#This probably also applies to… 99% of the cast | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

accirax · 4 months ago

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hey everybody! wanted to make a quick post to say that, due to various holiday shenanigans, i'm not sure how quickly i'll be able to get through the entirety of P:EG chapter 1. i really don't want to be spoiled, so i'll obviously be blocking the tag, but i also ask that nobody send me any asks related to the chapter until i'm done experiencing it! i'll probably either make an initial thoughts-y type post once i'm done, or reblog this post/someone else's art when that's the case. thank you :)

with that out of the way...

LAST MINUTE PREDICTIONS GAME JUMPSCARE!!! small explanatory blurbs under the cut :D

before i get into any of the individual selections: the third victim scenario. the basic formula of the predictions game requires that Chapter 3 contain two victims. however, even though i can't find the source, i'm 99% sure i've heard that Team: Eden's Garden (T:EG, if you will) has confirmed that they won't be following along with typical murder "tropes" such as the Chapter 3 double kill or Chapter 4's buff curse. therefore, Venus and i decided that, for P:EG specifically, we would not have two victims, and instead create an extra survivor slot. consider it a bonus rule applied in advance.

of course, the "fact" that there won't be two Chapter 3 victims doesn't mean that T:EG isn't planning to have multiple victims in a different chapter. however, if that's the case, we'll figure it out later. if anyone wants to play against Venus and I, do whatever you like ^_^

anyways!

Toshiko in the role of Chapter 1 Victim

this was obviously inspired by the fact that Toshiko isn't at all visible in the Trial portion of the Chapter 1 trailer. that feels to hint at her absence too obviously, but, does it...?

i'm really torn on whether i think the Ch1 victim will be her or not. on one hand, i think that Toshiko is a really unique and cool character concept that i hope T:EG has the opportunity to do more with. she was one of the characters that got the most focus in (the introductions part of) the Prologue, which might indicate that they're setting her up as a major player in the story.

however, it also tracks that one of the characters who got the most focus in the Prologue would then become the first victim, as the Prologue would be one of the best opportunities with which to give them focus. on the surface, it seems a bit random that they would make her so much younger than everyone else for just a role as the first victim, but it could be intentional. for instance, if the idea behind her character's creation was "what kind of first victim would make Wolfgang become the most aggro?", suddenly it becomes viable.

i swear, the P:EG cast is made up of half high variance characters (will either go super-Ch1-early or super-Ch5/6-late) and half characters that are definitely gonna die in the middle somewhere, but i don't really care where. the high variance characters are way more scary, because getting the coin flip wrong can land you with a bunch of points :( i totally think Toshiko has the potential to go far, which is why listing her first freaks me out.

what i will say is that, if Toshiko is the first victim, i think it's actually a good sign as to the quality of P:EG's writing. if even their first victim is as intriguing and clearly delineated as Toshiko, we're in for a good time!

Jean in the role of Chapter 1 Killer

at this point, i'm believing that Jean is the Chapter 1 killer (as per my theory) until canon proves me otherwise. which, actually, could be very soon‼

Venus and i just replayed the Prologue in order to fully refresh ourselves on the plot and characters before playing Chapter 1, and genuinely, nothing about what Jean did made me think that he wouldn't be the Chapter 1 killer. not to say that i'll be flabbergasted if i'm wrong, just that the theory holds up better than i thought through my admittedly biased lenses.

no idea where Jean goes if he's not Ch1 killer, also. we'll cross that bridge if/when we get to it!

Desmond in the role of Chapter 2 Victim

full transparency, this is probably the assignment on this sheet i feel worst about. Desmond was one of the last three people i placed, alongside Toshiko and Wenona. my initial vibe check would say that Desmond makes it further than this, more Ch4 or 5-ish.

however, i don't hate this placement. Desmond still hasn't totally clicked for me, and while i think that means his content might be back-loaded in the later chapters, it could also just be that he's not too important. i do like the allure of one weaponsmaster (Desmond) being taken out by another weaponsmaster (Eloise), and think that could be a fun Ch2-level puzzle. Desmond and Eloise also seem to have some sort of relevant relationship with one another, given how they were more-or-less introduced together and how, in the new main title sequence, Desmond's ammo shoots into Eloise. maybe that means they could be a killer/victim pair?

sorry, shippers.

Eloise in the role of Chapter 2 Killer

if anyone is wondering why i'm always calling Eloise that Chapter 2 killer, it's honestly more based on a meme/inside joke than anything at this point. however, that's not to say it has no basis in what i actually believe.

when Venus and i played the Prologue for the first time, we both individually got the strong vibes that Eloise would be, specifically the Chapter 2 killer. she seems fainthearted enough to crack under the pressure of the killing game, but sweet enough to be an appropriately surprising twist when it's revealed that she would kill. she has three separate instances of mentioning that she misses her family (her introduction, the investigation, and after the Class Trial) because you have to set up that early killer's motivation early. and, even if she doesn't use her swordswoman skills to carry out the murder, she has the strength and dexterity to take someone out, as well as directly telling us that she's very strategic and calculated.

ever since, we've joked to each other that Eloise is all but confirmed as the Chapter 2 killer. so, no matter what canon says, Eloise is my Chapter 2 killer <3 (/j)

Jett in the role of Chapter 3 Victim

Jett has big Chapter 3 oddball death energy to me. i think that one of him and Mark will probably survive, but, it could go the other way around! replaying the Prologue, he honestly had way more knowledge about horror and haunted houses than i remembered, which could make him a handy ally throughout the killing game instead. i just can't help but fear that Jett is too silly to live. so, my gut instinct is that Jett will die midgame to allow Mark to come out of his shell a bit afterwards.

Ingrid in the role of Chapter 3 Killer

i initially had Ingrid in the Chapter 3 victim slot before i moved Jett there instead. with Jett, i feel fairly confident that he isn't the type to kill anyone, whereas with Ingrid, i wasn't so sure. i just think that Ingrid has Chapter 3 death energy. i think it's the unique blend of sillyness (such that she wouldn't make it farther) and seriousness (such that she can be taken seriously for three chapters and believed as a killer) with which her character is handled that makes me think so?

she does seem to play by her own rules when it comes to blacksmithing, which could lead to her prioritizing her own belief and needs above the group's sometime down the line. Ingrid is 100% one of those characters who i believe will die in one of those middling chapters, so i don't think i'll score too high with her here no matter what.

Ulysses in the role of Chapter 4 Victim

perhaps if i were a smarter theorist, i'd continue listening to myself of the past and write Ulysses down as the mastermind of P:EG. however, i still just can't shake the feeling that he's important enough of a character to take on that role. not to say that Ulysses is a bad character, just that he feels more like one of the minor characters in the story to me. the only time he was of any particular importance in the Prologue was during his introduction, and i have no clue who his most important character relationship is supposed to be with. the only other character for which i believe this to be true is Ingrid (although, even she was one of the characters who got to participate in the investigation, and got to scold Damon at the end), and, well... you've already seen my thoughts on her. i can't help but feel that a character set up to be so important and late game would already be solidifying some important relationships, or at least bringing some comedy or specific insight to the table.

there's also his note-taking habit, which i believe i've said before totally feels like a victim gimmick to me. deciphering the notes Ulysses left to himself about where he went, who he talked to, what he'd been eating, etc definitely feels like something that would be used to create a unique murder case, with him as the victim. if not Chapter 4, then maybe Chapter 2?

Chapter 2 victim, Chapter 4 victim, or mastermind. what a weird space Ulysses exists in.

Wenona in the role of Chapter 4 Killer

hey, it's the third person i was struggling with.

i don't really know what to do with Wenona. she kinda gives me killer vibes, but that seems too obvious? she also kinda gives me late(r) game vibes, which is probably how she wound up in this late-game killer spot.

sorry, i don't have much to say here. hopefully this doesn't blow up in my face, lol.

Diana in the role of Chapter 5 Victim, Wolfgang in the role of Chapter 5 Killer, Eva in the role of Survivor (and also Damon in the role of Survivor)

quadruple combo!!! allow me to share that incredibly specific scenario i've been cooking up (that i really like) which puts these characters in these spots.

firstly, Diana, and her obvious mastermind-coding. the mastermind-coding is so obvious that it has to go somewhere, right? naturally, it could just result in her being the mastermind, but then i'm not sure why they would be so heavy-handed with it. therefore, i re-propose an idea i've discussed before: someone kills Diana because they think she's the mastermind.

in that case, this person is Wolfgang. the man hates killers and injustices, and believes himself to be a good judge of what's right and wrong. therefore, if he believed he had sights on the mastermind, i believe he could be willing to take a shot at them. of course, in this case, he would fail.

therefore, in the Class Trial, he needs to create a cover for himself. what better course of action than to weaponize his ethos as the Ultimate Lawyer to direct suspicions at the easiest scapegoat, the literal Ultimate Liar?

meanwhile, while Damon clearly has a lot to work through in terms of character arcs, one task on his checklist is surely to make friends. everything about the marketing of this game really makes it seem like Damon and Eva are the core relationship around which the whole story is based. they're Eve and the snake, the Debater and the Liar, and the only two who see through Wolfgang's BS from the beginning. thematically, i think Damon needs a support-type character to survive alongside him, to contrast against his initial lonely elitism. the game seemingly wants us to root for this protagonistic duo to have a happy ending-- and it might be a setup to get us to fight for their survival with all our might.

my vision is that the final Class Trial is where Damon has to put all of his character development to the test, to fully let his Ultimate Debater talent shine as he argues against the Ultimate Lawyer to prove that the Ultimate Liar is telling the truth in her innocence. it's a great setup because, although one might complain about how obvious it would be that Wolfgang would be the killer in this situation, it doesn't matter, because even if you figure out that Wolfgang did it, you still get the catharsis of kicking his ass. and as a bonus, we'd get to reap the benefits of the main antagonist actually getting to be the Chapter 5 killer, instead of circling around it without ever getting to hit the target.

Damon learns to argue for his friends instead of against his enemies, Eva learns that there are people out there who will trust her even when she's been called a liar, and Wolfgang has to reap the consequences of letting his own perceived intellectual superiority lead him to becoming the thing he hates most: a sadistic man who kills an innocent little girl. the end!

i know this idea goes against what i've been promoting-- AKA, a "more interesting" fangan where the authors are willing to kill off their stereotypical antag and support early in favor of surprising the audience with more unique antag and support choices. however, just because i've been asking for that doesn't mean that i actually think it's going to happen, lol. P:EG seems like a fangan to me that's deeply rooted in the Danganronpa classics (even if they won't do Ch3 double kill or Ch4 buff curse), which makes sense from a creative team that isn't otherwise active in the fangan scene, and therefore hasn't considering some of its wackier expeditions. however, as long as they manage to do something fresh with their somewhat stereotypical build, i'll still be happy.

oh, and i've always believed that Damon will be the protagonist for the entire game. he just seems so well-crafted to mirror the main themes and motifs of the story that i'm not sure what the team would gain from killing him off so early (other than the excitement of a protag swap).

Kai in the role of Survivor

um, it's the knowledge that some of the staff members ship kaimon, honestly. to me, that indicates that Kai will have an important relationship with Damon sometime down the line, likely that expands beyond Chapter 1. and, as a high variance character (to me), if you're gonna let the guy make it past Chapter 1, you might as well just let him live, right?

that being said, i do see a path to Kai dying midgame depending on how hard they lean into the "dictatorial influencer" thing. if he becomes more of a villain, i could see him going in Ch3 or 4. i do think he has good setup for a character arc, though, going from not caring about the killing game to actually putting in some effort, and think his humor and patheticness could be a good balancer in a surviving cast. i feel pretty good about this one!

Mark in the role of Survivor

again, you could trade this with Jett; i'm reserving this slot for one of them. i think Mark makes more sense as a survivor because i think that the "my best friend died but i live on" arc makes more sense on him than it does on Jett. for Jett, it would bum him out, sure, but i don't see the connection to his likely character struggles of self image and shame (as implied by his character intro sheet).

meanwhile, Mark's introversion currently appears to be his greatest hurdle, and having to continue on after his only friend dies would echo his arc of needing to open up to others and be positive even when the situation seems dire. plus, having Mark be the one who initially wasn't as interested in talking to Jett is good setup for Mark regretting not talking to Jett more when he had the chance.

Grace in the role of Survivor

i think a lot of people actually don't predict that Grace will survive, which was surprising to me, because she's always given me survivor energy. after Damon, Eva, and Wolfgang (not necessarily in that order), she definitely seemed to be the fourth most important character of the Prologue in a way that, to me, implied longevity.

Grace has a lot going on for her. she's always yelling and fighting with everyone, whether that be students she dislikes, the old men of her profession, or even Tozu himself. That already establishes her with potential (negative) relationships with a lot of people, further elevating her importance. also, she's really unlikable (/pos). this gives her insane character arc potential. why would they make a character that brash and aggravating if they didn't have plans to eventually let her change in some meaningful way?

furthermore, Grace was, surprisingly, one of the few characters to actually provide a new, correct argument in the Prologue Class Trial (she's the one who gets the students thinking about the bleach being in a bucket above the door). that may mean that she's smarter than she appears. might be relevant if she continues to hang around Wolfgang, which seems inevitable. she's a really good contrast to him-- someone who has the same sort of passionate fury that he does, but none of the social tact to prevent her from screaming her beliefs in people's faces. if Wolfgang is around for the long haul, i think Grace will be there with him.

... i'm really excited to learn more about Grace in the Prologue, because i feel i've made a lot of assumptions about her that are possibly unfounded, lol.

Cassidy in the role of Mastermind

Diana or Ulysses or Eva or whatever probably makes more sense, but this is my predictions sheet, so I operate off of my vibe check, yippee!!!

ignore everyone who believes that she's the Chapter 1 victim via visibility! ignore everyone who thinks she's too dumb and comic relief-y to pull off a killing game! ignore the eyebrow-raising logistics of why T:EG would give Cassidy an enemy in Wenona/make Cassidy a communist when that doesn't really make any sense with her being the mastermind! i reap the follies of my OWN poor decision making!!!!!! (/j)

... why am i even putting Cassidy as the mastermind after writing all that, you ask? uh, read my old mastermind ranking theory, idk.

okay that's all :) be back after i finish the chapter!!!

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we-pay-for-everything · 2 years ago

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Nancy Drew, season 4, episode 8 review (spoilers!):

So, this episode was very heavy on Nace, but I can't say I loved it? I loved that the episode was about them, and I loved them working together, actually talking, realizing they're better together even as friends, and that they can still bring out the best in each other, but the last minutes of the episode lowkey bothered me. Nancy had a huge growing moment when she opened up to Nick, George and Bess at The Claw but it was after Ace left. She called them family, they had a group hug, and then she celebrated her mom with all her family but Ace. That part bothered me! I know everything's always so tense with them now, but isn't Ace Nancy's family too? Isn't that the whole point of the episode - that they are still friends and always will be? Ace would've wanted to be there for Nancy and he was excluded. It's like now that he's the ex he can't be family - he's below the others when it really matters? It's all about epic love and angst now, but stuff like connection, trust, companionship - all of that can't apply to them anymore? It's always the same thing in media. There's this idea in mainstream "feminism" that friends > lovers. But, like, why? Aren't boyfriends supposed to be closer to you than friends? Is Nancy and Ace's love any less special and meaningful because it's romantic now? Is their love worth less now that it's fully romantic? Ace's part of their group and he was literally the only person not at Nancy's house.

