#accurate portrayal of what its like to play with commander try hards

[calcium-chan]

the boys play magic the gathering.

characters belong to xxacidnekoxx btw, very cool and epic

[hypmic-writings]

Love the stuff you do and love the energy you bring. I want to request MTC headcanons for them with an deaf s/o or maybe one just hard of hearing? If you get to this, thanks in advance. No worries if you don't.

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Pairing: Samatoki Aohitsugi x deaf!reader; Juto Iruma x deaf!reader; Riou Busujima x deaf!reader

Genre: Fluff

Warnings: None

A/N: This was an interesting one to write! Hopefully I was accurate in the portrayal of deaf/hard of hearing persons. Let me know if anything was incorrect or insensitive - I would never want to offend anyone! Hope you enjoy this!

⋘ ──── ∗ ⋅◈⋅ ∗ ──── ⋙

Samatoki Aohitsugi:

At the beginning of your relationship, Samatoki is going to be very careful when he’s around you

not because he thinks you’re weak or anything like that, but because he doesn’t want to mess up when communicating with you

he’s definitely the type to brush it off like it isn’t a big deal but then freak out about it secretly, so he would really appreciate it if you explained to him how you best communicate

if you tend to use sign language more than speaking, he’s going to do his best to learn it

he’ll definitely make lots of mistakes at first 

and please feel free to make fun of him and tease him about his word slips when he does

but he’s the type to keep working at it until he gets it right, 1. because he’s a perfectionist, and 2. because he wants to be able to properly communicate with you

if you have a hearing aid or a hearing helper, he’s definitely gonna yell at you to make sure it’s always charged and ask if you have it with you whenever you’re leaving to go anywhere

if he’s yelling at you for not doing the dishes and you just pop the hearing aids out, he’s going to be pissed but it would low key be hilarious

just do the dishes later and he’ll forgive you...he might be able to laugh about it later with you

sometimes he forgets that you have difficulty hearing and he’ll just be talking to you from another room and then when he suddenly remembers he plays it cool and walks over to you to re-start the conversation as if he didn’t just spend 10 minuted effectively talking to himself

he’s just trying his best, let him have this one haha

overall, it’s not going to change the way Samatoki thinks about you and if anything, it’ll probably just make him more protective and sweetly over-bearing

Juto Iruma:

When he first learns that you’re deaf, Juto is going to be surprised and as someone that likes to be in control of situations, he’s going to want to come to terms with it pretty quickly

he’ll ask if you sign or read lips or write to communicate and once you explain things to him, he’ll feel like he has a better handle on things

he’ll learn sign for you, but you’ll never catch him reading a book or studying about it because he wants to seem like it’s cool and effortless

in fact, it’s not, it’s quite difficult and Juto has spent many long nights in the office just staring at his hands in frustration

he’s definitely the type to joke around with things - if the two of you are at a boring work party, he’ll just glare at you as you slyly turn your hearing aid off and say that he wished he could drown out the idiots too

to which you would just chuckle and stick your tongue out at him 

sometimes you’ll be turned away from him and he’ll call to you a few times before realizing that you’re not looking at him, but he’s pretty good about getting your attention when he wants to talk to you

the one thing that Juto does a lot more with you is that he always seems to be touching you in one way or another

one time he was signing a super complicated phrase and when you told him that he got it right, he made the cutest gasp and that memory of him looking like a happy little kid is one of the most fondest you have

he does it quite subconsciously, but whether its an arm around your waist or his fingers consistently brushing up against yours, it’s like he always wants you to be able to feel his presence 

most of the time, when you both have lazy mornings he’ll wake up and sleepily say good morning to you and then cuss and try to drag up his hands

but you’d just laugh because you can read lips pretty well and let him know that you love him too

Riou Busujima:

I headcanon that Riou already knows sign language (ASL and JSL) from his days as a soldier, so when you tell him you’re hard of hearing/deaf, he’s already one step ahead

he’ll want you to tell him exactly how you best want to communicate and he’s definitely the one to slip into the new role the quickest

whenever you sign a word that Riou doesn’t know, he’s immediately asking you what it is and learning how to do it

sometimes he’ll use a signal that’s straight up an army sign and you’ll just stare at him blankly with raised eyebrows as if you’re supposed to know army commands

he apologized profusely after that but it was hilarious so you didn’t mind

the two of you have a cute routine where you leave each other little notes written out and hidden around the apartment to find

