection investigation into the company’s handling of vaccine misinformation.

“Facebook has said it’s taking action to address the proliferation of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on its site,” a spokesperson said. “But then when pressed to show its work, Facebook refused.”

The Biden Administration has also — unsuccessfully — pushed Facebook to be more forthcoming about vaccine misinformation. According to The New York Times, administration officials have met repeatedly with Facebook and other platforms as part of its effort to curb misinformations about coronavirus vaccines. Yet when a White House official asked Facebook to share “how often misinformation was viewed and spread,” the company refused. According to The Times, “Facebook responded to some requests for information by talking about vaccine promotion strategies,’ such as its PSAs or its tool to help users book vaccine appointments.

One issue is that it’s not always easy to define what is, and isn’t, misinformation. Factual information, like news stories or personal anecdotes about vaccine side effects, can be shared with misleading commentary. This, Facebook has suggested, makes it difficult to study the issue in the way that many have asked. At the same time, Facebook is a notoriously data-driven company. It’s constantly testing even the smallest features, and it employs scores of researchers and data scientists. It’s difficult to believe that learning more about vaccine hesitancy and how misinformation spreads is entirely out of reach.

from Mike Granich https://www.engadget.com/facebook-vaccine-misinformation-policies-170012241.html?src=rss

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perksofwifi · 4 years ago

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Another 2022 VW Taos Prototype Drive: This Time With Multiple Suspension Tunes

This isn’t our first time behind the wheel of a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time version of the 2022 Volkswagen Taos: Last fall, we sampled the new 1.5-liter turbo engine, and this time we were invited to drive more prototypes with suspension tuning that both was and wasn’t close to final. Frankly, at this point we just want to drive the damn production version, but VW seems determined to draw out the introduction like some sort of romantic interlude, minus the candles and prosecco.

We’ll play along, though this time we’ll skip the long setup on the small SUV’s market position, tweener status, and baby-Atlas styling because we covered those in our First Look. This time ’round, we were invited to Volkswagen’s hot-weather proving grounds in Maricopa, Arizona, where two front-wheel-drive and two all-wheel-drive examples of the wee SUV awaited.

This exercise was of questionable usefulness. We started out on one of Volkswagen’s handling courses—the fuel-handling course, which is a narrow, twisty track with tight, off-camber turns designed to make fuel slosh in the wrong direction. It also featured a few sine-wave bumps, which we were advised to take below 40 mph lest our Taoses catch some sick air. Good fun, to be sure, but about as close to real-world driving as Volkswagen putting us behind the wheel and dropping the cars out of an airplane.

But that’s okay because the prototypes we drove weren’t quite real-world, either. The two front-drivers differed slightly but were close to production tune, we were told, while the all-wheel-drive prototypes were very different, both from each other and the final product. One was stiffer and more aggressive, the other was notably softer, and we were told the final AWD tuning would be somewhere between the two.

The sharp curves of the fuel-handling course put the FWD Taoses into a constant state of tire-squealing understeer, and the reverse banking of the turns exaggerated the sensation of roll to the point that we were in no position to properly judge body control. We’d hoped for a few midcorner bumps to potentially highlight the differences between the front-driver’s torsion-beam rear axle and the all-wheel-driver’s multilink setup, but the pavement was baby-butt smooth except for the sine waves, which were like the world’s smallest and least thrilling roller coaster.

The softer of the two all-wheel-drivers felt remarkably similar to the front-drive cars, though it exhibited better grip that let us carry a bit more speed through turns. Its steering was also slightly less precise. The stiffer-riding of the two Taos AWD prototypes was tidier in its motions and handling, and quieter, too. Despite seemingly a little less steering feedback, it was the one we preferred. Even though it’ll never make production. We can also reliably report that regardless of the number of driven axles or suspension tuning, the engines never starved for fuel.

Next up was a slalom and a high-speed lane change exercise, where we noted many of the same behaviors as on the fuel-handling course. After that we headed to VW’s bumpy road course, an abusive stretch of tarmac that makes Detroit feel like its streets are paved with slabs of marble. The bumps pummeled our backsides, but we noticed the stiffer all-wheel-drive version didn’t beat us up much worse than did the other three. This, in turn, made us wonder why Volkswagen couldn’t just make all of the Taoses drive like the one we liked best, because there didn’t seem to be much of a trade-off in ride quality.

Although we were a bit frustrated at not getting a better idea of how the actual 2022 Volkswagen Taos you will be able to buy later this year rides and handles, we did come away with a few useful observations, few of which relate to the suspension.

First, we’re really looking forward to seeing the 1.5-liter turbo-four in production. This 158-hp, 184-lb-ft mighty mite will eventually replace the 1.4T, with the goal of increasing power and fuel efficiency and reducing complaints from owners (particularly American ones) about hesitation on initial acceleration. Power from this little gem is very impressive, though some might still take issue with the hesitation from the dual-clutch transmission fitted to the all-wheel-drive version.

We like the interior, which is similar to the straightforward setup found in the Jetta, albeit with a bit more personality. We know from our time with the ID4 electric SUV that VW interiors are about to undergo big changes, and for the better, but we’re going to miss these old super-sensible cabins. And we like the size and packaging of the Taos, which delivers the maneuverability of a smaller SUV with more useful space, particularly in the cargo area.

We think there’s a lot to the 2022 Volkswagen Taos that we’re going to like—and if VW would just let us drive the final version already, maybe we could figure that out once and for all.

The post Another 2022 VW Taos Prototype Drive: This Time With Multiple Suspension Tunes appeared first on MotorTrend.

https://www.motortrend.com/cars/volkswagen/taos/2022/2022-vw-taos-prototype-drive-review-again/ visto antes em https://www.motortrend.com

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masterofdeath · 5 years ago

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HARRY POTTER’S NATAL CHART. 5:00 PM | JULY 31, 1980 | GODRIC’S HOLLOW, UK.

OVERVIEW

SUN | LEO, 8°34'44" | EIGHTH HOUSE

ASCENDANT | SAGITTARIUS, 9°14'59" | FIRST HOUSE

MOON | ARIES, 0°40'34" | THIRD HOUSE

MERCURY | CANCER, 19°11'26" | EIGHTH HOUSE

VENUS | GEMINI, 25°40'6" | SEVENTH HOUSE

MARS | LIBRA, 12°7'36" | TENTH HOUSE

JUPITER | VIRGO, 11°34'27" | NINTH HOUSE

SATURN | VIRGO, 24°1'34" | NINTH HOUSE

URANUS | SCORPIO, 21°30'5" | TWELFTH HOUSE

NEPTUNE | SAGITTARIUS, 20°9'21" | FIRST HOUSE

PLUTO | LIBRA, 19°16'21" | TENTH HOUSE

#i worked so long on this analysis do NOT let it flop #study.#headcanon.#personals please don't reblog just this one okay?#you can come talk to me about it i would love to yell about it! but please do not! reblog!#also i don't know a lot about birth charts but i tried my best so let me know if i'm wrong

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globalblurb · 7 years ago

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[dropcap]M[/dropcap]etroid is a Nintendo institution, one that dates almost as far back as the company’s console business. The series includes phenomenal games like Super Metroid and Metroid Prime, two games that frequently appear on “best of” lists. But Metroid has been in a funk for the past decade and losing favor along the way. Fans don’t want experimental spin-offs like Metroid Prime: Federation Force; they want to explore alien worlds as Samus Aran, hunt for high-tech equipment, and use it to dig even deeper into the unknown. Finally, with Metroid: Samus Returns, that call has been answered.

[tie_index]Most VR games[/tie_index]

Most VR games

[tie_full_img][/tie_full_img]Why it took Nintendo so long to get to this point is anyone’s guess, but Samus Returns is so good that it almost doesn’t matter. A reimagining of the oft-maligned GameBoy game, Metroid II: The Return of Samus, Samus Returns is classic Metroid at heart.

Teleportation is also what VFR uses to replace the gory melee kills in Doom: once you stagger and enemy by dealing some damage, you telefrag them (teleport on top of their location) for fun and extra items. Watching gore shower around you as you explode a demon from the inside isn’t quite as satisfying as Doom’s elaborately animated demon-dismembering kills, but it’s just about as effective in adding some strategy to the fray: the same concept of picking off weaker demons off to replenish your health as you take a beating from the stronger ones works in VFR.