Also, I kept waiting for either Nancy or Ace to accidentally use the back door or whatever. I feel like that's how they are going to fix their death curse? They'll forget each other? Or at least one of them will, but they'll get together anyway and cheat death? Ace went finishing for a reason. That whole scene was about more than father-son bonding. Oh, and also, Ace's dad is less of an ass this season, but I can't forget how he kicked out his son out for accidentally revealing his dirty secret. I can't forget how Ace's mom did nothing and left her son alone after being kicked out of his home. She sided with the man who lied to her. Women always fucking do this. They always side with their husbands, it's pathetic. And even when she saw him for the first time in another episode, she barely asked how she was... Honestly...

I wasn't expecting the body swap and felt a bit of foreboding when it happened, but the writers successfully avoided clichés! But it's odd that it wasn't a bigger deal actually. The actor who plays Nick, Tunji Kasim, did one hell of a fucking job playing Bess. He 100% nailed it, from top to bottom! Kennedy McMann, who plays Nancy, did a great job with Ace's stoner, deadpan look. I think Alex Saxon did a good job playing Nancy too. They all did well, including Maddison Jaizani, but I think the actress who plays George, Leah Lewis, is the weakest one in the cast. She didn't stand out.

Sadly, I'm 99% sure Ryan is going to die this season. I don't know if that's his redemption arc, or if they want to make Nancy sad, but I'm pretty sure he's gone die unnecessarily, if anything for shock value since this is the last season and, aside from the gang, he's probably the most beloved character...

Hmm, I don't know... what do you guys think? I'm not in the fandom so I don't know what the fan theories are. I'll see if I can find some!

#nancy drew #cw nancy drew #ace nancy drew #nace #nancy drew cw #nancy x ace #I don't know how to tag for this show

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teefa85 · 9 months ago

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So some of you who've followed me for some time might remember that, around five years ago, I played an Arcana hack called Seal of Rimsala. Ultimately back then I decided that it had good ideas but was held back by how hard the reduced rate of enemies made it to grind. Well, I've been occasionally checking back on the updates and learned recently that 3.0 got released earlier in the year. And am happy to say it has greatly improved from what I played in 2019!

(note I'm using terminology from vanilla when applicable, not because name changes aren't good or correct, but in case someone who knows Arcana but hasn't played the hack is reading so they know what I'm talking about)

The grinding issue is somewhat mitigated by the maps that come with this release showing places with higher than normal monster concentration. Now, I'm not sure if these existed in vanilla or not since I'm not a hacker (though since Stavery 12F is one of them and I always thought I got into more random fights than normal...). But it definitely helped me to get into my groove in several places. Also, I've readjusted strategies and found perfect grind spots thanks to said maps including ones with the enemy domains so I can grab places with high EXP enemies.

There's now people credited with translation work, properly fixing early 90s censorship and things that were just plain wrong in the original. Which is what I'd been looking for in a text cleanup patch when I first checked the hack out of curiosity. I was also happy to find out that 99% of the things they said were how I interpreted the Japanese dialog when I looked into it...remember, I'm not a skilled translator, just an idiot with a kanji dictionary app. The biggest exception was a line I'd thrown my hands up figuring out anyway after trying to look up what the sentence meant when my app failed (so did Google Translate but that's not a surprise).

The new updates to the equipment makes it so much easier to make choices on what to equip and when. Like, I kept the Crystal Sword on over the Spirit Sword for much of Chapter 5 because it was doing more damage to the non-elemental Minotaurs and Jotuns while Teefa and the Spirits handled the elemental stuff. This also applied to figuring out what Attribute spell to cast between better labeling of Elements and the power level. Also...A+ names for the new spell names that better describe what human attack spells do. It also helped me to realize that I'd written Salah's Attributes 6 and 3 backwards in my lists...but a quick peak into Vanilla ENG and JP shows it was reversed and I was too dunderheaded to look at the MP costs.

Was a bit of a challenge starting Chapter 5 since all Teefa's equipment and Darwin's sword were moved till after the Karul fight. Money got tight and I didn't get Rooks a Kaiser Shield until after escaping the tunnel with Darwin's free gear (the darn thing is only 20,000 off max money and I needed to add a sword, a staff, and a robe to the shopping list). Though that let us punch dragons down for a bit till we were down to shields.

Gonna go back sometime with the Level Select which I tried out while doing my checks on Salah's spells in all three versions of the game I've access to. Probably run Chapter 1, then after starting the scenes in Chapter 2 reset and do the Level Select instead so I can amass as much cash as possible for Run 1, then try it again with Chapter 5 due to the listed changes in the readme file (which I won't spoil if anyone wants to play for themselves).

All in all, thanks to Autumn Shinespark and the team for improving this game so much!

#arcana(snes)#commentary

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suntzuanime · 2 years ago

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No, that's not how this works! The probability is actually different in the Monty Hall problem whether he's using psychic powers or just dumb luck! The reason the Monty Hall problem turns out the way it does is because Monty is leaking information to you by his choice of door. If he doesn't have any information, he can't leak it, and either door remaining has an equal chance of the car. It really is the intuitive 50/50. It's only because of Monty Hall's algorithm for door opening that the unintuitive answer occurs.

The key to the Monty Hall problem is that Monty will never open the door with the car. He knows where everything is and will only open a goat door. He also will never open the door you selected. This means if the door you selected has the car, he can open either of the other doors, and if the door you selected has a goat, he can only open the other goat door. This means if you selected a goat his actions are constrained, he had to open the door he did. If you selected a car, he had a 50% chance of opening the other door instead. So him opening the door he opened was a priori more likely if you picked a goat than if you picked a car, so seeing him open it should increase your probability that you picked a goat. Or you can come at it from the other direction. The starting probability that you picked the car is 1/3, and Monty Hall will always open a goat door so seeing him open a goat door is not information and should not cause you to update your chance of that. So that probability remains 1/3, and the rest of the 2/3 has to go to the final remaining door.

In the dumb luck case, in the charger case, these things don't hold true. The charger could have been in the first box that you opened. You don't have any information to leak. You aren't constrained by your knowledge. Opening a specific box you brought with you does not become any more likely whether or not the charger is in the box at home. You are not guaranteed to not open a charger box, you are not using Monty Hall's same algorithm. Since the charger could have been in each box you open, opening a box and seeing that the charger's not in it is information. As you open each box fruitlessly, that increases the chance the charger is in one of the remaining boxes, and does it evenly across all boxes including the one you left at home, so that by the time you're down to your final box you brought with you the odds are 50/50.

Now, if you ARE using Monty Hall's algorithm, if you are using magic to open a random box you brought with you that does not contain a charger, and you cast the spell 98 times and watch all the boxes open until there's one left with you, yes that one will be 99% to contain the charger. The spell is giving you information. However, note that this only applies if the spell only works on boxes you brought with you. If the spell can hit the box you left at home, then once you're down to one box with you it's 50/50. And it only works if the spell avoids the charger by magic rather than by dumb luck. If it's just dumb luck, it's 50/50 again.

I've tried to state this in plain language, but you can also diagram it out and do the math. Look at what the odds are for each starting condition, what the odds are for each observable event under each starting condition, and multiply through and renormalize. That's all Bayes' Rule is.

so this "5 boxes, one has the charger" thing, that isn't the same as the Monty Hall problem, right?

the thing goes "I have 5 boxes. I took 4 of them with me, and left 1 at home. One of them has my phone charger in it. I open 3 of the boxes with me, and none of them have it. What is the probability the charger is in the box at home?"

and people are going "duh, it's 20%, anyone who doesn't say that doesn't know the Monty Hall problem. Leaving one box at home is like picking it in the Monty Hall problem, and now that 3 boxes have been opened, the right answer is to switch, which means that the box with you has an 80% chance of being the right one."

but I feel like this is obviously wrong! if you had 4 red boxes and a blue box, left one red box at home, and opened the 3 red boxes with you, then you could say "having one box be blue is like picking it, so you should switch" at the same time as "having one box at home is like picking it, so you should switch," meaning there's an 80% chance of it being in the red box at home and an 80% chance of it being in the blue box with you, but you didn't change anything about the probability, you just put some stickers on things. assigning arbitrary categories can't change what is in there.

but I don't know how to formally state it or do the math

#older and wiser bayes #monty hall #probability

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joshuas · 4 years ago

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cuddles

♫ pairing: yoon jeonghan x female reader

♫ genre: fluff, domesticity, dad!au, ceo!au

♫ summary: lots and lots of fluffy family moments, maybe a hint of angst if you squint

♫ word count: 0.8k

♫ a/n: this was fuelled by jeonghan brain rot and stress, so enjoy <3 this is also unofficially part of the bias swap for @beomberries <3

♫ prompts: 99 + 83 from this prompt list!

♫ taglist: @beomberries @kwonthefire @starlightlillies @jadezircon @mostlikelynotmelissa @potato2earth send an ask if you’d like to be on the tag list <3

"Daddy, why wasn't I invited to your wedding?" Your 4-year-old daughter, Yuna, asked inquisitively, as she lay back in her bed. Jeonghan tucked the covers around her, grinning. The three of you had just attended one of Jeonghan's friend's- Chan's- wedding, piquing your daughter's interest in all the things about weddings, especially yours and Jeonghan's.

“Baby, you weren’t even alive back then.” Jeonghan chuckled, giving her a soft smile.

“But still! You could’ve sent the invitation to the bird that dropped me off. I would have come!” Yuna pouted. It was surprising how much she resembled her father, no matter how much Jeonghan insisted it wasn’t the case. You just hoped she didn’t carry his chaotic personality… the future was looking pretty bleak as of now.

“I’m sure you would have. Now, go to sleep, okay? Goodnight, I love you.” He leaned down, kissing her forehead softly.

“Goodnight, daddy.” She mumbled slowly, closing her eyes as he turned off the light, leaving her room.

“So, Yuna’s still upset about not being invited to our wedding but I eventually got her to bed, so don’t worry too much about that.” Jeonghan entered your bedroom, loosening his tie.

You hummed in acknowledgment, applying moisturiser to your face. He came behind you, wrapping his arms around your waist,

“Are you okay? You’ve been quiet all night. I was waiting for some of your witty commentary regarding the ‘chedding’.” He spun you around so that you faced him.

You sighed, failing to meet his concerned gaze,

“I don’t know. I’m probably just tired.”

“Really? Have you not been sleeping well? You haven’t been doing too great over the last couple of days…” He led you to the edge of the bed, sitting you down, before sitting beside you,

“I mean… I can't think of any other reason.” You muttered.

He cast you a knowing look,

“There is one thing.”

“I don’t-“

“Come on, Y/N. It’s the only logical reason. You’ve been like this for weeks.” He sighed.

“I can’t be pregnant… or… oh my god.” You put your head in your hands.

“Y/N? I can’t tell if you’re happy or sad about this.” Jeonghan asked, tentatively rubbing your back.

You lifted your head,

“I- I honestly have no clue. I don’t know how to feel. I mean we’ve been trying for a while, so I guess I should be happy. But you’re busy with the business, and I just got into the specialisation I wanted. Not to mention Yuna’s starting pre-school this year-“

“I think the timing’s perfect.” Jeonghan cut you off, taking your hands in his,

“Y/N, it’s okay to be worried about the baby. It’s okay to be worried about our family. But I love you and I’m going to be here to support you no matter how busy life gets. I’m not one of those cliche rich CEOs that neglect their wives. And you’ve wanted this baby for so long. Please don’t worry.” Jeonghan traced the back of your hand soothingly with small circles.

You sniffled,

“God, I sure hope not. Otherwise, we’re divorcing.”

He placed a hand against his chest in mock defense,

“You wouldn’t.”

“I so would, Yoon Jeonghan.” You giggled, raising an eyebrow.

“I guess you and the baby aren’t getting any cuddles tonight.” Jeonghan got up off the bed, heading to the walk-in closet.

“Noooo come back.” You pouted.

You heard the small pitter-patter of footsteps arrive at your doorway, your daughter rubbing her eyes from sleep, teddy bear in hand.

“Yuna? What are you doing awake?” You held out your arms to your daughter, scooping her up onto your lap after she ran to you.

“I heard you and daddy talking.” She said, playing with your hair.

Jeonghan came out from the walk-in closet, changed into pajamas, giving you a questioning look when he saw Yuna.

“Can I sleep here tonight?” Yuna asked, eyes wide.

You exchanged a look with Jeonghan, before looking back at your child,

“Of course, baby. Get under the covers.” She crawled out of your grip onto the bed, deciding to take up the middle of the bed.

“Does this mean that you want lots of cuddles from mummy and daddy?” Jeonghan tickled Yuna’s sides lightly as she squealed.

“Of course she does.” You settled beside her as Jeonghan took up the other side, turning off the light quickly before jogging back to bed.

You sighed contentedly, staring at the ceiling as everyone settled, your breathing in sync, Yuna curling up to your side, Jeonghan’s arms around the both of you. It was a feeling of bliss. Calmness. Content. You felt Jeonghan’s hand move taking your own, deciding to rest them on your stomach, the three of you (soon to be four), in utter bliss. Your little family.

images are not mine! credit to respective owners.

masterlist!

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greatwyrmgold · 3 years ago

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Can superhero film series work?

This is not clickbait. At least, mostly not.

Overly Sarcastic Productions recently-ish released two videos about Superman. (The first is from July and is ~99 minutes long; the second is from Friday and is ~61 minutes long.) The second video is more relevant to this post; its thesis is, essentially, that superheroes need to rescue people instead of just fighting villains, a thesis I agree to with some caveats (not all of which were explicitly stated in the video, sadly).

A comment on that video got me to thinking about pacing and structure, and made me wonder whether superhero film series can work.

Now for the bit where I question whether my one-clause title was, in fact, clickbait.

Caveat #1: What's a superhero?

Not all "superheroes" need to fit in the model Red describes. Heroes in superhero media ranging from Dreadnought to Megamind to Hancock to One Punch Man to Worm are rarely seen rescuing people, and that works with how those sorts of stories conceptualize superheroes. But most superheroes aren't trying to be Worm, which is a good thing.

So for the purpose of this post, when I say "superhero" I mean "classic superheroes," who I categorize by that famed biologist's method. You'll see classic superheroes in the general memespace occupied by most big Marvel/DC heroes, The Incredibles, My Hero Academia('s main cast), Invincible*, Ben 10, Sentinels of the Multiverse, Spinnerette, that one terrible Disney movie most notable for a video essay about it, etc.

*Say what you will about Omni-Man, his son's trying to be Superman.

Caveat #2: What's a film series?

I'm focusing here on three related types of media—standalone movies, film series, and TV-style serials—because I think this problem only exists with one of them. (Which is, sadly, the dominant way superhero stories are being distributed these days.) For the purpose of this post:

Movies are single-installment narratives, generally 90-120 minutes in length, created without intending to follow them up with anything. The Incredibles are probably the clearest example, though plenty of pre-MCU superhero film trilogies started out this way. If I say "movie," I'm referring to standalone movies.

A film series is a bunch of movies meant to tie together, each with their own internal narrative, but also building into a larger narrative. Individual film series are released sporadically, months or years apart. By far the most obvious and successful example would be the MCU. For brevity, I'll use "film" to refer to this kind of film series.