Riou insists that because your sense of sound is weaker, that your sense of taste must be heightened and therefore, always goes out of his way to make you new, different tasting meals

you tried explaining that’s not true, but he’s just so cute and excited to share his dishes with you that you just go with it

Riou’s always super thoughtful and considerate about your hearing loss and will cater to it most of the time 

HOWEVER

whenever you’re lazing around the apartment and he wants to talk to you, he’ll come up and tap your shoulder, which wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that Riou, despite his large build, has the stealth of a ninja

so to you, he’s just magically appearing by your side which has caused you to almost have multiple heart attacks

since then, he’s tried to make it a point to get in your field of vision whenever you don’t have your hearing aids in just so that he doesn’t startle you 

[scripttorture]

Torture in Fiction: Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, Paradise

This one was a recommendation from @skeerbs and I enjoyed the beginning a lot more than my previous Star Trek review.

Since I believe in stating my biases; this canon still isn’t for me but this episode is an excellent pick for a review.

Once again I’m rating the depiction and use of torture, not the movie itself. I’m trying to take into account realism (regardless of fantasy or sci fi elements), presence of any apologist arguments, stereotypes and the narrative treatment of victims and torturers.

Commanding Officer Benjamin Sisko and Chief Miles O’Brien are looking for habitable planets when they come across one that already shows signs of human settlement. It’s not documented so they decide to beam down and have the look. The community they find is made up of former Star Fleet personnel, stranded on a planet where all their advanced technology has stopped working.

The community initially appears to be an idyllic pastoral fantasy but as Sisko and O’Brien spend longer there the horrific set up of the community becomes more apparent. People are dying of treatable diseases. ‘Criminals’ are tortured. The community leader, a white woman called Alixus, seems to hold absolute power.

When O’Brien tries to get some of his technological equipment working in order to save a dying woman Alixus accuses him of the ‘crime’ of wasting time. The punishment is torture; a day in a cramped box, exposed to high temperatures with no food, water or sleep.

She chooses to have Sisko rather than O’Brien subjected to it.

At some point during the day she has Sisko removed from the box. Alixus tells him how ‘hard’ doing this is for her. She then says Sisko can have some water, if he agrees to take off his uniform.

Sisko, who is portrayed as unable to speak and almost incapable of walking, refuses. He staggers back outside in his uniform and gets back into the box.

In the meantime O’Brien manages to persuade a member of the community to let him search the area for the source of the energy field interfering with their technology. He finds a machine generating it.

O’Brien shuts it down and storms back into the village, releasing Sisko and revealing Alixus’ betrayal to the community. Sisko calls for rescue and offers passage back to civilisation for any of the villagers willing to leave. They all elect to stay.

Sisko and O’Brien are beamed up, along with Alixus and her son so they can answer for their crimes. The final shot is of the villagers dispersing, with two children looking at the empty box.

I’m giving it 6/10

The Good

1) To start with I think all the actors in this episode did a wonderful job with the script they were given. Avery Brooks does an excellent job throughout and the conflict between his character and Gail Strickland’s is really damn good.

2) At no point does this episode gloss over or downplay he damage torture causes. The first person the audience sees coming out of the box looks half dead. He’s unable to stand, he can barely speak. He trembles. The audience is very much shown he’s in pain and the characters explicitly refer to the incident as torture.

3) The torture here is realistically low tech. It is literally a large box. It’s a combined sort of torture encompassing dehydration, starvation, temperature torture and often stress positions and sleep deprivation as well. Boxes like this were actually used as a torture for hundreds of years.

4) The effects of these tortures seem to be shown accurately both for Sisko and Steven the first victim the audience sees.

5) After ordering him to be tortured Alixus tries to bribe Sisko into compliance, offering him water in exchange for taking off his uniform. Sisko rejects this, sticking to his beliefs and later he does this again, arguing with Alixus immediately after torture. There’s a dignity to the way Avery Brooks plays these scenes that gives them a real weight.