Using those two types of movement together to stay one step ahead of the horde takes some getting used to, especially learning not to panic when it looks like a 12-foot-tall Hell Knight is about to rip your spine out through your eye socket. But once you get the hang of teleporting behind an enemy and using the 180-degree-turn button to whip around and blast them in the back, and using the backward-scoot button to kite as you lay down a stream of fire at pursuing enemies, it starts to click.

[tie_index]Motion Controllers[/tie_index]

Motion-tracked controllers

The other movement is a sort of scoot, where you use the directional buttons or d-pad to jump a few feet at a time. You can do this as quickly as you can push the button, making for a jerky but speedy form of movement. It works, but makes me wish I could just enable smooth movement in the menus, just like you can turn on smooth turning if you don’t like the default incremental turns.

Motion-tracked controllers dramatically improve the immersion of aiming and firing a gun.

As in the 1991 monochromatic classic, you hunt down dozens of powerful Metroids on planet SR 388 in an effort to eradicate the bioweapon species and keep them out of evil’s hands. However, two key changes have occurred: the map has been greatly expanded and reshaped to more closely resemble what you might find in Super Metroid, and combat is more of a priority than ever. The latter is an effect of Nintendo bringing on Mercury Steam–the most recent developer to work on Castlevania–to develop the game. Thankfully (and most importantly), Samus Returns feels like a Nintendo-made Metroid, but it’s still easy to spot Mercury Steam’s influence–for the better.

[tie_full_img][/tie_full_img]

[tie_index]VFR uses[/tie_index]

VFR uses

BY DAN STAPLETON So far, the most common way to adapt an existing first-person shooter to VR has been to turn it into a shooting gallery, where you hold still and shoot targets as they pop up. Doom VFR is not that, at all.

Instead of taking that route or converting the original version (as Bethesda did with Skyrim VR), id built VFR from the ground up as a new game that bravely embraces Doom’s love of movement and momentum. It lets you get up in the faces of demonic invaders in some of the fastest-paced VR action I’ve experienced yet.

[tie_full_img][/tie_full_img]

[tie_index]The other movements[/tie_index]

The other movements

Maize, that crazy-sounding, and cool-looking corn game launched on September 12. Other notable new releases this week include Don’t Starve Together: Console Edition (September 13) and Baja: Edge of Control HD (September 14). You can see a rundown of new Xbox One releases below, as compiled by Microsoft.

VFR can be played with a controller by using your face to aim, but preferably with Moves or Vive controllers (or the Oculus Touch controllers, if you enable the new Steam VR beta), or the PSVR Aim controller. Motion-tracked controllers dramatically improve the immersion of aiming and firing a gun, and the sticks on the Aim controller work especially well for controlling teleportation. The one downside to the Aim is that accessing the weapon wheel is tough because it’s hard to hold the R1 button on the side down while gripping the handle.

But one of the persistent issues I have while playing with motion controls is that a charging enemy (imps, mostly) will often get so close that pointing my gun at them and firing misses because the barrel of my gun is sticking out of their backs. I have to hold the gun up above them and shoot down, which is just goofy. There’s a shockwave move that blasts them back to help combat this, thankfully – and it works on big enemies that have you cornered, too.

The most immediate contribution that you see is Samus’ new parry action, a first for the series that allows you to counterattack and stun a rushing opponent. In turn, common enemies are more aggressive than usual, more liable to seek you out then wait for you to make the first move. Though parrying feels a bit strange at first as it brings your momentum to a temporary halt, you quickly learn the proper timing and understand how it fits into your repertoire, and when to rely on it.

[tie_index]Using the other types[/tie_index]

Using the other types

You can also fire in any direction now thanks to the 3DS�� analog stick. The same input is used for movement, which means you can really only fire at a few angles while running forward, but all you need to do when surrounded by enemies is hold another button to stand your ground and aim freely. Samus’ newfound flexibility and physicality makes her feel like an even more capable hero, and makes the moment-to-moment exploration more lively than usual.

Considering that Metroid is more or less the foundation of so-called “Metroidvanias,” games where you wander massive environments, poking and prodding walls and ceilings to reveal secret chambers and items, it’s both curious and exciting when you unlock Samus’ Scan Pulse ability.

Triggering a pulse both reveals map layouts and information (including hidden passages) and temporarily highlights breakable objects in your environment. On one hand, this capability robs you of the unique joy that comes from isolating the one false brick in a wall, but it also means that you no longer need to waste time looking for secrets that may not exist.

To account for the bit of old-school joy that’s now taken away (unless you opt not to scan your environment), Samus Returns makes the process of acquiring items you’ve located more difficult than usual. You’re now often challenged to quickly juggle weapons, abilities, and maneuvers, without faltering, to reach items picked up during scans.

This may involve slowing down time and be activating Samus’ Lightning Armor to negate damage while moving along a wall with electrified plants (two abilities that share a resource meter), morphing into a ball and laying bombs to destroy a brick, and finally sliding through the gap before it regenerates.

There’s a healthy balance between easy pickups and these puzzling scenarios, and compared to other 2D Metroids, it’s far more fulfilling to work smarter, rather than harder, to reach 100% item completion–the real Metroid endgame.

For much of Samus Returns, that goal feels attainable thanks to your scanner. Sometimes you need to obtain a new piece of equipment or two before you can sol This Post Author

For much of Samus Returns, that goal feels attainable thanks to your scanner. Sometimes you need to obtain a new piece of equipment or two before you can solve an item-related puzzle, but that’s to be expected, and a handy multicolor marking system allows you to note where a specific weapon may be useful down the road. And by and large the game does a great job of providing insight into Samus’ ever-growing capabilities.

[tie_index]Conclusion[/tie_index]

Conclusion

[tie_full_img][/tie_full_img]

Giving you the information you need to overcome specific obstacles. There is, however, one isolated blemish in this regard: a traversal maneuver with inconsistent behavior, depending on a very specific circumstance that’s never mentioned or hinted at. Whether by design or by accident, this exception flies in the face of the game’s otherwise clear and informative nature, and proves frustrating in a few specific and punishing locations.

Tip of the day: That man again Metroid is a Nintendo institution, one that dates almost as far back as the company's console business.

#Games

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stop-him · 3 years ago

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People Don't Change, Rules Change.

If you saw my last reblog of, and answer to, the poll by @supersoftly - this is further musings on the theme of my response, comparing old and new incidents. I may go on for a while. There may be a cut.

Anyhow, as I mentioned, I was once a moderator on the site Gaia Online. As such, I got to witness some of the worst behaviors that cropped up from time to time. An example: once a user named Cigarette announced that she had terminal brain cancer. This prompted a massive outpouring of support and well-wishing, including the "1000 cranes for Cigarette" community event based around the bit about folding up multiple little paper cranes for loved ones - and it all turned out to be a hoax. Some people noticed that nobody could get any real-life information about the hospital where she was supposedly being treated, and somewhere along the line Cigarette confessed to making everything up.

Most everyone thought that was pretty awful when the news hit. I don't even remember what, if anything, the admins of the site did to Cigarette herself - technically it wasn't against the TOS to lie about one's personal health. But I was involved in a related incident, where another user posted a Flash animation depicting his character, enraged by the news of Cigarette's deception, pulling a gun and (to the theme of the Mentos commercials) shooting her to death. It was actually more funny than my description makes it, and it would be understandable that anyone investing any emotion into Cigarette's purported illness would be legitimately angry and frustrated. But, after some discussion, we Mods decided to remove it from the site, because regardless of the circumstances, it was essentially a personal attack on another user, which was definitely against the TOS.

That was the standard we operated under at the time. You could say, "I think that is a stupid viewpoint to have, that idea is dumb," but you could not say, "you are stupid and dumb for having that opinion". You could not just call anyone a Nazi without direct evidence that they were literally part of a self-identified Nazi group, because it was well understood that calling someone a Nazi was a personal insult, and intended as such. "I feel that this person is like a Nazi" wasn't an excuse.