A TV-style serial releases batches of much shorter episodes (usually 20-30 minutes each, sometimes 50-60 or some other length), sometimes all at once but more often weekly for a few months at a time. These batches are called "seasons," and usually last 10-15 or 20-30 episodes. Each episode has its own more or less self-contained plot, seasons usually have some kind of character and/or plot arc tying them together, and a series as a whole probably has something linking different seasons together beyond character names. This format was designed for TV, but these days lots of serials are produced for streaming platforms, and might not get any broadcast release. For brevity, I'm calling these "serials," even though that technically applies to film series and a bunch of other serial media.

TL;DR: The Incredibles is a movie, the MCU is films, Invincible is a serial.

I realize there's a lot of gray areas. The MCU includes a lot of serials in addition to the films, the DC universe has a bunch of loosely-linked animated movies, and I've mentioned more superhero stories with installments/versions in non-audiovisual mediums than ones which have only seen movies, films, and serials (as defined above).

But I'm not talking about all superhero stories, every way they can be structured, in every format. I'm talking about film series, and I'm using movies and serials as points of contrast.

Caveat #3: Let's not question OSP

To summarize OSP's thesis: Superheroes (as defined in caveat 1) need scenes where they save people from mundane peril to feel heroic. Superheroes are supposed to exist to save people, not just to fight villains.

If you disagree with these premises, if you think it's dumb for superpowered people to waste their time saving people from fires or industrial accidents or whatever, I'm not gonna argue. That's an argument about the philosophical nature of superheroism, which boils down to an argument over how "superhero" should be defined. I don't want to get involved in that kind of debate.

Instead: Starting with these caveats, let me get onto...

The Point

Story Structure

I'll be brief.

Stories have structure, and often recognizable structures. There are two big forces which drive stories to have the structures we recognize, or at least two I'll be discussing: The need for stories to tell a complete story, and time constraints.

Stories need to tell a complete story. The reason a lot of MCU knockoffs flopped as hard as they did is the amount of time they wasted on setups for future movies. MCU movies were reasonably restrained; each movie (or at least the movies I saw) did a pretty good job of telling a self-contained story, even as it built up to future movies. MCU knockoffs wanted to play catch-up, wanted to release their Avengers with as few introductory movies as possible.

But stories only have so much time to tell a story, and that time is very restricted in the mediums being analyzed here. Distributors don't really like movies and films more than 120-150 minutes long, because they either can't play as many times, require the theater to stay open longer, or both. And of course, serials have their episode lengths limited by broadcast schedules. In theory, streaming should give more runtime flexibility, but not many people have taken advantage of those possibilities so far.

In movies, the need to tell a complete story and the fairly strict runtime limitations have lead to a fairly strict structure known as the three-act formula; it's so ubiquitous that most films which try to avoid it end up reconstructing a form of the three-act structure, just to tell their whole story in one go.

Of course, films and serials operate on two different structural levels. Each film or episode needs to feel like a satisfying self-contained story, or at least a satisfying story fragment which went somewhere. An installment where it feels like nothing happened is often derisively called "padding" or "filler," because it is perceived to have added little to the series except runtime. You do not want your series to have filler if you can avoid it.

TL;DR: Every story, and every portion of a story released individually, needs to be structured in such a way that it tells its own story.

Where do we put the flood?

Consider the above point, and Caveat #3. Stories need to have structure, superheroes need to save people, and superhero stories only have so much time.

There's a well-established formula for movies. You put the disasters, petty crimes, and so forth late in act 1 or early in act 2, or maybe early in act 1 if your protagonist is an established superhero. This lets your hero earn their "superhero cred," and in the likely event that your protagonist isn't an established superhero, gives them a chance to establish themselves.

Movies don't need much. If you have around 100 minutes of movie, one 12-minute sequence where your hero discovers a burning building, finds people inside, and saves them is roughly an eighth of the movie. That's significant!

But that sequence won't cut it for a longer narrative. For a 12-episode serial with 22-minute episodes, the above sequence is less than 5% of the serial's runtime. Luckily, however, the serial structure makes it easy to work in multiple places where the superhero saves people, largely unrelated to the overarching seasonal plot.

You can have entire episodes focused on individual character conflicts, like the Hero and the Lancer having a pissing contest, or the Big Guy having a crisis of faith, or romantic bullshit, or whatever. At least some of these character-driven episodes should advance the overarching plot, but you can also have a couple which focus on more day-to-day heroism without losing too much—you just need the character conflict to go somewhere, and that can be the complete story you so desperately need.

Film series can't really do either.

The Problem with Superhero Film Series

Films are isolated in a way serial episodes aren't. It's easy to convince an audience to watch the first half of a two-part story if the second part is coming next week! It's hard to convince them to do the same if the parts are separated by a year. It worked for Infinity War/Endgame, but A. the end of Avengers: Infinity War was pretty definitive for a "part 1" and B. it's the culmination of a decade of genre-defining films.

And the year-long turnaround time is fairly short for film series. The MCU has been producing about three films per year, but I doubt anyone would argue that Avengers: Age of Ultron is the sequel to Guardians of the Galaxy just because they're next to each other in Wikipedia's list of MCU films. The sequel to Guardians of the Galaxy is Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, which released ~2.5 years later. 2-3 years seems like the typical game between releases within MCU sub-series, and the DCEU seems to have a similar rhythm.

Anyways, whether one year or three, each film has immense pressure to tell the best self-contained story it can. (Assuming the studio heads are applying sensible pressures and not trying to do an Any% Cinematic Universe Speedrun.) That means it's easy to replace "filler" scenes where your hero stops a bank robbery or rescues people from a...volcano or something (I'm running out of natural disasters) with something relevant to the plot of this story.

From the perspective of the individual film, this is a good thing! Spending a full sequence on, essentially, just reminding the audience that Superman is a superhero is a waste of your limited time. At the very least, you should tie that rescue into the plot somehow; maybe the bank robbers have information on the Big Bad, or the volcano is part of their evil scheme. It would probably be less contrived if you just throw out the rescue angle entirely, though.

From the perspective of the film series, this is a disaster! The net effect is that superheroes in these film series only rescue people from non-supervillain-related situations when they still need to earn "superhero cred," generally when they're fresh and inexperienced. This is exactly what Red meant when she said heroes "graduate" from saving people to fighting villains. Saving people stops being the point of superheroism, and instead becomes its final exam.

Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but I don't see a solution within the "film series" model. As long as film series are big individual segments, with each segment being released months or years after the last, those segments need to stand on their own. As long as films are being optimized for their standalone quality, there'll be incentives to cut the ordinary rescues from most films. As long as such incentives are there, superheroes will focus on the spectacular supervillain brawls at the expense of heroism.

In Summary

Stories are shaped by their structure, structures are shaped by medium and release format. Superhero stories these days are often lacking in "mundane" heroics like stopping muggers, rescuing trapped miners, and destroying meteors before they hit the Earth. In film series like the All-Consuming MCU, the release format discourages writers from including those scenes.

I'm obviously not saying superheroes can't work, or even that superhero movies can't work. Heck, even "superhero" film series can work, if they're not trying to be classical superheroes. But the MCU (and most other big-budget superhero films) are trying to be classical superheroes, and because they're film series, they're discouraged from letting their superheroes be heroes.

Now, this problem isn't unique to superhero films. The Teen Titans (2003) were more likely to frame their character-development episodes around petty one-shot supervillains (or fighting, say, Plasmus again) than rescuing people from a natural disaster. But on a fundamental level, nothing about Teen Titans (2003) would need to change if they fought fire instead of Fang.

I'm not sure there's any such solution for film series, without structuring them more like standalone movies or TV serials.

Postscript

Thank you, [NAME REDACTED], for inspiring me to write this.

#meta #superheroes #film series #overly sarcastic productions

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genshin-impact-updates · 4 years ago

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Version 2.0 "The Immovable God and the Eternal Euthymia" Update Details (Part 3)

For Part 2, Click Here

VIII. Adjustments & Optimizations

● System

1. Once your account for PSN is linked to a valid email address, you will be able to log in on iOS/Android/PC using your miHoYo Account, or on PlayStation using the account for PSN linked to the email address associated with your miHoYo Account and resume your game progress.

• There are two methods for linking:

Method 1 (Retain Prior Progress From miHoYo Account on Mobile/PC): On the PlayStation platform, using an account for PSN that has never previously logged in to Genshin Impact, open the game for the first time. Follow the steps in the pop-up window to link the email address associated with your miHoYo Account. This will link both accounts.

*IMPORTANT: The pop-up window prompting you to link your accounts only appears when your account for PSN enters the game for the first time, after you agree to the Terms of Service. You can only link an existing miHoYo Account from this pop-up window. There is no other way to link.

Method 2 (Retain Prior Progress From Account for PSN): Log in to Genshin Impact on the PlayStation platform, then go to Settings > Account > User Center > Link Account and link your account for PSN that is logged in to Genshin Impact to an email address that has not already been used to register a miHoYo Account. After linking, your game progress will be shared when you log into your account to play on the same server on iOS/Android/PC/PlayStation.

• Genesis Crystals

Genesis Crystals obtained on PC or mobile platforms and Genesis Crystals obtained on PlayStation will not be linked for the same account. This includes but is not limited to Genesis Crystals obtained via the following means: topping-up, refunds, and compensation for top-up errors for Blessing of the Welkin Moon and Battle Pass.

（For more information, please refer to the HoYoLAB notice, "Notice on Cross-Save Function Between Account for PSN and miHoYo Account")

2. Increases Max Map Pins limit from 99 to 150

3. Adjusts the contents of the Gnostic Hymn Bundle: Replaces Mondstadt's Talent Level-Up Material bundles with Inazuma's Talent Level-Up Material bundles

4. Optimizes UI display on mobile devices upon entering Aiming Mode when using touchscreen controls: The "Abandon Challenge" button is hidden and the text transparency of the challenge objectives is reduced

5. Adds a second confirmation when removing friends.

6. Adjusts the Waverider's Stamina mechanism: The Waverider's stamina is now independent of that of the character's, and Stamina Regeneration is also calculated separately for each.

● Audio

Adjusts Chinese and Japanese voice-over for some characters, and adjusts Korean voice-over for some Quests.

● Characters

1. Adjusts the animation performance of Mona's Combat Talent "Illusory Torrent"

2. Optimizes the expressions of some characters in combat

3. Adjusts the description of Ningguang's Passive Talent "Trove of Marvelous Treasures": Displays the location of nearby ore veins used in forging on the mini-map.

Originally: Displays the location of nearby ore veins (Iron Ore, White Iron Ore, Crystal Ore, Magical Crystal Ore, and Starsilver) on the mini-map.

〓Bug Fixes〓

● Quests

1. Fixes an issue with the Daily Commission "This Novel Is Amazing!" whereby there is a small chance of repeating dialogue.

2. Fixes an issue with the Archon Quest "Wanderer's Trail" whereby the camera shakes when using Traveler's (Lumine) Normal Attack.

3. Fixes an issue with the Daily Commission "Pigeons Go AWOL" whereby there is a chance that the items dropped by animals may refresh abnormally.

● Domains

1. Fixes an issue in the Spiral Abyss whereby the Events icon disappears from the main screen after teleporting to a Domain in the Adventurer's Handbook.

2. Fixes an issue on Floor 7 of the Spiral Abyss whereby the Ley Line Disorder "CRIT hits will generate Elemental Particles and Orbs" may not take effect properly.

● Monsters

1. Fixes an issue whereby Ruin Guards have a chance to be momentarily paralyzed and open to attack even though their weak point was not attacked.

2. Fixes an issue whereby when the character teleports away when a Whopperflower is paralyzed, after returning to battle, the number and animation effect of the Elemental Orbs of the Whopperflower are abnormal.

3. Fixes an issue whereby Abyss Mages may appear on the field abnormally after teleporting.

● Co-Op

1. Fixes an issue in Co-Op Mode whereby map pins may have an abnormal residual effect after exiting Co-Op Mode.

2. Fixes an issue when visiting another Traveler's Serenitea Pot whereby if the host and guest have the same character in their respective realms for whom they have chosen different outfits, the guest will see the clothing they have selected for their own character on the character that the host invited to move inside their realm.

● Characters

1. Fixes an issue affecting some characters whereby simultaneously casting an Elemental Burst and switching characters while the character is sprinting may cause errors with the Elemental Burst.

2. Fixes an issue whereby when a character triggers a Swirl reaction with multiple elements against multiple enemies at the same time, the character abnormally takes DMG.

3. Fixes an issue whereby when bow-wielding characters use the gadget "Wind-Blessed Harpastum" while switching their aiming mode, an error may occur.

4. Fixes an issue with Tartaglia whereby his bow and arrow are positioned incorrectly while executing an Aimed Shot.

5. Fixes an issue with Kaedehara Kazuha whereby switching weapons while he is sheathing his sword may result in abnormal weapon display.

6. Fixes an issue with Rosaria and Eula whereby the characters' heads may not correctly face forward after sitting down.

7. Fixes an issue with Eula whereby the animation of her Lightfall Sword abnormally remains on the field after Eula unleashes her Elemental Burst at the same moment Eula dies from fall DMG.

8. Fixes an issue with the Anemo Traveler whereby resonating with the Statue of the Seven multiple times will result in Lv. 4 Constellation "Cherishing Breezes" and Passive Talent "Second Wind" not taking effect properly.

9. Fixes an issue whereby when the Traveler resonates with the Statue of the Seven, the other characters' Elemental Resonance effects are not activated at the same time.

10. Fixes an issue with·Mona whereby the reflections summoned by her continue to taunt enemies when the skill has already ended.

11. Fixes an issue with Yanfei whereby clipping occurs during her attack animations.

12. Fixes an issue whereby characters could not deal DMG to enemies after triggering an Overloaded reaction by inflicting elemental effects on themselves.

13. Fixes an issue whereby a character may fall to the bottom when performing a Plunging Attack while above the water surface.

14. Fixes an issue whereby attempting to sit down while switching characters will cause the character to teleport and sit down upon switching back to the initial character.

15. Fixes an issue whereby if a character uses a skill at certain locations, the skill effect becomes tilted.

● Audio

1. Fixes an issue whereby some sound effects are missing from some skills and gameplay, and adjusts sound effects in some environments.

2. Fixes an issue whereby some characters' voice lines are not triggered properly when the weather changes.

● System

1. Fixes an issue whereby some Artifact set names were displayed incorrectly in the rewards preview screen of Domains. The Artifact set names have been corrected to reflect their corresponding Set Bonus.

2. Fixes an issue in the Serenitea Pot whereby multiple characters can sit on the same spot on the Furnishing "Soft Lounge Sofa."

3. Fixes an issue in the Serenitea Pot whereby after switching Decorations > Doors, there is a small probability that multiple overlapping doors will be displayed.

● Other

1. Fixes an issue in Qingxu Pool, Liyue, whereby the Geo mechanism effects are not displayed properly (only visual effects are abnormal, puzzle gameplay is not affected).

2. Fixes an issue whereby the duration of healing dishes effects is incorrectly applied under certain circumstances.

3. Fixes an issue whereby the character is pushed aside by Paimon after opening the Paimon Menu under certain circumstances.

4. Fixes an issue with using controllers whereby crafting Furnishings or Dyes will result in default selection of the first option.

5. Fixes textual errors and display issues in Spanish, German, English, French, Indonesian, Japanese, and Russian and optimizes the localization of text. (Note: Related in-game functions have not changed. Travelers can view the changes in different languages by going to the Paimon Menu > Settings > Language and changing the Game Language.) Text-related fixes and optimizations in English include:

◆ Revises Kazuha's affiliation to be consistent with that of other characters of the same affiliation. Where the original affiliation reads "Crux Fleet" and the revised affiliation reads "The Crux".