6) This may be a good point to talk about Alixus. One of the things that stood out to me during this episode is the positioning of Alixus as a character. Thinking of films like Get Out and the discussion it generated around the role white women play in violence against black men- well it makes the casting choices here feel very deliberate and weighted by history. I’m not an expert in American history or racism so I don’t think I should try to go into a lot of depth here. But it’s a detail that I appreciated in this story. There’s a highly racialised thread running through this portrayal of torture, with the gardens looking like cane fields and the use of a torture that black men were often subjected to in American jails.

7) Alixus’ use of social manipulation is incredibly well portrayed. She’s shown constantly adjusting the situation to get people ‘on side’. She points out how every one ‘agreed’ to the rules regarding torturous punishments. She positions trying to save a woman’s life with technology as a betrayal of the woman and the community’s values. She tries to get Sisko ‘on side’ by manipulating a young woman into an attempted seduction. She doles out humiliations and punishments on a whim and positions them as in ‘everyone’s’ best interests.

8) Alixus’ ‘justifications’ for torture are the kinds of justifications torturers use. She claims that she’s doing this for the sake of social order and bettering society. ‘This is painful for me too’ she tells Sisko, apparently unaware of the irony.

9) The end result is one hell of a villain. She’s awful. Manipulative, prone to random outbursts of violence and adapt at disguising those outbursts in socially acceptable ways. She orders Sisko to stand watch during the night and then using social pressure to force him back into the fields in the morning. Weaponising sleep deprivation while giving herself a socially acceptable excuse, ‘he could have said no’.

10) There’s also a small but rather nice discussion on the limits of compliance here. Sisko refuses to remove his uniform because it represents so much of what he believes in. One of the villagers feels unable to ‘look the other way’ while O’Brien goes looking for answers. But he does let O’Brien knock him unconscious. Which allows O’Brien to do what he thinks is right, while allowing the villager an ‘excuse’ to present his community. It demonstrates disagreement, but not disagreement as deep and fundamental as Sisko’s.

The Bad

My only real problem with this story is that I don’t feel it goes far enough when it comes to challenging or undermining the torturer’s views. She’s given a lot of speeches justifying her behaviour but the characters opposing her aren’t given much to say in return. They say she’s wrong and that’s about it.

Her actions lead to deaths and suffering but despite that the narrative hedges its bets at the very end. It writes her victims as not wanting to be rescued. It shows them volunteering to stay in a community founded on violence and lies. That action seems to support the justifications Alixus gives for torture; that it’s building and protecting her community.

The truth is torture tears communities apart. It leaves survivors with severe, life long mental health problems. It does the same to a good proportion of witnesses. It polarises and radicalises people. It stops people trusting and engaging with the authorities; crimes are not reported and witnesses don’t volunteer information because torture is a likely response.

For me this story really didn’t go far enough with its ending and it suffered for giving the torturer narrative time over and above her victims.

Miscellaneous

The first character that the audience sees tortured appears to be compliant and agree with the ‘justification’ his torturer presents for torturing him. But he is in her presence at the time so it’s arguable as to whether this is showing anything beyond a survivor paying lip service to a torturer to avoid further pain.

Overall

I enjoyed the majority of this episode and it does have some really good elements to it. The story goes out of its way to show the damage that ‘clean’ non-scarring tortures cause. It shows resistance in survivors.

But I think it does fall down at the very end by allowing the torturer the last word.

The narrative choice, giving her a big powerful speech with swelling music, where she justifies her atrocities, means her views are never effectively undermined. The fact the people she manipulated, tormented and denied medical care for a decade all opt to stay behind in the name of her ‘community’ seems to give weight to her ideals.

It’s close. For me it’s closer than the last Star Trek episode I reviewed. It’s coming down to the implications in the narrative, the editing and the way things were acted, rather than the more fundamental flaws in the script or concept.

But for me the end result feels like another narrative cop out. As though the writers weren’t quite prepared to commit to the idea that torture is bad.

That’s a subjective analysis, and many people may disagree but it’s why the score here is middling rather than good.