One's opinion was not a justification.

The teeth of Gaia Online's enforcement was their avatar system - for those unaware, GO's big attraction was that a user had a little anime-styled avatar that appeared by their posts. You gained currency by doing things in and around the forums, and you used that currency to buy clothes and other items for your avatar. Part of the outcry over Cigarette's stunt was that sympathetic users had donated high-value items for her avatar under false pretenses.

As Mods, we had the ability to not only ban users for infractions, but also monitor and undo trades and transfers of items between users. So if a user feared that a post they were going to make was going to break the TOS, they might want to stash their items with friends or in alternate accounts - only the Mods could see these actions and know they were attempts to avoid the consequences of their behavior, so often the items got confiscated anyway. What happened was that many users created a cache of "junk" accounts - no items, not much history, built up around the mass of free email accounts one could get. They would use these accounts to break the TOS, because they risked little if those empty accounts got banned. Some Mods had access to IP address info, so that wasn't a guarantee of safety, but it was a common practice among the more contentious users.

I explain all that for the sake of context in the following tale. After a few years of being a Mod, Gaia Online began to grow in popularity, and its userbase expanded, and after a while the Admins decided to outsource much of their Mod duties just to handle the load. I retired from being a Mod at that point, so no longer had access to any of those investigatory tools. I stayed on the site for a little while longer, but it's one thing to be in your 30s when the bulk of the site is 20-somethings, it's another to be pushing 40 when the bulk of the site is in their mid-teens.

But before I eventually left, i spent a bit of time hanging around in the forum's creator-oriented areas, notably in art, writing and comics-centered sub-forums.

There was a clique in those days of what I call "art snots", people who not only had ideas on what was the proper way to go around making art but who would aggressively advocate for their way as being the best way and anyone who didn't toe their line was not only wrong, but a fool. Many of them were products of formal art schooling, and many of them had open contempt for the trend of art styles emulating "that shiny animu shit".

One thing that could be done in the art community was to "give critique". Ostensibly, if you posted your art on the forum, you were making it available to be commented on, and were expected to be able to withstand a certain amount of unfavorable criticism. This (naturally) led to conflicts between very sensitive beginning artists who did not really want any criticism on one hand versus many of the aforementioned "art snots" who took the opportunity for "critique" as license to utterly verbally savage every tiny aspect of the poster's art, especially if it had any hint of anime influence. And so Mods were often called in to keep the peace, and when it was apparent that outright abuse would be disciplined, the "art snots" would, like many others, gather a collection of throwaway accounts to take the bans, using them as one-shot insult delivery systems. (Though, a few became masters at playing the TOS, making posts that were just within the boundaries of what was acceptable, and never needed alternate accounts...)

Near the end of my stay at GO, there was one user who was "art-snot-adjacent". They were a webcomic creator, whose webcomic at the time was garnering some popularity (as those things go) and critical acclaim. Obviously talented and well-spoken, it was apparent that they were sympathetic to the stances of the "art snots", but without nearly the same amount of vitriol. If they spoke on those matters, they spoke in civil, measured tones. Many of the "art snots" circled in their orbit, possibly due to friendships outside Gaia, or possibly due to simple sycophancy.

I took up reading this person's webcomic - it was pretty good - and while I didn't always agree with the opinions they stated on Gaia, I appreciated the way they kept their tone nominally respectful.

The front page of this webcomic had a few widgets installed, one of which was a feed of the author's Twitter account, back when Twitter was a lot newer and less ubiquitous. So there was a little sub-window on the page that displayed, say, the last five Tweets the author made.

One day I went to the webcomic to check if there were updates, and saw that one of the recent tweets mentioned Gaia, so I looked more closely. It has been ages at this point, but the general thrust of the message was:

"Looks like I'm going to have to burn another Gaia account so I can set this other user straight about how stupid they are."

And now immediately I knew that this webcomic creator that I had somewhat respected up until now was not any different than so many others, they were simply better at putting up a polished public face. They were just as eager to hide their true feelings in order to keep all the little virtual clothes on their Gaia account, until they could let fly with an alternate sockpuppet, and be abusive to their heart's content.

[As an aside: I think this was one of the only times I've ever been unable to separate the artist from their art. For a little while I still kept up with the webcomic, but one day, I found myself about to click the bookmark for the page and I just didn't feel like reading the story anymore. Just - "meh", and I didn't click to it, and never went back. It wasn't like seeing that Tweet enraged me, I wasn't scandalized, I just... didn't respect the creator anymore. I'm not sure why that killed my interest in the story, when I have few problems engaging with art by artists who I know have done far, far worse in their lives. But there it is.]

These Gaia anecdotes establish something I think is true: people were just as nasty then as they are now. But a site like Gaia - at least at the time - enforced a code of behavior that said, "as long as you're on our site, you'll behave with a minimum of respect towards other users."

And now, let's come to the present day. As I write this, YouTube has been sending me recommendations for videos about a bit of drama. Of course, YouTube has no shortage of drama. But in this case, it reminds me of Gaia in some ways, because it's an artist-related drama.

At one point, YouTube proposed I watch an artist draw a picture as they told a story about the worst commission they ever drew, and I did, and so of course YouTube then bombarded me with a thousand similar videos. Some I watched, if they had interesting subjects. Many I didn't. And one type I stayed away from was the callout videos, where while drawing some pic, the artists would detail the various sins of some other YouTuber and make the case for them being an irredeemably awful person.

But, I've been floating around the edges of this drama, because for a while I was watching the videos from Girl Artist 1 (actual name/account redacted - probably if you're actually an active part of that community you can guess who it is, and if you don't have any idea, well, count yourself fortunate). Only now I no longer get videos by her recommended to me, now I'm getting videos about her.

First it came to light that she was sockpuppeting on some site, pretending to not be herself in order to stir up drama/make herself look good/whatever. Then it seems she was involved in a harassment campaign, and even more serious charges involving downright illegal shenanigans are being leveled.

I'll make it clear that I don't know all the details, or whether any of this is true or not. I watched some of Girl Artist 1's videos when the subject interested me, but ignored many when it was clear she was calling out other artists, YouTubers and the like. I noted the name of Girl Artist 2 come up a few times, and even in the titles of other videos by other people. Apparently Girl Artist 2 had her own moment of being condemned. But now she's back, with her own video to speak out against Girl Artist 1, along with a host of others all dogpiling on the current object of ire.

Is Girl Artist 2 forgiven now? Will Girl Artist 1 undergo her own journey of redemption? Will that be possible? Who knows, and outside of the community, who cares?

YouTube doesn't. And finally I come to my point: This is the difference between an older site like Gaia Online and newer platforms like YouTube and Twitter - the incentives.

Gaia had its own economy based around its avatar system, and its own motivation to promote an even keel and keep drama to a minimum. The latter was achieved by using the former as both carrot and stick. The reward for good behavior was getting to keep your virtual items, punishment was their loss.

Twitter's reward is internet fame, reinforcement of things you say with likes and retweets and new followers. Drama is a path to this - sometimes a much easier path than actually creating a work of art to attract attention. YouTube is much the same, only with the added incentive of real money for select users. YouTube does not mind controversy in and of itself, because controversy drives views, and views pay off for advertisers, who pay YouTube.

Therefore, there is often little incentive to not be an asshole. Every judgemental soul can freely pontificate about the sins of others, and condemn them in the most explicit terms. In a practical sense, the accusations don't even have to be true. My example of calling people Nazis as an insult? Go ahead! It gets clicks. YouTube and Twitter like the clicks. Not only do you not have to show anyone any respect, it's almost expected to be actively disrespectful to anyone who annoys you in the slightest.

That's my thesis: the overall nastiness of the human race is, I think, much the same as it's always been. A lot of people have always been judgemental pricks. It's just that the rules have shifted just so, and now the nastiness is being rewarded instead of discouraged.

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lunamusings · 4 years ago

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Gravity Well

Chapter 4: Chocolate and Revelations

A Loki x Lithium Fanfiction (CanonxOC)

Set before the events of Thor, Loki receives as large mysterious crate of alcohol the day before his birthday. What seems like a strange yet benign gift from an anonymous person ends up being more than he, or the woman at the bottom of the crate bargained for.