◆ Revises Beidou's 4th Constellation effects to reflect what occurs in-game. The original description implies that she must take DMG to gain a 20% Electro DMG Bonus. The revised description states that attacked, Beidou gains an instance of Electro DMG instead.

◆ "Already" implies that the player knew how to create a certain item prior to this instance, which is misleading. It was thus removed.

◆ "Already" implies that the player had summoned a Waverider prior to this instance, which is misleading. It was thus removed.

*This is a work of fiction and is not related to any actual people, events, groups, or organizations.

#genshin impact #genshin impact updates #official #genshin impact news #genshin impact 2.0 #there we go #this is so exciting

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heyclickadee · 1 year ago

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Yep. I can see arguing that it’s different for background characters. I’ll admit that I tend to lean towards “the empire killed them” in the debate on what actually happened to the younger clone cadets and the tubies even though we don’t see their deaths on screen, but that’s because they’re; one, background characters, and two; kids and babies, and showing them getting killed on screen is a whole different animal than showing the same thing with adults (but I’m also very open to the idea that the cadets and tubies just got taken somewhere else). You can say that stormtrooper #603 probably died from falling off a thing. For main or even secondary characters, though, the rules are different.

Nobody’s sitting here debating whether or not Wilco, Governor Ames, Slip, Cade, Nolan, or Mayday died. Nobody goes back and forth over whether or not Hemlock tortured Crosshair. That all happened on screen, right in front of our eyebulbs and/or ears. And, conversely, I went back and checked—nobody really thought the Ninth Sister in Fallen Order was dead when she fell off of a high thing, and they only justification I saw anyone give was that she was cool. (And, turns out, they were right. She survived.) The idea that it’s suddenly different for Tech and that he MUST be dead despite *waves vaguely at the combination of storytelling conventions, foreshadowing, Tech’s demonstrated ability to hit long odds every time, vague cast and crew statements, and social media fuckery again* is one I just can’t get behind. I think there are a few reasons for it, though:

1. The moment Tech falls in “Plan 99” is expertly done and gut-wrenching because of it. It aims to rip out hearts and set them on fire, and it succeeds. If you’re attached to any of the characters on screen, it can be a little hard to pull yourself out of being punched by your feelings enough to pay attention to what’s happening. (Though I think this comes back around and rejects the idea that people are only arguing that Tech’s alive because they’re emotionally attached to the character. For my part, the only reason I did briefly start to buy that Tech was really dead (for a day or so about a week after the finale aired) was because of how much I love the character and how much he means to me on a personal level, not the other way around. So I’m sympathetic to this first one, and really don’t mind it or the next three categories, even if I disagree.)

2. Some fans find it easier to assume he’s dead and rip the band-aid off, just in case. (I’m also sympathetic to this, even if I’m not doing it).

3. Some fans want him to be dead for story reasons. For example, they don’t want Tech’s sacrifice to lose its weight in the event of the show bringing him back. And…I’m…sympathetic to this, but only to a point. I understand where people are coming from with this, but I can’t agree. I don’t see self-sacrifice as inherently toxic if done well, but the idea that self-sacrifice must equal self-annihilation in order to count absolutely is. If you accidentally walk out in front of a bus and a friend pushes you out of the way to save you but, tragically, gets hit by the bus themselves, it doesn’t suddenly not count as an act of love and sacrifice if they survive. Tech dying is not what gives that moment in “Plan 99” weight. Tech’s love for his family does. Their love and grief for him does. All of that exists in that moment and will continue to exist when he comes back. Besides, Tech isn’t choosing to die; he’s choosing to get the people he loves out of there alive by taking a massive risk that could get him killed, and that difference matters. So. Anyway. I get why people make this argument, even if I really don’t like it.

4. Some fans are exhausted by fake-out deaths in Star Wars. Which. Okay, I get that, I actually don’t think “no body, no death” should universally apply, and there have been some badly done fake-outs in the last forty odd years. That said, fake-out death isn’t a bad trope on its own—it can be a very good trope—and should be considered on a case by case basis. And the fact that they’re putting all their energy into this specific one is. Hmm. But still. I get it.

5. Maybe getting into some unkind speculation here, but: Some fans (getting into the Reddit dudebro territory here (dudebro is being used here as a gender neutral term)) are still upset that The Bad Batch isn’t Republic Commando and they hate the fact that Tech’s “death” is very cleanly set up to be a fake-out in a “if it’s a fakeout, it’s immaculate; if it’s a real death, the writing here is abysmal” kind of way, so they’re lashing out by trying to will Tech’s death into existence in the hopes that it will turn the show into what they want it to be. The first four categories don’t really throw the word delusional around, from what I’ve seen. They think Tech is dead, but they don’t mind that other people don’t. This fifth category, though? This are where most of the “delusional” comments come from, as far as I can tell. I’m not sympathetic to this. At all.

6. Definitely getting into unkind bit of speculation, but I think it’s warranted: A tiny minority of assholes are still angry that autistic Bad Batch fans got to be happy about Tech being like us, and they’re using the idea of Tech dying as a way to bully fans who would be very happy to see Tech back because they’re miserable people who can’t stomach the idea of anyone who might be a little different from them enjoying anything. Or they’re just generally angry that anyone not them likes the character. These people can go suck it.

Again, this is all just based off of anecdotal evidence, so it’s probably not very accurate. But this is how it looks from my point of view.

Anyway, Tech and Phee would (will) be that hyper-competent adventure couple who would also absolutely awaken the ancient horrors on purpose on a bi-monthly basis.

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whitehotharlots · 4 years ago

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The point is control

Whenever we think or talk about censorship, we usually conceptualize it as certain types of speech being somehow disallowed: maybe (rarely) it's made formally illegal by the government, maybe it's banned in certain venues, maybe the FCC will fine you if you broadcast it, maybe your boss will fire you if she learns of it, maybe your friends will stop talking to you if they see what you've written, etc. etc.

This understanding engenders a lot of mostly worthless discussion precisely because it's so broad. Pedants--usually arguing in favor of banning a certain work or idea--will often argue that speech protections only apply to direct, government bans. These bans, when they exist, are fairly narrow and apply only to those rare speech acts in which other people are put in danger by speech (yelling the N-word in a crowded theater, for example). This pedantry isn't correct even within its own terms, however, because plenty of people get in trouble for making threats. The FBI has an entire entrapment program dedicated to getting mentally ill muslims and rednecks to post stuff like "Death 2 the Super bowl!!" on twitter, arresting them, and the doing a press conference about how they heroically saved the world from terrorism.

Another, more recent pedant's trend is claiming that, actually, you do have freedom of speech; you just don't have freedom from the consequences of speech. This logic is eerily dictatorial and ignores the entire purpose of speech protections. Like, even in the history's most repressive regimes, people still technically had freedom of speech but not from consequences. Those leftist kids who the nazis beheaded for speaking out against the war were, by this logic, merely being held accountable.

The two conceptualizations of censorship I described above are, 99% of the time, deployed by people who are arguing in favor of a certain act of censorship but trying to exempt themselves from the moral implications of doing so. Censorship is rad when they get to do it, but they realize such a solipsism seems kinda icky so they need to explain how, actually, they're not censoring anybody, what they're doing is an act of righteous silencing that's a totally different matter. Maybe they associate censorship with groups they don't like, such as nazis or religious zealots. Maybe they have a vague dedication toward Enlightenment principles and don't want to be regarded as incurious dullards. Most typically, they're just afraid of the axe slicing both ways, and they want to make sure that the precedent they're establishing for others will not be applied to themselves.

Anyone who engages with this honestly for more than a few minutes will realize that censorship is much more complicated, especially in regards to its informal and social dimensions. We can all agree that society simply would not function if everyone said whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You might think your boss is a moron or your wife's dress doesn't look flattering, but you realize that such tidbits are probably best kept to yourself.

Again, this is a two-way proposition that everyone is seeking to balance. Do you really want people to verbalize every time they dislike or disagree with you? I sure as hell don't. And so, as part of a social compact, we learn to self-censor. Sometimes this is to the detriment of ourselves and our communities. Most often, however, it's just a price we have to pay in order to keep things from collapsing.

But as systems, large and small, grow increasingly more insane and untenable, so do the comportment standards of speech. The disconnect between America's reality and the image Americans have of themselves has never been more plainly obvious, and so striving for situational equanimity is no longer good enough. We can't just pretend cops aren't racist and the economy isn't run by venal retards or that the government places any value on the life of its citizens. There's too much evidence that contradicts all that, and the evidence is too omnipresent. There's too many damn internet videos, and only so many of them can be cast as Russian disinformation. So, sadly, we must abandon our old ways of communicating and embrace instead systems that are even more unstable, repressive, and insane than the ones that were previously in place.

Until very, very recently, nuance and big-picture, balanced thinking were considered signs of seriousness, if not intelligence. Such considerations were always exploited by shitheads to obfuscate things that otherwise would have seemed much less ambiguous, yes, but this fact alone does not mitigate the potential value of such an approach to understanding the world--especially since the stuff that's been offered up to replace it is, by every worthwhile metric, even worse.

So let's not pretend I'm Malcolm Gladwell or some similarly slimy asshole seeking to "both sides" a clearcut moral issue. Let's pretend I am me. Flash back to about a year ago, when there was real, widespread, and sustained support for police reform. Remember that? Seems like forever ago, man, but it was just last year... anyhow, now, remember what happened? Direct, issues-focused attempts to reform policing were knocked down. Blotted out. Instead, we were told two things: 1) we had to repeat the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE, and 2) we had to say it was actually very good and beautiful and nonviolent and valid when rioters burned down poor neighborhoods.

Now, in a relatively healthy discourse, it might have been possible for someone to say something like "while I agree that American policing is heavily violent and racist and requires substantial reforms, I worry that taking such an absolutist point of demanding abolition and cheering on the destruction of city blocks will be a political non-starter." This statement would have been, in retrospect, 100000000% correct. But could you have said it, in any worthwhile manner? If you had said something along those lines, what would the fallout had been? Would you have lost friends? Your job? Would you have suffered something more minor, like getting yelled at, told your opinion did not matter? Would your acquaintances still now--a year later, after their political project has failed beyond all dispute--would they still defame you in "whisper networks," never quite articulating your verbal sins but nonetheless informing others that you are a dangerous and bad person because one time you tried to tell them how utterly fucking self-destructive they were being? It is undeniably clear that last year's most-elevated voices were demanding not reform but catharsis. I hope they really had fun watching those immigrant-owned bodegas burn down, because that’s it, that will forever be remembered as the most palpable and consequential aspect of their shitty, selfish movement. We ain't reforming shit. Instead, we gave everyone who's already in power a blank check to fortify that power to a degree you and I cannot fully fathom.

But, oh, these people knew what they were doing. They were good little boys and girls. They have been rewarded with near-total control of the national discourse, and they are all either too guilt-ridden or too stupid to realize how badly they played into the hands of the structures they were supposedly trying to upend.

And so left-liberalism is now controlled by people whose worldview is equal parts superficial and incoherent. This was the only possible outcome that would have let the system continue to sustain itself in light of such immense evidence of its unsustainability without resulting in reform, so that's what has happened.

But... okay, let's take a step back. Let's focus on what I wanted to talk about when I started this.

I came across a post today from a young man who claimed that his high school English department head had been removed from his position and had his tenure revoked for refusing to remove three books from classrooms. This was, of course, fallout from the ongoing debate about Critical Race Theory. Two of those books were Marjane Satropi's Persepolis and, oh boy, The Diary of Anne Frank. Fuck. Jesus christ, fuck.

Now, here's the thing... When Persepolis was named, I assumed the bannors were anti-CRT. The graphic novel does not deal with racism all that much, at least not as its discussed contemporarily, but it centers an Iranian girl protagonist and maybe that upset Republican types. But Anne Frank? I'm sorry, but the most likely censors there are liberal identiarians who believe that teaching her diary amounts to centering the suffering of a white woman instead of talking about the One Real Racism, which must always be understood in an American context. The super woke cult group Black Hammer made waves recently with their #FuckAnneFrank campaign... you'd be hard pressed to find anyone associated with the GOP taking a firm stance against the diary since, oh, about 1975 or so.

So which side was it? That doesn't matter. What matters is, I cannot find out.

Now, pro-CRT people always accuse anti-CRT people of not knowing what CRT is, and then after making such accusations they always define CRT in a way that absolutely is not what CRT is. Pro-CRTers default to "they don't want students to read about slavery or racism." This is absolutely not true, and absolutely not what actual CRT concerns itself with. Slavery and racism have been mainstays of American history curriucla since before I was born. Even people who barely paid attention in school would admit this, if there were any more desire for honesty in our discourse.

My high school history teacher was a southern "lost causer" who took the south's side in the Civil War but nonetheless provided us with the most descriptive and unapologetic understandings of slavery's brutalities I had heard up until that point. He also unambiguously referred to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshmia and Nagasaki as "genocidal." Why? Because most people's politics are idiosyncratic, and because you cannot genuinely infer a person to believe one thing based on their opinion of another, tangentially related thing. The totality of human understanding used to be something open-minded people prided themselves on being aware of, believe it or not...

This is the problem with CRT. This is is the motivation behind the majority of people who wish to ban it. It’s not because they are necessarily racist themselves. It’s because they recognize, correctly, that the now-ascendant frames for understanding social issues boils everything down to a superficial patina that denies not only the realities of the systems they seek to upend but the very humanity of the people who exist within them. There is no humanity without depth and nuance and complexities and contradictions. When you argue otherwise, people will get mad and fight back.

And this is the most bitter irony of this idiotic debate: it was never about not wanting to teach the sinful or embarrassing parts of our history. That was a different debate, one that was settled and won long ago. It is instead an immense, embarrassing overreach on behalf of people who have bullied their way to complete dominance of their spheres of influence within media and academe assuming they could do the same to everyone else. Some of its purveyors may have convinced themselves that getting students to admit complicity in privilege will prevent police shootings, sure. But I know these people. I’ve spoken to them at length. I’ve read their work. The vast, vast majority of them aren’t that stupid. The point is to exert control. The point is to make sure they stay in charge and that nothing changes. The point is failure.

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astarlightmonbebe · 4 years ago

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the devil judge ep. 4: thoughts

i know i already wrote like five paragraphs of thoughts yesterday. well it turns out i had some more, though this post mostly focuses on what we learned in episode four, as well as other questions, and some analysis.

yohan and the fire.

the number one question we’re (the viewers) left with at the end of the episode is how much of the story yohan tells gaon is true. considering what we know, i would say most of it is, but likely there are some crucial parts are different. now, this isn’t only based on yohan’s cryptic, ‘i knew it, people like stories like this.’

here’s what we know about the fire, and about yohan:

1) in episode one, at the ending when yohan looks at gaon, he sees a fire, and remembers seeing his brother looking at him. he also remembers touching his brother’s face, with what looks like a teddy bear in his hand - which i’m pretty sure we see elijah holding in the episode four fire. since this is introduced first, in episode one, and is obviously a true flashback, i am assuming that this actually happened. however, in yohan’s events, we don’t actually see this scene. of course, it might just have been omitted between yohan crying and then him leaving the church, but it’s certainly interesting, especially because parts we see in flashback usually make an appearance when the full memory is revealed. also note that the scene of his brother looking at him happened after the fire was actually put out, in the blue lighting, when he should have already been dead - of course, it could have just been what yohan saw when he looked at gaon, or it could have actually happened.