Disclaimer

[rlaliberty]

Beeps, Pings, and Whirrs: Sonic Representations of Hacking in Cinema

Computer hacking, as seen in the linked video essay, is as much sonic as it is visual. Amongst command line prompts, transparent screens, three-dimensional file managers, novel GUIs, and blinking text, there is a vast world of sounds: Teletype-like clicks, the whirrs of hard-drives and fans, various swooshes, pings, and beeps that support graphical movement, and ubiquitous booms and sizzles when computers explosively crash. Unlike my present interaction with Microsoft Word and my Macbook Pro, which is largely silent save the clicks of the keyboard, computers in these hacking films are always sonically present. Whereas Microsoft Word and macOS seek to melt away from the user, the interfaces in these films — spanning over three decades — have a forceful presence. This paper will explore this presence and the ways in which, for many spectators, it differs from reality. While conceding that this is often true, realism in representation is more complex than such simple statements of adherence attest and this paper will thus probe beyond these statements into considerations of larger industry trends in human-computer interaction (HCI) design for how cinematic interface representations and HCI design practices bleed into one another in a cycle of mutual influence. Sonic realism, it will be argued, is not necessarily congruous with sonic reality, and especially so when the external “reality” is itself a complex, technically mediated construction, coupled with the trends of a fickle marketplace. Furthermore, it will be argued that while the sonic representations of hacking as heard in these films may not accurately adhere to the “real” sonic worlds of hacking, they serve a particular narrative function that sets the hacker off from surging market trends that embrace “transparency” in HCI design.

Representations of computing and hacking in cinema Joceline Andersen (2011) traces representations of computing in film as early back as 1927 with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Germany). Later, the 1950s and 60s brought films like Desk Set (United States, 1957), which centers around an ENIAC-like computer that provokes job fears in the employees tasked with working alongside it, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (United States, 1968), which features the sentient HAL9000 as a deadly yet logical general artificial intelligence. As Andersen notes however, these are outliers: computing really found a place in cinema in the 1980s, as the computer found commercial and domestic form in standalone “personal” systems like the IBM Personal Computer and the Apple Macintosh, the latter which featured the first mass-market graphical user interface (GUI). Films like Tron (United States, 1982), WarGames (United States, 1983), and The Terminator (United States, 1984) are merely the most frequently cited of a large mass of films that addressed computers and computer hacking throughout the decade. Into the 1990s and 2000s, computers became commonplace in film, their domestic place hardly different than that of a telephone or television set. Yet, while the computer became suffused with the banality of domesticity, computer hacking still maintained an aura of intrigue and mystery, as the vast set of hacking films from the 90s and 2000s indicate: Lawnmower Man (United States, 1992), Hackers (United States, 1995), Johnny Mnemonic (Canada/United States, 1995), The Net (United States, 1995), Masterminds (United States, 1997), Enemy of the State (United States, 1998), The Matrix (Australia/United States, 1999), Swordfish (United States, 2001), Firewall (Australia/United States, 2006), Live Free or Die Hard (United States, 2007), The Social Network (United States, 2010), Chappie (United States, 2015) — to name just a few. 

Representations of hacking and computing in film span at least forty years. Throughout this period, major changes in computing technology have taken place — in GUI interfaces and control schemata that have become entirely naturalized, in exponential advances in computing power and memory, and, returning to the subject of this paper, in interfaces that have grown increasingly silent. Yet, despite these changes, the command line remains prevalent in representations of hacking, seemingly both embedded in and productive of a dense soundscape that blurs the boundaries of the diegesis. While most sounds seem to be linked to some human-interface action, others have no immediate referent, as in Hackers where its electronic music blends in with interface sounds to the point of impossible attribution (and this blurring of the diegesis is of course emphasized by the animation sequences meant to stand in for the digital world of the fictional Gibson supercomputer). Unfortunately, fully describing the soundscapes of these films and analyzing the ways in which they blur the traditional diegetic/non-diegetic boundary is beyond the scope of the present analysis. Instead, these soundscapes will be considered for how they function towards the end of realism.       