Chapter Warnings: Drinking Games?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Loki began to become concerned when a loud rambunctious crowd gathered around the last place he saw Lithium. She had not even made it to the cake he had directed her to, and that was at least an hour ago. At the sound of one more round of woops and applause, he made his way that direction, pausing only to instruct a maid to send two pieces of the chocolate cake up to his room, as he predicted that neither he or Lithium were going to manage procuring a piece at this rate.

He was nearly there when Thor fell from his seat, more wasted than he had ever seen him, a cascade of beer mugs following him to the floor. It took a considerable amount of strong alcohol to send him into this state. Several other men, notable warriors all of them, were similarly intoxicated, reeling in their seats or with heads pressed to wooden table. If they were this far gone, how was Lithium faring, as tiny as she was?

He was only a few steps away when Lithium popped up from behind a struggling Volstagg, stepping up onto the table. She was perfectly balanced, poised even, as she offered the men around her a condescending curtsy.

She is completely and utterly sober, how?

"And that, gentlemen, is how drinking is done." She turned to step down and spotted him, a bright smile on her face.

Loki glanced down at the severely inebriated men around her, clearly defeated, then back up at her. "Should I even ask what happened here?"

She accepted his help down from the table, chuckling with generous amount of amusement. "I'll tell you on our way to that dang dessert table. "

He had to agree. "After you, my minuscule cohort."

Lithium giggled, a much less devious sound than she had made just before. "Nice to see I've graduated from intruder-status."

"Oh, you did that within the first twenty minutes, but it was far more amusing to tease you about it."

She shrugged as she stopped before their destination. "I would complain, but I did sorta' just win a drinking game by not mentioning the fact that I'm incapable of getting drunk, so I don't think I have much of a high road to walk."

Loki froze halfway through picking up another dessert that featured chocolate. "You did what now?"

"I joined a drinking game, knowing fully well alcohol doesn't effect me even a little bit."

Loki glanced around before leaning in close and whispering into her ear, noting the bright blush that crept across her face. "Tell this to no one . This is valuable information you could use for at the least, incredible amusement."

Her laughter at this was bold and warm before taking her own volume down to match his. "Good thing you're the only one I've ever really told then."

He felt the smile he had from this melt away when he noticed his father watching them.

He held his gaze for an uncomfortable amount of time before Lithium caught his attention again. "I am sorry, I missed what you said."

Lithium was shuffling the layers of her dress, revealing more of that acid green color, until she found a pocket. She removed something from it and held it out to him. "I said I have something for you. I didn't have much time, considering I just learned it was your birthday this morning."

In her palm was a flat chord of three green shades, knotted into a diagonal pattern. "They're usually called friendship bracelets in my original neck of the woods, but I thought you could use it as a bookmark or something."

He put it in his jacket pocket. "I'll certainly find use for it. Thank you."

He was rewarded with another large smile as she headed off to one of the other food tables. When she was busy filling a plate, he pulled the simple little gift back out of his pocket, running his finger over the knots.

Friendship bracelet, is it? I like the sound of that, silly as it is.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lithium perched in what was now one of her own chairs, one leg curled under her, a delicate cup full of tea in one hand, a sandwich in the other. The tea blend was one that Frigga had developed and now her favorite, and the sandwich made appropriately for her near-carnivorous appetite. There was a little breeze floating through the cracked window, keeping the room on the cold side, the perfect temperature for someone who ran hot all time.

The few weeks she had spent in Asgard had required at great deal of adjustment, but it was also incredibly peaceful. There was little expected of her, unlike back home where she would have been knee-deep in paperwork and bottles to be filled. Here, she only had one planned item for the day, walking Loki through the crate of alcohol over dinner.

He was not lost on pairing drinks with food, but since he was not acquainted with the Midgardian produce that made up her work, so she was more than happy to make selections for him. She knew her brews almost as well as she knew her shifts, which she had to know down to the smallest detail to not turn her body into a useless mess.

That it gave her an excuse to spend time with Loki made it all the more delightful.

She took another sip of tea and sighed. "I would develop a crush on a literal prince and self-proclaimed god, wouldn't I?"

Lithium took an aggressive bite of her sandwich. "I guess I can't blame myself too much. Said literal prince did offer me a place to stay when Bart decide to be an epic-tier dick and I just randomly appeared in his room in the dead of night. The tall, dark, handsome and wicked smart thing is a bonus."

A nearly foot-and-half-taller-than-her bonus with a smirk that could turn her knees to jelly.

"Better push that down deep, girl" She took another sip of tea and stood up, smoothing her tunic out. "He'll probably figured it out in a hot second and tease you for the rest of eternity…"

She stretched her arms over her head, and smoothly transitioned into her real form, and then slowly through her regular array of shifts. Most were used for combat, though a few of them, like the giant duckling, were mostly for fun. She went through them again, pairing each to a set of yoga poses that the creature fit best. They were becoming too easy at this point, given all free time she had. When even her most complex shift eased across her body in a matter of seconds, she knew it was time to work on more. Knowing that, she worked on combining the shifts until it was time for dinner.

A shower and a change into one of her nicer, but not overly formal, dresses later, she did her best to remember where to go in the maze that was the palace. Even if it had had an easy set up, it was large enough that using her nose only worked well enough when she was close to her destination and not full of different perfumes depending on the time of day. As much as she appreciated the soft scent that was as close to lavender as Asgard had in the late evening when she could not sleep, it did nothing for her natural navigation tactics.

Despite her personal struggles, she was glad to see that she made it there as dinner was being dropped off, rather than seeing the kitchen maids walking toward her on their way back. She was early enough that one of them opened the door for her instead of Loki. She did her best to ignore the sideways looks both this maid and then then other gave her as she walked past them with a polite smile.

Loki's small smile made up for them anyway.

"You have cut two minutes from your usual time." He pulled out her chair for her.

Lithium sat and tried not to squeak for the hundredth time when he pushed her back in as easily as it was for him to move the empty chair. "One of these days I'll beat the food here. But don't hold you breath because I don't know what day that will be."

"I will make it a celebration when you do." He chuckled and gestured to the food. "What bottle shall I retrieve for this meal?"

Lithium closed her eyes and took at deep breath. "Ah, the Cute But Deadly Umeshu."

"Small glasses with this one as well?" He asked while he was halfway in the crate. He had been maintaining a collection of appropriate glassware for this alcohol adventure. It gave a touch of familiarity that eased some of her adjustment difficulties.

"Yes, probably the smallest ones. It's a sake variant, so it will pack the same punch."

"So I should drink with caution." Loki smirked. "I will not repeat what happened last time."

Loki was no slouch when it came to drinking, but sake was like punch to the more delicate parts of one's anatomy, regardless of the type one possessed, if not expecting it. He spent some time sputtering before he could talk normally, and ate quite a bit of his dinner before trying another drink. She tried not to laugh but she was not exactly successful.

She laughed so hard, it brought tears to her eyes, made only worse the more he tried to swear between sputters.

They both began eating after he tasted the umeshu, slowly this time. "I have to say, I like this better, though it maybe because my body was not reacting like I had thrown back a cup of flames."

"I'm glad for that." She grinned a little wickedly. "I'd hate for the food to get cold because you're doing that and I'm laughing so hard I can't breathe."

"It would also make it hard to let you know the latest information I've been given."

Lithium's fork paused part way to her mouth. "Is it why Odin wanted to talk to Thor and you yesterday?"

"Yes. Thor's coronation will be at the end of the week."

Lithium watched a few tiny expressions cross his face before it became appropriately neutral. "And your concerns are still as valid?"

Loki nodded, shaking his head. "I love my brother, I truly do, but he's impulsive and proud. I do not know how well he will handle situations that require more temperate solutions than "hit it with a hammer until it goes away", of which there will be many."

"Frigga is certain your counsel will help him with that." Lithium took another bite, knowing that bringing up his mother always turned a negative train of conversation into one with a touch more optimism. "Do you doubt your own ability there?"

"My counsel works only as well as Thor listens to it." He took another drink and sighed. "And honestly, I fear for this realm. The little glimpses of technology in your possession suggests Midgard is more advanced than predicted. The other realms are there with Midgard, if not beyond it. Yet still, my father refuses to invest in improvements for ourselves."