2) the firefighter. in episode two, i think, we see yohan looking at homeless people and checking their wrists. his motive is confirmed in episode four, when he finally finds the firefighter who stole isaac’s watch. however, the firefighter is terrified enough of yohan that he has a panic attack of sorts when he sees him and then flees, eventually accumulating in his suicide. now, this reaction seems out of proportion compared to what we saw in yohan’s flashback. yes, the firefighter is guilty of stealing from a dead person, but there’s really no reason for him to be that scared of yohan. he could have just given the watch back and run away, but he fled as if terrified for his life instead. this insinuates that the firefighter had a negative experience with yohan during the church fire. also i’m 99% sure that the watch yohan takes back is the same one he gave to gaon which is interesting for many reasons.

3) elijah herself seems to hate yohan. now, this could be because she hates him for leaving her parents there and rescuing her instead of trying to save them, but apparently she wants him dead, which is a little concerning, especially since they are uncle and niece and live together. her reaction is strange towards someone who supposedly saved her life, and it doesn’t just seem to be because she wishes she hadn’t survived, etc.

4) yohan’s line at the end itself. this line clearly indicates that he told his story for the purpose of manipulating gaon. if the story itself is more sinister, it makes sense for him to share a version that would make gaon clearly empathize with him.

my conclusion based on all of this is that the events likely happened in the order, but that yohan’s position in all of this might have differed a bit, and not been as heroic as initially described. yohan genuinely hates the people in power, believes in the cruelty of the world, and has a reason to. however, he also benefits immensely from making the events more sympathetic towards him, which makes it hard for us, as viewers, to completely trust him. all i can say is that i hope he’s not lying entirely, because if he lied with the purpose of manipulating gaon and steering him away from the actual truth, by telling a story he knew would make gaon feel strongly about due to his own trauma and backstory, then that’s just a disaster in the making.

gaon as isaac’s lookalike.

this episode clearly established the story of kang isaac, who gaon shares a remarkable similarity to. there’s a possibility that he is isaac’s son, but that feels like it wouldn’t fit. gaon looks like he’s in his mid to late twenties. yohan is probably somewhere in his thirties, but it’s hard to tell with men that look like that lol. there’s at least a ten year age gap between them in my opinion. elijah is probably in her mid teens, given it has been ten years since the fire and she was a young child then. still, the ages don’t exactly match up, and there’s no scenario for how that could have occured, so why does he look exactly like isaac?

there’s also the fact that no one else has noted his resemblance to isaac. i can understand why the other rich people didn’t, but jung sunah spoke directly to gaon about isaac, but didn’t seem to note any similarity. now, it has been ten years since his death, and i think if people aren’t looking for similarity they won’t see it, especially since glasses change a person’s face, but the jarring similarity should have at least turned some heads.

yohan is seen to give gaon isaac’s watch. this is symbolic for many reasons. one of them, like yohan said, is because he’s syncing gaon to yohan’s time, another way of demonstrating how yohan is introducing gaon into his world, bringing an outsider in. but the fact that he gave gaon a watch that belonged to his dead brother who looks exactly like gaon says something else. almost as if gaon is transforming into isaac, or something weird like that. it was just weird, period, and yohan obviously made it a deliberate choice.

gaon and yohan in general.

i already talked about them quite a bit, and a lot of other people have as well, but this episode really served. first there was the white vs. black, especially when introducing gaon to the corrupt world of the rich. the white coat initially protects gaon in a way, but he takes it off when meeting with the actual rich people, as if his kind morality is not allowed there, further demonstrated by yohan bodily throwing him out of his chair when he tried to speak up. although jinjoo also went with yohan to a social event, gaon is invited to the intimate gathering of the top tier organizations, given a seat at the table, with yohan basically wanting him to see things as they are at the moment, making him aware of what yohan himself knows.

there was also the scene in the car, when yohan jerks the wheel. i think this scene was super interesting because it clearly demonstrates how yohan is just. not really that sane. which isn’t exactly what i mean, but i don’t know how else to describe it, because yohan isn’t exactly mentally unstable, though he certainly seems to be. instead, the yohan of today is just a mirror of the yohan who the priest described as the devil. he thrives off chaos. yes, his actions as a child were inventive and clever, but it also demonstrates how yohan can and will exploit other people for no other reason than enjoyment. the live court gives him the opportunity to do this to the whole world. he has a flair for dramatics, he’s the gamemaster, carefully orchestrating everything and enjoying the results for his benefit. not only is he making himself popular, but he’s turning himself into a godlike idol, which is honestly blasphemous considering the fact that he’s a judge, but it makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that he’s been called the devil, the judge robes look like a priest’s robes instead, he has the symbol of the cross on his back (scar), etc...it all adds up, and the religious imagery is frankly insane. one wonders if he’ll end up a martyr, or cast into fiery pits.

in cast interviews, or the clips that i’ve seen, gaon’s character has been referred to as an angel of sorts, a ray of hope. this is obviously in stark contrast to yohan, who is darkness, who is gray morality. gaon believes in the idea of justice taught in school, which i think makes sense when you consider the fact that his childhood was likely extremely unfair: living in poverty, parents killing themselves because of debt. he believes in lawful justice almost as if he has to, to have a chance to change things. he doesn’t understand what yohan is trying to make him understand: that lawful justice will never apply to the rich, that fairness doesn’t matter to million and billionaires, because they can change the law however they please the suit their benefits. it’s funny because that is what yohan is proving with the public, that the rich can be brought to justice. i’m really interested to see how their views will change when they get to know each other better and/or team up. there’s a lot of potential there (yes i’ve said this like five times. it’s all i think about right now.).

jung sunah.

i actually don’t have much more to say on that character, but as she’s revealed to be the actual head of the social responsibility foundation, we’re left wondering if mr. seo is just a figurehead, or if she just gained power by controlling him. idk if this makes sense - is she in charge charge of everything, or just in charge of mr. seo? i think next episode will more clearly demonstrate this.

the public, the ethics of live court shows, etc.

this episode was by far the most concerning one when it came to the live court show. whereas their first case was something that was clearly evil and neatly tied up, youngmin’s case was a brutal display of the power of the public and what it means when someone has the power to manipulate the public. youngmin definitely deserved to be punished. i think it’s actually super funny how his argument was that they didn’t have the right to judge him, when he did exactly that to everyone who suffered from his abuse. however, public flagellation seemed absurd. despite most people saying he deserved it, there was also the vibe that most people didn’t believe it would actually be shown. however, when it was, you could see that most of the public was deeply unsettled by this. yohan’s cult was also demonstrated in this scene, from the people cheering.

was youngmin’s punishment justice? maybe, in a way. i don’t think there really was a punishment that would be right for him. flogging would scare him, but it also ignites his anger. in prison he might live a better life than most, but he would also be kept away from people he could hurt, which is kind of the purpose of prisons.

the flogging felt very dystopian, but i think it also showed the danger of the live court show perfectly. not only did it incite people and their bloodthirst at being offered a sort of justice, but it also showed how people feel when confronted with a decision they chose. over 95% of people chose for that punishment to be carried out, but few appeared to actually enjoy seeing it carried out. it’s a lot easier to click a button and feel as if you don’t matter in the large scheme of things than it is to see what happened as a result of you and many other people choosing to do something. it showed the power of the public, or more exactly, how yohan was able to manipulate the public into torturing cha kyunghee and ripping her family apart slowly.

at the end of the day, i doubt few (of the viewers, at least, though i don’t really know) were actually satisfied or happy by youngmin’s punishment. it might have been satisfying to see his court breakdown, but when it comes down to it, it’s just more human suffering.

it also begs the question of if yohan will ever be put on trial. could that even happen? it seems an almost inevitable conclusion to his trajectory right now - when you fight corruption with corruption, the only thing left when the corruption is gone is your corrupted self - but i think right now he’s also building the public as a way to protect himself, which has proved right so far. it’s interesting to wonder if the public will ever turn on him, and what will happen if public opinion shifts.

#the devil judge #tvn the devil judge #episode four #kdrama #i mean the viki translation for the ending line is wildly different from the dramanice trans #it says 'indeed people put on a show by saying things like that'#which is a little concerning for me. but yk #i'm not here to debate the prison system btw i don't have the energy for that #anyways many thoughts #i think this is all #it's mostly just me having thoughts again #bsjajs did i even say anything new WHO KNOWS

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alatismeni-theitsa · 4 years ago

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(1/2) I know this is some controversial topic and that you sometimes cover US politics, but what do you think the american left needs to improve to reach to more people and be taken more seriously?; It's unbelievable that in the very 2021, apolitical folk are still fallin into the whole "the leftist are a bunch of crazies" narrative, we may do some pushback the last three years against conservative politics.

(2/2) But it's still not enough; on your personal opinion, what fundamental core value needs to be changed to engage to these apolitical people and that leftist want politics to improve the quality of life of the population without being labeled as a "petulant, whiney children" There's some greek-flavored advice that we can apply to our discourse? Thanks in advance :)

========================== END OF ASK ======================

Ooooo… Great question! And by “great” I mean “Do you want me to go down in flames and get cut a thousand times with pitchforks??” xD But it’s very interesting so I will answer it! And you will be subjected to an essay of 3.200 words 😘💅 (I want to be meticulous, don’t come at me)

Please assume the tone is light and conversational. I am not in a very serious or dramatic mood, and I don’t want to estrange any group by assuming the role of an all knowing tutor or someone who always has the high moral ground. This is just 1am blabbering.

I am not against leftists. On the contrary, I know their side so well that I think I have a solid opinion on its flaws. (I have friends who are left- okay I’ll stop xD) Needless to say, the right side also has flaws and the two sides often share flaws. But right now, we are only talking about the leftists. And of course, #notallleftists xD I recognize that leftists are ordinary and diverse people with empathy and capability of critical thinking and problem-solving (Did I mention I have friends who ar--) Jokes aside, I think my following is quite left leaning and I am not bashing them here. I am criticizing the movement as a whole and trying to see where it can be improved.

***** Anyways, I will generalize the bad traits for the sake of everyone’s time, it’s what I am saying! So, when I say “they” I will probably mean “some” or “the bad apples” etc. *****

To begin, US leftists don’t want to, but they are accidentally imperialist xD Unfortunately, they don't know much about other countries, and they don’t usually have knowledge of countries they are talking about if they don’t have an immediate connection to them. Not knowing things is fine, but when people on this site are like “ugh Americans” this points to an ignorance and a sort of entitlement that doesn’t occur this often in other countries. My internet cycle is overwhelmingly leftist and yet I continue seeing willingness for ignorance all around - and when I check it’s not by conservatives.

Leftists think their (social and not) politics apply to every country and culture, that people in different countries classify themselves as they do in the US. And when people from those countries talk about their problems, there is always an American that wants to give input based on American politics, and without knowing the situation in this other country they want to talk about. Ironically, the last one is a behavior of conservative politicians. Conservative politicians and citizens sometimes think it’s fine to intervene in other countries for “the greater good”. Well, leftists do the same but on the internet. It stalls conversation and makes it messy and force foreigners to apply to American standards.

Because leftists don't understand social differences between countries, they project their own politics, and that can make them seem obsessed with skin color and blind to cultural diversity. They act like only Americans or certain countries have every lived through colonialism and suffered slaughter and slavery. (Because they don’t feel the need to study and learn further.) To an American that might not be the case, but when Americans converse with foreigners about foreign issues, they seem to have a blind spot.

They act as if only white, cis, straight people can be perpetrators of imperialism. Booyyy I have news xD Yes, of course white, cis, straight people can be perpetrators of imperialism, but the attitude that they are the first to blame, always, it’s faulted. I have many experiences, but let’s start with a very simple one, of an Indian American young woman who thought only a lota can clean you with water in the toilet, and that Europeans haven’t heard of bidets or any other means of cleanliness (or that they have the bathtub RIGHT THERE xD) One of the highlights was a Black woman insisting “Medusa was Black because my grandma told me” despite what Greeks were telling her.

Another thing that stuck with me was the case of a Greek who wanted to write about the people who happen to be a minority in the US (you would call them poc I guess). Many people from those countries were enthusiastic about the project and aided the writer as much as they could, sharing culture and realizing how many things in common they had. But it was from same populations in the US that the writer found people who blamed them for daring to write something outside of their culture. (To explain, most US Americans were fine, but only in the US were some who were hostile). Or, I have seen Chinese Americans being offended by a certain thing (I think it was something about fashion) saying “this is an offense to Chinese culture” meanwhile Chinese people from everywhere else in the world (99% of Chinese, I’d say) said “I don’t understand… this is fine!”

Many US American poc categorize all light skinned Caucasians of the world as White Americans and the rest are the “cultured” Black or Brown people. US Americans are now learning that Slavic cultures exist and it’s… something else to watch leftists realizing light skinned people can have great embroidery and they are not actually stealing Mexican traditional clothing xD (reference to an obscure “calling out” comment on tik tok).

I don’t specifically target US poc here, I am just mentioning that everyone conveniently forgets them as if they are untouchable and never said anything ignorant, while they are as active on social media causes as other Americans. In fact, if most poc are aligned to a side, that would be the Left. They are a very big part of the progressive movement – and that’s why I am giving so much space here for them – but then it seems they can’t have a share of the “bad” things of the leftist movement, only the good. Which is humanly impossible, to be always correct.

That’s one of the problems of leftism, that in a way pardons certain minorities and by doing that it not only lets the problematic bubbles grow but also infantilizes those minorities because it passes the message that “they can never do anything wrong”. While background matters when having an opinion, I see that skin-color goes ridiculously above opinion on these matters, which is not very egalitarian. When I argue with a person, the last thing I see is the person’s skin color. When someone says “ancient Greeks were actually a Black nation ad then they became White” I don’t care how this person looks like. No matter your skin color, you must take responsibility for the misinformation you are spreading. I won’t assume that because someone is a poc that they can’t study and learn more about the matter of discussion.

So… the “issue” doesn’t come from being white, cis, straight etc but from being raised as a US American. I don’t imply by any means that being a US American is bad. The last thing I want to do here is enforce guilt. (If you are feeling guilty already I must be mistaken in my wording so I am sorry for that). I am talking about certain beliefs that come with raised as a US American. Similarly, many beliefs a Greek can have are because of their environment. Everyone is affected by their background in one way or another.

American leftists believe that even the piss poor British farmers benefited from colonialism – and still benefit perhaps on a systemic scale. So, with the same logic, even the lowest layers of the US American society benefit from imperialism and war crimes overseas. (Truth is the quality of living in the US is great and extremely progressive compared to most of the world, because of the US’ politics. I had analyzed this in a previous post). But American leftists never mention that when it comes to THEIR case, because it doesn’t give them an advantage.

To tie it up with how American leftists see the world, there is youtuber I like, who is a US American woc and one time she said “My country is bombing Brown people” in an annoyed tone and it just sounded so offensive I closed the video. It’s obvious the youtuber doesn’t support the bombing, but it was just the phrasing which left a bitter taste in my mouth the whole day. It was the fact that 1) she could make a statement in an annoyed/joking tone 2) people in those countries don’t identify as “Brown” outside the US (and you are talking about them now) 3) your country is indeed bombing them so maybe at least categorize them as they wish?? They have a certain ethnicity, so mention that and stop categorizing them like dog breeds! They already have the bombs, do you want them to hear Americans categorize them like that?