Two theories of realism What counts for realism in film? Does the camera, and its linked technologies for recording sound, capture the real world? If it does, should it be put to that use? What even is the real world? This is a debate that has waged since the inception of the moving image and recorded sound and it will certainly not be settled here, but I will attempt to flesh out its two poles briefly via the theories of Siegfried Kracauer and Michel Chion. For Kracauer, writing on film from the 1920s to the mid 1960s, cinema is linked to photography. Both mediums can record the physicality of life itself, life beyond the lens. As he writes in Theory of Film (1997): “Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality” (p. xlix). Kracauer does not deny that there is a whole mediating technical apparatus of cinema (though he does not use the language of mediation), but he argues that its influence should be minimized and it should act to serve the representation of the real. While Kracauer has not written on film sound and its representation of the real with the same depth as the film image, a review of two German sound films written in 1928 points towards these connections:    

The sound-image film is for now the last link in the chain of those powerful inventions that, with blind certainty and as if directed by a secret will, push toward the complete representation of human reality. Through the sound-image film, it would be possible, in principle, to wrest life in its totality from transience and to consign it to the eternity of the image. (Kracauer, 2016)

Film sound, thus, serves the same purpose as film image — it should represent the real in all its totality. It should render the impermanence of memory permanent.  

Michel Chion, writing on film and film sound from the 1980s to the present, provides a counterpoint to Kracauer. For Chion, “realism” is not synonymous with “reality,” i.e., the experiences of phenomena that are lived. Realism in film is constructed in the transposition of three-dimensional reality to a two-dimensional audiovisual format. As he writes in Audio-Vision (1994):  

[…] the sound heard at the end of the process is the product of a preexisting reality plus conditions of reproduction. This end product is a specific reality: neither the neutral transmission of a sound event, nor an entire fabrication by technical means. (p.103)

The apparatus of recording thus cannot simply “capture” reality as if a butterfly in a net. In mediation, it is always altered. Moreover, realism is not just constructed at the intersection of the outside world and the mediation of the recording apparatus. Rather, realism is designed from the ground up, and often so with little true resemblance to reality — such as in the creation of Foley sound effects or in sound design for science fiction or animation. This “rendering” of reality, to use Chion’s term, serves to transmute the three-dimensional, deeply multisensory world, to a flat world only accessed by two senses. Sound design can be used to fill in the gaps where the intensities of the other senses lay dormant. Realism thus is constructed to serve reality, to represent reality, but with no claims that it does so objectively. Realism, for Chion, is always mediated. This is similarly put by sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne (2003), who argues that all sound and perception thereof — even the live sound of a concert — is a mediated event. Sound is always shaped by exteriors, whether those exteriors be the acoustics of a listening space, the shape of a listener’s ear, the microphone selection and placement in recording, or the mix in which a beeping interface is embedded.   

Realism(s) and the soundscapes of hacking Discussion between the poles of Kracauer and Chion plays out in the public discourse on sonic representations of computer hacking. Across blogs and forums, spectators of these films — and often those with occupations around computing — express disdain and frustration for the incorrect portrayals of computing and computer hacking. A post at Den of Geek, titled “The things the movies think computers do,” goes on to lay out a variety of ways in which Hollywood is (no doubt) unrealistic in their portrayals of computers. A post at Pop Crunch awards “beepy computers” a place as “7th most inaccurate movie sound effect.” For a user at the NeoGaf forums, these representations are “just so bad and continue to be bad. It’s as if they don’t even try.” As a user at the tech blog Gizmodo writes, “God, this is like my biggest movie pet peeve of all time. Computers do not make that much noise! No software company would program that much noise into their programs because it would drive their customers insane.” As a user at forum StraightDope writes, “Is anyone else annoyed by the sound effects currently used when portraying a computer at work in movies today? […] When you're checking out a web page, the computer does not go "beep beep beep" as the page displays! […] Can't they get an image and sound of an ACTUAL pc?”. Certainly, comments such as these are not the sole response to sonic representations of hacking in cinema: other viewers, some who admit to not having much prior knowledge of computing, find them unobtrusive, if not helpful, while others simply respect them as acts of sound design that serve a purpose to heighten the intensity of a scene (à la Chion). Yet, complaints of a lack of adherence to reality, framed as a lack of realism, should be contended with for their pervasiveness. 