"That does happen when you leave groups of people alone for a thousand years or more." She tilted her head. "But that does seem kind of dumb to stop innovating just because you were at the top at one point."

"See, you understand that, I understand that, but that makes two and half people in all of Asgard." He threw his hand up, still holding his fork. "And you're not even from here."

"Is Frigga the half?" She tilted her head back the other way.

"She sees the value in gaining greater knowledge and applying it for good of all people. But she will not push for it, after the first few times to convince Father went over about as well as putting one of your shirts on Volstagg."

"Now there's an image I never wanted."

"Nor did I, but I had brought that thought into being and was subsequently traumatized, so I at least wanted company in this plight."

Lithium rolled her eyes but smiled at him anyway. "I guess I should be honored you let me accompany you on this…special…journey. To be fair though, just about any man here trying to wear my shirt would be intensely weird."

"Would you say the same about me?"

Lithium nearly choked on a sip of umeshu. She felt the heat creep up her face and her mouth hung slightly open. Her mind threw out so many options for answering him, it turned to nothing more than deluge of disconnected sounds in her head.

"I am not sure how I should interpret your speechlessness. Should I be insulted, flattered or concerned about the thoughts that wandering through your mind?"

"Ah…well…you would be one of the few who could actually get it on you…"

It would be too short though…and quite tight…

"Lithium?"

She snapped back to reality, eyes enormous and face catching fire once again. "What?"

"I said that I could always shapeshift into a woman and that would make it less weird."

Does it count as bisexuality if it’s the same person?

#loki #loki of asgard #loki friggason #loki odinson #loki fanfic #canon x oc #loki x lithium #gravity well

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mikegranich87 · 3 years ago

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Why is Facebook so bad at countering vaccine misinformation?

Facebook’s pandemic decision

A spotty record

Claims and counterclaims

from Mike Granich https://www.engadget.com/facebook-vaccine-misinformation-policies-170012241.html?src=rss

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years ago

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Intermission: Med Systems Marathon – That was 1981!

by Will Moczarski

We’ve finished the second year of our Med Systems marathon now, and there are only four adventure games left. The company would exist for two more years, and in 1983 it was rechristened Screenplay. They would continue to operate under the new name until around 1986 but their output was meager and no new adventure games hit the market after 1983. In 1981, however, Med Systems were slowly reaching their peak: three of their innovative 3-D maze adventure games had been released by January 1981, they attracted new and talented programmers and entered the Atari market after having been an Apple ][ and especially TRS-80 company exclusively. Of course, they were not alone: 1981 was a seminal year for what was still being called “micro games”, as can be gathered from reading an extended feature from the August 1981 issue of 80 Microcomputing Magazine. In it, Med Systems Software were featured as one of the most important players of the time, and it’s the best source of information you can get if you’re interested in the history of the company.

I’ve compiled some of the most interesting quotes here to set the stage for the year that was 1981 – as usual, I’ve played the non-adventure games, too, and report back about the other software released by Med Systems.

Introduction: A burgeoning industry

According to Bert Latamore’s multiple-page feature “Micro Games Sell Like Hot Cakes, Suppliers Scramble to Keep Up” in the August 1981 issue of 80 Microcomputing Magazine, the software market of 1980 is estimated at $80 to $90 million retail by the IRD (International Resource Development) which is remarkable for a market that hasn’t managed to lay out many binding rules or even basic structures at that point in time. The suppliers themselves hence are rather vague when it comes to their take on the market, describing it as “very attractive” or even “unlimited”. Those were the days when one single programmer could score a veritable and lucrative hit, the age of a young Nasir Gebelli and an even younger Richard Garriott. Games were fast becoming a guilty pleasure, a kind of secret reason to buy a micro computer that soon wasn’t so secret anymore: “Professional people play games on their lunch hours, their children play educational games at school. People with no use for an accounting program buy games, and people who would never think of using word processing also play games”, Latamore writes.

Med Systems founder and president William F. Denman, jr. was also interviewed for Latamore’s feature – as one of the distinct players on the market at this point in time and as an advocate for the division of software companies’ product lines between “other kinds of software” and games (note how games quickly became the norm in this line of argumentation while business or home applications are already “other kinds of software”!). This is clearly for fiscal reasons, as Denman readily admits: “We make most of our money on games. I consider that to be a really growing market.” He goes on to say that they have seen a large expansion in the market over the last few months which may explain why all of Med Systems’ 1980 games were extensively reviewed and marketed from 1981 on and not earlier. “All kinds of games are selling well, although high speed graphics adventure games sell best”, Latamore sums up. Because of that, Med Systems “are considering” to support the Atari as their third platform. The decision must have been made rather quickly because there’s an ad in Compute! the same month for the Atari version of the Med Systems game Knossos.

Apart from Latamore’s industry report there’s another feature by the same author in that same August 1981 issue of 80 Microcomputing Magazine. “A Walk on The Monster Side” provides “[a] short history of games and game development”, and it’s a really interesting read, for its arguments why games have never been better than right now seem to be repeated in every age of computer gaming up to this day. Latamore’s history includes a mini-portrait of Med Systems, too, and I’ll just quote it as a whole:

“Med Systems, Chaple Hill, NC, produces some of the most elaborate maze games. This may be a direct result of part of the firm’s philosophy. William Denman, Med System [sic!] president, said they want a game ‘someone can play for weeks, with fast graphics and reasonably different from other games.’ Anyone who has tried to find his way through Labyrinth knows what Denman means. ‘Each time we do a game it gets better,’ he said. ‘We handle the graphics better, we get things to fit better. Asylum, our newest release, is a 1,200-location maze. A programmer would find it elegant, a game player will find it devastatingly interesting.”

Denman also states that he is still writing most of his games for 16K memory because his company has many customers overseas who still own older machines. “Curiously, while his company does not handle arcade games, he admits the arcades are his favorites, and he admires Big Five Software’s products.”

Another testimony to the boom of the software (or rather games) market in 1981 is an employment ad by Med Systems from the August 1981 issue of Compute! magazine. Software developers are wooed to “join the company of bestselling authors at Med Systems. We have an established market spanning the free world and royalties second to none. We seek excellent games, utilities and applications packages. Only the best are accepted! If you have authored software you feel is publishable, submit it to Med Systems, Software Review Section.” They were really stressing their claim to excellence back then, as you can also see in the subsequent part: “MED SYSTEMS has been publishing and distributing software worldwide since 1979. We publish only the best! […] We know how hard it is to wait for that perfect program. We even guarantee satisfaction! If you don’t like our software, return it within 14 days for a prompt, cheerful refund. If you have a problem, call us 10-6 EST. We are here to serve you.” Now that’s what I call service-oriented.

Med Systems has quickly developed from a one-man company to one with at least two more employees – Frank L. Corr, jr. and Simon Smith. They also attracted a couple of contractors who were notable talents: Jyym Pearson and Arti Haroutunian. As the market expanded, their marketing strategies became increasingly aggressive, as can be seen in the October 1981 issue of 80 Microcomputing Magazine. In it, there are no less than three full-page ads by Med Systems back to back which must have cost quite a dime. Put simply, they were on top of things, and while Asylum proved to be a successful game that even merited a sequel, their first arcade games like Laser Defense finally went through the roof.

1981: Employees and Contractors

a. Frank L. Corr, jr.