Moreover, many US leftists think they care about other countries while, in actuality, they don’t. They just want to make other countries have the exact progressive US politics - because that’s the only “correct” political system they know. That shows even in kind of superficial matters. In a movie about Greek mythology, they will make sure there is an American Arab, an American Black person, an American East Asian person etc (which would be a cast that would reflect American diversity, not Mediterranean) and are hesitant to cast Greeks or ask Greeks how the portrayal of the story and figures could be better and respecting.

Another thing, they take everything too personally. They think success and failure of a movement is highly dependent on them as an individual. It’s difficult for them to approach a harsh past or present situation in a levelheaded manner because they don’t realize this situation has been universal. So, they feel a special kind of guilt and that makes them over apologetic but also overzealous (like a righteous self-flogging zealot) and that is what drives people away. They combine that behavior with ignorance about the rest of the world, and you can see why a non-US American might want to keep their distance.

I had some Americans apologizing to me because their ancestors did something to Greeks and just… don’t. I know you have the best intentions, but it makes everyone – even me – feel bad. There is no need for apologizing because 1) you and your family did nothing wrong 2) it was centuries ago 3) this bad shit happens/happened literally everywhere. You might as well apologize for your people knowing how to cook. It’s FINE, really, it’s FINE. For instance, do you think I have a grudge on YOUR people running a slave trade six centuries ago while there was dozen active slavetrades in the area, and while Greeks of the Byzantine empire probably bought slaves some decades before they were sold to slavery themselves? Do you see what a mess this is? Not only it doesn’t fix anything, but you also put unnecessary weight on yourself, as an individual. It’s fine to be aware and trying to fix past mistakes - if it’s possible - but there is a certain delicate process that must be followed. Not… whatever this is.

To continue on the extreme individualism, leftists think it's the end of the world if they have done or said something controversial (and that's also because they have cultivated a culture where any small transgression is a potential danger to the whole society :p aka "the left eats itself"). Around them people feel they must tread on eggshells just in case they phrase a thing wrong or post something that could be linked to a person the Left doesn't like.

The left is also on the extremes, so I have to put 1000 disclaimers every time I say something. (I guarantee that the example with the Chinese people will be translated by some Americans like “Theitsa promotes Asian hate!!”) Do you know who doesn't annoy me if I don't put 1000 disclaimers? Certainly not Conservatives. I had more harassment from leftists than I had from actual nazis, even though my blog is not conservative or (god forbid!!) supportive of nazism or any type of supremacy. Even nazis completely understand my beliefs before they send hate. (It might be odd but I never had one not understanding my point xD) But the leftists who sent hate misinterpret stuff, or they don’t bother reading actual posts. The funny thing is that I usually agree with these progressives in 99% of issues but they don’t care asking or learning, they just decide our morals are opposite. I mean they don’t have to like me, but many leftists don’t even read the basics.

On top of that, leftists rarely want to have a conversation with a conservative. I don't say go and AGREE with a conservative, I say just talk. (see? I feel the need to clarify here because many leftists might say “Theitsa wants us to go and AGREE with conservatives! Does Theitsa want us to become nazis and homophobes???”) How does one feel they have to be sooo righteous and then cauterize every member of society who disagrees with them? Why do leftists rarely want to have a conversation? Some people were ready to attack me for referencing a meme which referenced Steven Crowder, as if that shows I am his supporter 😩 (Guilty by association is strong on the leftist side and it’s very reminiscent of authoritarian tactics, another thing that needs to be improved, to my opinion.)

I don’t support Crowder (I know Crowder has done awful stuff) but I shouldn’t be scared to admit I like the “change my mind” episodes. (Flash news, leftists, you might like a part from a person’s work and not 100% support that person!) I like the episodes because both sides are heard, the conversation is civil (for the most part xD) and I can see the thought process of the two speakers as they explain their worries and what solutions are out there.

Most of all, in those episodes I see how BOTH sides CARE about the SAME problems, it’s just the perspectives that differ. And those conversations highlight the issues the left hasn’t studied very well, so it helps the leftists understand what they need to learn in order to better society. But where the “immaturity“ of the leftist side can show is in the unwillingness to approach the “opponent“ as a human just like them.

(They might instead prefer to call Mexicans white supremacists and claim that “whiteness” has no color because quite a few poc voted Republican, as some leftist news sources have stated)

What is more, is it just my idea or conservatives understand leftists better than leftists understand conservatives? Of course both sides jokes about the other one but I am talking about the serious talks. Leftists just describe conservatives as horrible people who want all minorities to perish and we must not talk to them while, surprisingly, the conservatives are the ones who stereotype less the opposite side. (I am talking about the normal, moderate people). From what I have seen, most simple people who are conservatives DON’T want the US’ ethnic and sexual minorities to perish. They are worried about problems they don’t have a good understanding about. And the only way to make them understand it’s to… talk to them, show them what good the left to offer.

Some leftists think conversation is “emotional labor” but 1) that applies to actual labor as in… jobs, so stop invalidating doctors, nurses, teachers etc, 2) yeah, sorry, sometimes things get difficult and you have to explain your side. (As non US-Americans endlessly have to do for US-Americans). That was, is and will be life until the sun swallows us all. You can’t be THAT militant on social media with 100 posts per day and remembering 50 different campaigns about social issues but the moment someone genuinely asks you for directions on your side you shut them off with “why do you demand labor from me? Do your own research” (hint: most likely they have done their research, but they are stuck, and you don’t help them like this).

If you are very tired and don’t want to explain (as it is your right) you can be polite about it and not blame the individual about their circumstances when they are trying to learn. If you DO want to explain but you get tired, be more organized. Have posts and F.A.Q.s ready, or send them to someone else (a friend, a blog, a youtube channel, an article, whatever). Instead of leftists arguing their positions, sometimes they are like “Do more research and realize I am right.” Yyyeah the other person is not gonna do that – especially because you haven’t pointed them anywhere or supported your position with arguments. Moreover, leftists can have the attitude of “I stand for PROGRESS, how can I ever be wrong??” Weeell things are not black and white and me, you, everyone has the potential to not have a not that beneficial to society position at some issues no matter where we stand on the political compass.

For the “petty whiny children” thing, I believe a lot of people might think that because the youth is usually making noise about progressive issues on social media. It’s true that oftentimes in social media discussions their emotions get the best of them (it’s happened to everyone) but combined with the lack of life experience they may have about the world, the argument sounds silly. (I heard one leftist university student say that the US shouldn’t have borders because borders are bad but then they realized they don’t want people to come and go as they please in the US, so she said there should be SNIPERS in the borders to shot everyone who tries to get in…….)

And, as I mentioned, the leftists are very quick to cancel and attack for the slightest transgression so people prefer to deal with the conservatives who can, at least, take a slight misstep, than meddling with people who are going to cancel them for doing or not doing a small, insignificant, but not ‘woke enough’ thing. Leftists are constantly checking each other to see if they are doing better and better (even in silly issues) and that can be intimidating to someone who is new to politics.

Some leftists get REALLY turned on by righteousness (Frollo villain style) and instead of trying to unite the society, they aim to divide it further. They don’t want to create bridges but burn them and find themselves on the “right side“ of morals.

And, last but not least, they don’t realize leftist propaganda is a thing. Malicious people are EVERYWHERE and they don’t just magically avoid the left. Leftists are not automatically super virtuous people. There are some manipulators and bullies around, so one has to be cautious even with leftist sources. (Cross-examine stuff, always. You might have the best intentions but accidentally share something nonfactual because you trusted a source).

Ok that was all, I think. To anyone who comments, PLEASE keep the tones down, have a conversation, take it slow, remember it doesn’t help us being hateful towards each other. (And causing serious friction wasn’t the purpose of this post). Oh, and if you need a clarification on something I said, before gossiping with your friends about how awful I am, do me the courtesy of first asking me what I meant xD

#answered #leftism #leftist #us politics #progressivism #progressive #long post

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

Link

Stefanie Gray explains why, as a teenager, she was so anxious to leave her home state of Florida to go to college.

“I went to garbage schools and I’m from a garbage low-income suburb where everyone sucks Oxycontin all day,” she says. “I needed to get out.”

She got into Hunter College in New York, but both her parents had died and she had nowhere near enough to pay tuition, so she borrowed. “I just had nothing and was poor as hell, so I took out loans,” she says.

This being 2006, just a year after the infamous Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 was passed, she believed news stories about student loans being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. She believed they would be with her for life, or until they were paid off.

“My understanding was, it’s better to purchase 55 big-screen TVs on a credit card, and discharge that in a court of law, then be a student who’s getting an education,” she says.

Still, she asked for financial aid: “I was like, ‘My parents are dead, I'm a literal fucking orphan, I have no siblings. I'm just taking out this money to put my ass through school.”

Instead of a denial, she got plenty of credit, including a slice of what were called “direct-to-consumer” loans, that came with a whopping 14% interest rate. One of her loans also came from a company called MyRichUncle that, before going bankrupt in 2009, would briefly become famous for running an ad disclosing a kickback system that existed between student lenders and college financial aid offices.

Gray was not the cliché undergrad, majoring in intersectional basket-weaving with no plan to repay her loans. She took geographical mapping, with the specific aim of getting a paying job quickly. But she graduated in the middle of the post-2008 crash, when “53% of people 18 to 29 were unemployed or underemployed.”

“I couldn't even get a job scrubbing toilets at a local motel,” she recalls. “They told me straight up that I was over-educated. I was like, “Literally, I'll do your housekeeping. I don't give a shit, just let me make money and not get evicted and end up homeless.”

The lender Sallie Mae at the time had an amusingly loathsome policy of charging a repeating $150 fee every three months just for the privilege of applying for forbearance. Gray was so pissed about having to pay $50 a month just to say she was broke that she started a change.org petition that ended up gathering 170,000 signatures.

She personally delivered those to the Washington offices of Sallie Mae and ended up extracting a compromise out of the firm: they’d still charge the fee, but she could at least apply it to her balance, as opposed to just sticking it in the company’s pocket as an extra. This meager “partial” victory over a student lender was so rare, the New York Times wrote about it.

“I definitely poked the bear,” she says.

Gray still owed a ton of student debt — it had ballooned from $36,000 to $77,000, in fact — and collectors were calling her nonstop, perhaps with a little edge thanks to who she was. “They were telling me I should hit up people I know for money, which was one thing,” she recalls. “But when they started talking about giving blood, or selling plasma… I don’t know.”

Sallie Mae ultimately sued Gray four times. In doing so, they made a strange error. It might have slipped by, but for luck. “By the grace of God,” Gray said, she met a man in the lobby of a courthouse, a future state Senator named Kevin Thomas, who took a look at her case. “Huh, I’ve got some ideas,” he said, eventually pointing to a problem right at the top of her lawsuit.

Sallie Mae did not represent itself in court as Sallie Mae. The listed plaintiff was “SLM Private Credit Student Loan Trust VL Funding LLC.” As was increasingly the case with mortgages and other forms of debt, student loans by then were typically gathered, pooled, and chopped into slices called tranches, to be marketed to investors. Gray, essentially, was being sued by a tranche of student loan debt, a little like being sued by the coach section of an airline flight.

When Thomas advised her to look up the plaintiff’s name, she discovered it wasn’t registered to do business in the State of New York, which prompted the judge to rule that the entity lacked standing to sue. He fined Sallie Mae $10,000 for “nonsense” and gave Gray another rare victory over a student lender, which she ended up writing about herself this time, in The Guardian.

Corporate creditors often play probabilities and mass-sue even if they don’t always have great cases, knowing a huge percentage of borrowers either won’t show up in court (as with credit card holders) or will agree to anything to avoid judgments, the usual scenario with student borrowers.

“What usually happens in pretty much 99% of these cases is you beg and plead and say, ‘Please don't put a judgment against me, I'll do anything… because a judgment against you means you're not going to be able to buy a home, you’re not going to be able to do basically anything involving credit for the next 20 years.”

…

The passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was a classic demonstration of how America works, or doesn’t, depending on your point of view. While we focus on differences between Republicans and Democrats, it’s their uncanny habit of having just a sliver of enough agreement to pass crucial industry-friendly bills that really defines the parties.

Whether it’s NAFTA, the Iraq War authorization, or the Obama stimulus, there are always just enough aisle-crossers to get the job done, and the tally usually tracks with industry money with humorous accuracy. In this law signed by George Bush, sponsored by Republican Chuck Grassley, and greased by millions in donations from entities like Sallie Mae, the crucial votes were cast by a handful of aisle-crossing Democrats, including especially the Delawareans Joe Biden and Tom Carper. Hillary Clinton, who took $140,000 from bank interests in her Senate run, had voted for an earlier version.

Party intrigue is only part of the magic of American politics. Public relations matter, too, and the Bankruptcy Bill turned out to be the poster child for another cherished national phenomenon: the double-lie.

…

Years later, pundits still debate whether there really ever was an epidemic of debt-fleeing deadbeats, or whether legislators in 2005 who just a few years later gave “fresh starts” to bankrupt Wall Street banks ever cared about “moral hazard,” or if it’s fair to cut off a single Mom in a trailer when Donald Trump got to brag about “brilliantly” filing four commercial bankruptcies, and so on.

In other words, we argue the why of the bill, but not the what. What did that law say, exactly? For years, it was believed that it absolutely closed the door on bankruptcy for whole classes of borrowers, and one in particular: students. Nearly fifteen years after the bill’s passage, journalists were still using language like, “The bill made it completely impossible to discharge student loan debt.”

…

The phrase “Just asking questions” today often carries a negative connotation. It’s the language of the conspiracy theorist, we’re told. But sometimes in America we’re just not told the whole story, and when the press can’t or won’t do it, it’s left to individual people to fill in the blanks. In a few rare cases, they find out something they weren’t supposed to, and in rarer cases still, they learn enough to beat the system. This is one of those stories.

…

Smith’s explanation of the history of the student loan exemption and where it all went wrong is biting and psychologically astute. In his telling, the courts’ historically sneering attitude toward student borrowers has its roots in an ages-old generational debate.

“This started out as an an argument between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers,” Smith notes. “A lot of the law was created by people railing against draft-dodging deadbeat hippies.”

He points to a 1980 ruling by a judge named Richard Merrick, who in denying relief to a former student, wrote the following:

The arrogance of former students who had received so much from society, frequently including draft deferment, and who had given back so little in return, accompanied by their vehemence in asserting their constitutional and statutory rights, frequently were not well received by legislators and jurists, senior to them, who had lived through the Depression, had worked their ways through college and graduate school, had served in World War II, and had been paying the taxes which made possible the student loans.

Smith laughs about this I didn’t climb the hills at Normandy with a knife in my teeth just to eat the debt on your useless-ass liberal arts degree perspective, noting that “when those guys who did all that complaining went to school, only rich prep school kids went to college, and by the way, tuition was like ten bucks.” Still, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the conservative position.

…

This concern about “deadbeats” gaming the system — kids taking out fat loans to go to school and bailing on them before the end of the graduation party — led that 1985 court to take a hardcore position against students who made “virtually no attempt to repay.” They established a three-pronged standard that came to be known as the “Brunner test” for determining if a student faced enough “undue hardship” to be granted relief from student debt.

Among other things, the court ruled that a newly graduated student had to do more than demonstrate a temporary inability to handle bills. Instead, a “total incapacity now and in the future to pay” had to be present for a court to grant relief. Over the course of the next decades, it became axiomatic that basically no sentient being could pass the Brunner test.

…

In 2015, he was practicing law at the Texas litigation firm Bickel and Brewer when he came across a case involving a former Pace University student named Lesley Campbell, who was seeking to discharge a $15,000 loan she took out while studying for a bar exam. Smith believed a loan given out to a woman who’d already completed her studies, and who used the money to pay for rent and groceries, was not covering an “educational benefit” as required by law. A judge named Carla Craig agreed and canceled Campbell’s loan, and Campbell v. Citibank became one of the earlier dents in the public perception that there were no exceptions to the prohibition on discharging student debts.

“I thought, ‘Wait, what? This might be important,’” says Smith.

By law, Smith believed, lenders needed to be wary of three major exceptions to the non-dischargeability rule:

— If a loan was not made to a student attending a Title IV accredited school, he thought it was probably not a “qualified educational loan.”

— If the student was not a full-time student — in practice, this meant taking less than six credits — the loan was probably dischargeable.

— And if the loan was made in an amount over and above the actual cost of attending an accredited school, the excess might not be “eligible” money, and potentially dischargeable.

Practically speaking, this means if you got a loan for an unaccredited school, were not a full-time student, or borrowed for something other than school expenses, you might be eligible for relief in court.

Smith found companies had been working around these restrictions in the blunt predatory spirit of a giant-sized Columbia Record Club. Companies lent hundreds of thousands to teenagers over and above the cost of tuition, or to people who’d already graduated, or to attendees of dubious unaccredited institutions, or to a dozen other inappropriate destinations. Then they called these glorified credit card balances non-dischargeable educational debts — Gray got one of these “direct-to-consumer” specials — and either sold them into the financial system as investments, borrowed against them as positive assets, or both.

…

Smith thought these practices were nuts, and tried to convince his bosses to start suing financial companies.

“They were like, ‘You do know what we do around here, right?’ We defend banks,” he recalls, laughing. “I said, ‘Not these particular banks.’ They said it didn’t matter, it was a question of optics, and besides, who was going to pay off in the end? A bunch of penniless students?”

Furious, Smith stormed off, deciding to hang his own shingle and fight the system on his own. “My sister kept saying to me, ‘You have to stop trying to live in a John Grisham novel,’” he recalls, laughing. “There were parts of it where I was probably super melodramatic, saying things like, ‘I'm going to go find justice.’”

Slowly however, Smith did find clients, and began filing and winning cases. With each suit, he learned more and more about student lenders. In one critical moment, he discovered that the same companies who were representing in court that their loans were absolutely non-dischargeable were telling investors something entirely different. In one prospectus for a trust packed full of loans managed by Sallie Mae, investors were told that the process for creating the aforementioned “direct-to-consumer” loans:

Does not involve school certification as an additional control and, therefore, may be subject to some additional risk that the loans are not used for qualified education expenses… You will bear any risk of loss resulting from the discharge.

Sallie Mae was warning investors that the loans might be discharged in bankruptcy. Why the honesty? Because the parties who’d be packaging and selling these student loan-backed instruments included Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank.

“It’s one thing to lie to a bunch of broke students. They don’t matter,” Smith says. “It’s another to lie to JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. You screw those people, they’ll fight back.”

…

In June of 2018, a case involving a Navy veteran named Kevin Rosenberg went through the courts. Rosenberg owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and tried to keep current on his loans, but after his hiking and camping store folded in 2017, he found himself busted and unable to pay. His case was essentially the opposite of Brunner: he clearly hadn’t tried to game the system, he made a good faith effort to pay, and he demonstrated a long-term inability to make good. All of this was taken into consideration by a judge named Cecilia Morris, who ruled that Rosenberg qualified for “undue hardship.”

“Most people… believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” Morris wrote. “This Court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.” The ruling essentially blew up the legend of the unbeatable Brunner standard.

Given a fresh start, Rosenberg moved to Norway to become an Arctic tour guide. “I want people to know that this is a viable option,” he said at the time. The ruling attracted a small flurry of news attention, including a feature in the Wall Street Journal, as the case sent a tremor through the student lending world. More and more people were now testing their luck in bankruptcy, suing their lenders, and asking more and more uncomfortable questions about the nature of the education business.

In the summer of 2012, a former bond trader named Michael Grabis sat in the waiting room of a Manhattan financial company, biding time before a job interview. In the eighties, Grabis’s father was a successful bond trader who worked in a swank office atop the World Trade Center, but after the 1987 crash, the family fell out of the smart set overnight. His father lost his job and spiraled, his mother had to look for a job, and “we just became working class people.”

Michael tried to rewrite the family story, going to school and going into the bond business himself, first with the Bank of New York, and eventually for Schwab. But he, too, lost his job in a crash, in 2008, and now was trying to break the pattern of bubble economy misery. However, he’d exited Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College in the nineties carrying tens of thousands in student loans. That number had since been compounded by fees and penalties, and the usual letters, notices, and phone calls from debt collectors came nonstop.

Now, awaiting a job interview, his phone rang again. It was a collection call for Sallie Mae, and it wasn’t just one voice on the line.

“They had two women call at once,” Grabis recalls. “They told me I’d made bad life choices, that I lived in too expensive a city, that I had to move to a cheaper place, so I could afford to pay them,” Grabis explains. “I tried to tell them I was literally at that moment trying to get a job to help pay my bills, but these people are trained to just hound you without listening. I was shaking when I got off the phone, and ended up having a bad interview.”

Two years later, more out of desperation and anger than any real expectation of relief, Grabis went to federal court in the Southern District of New York and filed for bankruptcy. At the time, he, too, believed student loans could not be eliminated. But the more he read about the way student loans were constructed and sold — he’d had experience in doing shovel-work constructing mortgage-backed securities, so he understood the Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) market — he started to develop a theory. Everyone dealing with the finances of higher education in America knew the system was rotten, he thought. But what if someone could prove it?

The 2005 Bankruptcy Act says former students can’t discharge loans for “qualified educational expenses,” i.e. loans given to students so that they might attend tax-exempt non-profit educational institutions. Historically, that exemption covered almost all higher education loans.

What if America’s universities no longer deserve their non-profit status? What if they’re no longer schools, and are instead first and foremost crude profit-making ventures, leveraging federal bankruptcy law and the I.R.S. code into a single, ongoing predatory lending scheme?

This is essentially what Grabis argued, in a motion filed last January. He named Navient, Lafayette College, the U.S. Department of Education, Joe Biden, his own exasperated judge, and a host of other “unknown co-perpetrators” as part of a scheme against him, claiming the entirety of America’s higher education business had become an illegal moneymaking scam.

“They created a fraud,” he says flatly.

…

Grabis doesn’t have a lawyer, his case has been going on for the better part of six years, and at first blush, his argument sounds like a Hail Mary from a desperate debtor. The only catch is, he might be right.

By any metric, something unnatural is going on in the education business. While other industries in America suffered declines thanks to financial crises, increased exposure to foreign competition, and other factors, higher education has grown suspiciously fat in the last half-century. Tuition costs are up 100% at universities over and above inflation since 2000, despite the 2008 crash, with some schools jacking up prices at three, four times the rate of inflation dating back to the seventies.

Bloat at the administrative level makes the average university look like a parody of an NFL team, where every brain-dead cousin to the owner gets on the payroll. According to Education Week, “fundraisers, financial aid advisers, global recruitment staff, and many others grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009,” which is ten times the rate of growth for tenured faculty positions.

…

Hovering over all this is a fact not generally known to the public: many American universities, even ones claiming to be broke, are sitting atop mountains of reserve cash. In 2013, after the University of Wisconsin blamed post-crash troubles for raising tuition 5.5%, UW system president Kevin Reilly in 2013 admitted that the school actually held $638 million in reserve, separate and distinct from the school endowment. Moreover, Reilly said, other big schools were doing the same thing. UW’s reserve was 25% of its operating budget, for instance, but the University of Minnesota’s was 29%, while Illinois maintained a whopping 34% buffer.

When Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice looked into it, he found many other schools were sitting atop mass reserves even as they pleaded poverty to raise tuition rates. “They’re all doing it,” he said.

In the mortgage bubble that led to the 2008 crash, financiers siphoned fortunes off home loans that were unlikely to be repaid. Student loans are the same game, but worse. All the key players get richer as that $1.7 trillion pile of debt expands, and the fact that everyone knows huge percentages of student borrowers will never pay is immaterial. More campus palaces get built, more administrators get added to payrolls, and perhaps most importantly, the list of assets grows for financial companies, whether or not the loans perform.

…

“As long as it’s collateralized at Navient, they can borrow against that,” Smith says. “They say, ‘Look, we've got $3 billion in assets, which are just consumer loans in negative amortization that are not being repaid, but are being artificially kept out of default so Navient can borrow against that from other banks.

“When I realized that, I was like, ‘Oh, my god. They’re happy that the loans are growing instead of being repaid, because it gives them more collateral to borrow against.’” Smith’s comments echo complaints made by virtually every student borrower in trouble I’ve ever interviewed: lenders are not motivated to reduce the size of balances by actually getting paid. Instead, the game is about keeping loans alive and endlessly growing the balance, through new fees, penalties, etc.

There are two ways of approaching reform of the system. One is the Bernie Sanders route, which would involve debt forgiveness and free higher education. A market-based approach meanwhile dreams of reintroducing discipline into student lending; if students could default, schools couldn’t endlessly raise costs on the back of unlimited government-backed credit.

Which idea is more correct can be debated, but the one thing we know for sure is that the current system is the worst of both worlds, enriching all the most undeserving actors, and hitting that increasingly prevalent policy sweet spot of privatized profit and socialized risk. Whether it gets blown up in bankruptcy courts or simply collapses eventually under its own financial weight — there’s an argument that the market will be massively disrupted if and when the administration ends the Covid-19 deferment of student loan payments — the lie can’t go on much longer.

“It’s just obvious that this has become a printing money operation,” says Grabis. “The colleges charge whatever they want, then they go to the government and continuously increase the size of the loans.” If you’re on the inside, that’s a beautiful thing. What about for everyone else?

#matt taibbi #substack #long #read the whole thing #student loans #student loan debt

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vicecityhq · 4 years ago

Photo

██████████████]99% LOADING...SUSPECT INTO THE APD DATABASE...

WITNESS(ES) SAY HE REMINDS THEM OF: the Italian Mafia, the sound of Lo-Fi beats, a coffee house . With a slight resemblance to NAKAMOTO YUTA of/the NCT 127.

CLICK BELOW TO VIEW ENTIRE FILE.

FULL FILE:

Last Name, First Name: Maiko, Akuyoshi ALIAS: The Crow Realm of birth(if earth, nationality): Japanese Age: 73 Date of Birth: October 31st, 1948 Gender: Cismale Preferred Pronouns: He/Him Species: Demon Occupation: N/A Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

VISUAL FILE:

Skin Color: Pale Eye color: One dark grey almost black the other black with red, white and gold flecks in the iris Scars: two burn scars on either temple, faint scars on his wrists and ankles from long term restraints Piercings: 10 up his right ear from lobe to the top, 5 on his left ear (double lobe, cartilage, helix and daith) Tattoos: Many sporadic tattoos up his arms, and a few on his chest, hip and back. Hair color: jet black with a white/greyish streak in the front Abnormalities: his eyes, and his hair color is natural Horns/ wings/ etc: Transformed form: Akuyoshi’s transformed (demon) form is a four eyed creature with two long black horns coming from his head, dark shadow like wings sprout from his back. The corner of his mouth extend into a sharped tooth grin and his nails grow to abnormal lengths.

PERSONAL FILE:

RELIGIOUS BELIEF: N/A SINS: greed / gluttony / sloth / lust / pride / envy / wrath VIRTUES: chastity / charity / diligence / humility / kindness / patience / justice KNOWN LANGUAGES: Russian, Japanese, English and Below Average Korean SECRETS: The reported terroistic attack on the KGB agency was carried out solely by him, he was in the wind before they could find him. SAVVIES: Guitar, Tinkering/fixing things, Cooking, Assassin work Powers & Abilities: Darkness manipulation, minor pyrokenisis, the ability to possess the living(any 'undead' creatures are immuned), life draining, Infrakenisis (with limitations due to being on earth), Demonic Psionics (with limitations due to being on earth), and able to summon creatures from hell. Expert Stealth, Assassination Tactics, Knowledge in various tranquilizers and poisons, Knowledge in various ways of body disposal, Advance knifing abilities (this includes throwing knives, regular knives, swords and katanas). Traits: patriarchal & mysterious

BACKGROUND CHECK:

Date of Birth: October 31st, 1948 Date of Death: [ if applying for an undead character ] Crime Record: He hates most authority figures, the ones that use their power over others to control them. He’s on many watch lists for assassination of political leaders (rumored), various counts of murder (alleged), various counts of torture (alleged) and a connection to a wealthy and quite suspicious operation worked out of the human city (also alleged), he has never been convicted. He is also technically the sole suspect of the slaughter of 25 KGB agents, 3 high ranked scientists and 2 high ranked psychologist back in 1964.

Background/Biography:

tw: this passage includes vague descriptions of murder, mind control, non-l conscentual impregnation, drug use, sexual abuse, rape, abuse of a minor, blood , parental death, death during childbirth and torture.

Once you are locked away by fiery bars, too powerful to be allowed loose in the human realm or any other, when some from even the darkest depths and realms fear your name on their lips you find yourself, aching to create the chaos you so desperately seek. Cursed to spend the rest of your days roaming the underworld in a special sanctuary for the protection of other hellspawns...and the world, with no way of getting to those realms, in fear of their ultimate destruction what could you possibly do to sate your disgusting lust for those around you to suffer. Easily, he would say, a powerful demon whose name they refused to utter, you create someone else to do the job for you. Sure possession is an option, but all it takes is some divine force to remedy that, especially when it comes to humans, so you….steal a vessel, create living breathing flesh to carry out your sadistic tendencies while you watch from the depths of Hell. All you need is someone to hold it, just for nine months.

Akame Miako’s obsession with the occult lead to her being that vessel. An only child to a hardworking and quite wealthy family in her village she seemed to counter the intense loneliness with spell books and rituals, stories of demonic possession and seances peaked her interest and she went as far to invite one into her home...kind of. Akame didn’t think the stories were true, easy access to summon something that even some other demons feared was far fetched for a mere mortal like her, besides even if she did , she was sure it’d be harmless, as harmless as demon could get. The translation from Latin to Japanese was a bit murky, she did all the things she was supposed to do, shut the door, lit the onyx colored candles and chanted his name. It tasted foul on her lips, metallic and sour as if blood had suddenly come up her throat like bile. The room grew in heat and sweat matted her jet black hair to her forehead, with all this build up the young teen would think that something was bound to happen right? But simply only the candle blew out, casting her room into darkness only set alite by the moon, of course she was right, it was all hullabaloo probably something conjured up by her great great gran something to spook their little village.