Frank L. Corr, jr. had made himself a name as a prolific programmer of 3-D mazes by August 1981. Consequently, he was the subject of a longer feature article by Mike Nadeau in 80 Computing Magazine telling us much about Frank’s background that would otherwise remain unknown. By the summer of 1981, Frank had designed Rat’s Revenge and Deathmaze 5000 on his own, and collaborated with his boss William Denman for Labyrinth and Asylum. According to the feature in question, “Frank Corr – Making the Ultimate Maze”, he was an 18-year-old freshman at MIT when he wrote Rat’s Revenge. He got a marketing offer by William Denman on the spot which surprised him because, possibly in the non-commercial spirit of an MIT programmer, he had not planned to sell the game. Corr simply replied: “Fine, you can market it, but I want to learn machine language first.” While Corr wrote an English research paper on machine language, probably in early 1980, Denman went on to sell Rat’s Revenge. In June 1980 Frank Corr was employed by Denman to use his newly acquired skills for a fast machine-language 3-D maze adventure game. The fact that Deathmaze 5000 sometimes feels so different from its peers may be reflected in Corr’s statement that he “never played an adventure game until [he] was halfway through Deathmaze.” Fans of the game seem to have loved the new concept but Corr realized he had to provide more clues in his subsequent adventure games. He thus teamed up with Denman who already had the experience of Reality Ends under his belt. Labyrinth was the fruit of this collaboration between the writer Denman and the graphics programmer Corr, it seems. Most of the frustrating aspects of Labyrinth are attributed to Corr who called his frustrating teleporters “a cute little stunt.”

Corr was especially proud of Asylum which he though was twice as good as Deathmaze 5000. According to Nadeau, “[h]e attributes much of the improvement to a routine he discovered in January that allows graphics to be stored as data.” And according to Corr, Asylum is “by far an easier game” than Deathmaze 5000. I tend to disagree.

Source: Spring 1981 Med Systems Catalog

Interestingly, Corr was working on another adventure game for the TRS-80 in August 1981 but sadly it never saw the light of day. “The graphics will be vastly improved, with octagonal rooms, and use a space station or similar setting, Corr said. After that, Corr wants to write real-time arcade-style games based on the Atari micro, whose graphics capabilities Corr prefers. He intends to stay with Med Systems, however.” Asylum remained Corr’s last game, at least as far as I know. Its sequel was programmed by William Denman alone, and he never published anything for the Atari micros. I find it interesting that Corr and Denman both were looking to arcade games for inspiration (and their own enjoyment) while they were busy making adventure games. This is also what Med Systems and later Screenplay followed up on as companies. Also, Frank Corr appears to have been very optimistic about games conquering the home, a prediction that has long since been proven right: “Most people will be home playing games and not watching TV, which is good!”

b. Arti Haroutunian, Simon Smith, Jyym & Robyn Pearson

Arti Haroutunian published his first game Microworld through Med Systems. This made him the company’s second contractor after Frank L. Corr, jr. but other than Corr, he never joined as an employee. Microworld fits the Med Systems catalog quite nicely as it follows up the journey into the human body that is The Human Adventure (1980) with a journey to the center of a TRS-80. Haroutunian’s next games were all action or arcade games and published through Tronix Publishing until he landed a lucrative deal with Activision for a computer port of River Raid in 1984. Moreover, Haroutunian was responsible for Juice! (1983) which one of our admins, TBD, has a soft spot for. Other notable ports by Haroutunian include Skate or Die (1988) for EA as well as Pac-Mania (1991), the side-scrolling jump’n’run that famously predated Super Mario Bros. in the mid-80s. He went on to work on three WWF wrestling games in the 1990s and later joined Disney Interactive Studios for some licensed property games in the 2010s. What he did in between 1994 and 2008 or since 2015, I don’t know. For our purposes, Microworld is the only Med Systems game and the only adventure game he ever did. He appears to have returned to the fold briefly for the Atari port of his own game in 1983, now letting the player experience a journey to the center of an Atari 400 or 800.

Simon Smith appears to be Med Systems’s second employee, at least in the programming sector, as he exclusively worked for them as well as their successor Screenplay. He wrote the business application GRBasic for them (more on that below) in 1981 and his first game Knossos was released around May of the same year. He went on to write Laser Defense as well as a port of Sentinel in 1982 and possibly Cyborg as well as Arena 3000 in 1982 but we’ll get into that another time. I’m not really sure about Smith’s ludology because, as you can imagine, it’s rather futile to google someone called Simon Smith.

Jyym Pearson was at the center of our attention for quite some posts now. I dedicated a whole mini-marathon to his and his wife Robyn’s work. They were apparently also contractors for Med Systems and released The Institute (1981), Lucifer’s Realm (1982), The Paradise Threat (1982) and The Farvar Legacy (1983) through William Denman’s company. Their OtherVentures games as well as Saigon: The Final Days were all written between 1980 and 1981, although Saigon may have been released as late as 1983. They never released anything new after The Farvar Legacy except for ports and compilations of his earlier work. Jyym Pearson sadly passed on in 1994. I would have loved to interview him, as his personal style is really something different, and apparently Med Systems knew how to build upon his reputation, marketing many of his titles by using his name.

Source: Analog Computing 08 (11/1982)

Source: Antic Vol. 2 No. 1 (4/1983)

1981 Non-Adventure Games

a. Knossos (by Simon Smith, August 1981, source: Compute!)

I first thought that Knossos was another 3-D adventure game in the vein of Labyrinth but in reality it’s a close cousin to Rat’s Revenge using a different look (I’m not sure if you could call that a different ‘engine’, really). It is related to Labyrinth, however, through their shared mythology. Both feature a minotaur who’s out to get the player but in Knossos you don’t have to solve any puzzles to evade him. A minotaur in a labyrinth always spells Knossos, of course, so they’re technically set in the same imaginary storyworld. From Beowulf to Plutarch, Med Systems sure knew their classics off pat.

The plot is rather simple according to this September 1981 ad from 80 Microcomputing Magazine:

“You are isolated and alone in the maze at Knossos, Crete. Somewhere, a minotaur is tracking your scent. Can you find the only door without becoming minotaur’s meat?” Also, the ad explains the gameplay quite concisely: “Knossos is a 3-D graphic simulation. Mazes are represented by a perspective view, as though you are actually there. These graphics are not the simple, square graphics you have seen before. An entirely new representation has been implemented giving a true cave-like quality. And like all Med Systems 3-D graphics, lightening fast screen generation is standard. Other features include chalk with which to mark the floor for reference points, randomly generated mazes, distance counters for exit, and monster graphics. A typical game might last 15-20 minutes. This is the first Tandy 3-D arcade game ever offered.” The last sentence is especially telling. William Denman made a real job of his ambitions to enter the arcade business as soon as possible.

Playing Knossos feels like stepping into a mixture of Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth without the adventure game elements. The objective is to escape the minotaur’s maze (not kill it) and I can use chalk to (presumably) find my way through the maze. There is a fixed maze and a randomiser. I can also select the difficulty level: a slow minotaur and 10 chalk marks is the easy mode, whereas true professionals only need 2 chalk marks, prefer to have no range and enjoy running from a very fast minotaur.

The labyrinth looks different because, like the ad said, the graphics are more suggestive of a cave than the straight walls of the Continuum games. If the minotaur comes too close for comfort, there’s a warning message (you’ll see this a lot). It’s not easy to die in easy mode and impossible not to die in hard mode, at least for me. If you do, the game taunts you, Med Systems style: “You have just been chomped up into many pieces and left to rot away in a remote corner of the maze. Better luck next time!” Also, the minotaur looks essentially the same as in Labyrinth, if I remember correctly.

As it’s possible to map the permanent maze, that’s obviously the easiest task. However, I succeed with a random map and manage to solve the game on my second attempt. I have to admit that it’s not very thrilling and the replay value is rather low. This is more or less exactly the same game as Rat’s Revenge with a few extra features and nicer graphics. It’s neither cerebral nor action-packed, it’s something in between – and that makes it a little boring.

b. Laser Defense (by Simon Smith, December 1981, source: 80 Microcomputing)

As we were able to see above, Simon Smith was apparently the new go-to guy for arcade games within the small Med Systems company. Laser Defense was released the same year as Knossos and – according to later advertisements of the Atari port – went on to become a veritable success. The manual is still in existence (thanks to archive.org), and it does a good job of summing up the game’s general metaphor: “Laser Defense places you in control of the United States strategic defense satellites. These satellites sit spinning in orbit, ready to intercept nuclear missiles with high-energy laser beams. They also have the capability to destroy missile silos on the ground.” That description sounds a bit like a home version of Atari’s Missile Command which had been a huge hit in the arcades the previous year but we’ll see if that holds true.

To quote the back of the manual: “The screen shows you the United States and its cities as though viewing them from orbit. […] With the press of a button, you can see Europe and the Soviet Union. Missile launchers are visible, and even as you watch, a continuous stream of nuclear rockets rise and disappear over the pole to destroy your home cities. The goal is simple: destroy all the missile silos while intercepting rockets launched toward the U.S. Pulverize the enemy. Keep your cities alive. As you proceed to each new wave, more and faster missiles are launched. Particle beam weapons on underground MX tracks attempt to blast your satellites from orbit, and your fingers itch to activate the final defense . . . ERADICATION!”

I’ll admit right away that I suck at playing Laser Defense. I never beat my first score of 2.200 again, and although the game is a lot like Missile Command (which I like) I don’t understand why it’s suddenly game over. You can shoot incoming missiles with your laser which has a pretty good scope, so it’s not really hard to hit them. Another option is the “eradicator” which makes sense when a lot of missiles scatter the screen. Pressing “1” will change the maps, meaning you will see Europe instead of North America – however, the missiles are ostensibly launched in the Soviet Union and I can’t find any way to interact with them on the European map. Finally, I am unable to try out the 2-player game but it seems notable that there is one.

Because I am not a wimp but an adventure gamer, my journey doesn’t end there. After my first session, I read the manual again and find that I have overlooked one crucial detail: you need to destroy the missile silos on the European map while defending your cities against the attacks on the American map. This turns out to be a lot more fun, and I am much more successful now. Four attack waves perish, and I am rewarded more than 10.000 points. Very nice! After a while, there may be a nuclear plant located in East Germany. According to the manual, you can destroy it with the eradicator but when I try to do just that, it always drains my energy but doesn’t blow up. Also, the game is always over when the Soviets manage to build some kind of SDI defense – as soon as that one is finished, it destroys all of my attack satellites right away, and I lose. There seem to be ten attack waves, maybe more, but I am not trying to get good at Laser Defense, I just want to get an impression of it. It’s a very well-made arcade game and I can see that it was a huge success for such a relatively unimpressive machine as the TRS-80.

1981 Applications

a. GRBasic (by Simon Smith, May 1981, source: 80 Microcomputing Magazine)

Med Systems also released three more business (or college) applications. I won’t go into detail with these and wasn’t able to test any of them but for the sake of completeness I’ll try to give you an impression what (I think) they did.

GRBasic was programmed by Simon Smith who seems to have had a productive 1981. The program offered “fully integrated basic graphic commands for the [TRS-80] Model I and Model III”, meaning it enabled you to create lines and shape tables while allowing for scaling and rotating them. It’s an extension to common Tandy BASIC packages (Level II or Disk BASIC) to include a graphics command set, which probably means you needed to employ BASIC commands to draw lines, tables and other shapes on the screen.

GRBasic was seemingly geared for developers and possibly scientists. It was a unique product meant to improve the Tandy computer line to compete with the superior Apple ][ computer. To quote an ad from the May 1981 issue of 80 Microcomputing Magazine: “GRBasic will allow the professional user to produce data graphs and displays with unbelievable ease. […] 3-D animation from BASIC is now a reality!” It’s well possible that GRBasic is essentially a marketable byproduct of Knossos and Laser Defense, as the graphic examples in the ad all stem from micro games.

In September 1981, Med Systems released an add-on for GRBasic allowing for “the plotting of almost any function, including polar coordinate based figures, parametric equations, and almost any wave form”: the GRBasic Function Plotter. A set of both on disk set you back $44.90 which would be about $126.83 in 2019.

b. Qwerty 3.0 (September 1981, source: HE Computronics)

Also in September 1981, Med Systems introduced Qwerty 3.0, a complex typeset program with easy printer support catering exclusively to academics. According to the December 1981 ad in 80 Microcomputing Magazine, Qwerty 3.0 “has seen thousands of hours of use in a university environment. A master’s thesis and a statistical doctoral dissertation were produced and accepted right off a Centronics 737 [a dot-matrix printer] using this package.” Med Systems, as usual, are very convinced of the quality of their product: “Since introducing Qwerty 3.0 in September, people have been calling to ask if we were making ludicrous claims. The answer is NO! Qwerty 3.0 does all we claimed and more! No other software of this type can match Qwerty 3.0.”

Interestingly, you could buy the manual first (a steal at only $10!) to check out Qwerty’s features before jumping in at the deep end: “For cautious buyers, we offer the manual (over 70 pages) for $10. When you decide to buy Qwerty 3.0, we will credit the full manual price.”

c. SPM (by Bruce P. Douglass, December 1981, source: 80 Microcomputing Magazine)

Bruce P. Douglass, a hitherto unknown Med Systems employee or contractor, wrote the company’s third killer application of 1981: Statistical Package for Microcomputers (SPM). It caters to those who want to use their TRS-80 for statistical analyses. Among its impressive features are descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, two way analysis of variance, linear regression, multiple unear regression, non-linear regression, and multiple non-linear regression. SPM is also able to transform the data, e.g. through linear transformations, logarithms, exponentiation, absolute values, and trigonometric functions.

Final tidbits: New findings about 1980 Games

a. Reality Ends: Authorship confirmed

Finally, some news about the older games! According to Jason Dyer over at Renga in Blue, my assumption that William F. Denman, jr. was the author of Reality Ends turned out to be correct. He got the confirmation from the proprietory of Ye Olde Infocom Shoppe who own a copy which, I presume, includes the manual.

b. Money Master: Test turned up

In the last summary I wasn’t able to say much about the educational game Money Master because it seems to be lost and thus unavailable. The February 1981 issue of 80 Microcomputing Magazine contains a review by Sherry M. Taylor at least, so I can flesh it out a little more this time.

According to the review, Money Master “is designed to give children practice counting money.” Seems like the right game for the dawn of the Reagan decade, right? “There are drills in adding coins and bills and drills in making change[,]” Taylor continues. I’ll just quote the review from here on out, as otherwise I would just be paraphrasing a game I wasn’t able to play which seems a bit silly.

“When the student enters a room in which there is an object, the screen clears and shows drawings representing the coins, penny through half-dollar, in a column with a graphics $1 and $5 bill. The student pays for the object by indicating how many of each coin or bill are needed to make up its exact price.

When a creature is encountered, the student is told how much the toll is and what the creature took. Alongside the coins, the student is then shown his change. The student must determine whether the creature gave back the correct change, and indicate yes or no. If the student’s answer is wrong, the computer displays the correct answer. The creature or object is moved to another room to be faced again. If the student gets the amount correct, but another combination of coins is better, that answer is also shown. He is given credit for a correct answer, but cannot use 68 pennies to pay for something that costs 68q. In this case, the computer informs him that the amount is correct, but he has used too many coins. Each game is different. There are two dozen creatures and objects stored in memory, but only six are used for any game. The arrangement of the rooms and hallways is random.

A graphic representation of the player shows him walking along the hallways, commanded by the arrow keys on the keyboard. The animation routine is simple, but adds a nice touch. […] When all the objects have been bought and the creatures dispelled, the game ends. Everything the child bought is shown on the screen, along with the percentage of correct answers. The program has three levels of difficulty. Easy deals with amounts under $1; moderate, up to $5; hard, up to $10. I wish the program had a preschool level. This option could allow 79 pennies to be accepted for payment, or keep the prices to a total of one coin. This way the preschooler could match the coin to the price, penny by penny. The program is written in BASIC and uses 16K memory.”

Med Systems Marathon Overview: (a) 1980 Summary (b) Reality Ends (1980) (c) Rat’s Revenge / Deathmaze 5000 (1980) (d) Labyrinth (1980) (e) Asylum (1981) (f) Microworld (1981) (g) The Institute (1981)

Jyym & Robyn Pearson Mini-Marathon Overview: (a) Curse of Crowley Manor (1981) (b) Escape from Traam (1981) (c) Earthquake – San Francisco 1906 (1981) (d) Saigon: The Final Days (1981)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/intermission-med-systems-marathon-that-was-1981/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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cottonbaronsstuff · 7 years ago

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ricardosousalemos · 8 years ago

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Glenn Gould: Bach: The Goldberg Variations

The press release began: “Columbia Masterworks’ recording director and his engineering colleagues are sympathetic veterans who accept as perfectly natural all artists’ studio rituals, foibles, or fancies. But even these hardy souls were surprised by the arrival of young Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and his ‘recording equipment’ for his first Columbia sessions. … It was a balmy June day, but Gould arrived in a coat, beret, muffler and gloves.” The rest of the bulletin detailed the other peculiarities that Gould had brought along with him when recording J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations for the label.