But what Akame hadn’t known, was that she’d open the door for exactly what He want ed, she would become his vessel, allowing him to breathe life into flesh another piece of him roaming the planet. It only took a few weeks for her to notice the signs, a usually healthy 18-year-old spent her mornings vomiting crimson, and her nights in searing abdominal pain, maybe a plague was sweeping through their village once more, it wouldn’t be the first time and sure wouldn’t be the last, but it had only been Akame who was harboring this, torturous disease. She hid it for as long as she could, not wanting her parents to worry, time off work meant a dwindle in their status and that was something they couldn’t afford, it wasn’t ‘til her mother founder her, writhing in pain on the floor that the village doctor was called, with a diagnosis no one was expecting, Akame was pregnant. There was no way of convincing her parents that she hadn’t gone against her pledge to wait ‘til marriage. They hadn’t believed that she was some Virgin Mary and she couldn’t even explain it herself. But, an unwed mother and her father’s place in the countries politics was something that they couldn’t afford, they’d locked her away until the babies birth, and it wasn’t until then when they found something was horribly, horribly wrong. It was a taxing birth, the room creaked and groaned, disembodied voices filled the empty space, her stomach twisting and contorting as the creature fought its way out of her. It tore her apart, as it crowned, and Akame was not equipped to handle it. Her feeble and young, she perished as the baby was born leaving her parents in mourning, and the doctor in fear. What was it? Why had it come with jet black hair and dark eyes? Why had it rejected the doctors blessing, crying and wailing as if the prayer was causing it great pain? He could only advise its remaining living relatives one thing, get rid of it.

The Miakofamily wasn’t to keen on killing an infant, in fact they flat out refused, telling the doctor there must be some way to get it far away from them without causing it any harm. They traveled for years, keeping the demonic entity at arms length before an unsuspected visitor received a tantalizing letter. The man was stone cold, with a charming smile, he had a weird accent and shining blue eyes, he’d pay them good money to take the now toddling child into what he called, a ‘school of reform for lost boys’. They took the bate, and the money, almost sad to see it go but happy to be rid of something that they were sure harbored some evil, the thing that killed their daughter, their only child. He said he’d rid it of whatever evil’s that may have come with it, that where it was going it would emerge a new man, and maybe one they would want to communicate with again. Masked by pearly gates and brass door knockers, they weren’t told about the extensive training, and weren't told about the weapon he’d become. How they would abuse him, strip him of his identity and show him how to use his striking looks for his own gain. They didn’t tell him about the monster he’d become, the new man that they’d create on their own accord. And he excelled, climbing in their ranking and leaving bodies and broken bones behind him. His body filled, cut clean, and he followed orders to ever ‘t’. He was reformed sure, a weapon now, molded to their perfect standard, used and abused, raped and pillaged for their own use somewhere in the world, they wanted a monster, masked by something so beautiful and enticing, and so he became one, using his powers at their will. It was a team full of creatures just like him, western Asia’s super weapon.

They assumed that he would continue to stay obedient, assumed he’d bend to their every will, for the rest of his life, but they were not careful, and let him in too close. He became conniving, manipulative, a teacher’s pet with a vendetta against the system and so he took the teacher’s job. Worked his way up until he was eye to eye to those that made him. And then, he destroyed them, and oh, how Olympus has fallen. He left with his life, though he cannot say much for the others. They had taken it all from him, he had no memories of what was before them, no images of family, of what an actual life was. Just a name. His grandfather was long gone, not that he knew, not that he cared, but he took what was given to him, a bank account, frozen until he was eighteen, when he was supposed to return, about 110 million yen, what was left of what they had, a supposed consolidation for abandoning the child, his grandmother fine and comfortable and she came looking, more than once she came looking and each time he left, ran far away from her, he didn’t know her never knew her, not like she wanted. He had become something absent of emotions, absent of memories, he was just a surname, but a name he could not live up to. Thus, he became someone else, just as they wanted.

He wandered on his own a bit, finding solace in the underground, and a band of misfits just like him. But touring, guitar shredding and becoming a confidant didn’t scratch that itch they had created for him. The itch to draw blood, hear torturous screams and extract the information that he wanted. The woman he had met had humanized him, made him feel less of a robot, less of a monster, showed him that he could make genuine connections even if they felt idle or like autopilot. Though, those thoughts still persisted, so he sought out ways to cure his hunger, more like the chef that could cook up such a feast had found him, a tragic case, sucked into another tragedy.

INTERVIEW QUESTION (para sample): “Just run us through what happened that night”. - Officer

Akuyoshi spit on the ground and slumped back in his chair. The officers furrowed their brows, though fear was apparent of their faces. “We know who you are.” One of them spoke in English, the demon only erupted into a dark laugh, one that drained the color from the younger officers face. “Good.” His Russian accent was sharp, cutting through them like sharpened blades.

“If you want information, you wont get it from me.” He said tilting his head back, wet, sweat covered strands falling from his face. The ex agent had already began picking the lock on the cuffs behind him, brow ticking as they came unlocked. It was in a blink of an eye, blood splattered his face and the ceiling, the elder officer going to the ground with his hand grasping at his throat in panic, the one that was left only looked at him in horror, frozen in place and unable to run to safety, and Aku took the opportunity, taking both of his cheeks in his palms before twisting his wrist, the sound of the snap satisfying.

He disappeared in a cloud of dark smoke, before appearing before the camera that filmed the interview room, “Bozhe pomiluy svoyu dushu,” he said darkly, the word echoing off the walls like the demon’s father had began to ascend before he snatched it from the wall the last thing the overseers seeing was his large smile spreading towards his ears.

#vcaccepted #vccivilian #vchowlers

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thesilkenlair · 5 years ago

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(Casey Here!)

As much D&D as I play, you'd imagine I would eventually get around to illustrating some of their most iconic monsters! Which is to say, the ones that I personally find the most iconic. Which is to say, the ones I memorized when I was reading my dad's monster manual at age nine. Purple worm - Sandworms never go out of style. I've seen a lot of rad designs for this bugger over the editions, but I favor the slightly less reptilian older takes for this particular critter. It's kinda basic, but sometimes that's what you want. It's like a shark or a crocodile: Just flat out unchanged across the ages. Hook horror - I've heard it rumored that Gygax used a small Gigan figure to represent this monster. I can't verify that, but it definitely sounds right. Hook horrors are one of the very first things you meet when you play around in the caves, and they kind of remind me of the Father Deep monsters of the Hork Bajir homeworld that way. Mind flayer - Mind flayers! Basically, take all of your Dracula conventions and dip them in a fresh coat of Lovecraft. There's that old "decadent aristocratic upper caste system who literally eats the poor, but still somehow comes across as less evil than the actual real life 1%" setup that will never stop being relevant. Though personally, I see mind flayers as the first alternative for folks who want to play that monster-who-feels-the-urge-to-eat-their-friends-but-refuses-to-do-it shtick but don't want to deal with vampire baggage. You know, the furry option! ... Slimy? Rubbery? Do we have a word for anthro-cephalopods? I'm only a casual furry. Gelatinous cube - I'm not apologizing for giving this one a slot. Froghemoth - So, back when I participated in my very first long-term campaign, I played a druid. You've met Talia before. Naturally, I was chomping at the bit for the day I finally got to turn her into a froghemoth, and celebrated the day my wish was finally granted and she was allowed to chug human-supremacist-cultists like popcorn. Yeah, okay, the froghemoth is one of the classic vore-monsters. But it's a charming design in its own right. Kind of a freaky Hanna Barbara critter, like you'd see Space Ghost fighting. No matter how many artists draw it, they can never shake that inherent goofiness that third edition tried so hard to purge. I would probably cram them somewhere onto Fronterra if I was sure they were public domain. As is, I'm 99% certain that this is what Visser Three turned into when he ate Elfangor. Tarrasque - D&D's original kaiju! Kind of just takes the name and nothing else when it comes to its mythological origins, but I don't mind. The Tarrasque is that endgame "let's test the players" final boss monster... Or at least it's supposed to be. My DM reskinned it for our final Pathfinder session, and one of the PCs still nearly killed it in a single turn. Also, he let Talia turn into one, so maybe Pathfinder is just bullshit? Regardless, the Tarrasque has one of those simple, iconic designs. I've heard rumors it was based on the concept art for Fallout's deathclaws, and like the Gigan-figure, I can't verify this in any way. With its reptilian features, twin horns, spiny carapace and grabby fingies, it has an undeniable lizardlike quality that I can't help but find charming. Kinda feels like a more refined version of Zilla? Though for an insatiable eating machine, I notice a lot of artists give it very little belly to work with. Come on, this guy eats entire cities! Give him somewhere to put it! Rust monster - An icon of icons, the rust monster! Drawing its origin from a bizarre Chinese "dinosaur" toy, later designs have made it more insectoid in appearance, but never feeling QUITE like anything Earthly. It's the four limbs. Between the four limbs and the tail, it's hard to tell if it's an arthropod mimicking a vertebrate or the other way around. I'm pretty sure this is part of what inspired my ossaderm creatures for Fronterra. Also, Ryla can turn into one in our campaign. I have no shortage of havoc to wreak when the opportunity comes. Behir - Dragons in D&D are kind of... extra. Godlike beings, paragons of whatever personality trait they represent. Whenever there's something uber powerful in D&D, it gets compared to dragons. It makes them kind of unapproachable. Behirs provide all the essentials of a dragon - Serpentine body, scaly skin, horns, sapience, breath weapon, taste for human flesh - wrapped up in a smaller, weirder, IMO cooler package. You know, your Lambton Worms. A lot easier to port in and out of adventures, a lot less of an event when they show up, but still a formidable force in their own right. I like the behir. The behir knows how to taunt me just the right amount. Bulette - Another Chinese "dinosaur" figure monster, the bulette is actually another one I associate with Talia. Whenever we faced a problem that didn't have a glaringly and immediately obvious solution, she would turn into a bulette, whether it was for beating up robots, digging through obstacles, trampling smurfs, navigating labyrinths, distracting slashers with cute dog tricks... it was kind of her signature form. But shenanigans aside, the bulette is just an excellent monster. While the "land shark" shtick may be common, there's a lot more going on with the bulette's design. It's rumored to be a mad wizard's creation, as he combined a snapping turtle with an armadillo and mixed in a helping of demon blood to taste. Personally, I always considered that to be a neat little rumor to flesh out the world, but never assumed it to be true. The bulette just feels too naturalistic for that. Like some kind of protomammal or crocodylomorph, or weird triassic monstrosity. Magic and demons and dragons and so on DO affect the ecosystem. I always figured the bulette was just something that evolved to compete in this new biosphere. Owlbear - This one, on the other hand, I fully believe the "mad wizard was bored" explanation. Another chinasaur critter, the owlbear is frequently made fun of. What makes it scarier than a regular bear? It can't fly, so why have owl parts at all? Why trade fangs for a beak in what is at best a latural move? Well, first of all, fuck you, owls are creepy motherfuckers, and that alone is enough to justify it. But secondly, that's part of its charm. Besides some improved vision, the owl DOESN'T make it more dangerous. What makes the owlbear dangerous is that it's an insane, Frankensteinian monstrosity roaming uncontrolled through the wilderness! It doesn't need weaponry, its sheer temperament is enough to make it a worthy opponent. Sure, the practical threat might not be hugely above that of a bear, but storytelling isn't about numbers. Any asshole can go outside and get eaten by a bear. The owlbear is part of this world. The owlbear is a reminder of what magic can do. Someone somewhere actually made this thing, for whatever reason, and now the world is irrevocably changed because of it. Owlbears go beyond practicality. They bring the lore! Also, bears don't have very good eyesight, so the big owl eyes probably make them better hunters. Flumph - Is that a Japanese-style martian? Do we just have aliens in D&D? Dear lord, I love them! Okay, the flumph has got a sizable hatedom. And that hatedom can eat my ass, because the flumph is precious and perfect just the way it is! Flumphs are designed as a sort of sidekick-type creature. They're not very good fighters, but they bring knowledge and lore to the table. Whether they're aliens from some far off star, seeking your aid to prevent catastrophe, or psionic natives of the Underdark eager to bask in your positivity and hopefully stick it to the tyrants they're forced to share real estate with. My group generally treats them as straight up aliens, benevolent but strange. Course, we're all pretty strange, so we get along just fine. Otyugh - Okay so, the aberration creature type implies that this is something from another world that doesn't belong. And yet otyughs, which are aberrations, are an essential part of this world's ecosystem? Okay, I can buy the idea that an alien organism adapted to our world and is now a key part of it. Fronterra's got a TON of that. It just feels like after a point, the otyugh would be considered a beast? Otyughs are great. Every ecosystem needs a decomposer, and every fantasy story needs at least one dive into the sewers. Otyughs provide both, and are intelligent enough to keep the plot moving if it hits a snag. There's always going to be garbage, refuse, carrion, decay, things that need to be broken down and processed. Carrion crawler - The carrion crawler is pretty similar to the otyugh in that it's technically not considered a beast, and therefor must have its origins elsewhere, but feels so integrated into the ecosystem that it just feels like it belongs. They usually can't talk, so they're not just reskinned otyughs, but I still consider them pretty essential. Otyughs find a singular spot where waste is dumped and shovel it down at their leisure, while carrion crawlers skulk through the tunnels, actively seeking their food. The crawler got one of the most radical redesigns on the transition from second to third edition, but I can't really choose a single favorite. The oldschool tentacle-faced cutworm looks like it could be a real animal, while the googly-eyed Halloween decoration feels like it could be from another world, merely having set up shop here. Could there name apply to two wholly different creatures? If so, then I'm not sure which one mine would be considered. I kinda mashed them together into something that doesn't quite feel like either. But I like it for what it is. Maybe I'll sneak it onto Fronterra. Aboleth - Tentacled, telepathic sea creatures who turn humans into slimy minions, who remember everything their race has ever seen, and who are always plotting something behind the scenes. Yeah, the aboleths really crank up the Lovecraft elements. Actually, between the mind flayers, the flumphs and the aboleths, even the most oldschool D&D covered quite a few essential Lovecraftian bases. The flayers are your corrupt yet still recognizable humanoids who can be considered truly evil, the flumphs are benevolent-yet-bizarre guardians who know more than you, and the aboleths are the truly unknowable, sinister intellects. The fact that they can barely function on land honestly only adds to that, IMO. They're inherently difficult for a party to reach, and they offer some nice underwater adventure seeds. Not enough adventures go underwater. There's this perception that the ocean is bad for storytelling because so many writers lack the creativity to make it work. I wanna run an underwater adventure now. Beholder - Icon of icons! THE D&D monster! The beholder! Paranoid, jumpy, always five steps ahead and twenty steps perpendicular! Beholds are fun in just about every way. Between their wacky, diverse designs, their elaborate lairs, their eccentric personalities, their bizarre powers, you're never gonna run out of fun with beholders. Remorhaz - It's always been a thing that bothered me with environment-based monsters. Why does the ice monster who lives in the cold use ice as a weapon? Aren't most of the things it encounters going to be resistant to the cold? Sure, a cone of cold will still kill a polar bear, but a lot of the monsters in the tundra are outright immune to cold. A while dragon's not going to get much use out of its breath weapon fighting frost worms and frost giants. That's one reason the remorhaz sticks out to be. We have an icy tundra beast whose insides are a scorching furnace, which it can intensify and weaponize as it sees fit. Which also conveniently explains why its design - a sort of cobra-esque centipede - invokes warm-weather creatures, despite its icy environment. It's a nice subversion of the usual tropes, plus it's just a memorable, cool looking critter to begin with. On a smaller note, the remorhaz feels like a good loophole for Ryla's "no cold weather morphs" rule. Turning into something elementally affiliated with ice is no good, but a non-magical monster that survives the cold by superheating its insides? That seems perfectly viable to me!

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