These were many. Instead of nobly holding his head high with a proper recitalist’s posture, Gould’s modified piano bench allowed him to get his face right near the keys, where he would proceed to hum audibly while playing. He soaked his arms in hot water for up to 20 minutes before takes and brought a wide variety of pills. He also brought his own bottles of water, which, for 1955, was still something that seemed like only Howard Hughes would do. It was these initial, broadly trumpeted peculiarities that helped shape the Gould myth throughout his too-short life, the audacious genius who slightly unsettled everyone around him. Fittingly, throughout the 20th century, there would be no more audacious and initially unsettling act of musical reinterpretation than Gould’s debut studio recording.

With his 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the young pianist made a compelling case for a work that, at the time, was considered an obscure keyboard composition by an otherwise imposing master of Baroque music. Gould made his counter-argument for the piece’s rightful prominence by taking wild liberties with the source. In addition to playing the work on a piano instead of on the 18th-century era-appropriate harpsichord, Gould rushed tempos and varied his attack with aggression. His body flailed up and down his creaky chair, displaying melodramatic physical gestures—the very cliche of a young genius at work. But instead of seeming like an impudent youngster, Gould’s innovations signaled a clear love for the source material. He took the piece’s unusual status—a theme-and-variation work so varied that it could be hard for a lay audience to follow—and realized that it could be performed with modernist vigor, full of wild twists of character.

Gould drilled his famous technique over time, using an obscure practice known as “finger tapping” to produce muscle memory in his fingers—thereby allowing for dizzying flurries of notes with astonishing control and minimal physical exertion. And at a time when the future members of the Beatles were still obsessing over British skiffle bands, Gould was pioneering the use of the studio as an instrument by splicing together different takes: finding startling collisions of mood that could help drive his conception of a work.

In its fervor for relating Gould’s peculiar behaviors, Columbia’s first press release neglected to mention all the substantive ways in which the pianist was revolutionizing the art of interpretation. The critics, however, did notice. Gould’s Goldbergs received a raft of rave reviews from the New York Times, Newsweek, and Musical America, among others. Even writers who were unsure if his was a respectable way to approach Bach’s sublime music counted themselves impressed by Gould’s array of approaches—including his dancing sprightliness, a dashing top-gear of speed, and swooning sense of drama. And Gould proved a forceful advocate for his own ideas about the piece.

In erudite liner notes that accompanied the first LP issue in 1956, Gould writes about the strangeness of Bach’s theme-and-variation work: “...one might justifiably expect that … the principal pursuit of the variations would be the illumination of the motivic facets within the melodic complex of the Aria theme. However such is not the case, for the thematic substance, a docile but richly embellished soprano line, possesses an intrinsic homogeneity which bequeaths nothing to posterity and which, so far as motivic representation is concerned, is totally forgotten during the 30 variations.”

It’s a fascinating read of the piece—even if it seems trollish to accuse Bach’s Aria for adding “nothing to posterity.” (At least Gould was consistent in his dislike of obvious, top-line melodies. He didn’t much care for Italian opera, either.) Still, it’s true that the power associated with the culmination of Gould's Goldbergs—when the Aria returns—has something to do with how far the listener has traveled since the opening. If you want to make that Aria really floor people at the end, why not blow out the contrasts between the variations as you play them?

Gould makes an argument for his own radical vision of how the piece should be played. He sees his own jagged cadence not in defiance of but as a requisite to Bach’s score. Even listeners who put the Goldbergs on as background music are likely to sit up and pay attention when Gould pours it on during Variation No. 5. With that one far edge of intensity established, his ruminative way of handling Bach’s “Canons” is far more seductive. Gould’s lightning-fast runs tend to get all the press, but they cast into sharp relief his poetic handling of the so-called “black pearl” Variation No. 25. The power of Gould’s 1955 Goldbergs comes from the contrasts that Gould chooses to emphasize.

Gould’s first version of the Goldbergs reportedly sold 40,000 copies in its first five years: A considerable amount for any classical recording at any time, but particularly notable at the dawn of the LP era. The pop-cultural primacy of Gould’s first take on the Goldbergs also fostered some detractors, among them some Bach specialists like Wanda Landowska who were also interested in rescuing the piece from its relative obscurity. Late in life, Gould joined their ranks, offering some withering criticisms of his 1955 recording. In 1981, the pianist told the critic and biographer Tim Page that the 1955 handling of the “black pearl” variation had become particularly unwelcome to his own ears: “It seems to say—Please Take Note: This Is Tragedy. You know, it just doesn’t have the dignity to bear its suffering with a hint of quiet resignation.”

The idea of judging his famous 1955 recording on the basis of those criteria seems like a category error—or a set-up destined to prompt a negative assessment of his first record. The latter possibility is at least plausible, since when Gould offered this self-criticism to Page, he was doing so as part of a new publicity campaign. After being so closely identified with the Goldbergs for decades, Gould had made the rare decision to re-record a work already in his repertoire.

His 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations is still recognizable as Gould: the strutting precision and emphasis on counterpoint apparent. So too is Gould’s famously divisive practice of humming along with his playing (a natural trait of Gould’s that seemed to flower into a deliberate affectation sometime between 1955 and 1981). But in the interim, much else has changed. There’s less swing in Gould’s playing; even when he turns up the tempi, it feels considered and autumnal.

Variation No. 5 is played in 37 seconds, the identical span of time Gould needed to burn through it in 1955. But in the 1981 variations, Gould makes good on his desire for dignity. The 1955 rendition of No. 5 has a compelling, nervy energy; the 1981 version takes a greater sense of self-possession. The ability to find that much expressive room inside a similar tempo resulted in Gould’s second masterstroke with the Goldbergs.This range of musical investigation signals something profound. Two different approaches to the same notes can say a great deal about how one ages and how tastes can move over time.

Gould died just days after Columbia released the second Goldberg set. His death enhanced the idea of this being a grand, final statement—as though touching the work again had created a fateful resolution for his startling debut. But even if Gould were still with us, the 1981 Goldberg performance would sound necessary. Here, Gould luxuriates in the stately character of the “French” overture (No. 16)—and its pivot away from the prior, minor-key canon—with greater pomp than on his first try. It’s just that the fun never spills over into abandon, as on Gould’s first pass. For all his eccentricities, Gould’s most striking trait may have been his ability to revise his own carefully considered understanding of a work that was important to him.

Both interpretations have their uses. Along with Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft”, which I’d purchased at 12:01 am on Sept. 11, 2001, at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, Gould’s 1981 Goldberg set was the album I played most often in the days that followed. With the ashen smell still in the air, and the streets south of 14th Street devoid of car traffic, most who lived inside the perimeter established by the National Guard spent some portion of each day balancing requirements of mourning and anger with the search for a new equilibrium—a way to feel less anxious that didn’t also involve pretending that something traumatic hadn’t just taken place.

I owned both versions of Gould’s Goldbergs because I had been told by guidebooks that this was a prerequisite for caring about classical music (it is.) Until that week, I’d spent most of my time with the 1955 recording—identifying with its direct access to youthful exuberance. Now, however, the high energy of that edition seemed a poor fit to the mood. The dignity Gould had intended to emphasize in 1981 came through clearly.

Record collecting and music appreciation often turn on arguments about rankings, peerlessness, and the greatest-of-all-time. Classical fans play this game as aggressively as anyone—so hard that they occasionally seem to rule out the possibility of any worthy new music being made for traditional classical instruments. And we do this with Gould’s Goldbergs, too. Think fast: 1955 or 1981? Sometimes that’s fun. But these recordings’ mutual portrait of variations held in a single mind—one capable of such deliberate differences of opinion with itself—seems not just like something you’re well advised to have in a music collection, but instead like an approach to life worth exploring and emulating.

#reviews-albums

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