Returning to Chion (1994) and Sterne (2003), total adherence to reality is impossible. Sound is always filtered through the medium itself in practices of recording and mixing. Counter Kracauer, recording and reproduction offer no pure access to an unmediated world of sensory perception. Recording does not and cannot duplicate the world. In the face of this, arguments over adherence to reality become uninteresting, little more than back-and-forth quarrels that levy a film’s quality to its representations. Instead, recognizing that realism is always a construct, it can be analyzed for its complex and indirect relation to the external world. Two nodes of this complex relation will be explored here: (1) the mutual influence between cinematic and real-world interfaces and (2) the greater market move towards “transparent” interfaces, counter cinema’s continued use of the command line in representations of hacking. 

While the trajectory of influence between technological innovation and cinematic take-up may frequently be thought of as unidirectional, in the case of HCI interface design, this influence has worked both ways, forming an intermedia feedback loop where media representations influence HCI design, which in turn influence media representations, ad infinitum. The work of John Underkoffler, former research at the MIT Media Lab, provides a prime example of this messy cycle of influence. While working at the MIT Media Lab, Underkoffler was tasked by Steven Spielberg with designing the interfaces of Minority Report (United States, 2002). In developing the gestural interface of the film, Underkoffler notes influence from ongoing MIT Media Lab projects, but there is no doubt influence from other, commercial gestural interfaces such as various wired glove technologies like Nintendo’s 1987 Power Glove. In the end, Underkoffler developed a fully functional prototype of a gestural interface called g-speak for use in the film. Since that time, Underkoffler has left the MIT Media Lab to start Oblong Industries, which now sells a modified version of g-speak for use in large-scale meeting/collaboration environments. 

In addition, following Minority Report’s release, a wealth of gestural and multitouch interfaces have come to market, from gaming controllers such as the Nintendo Wiimote and Microsoft Kinect, to the touch interfaces of Apple’s iPad and iPhone. Of course, this is only one, relatively commonplace example. Further research would be useful to highlight the crossover between cinematic and real-world interface design. Furthermore, sound does not play an overwhelming role in either the g-speak of Minority Report or its real-world counterpart of Oblong Industries. Yet, the point remains: the referents to which cinematic representations point can be blurry. What is constructed for film, whether that is the telemetric beeps of a keyboard press or the gestural multitouch interface of Minority Report, does not necessarily engage 1:1 with a real-world referent. Occasionally, the reverse occurs where the construction inspires the real-world development and commercialization of said referent. In this blurry, intermedia feedback loop, what becomes of the objective real?

Continuing to problematize the reality/realism connection in sonic representations of computer hacking, I would like to lay out what many would consider an inaccurate representation on the part of the filmmakers before considering the purpose of such a representation for how it serves a narrative function. As noted earlier in this paper, the command line — or some custom amalgamation of command line and GUI — reigns supreme as the prototypical cinematic hacking interface. Yet, since the mid 1980s with the advent of the GUI and its first popular implementation in the Apple Macintosh, the command line has been increasingly pushed under the surface of the screen, replaced with the GUI’s “desktop“ metaphorization of the underlying system. For Lori Emerson (2014), this is evidenced by a trend towards interface “transparency” that has only increased in ubiquity in recent years. This transparency does not reveal the system to the user; on the contrary, the ideal transparent layer is the interface itself. Transparent or invisible interfaces attempt to efface the interface, “alien[ating] the user from having access to the underlying workings of the device,” as Emerson writes (p. xi-xii). The result, Emerson continues, is a marketplace of “consumers rather than producers of content” (p. 1). While I may produce content in Microsoft Word, for instance, I am restricted to create within the confines of the interface, which itself works within the confines of its undergirding software. I do not create freely, but according to the restrictions of the software and its interface. This is a mild example, as creation — analog and digital — is always bound by material limitations. Take instead the Amazon Alexa Voice Service line of devices. Another line in the now long lineage of voice-activated devices, Alexa’s goal is to provide a seamless, transparent user experience that allows the user to order products from Amazon, control home automation products, access the news and weather, and, with third-party development, get an Uber, order food, translate across languages, with more learnable “Skills” constantly becoming available for download. As Amazon notes, “All you have to do is ask.” Choice may seem abundant here with the growing library of Skills, yet, choice is exactly what is disappearing. The true, open choice of a programmable digital system is replaced with a stylized, voice-activated menu of pre-defined options. Emerson was writing pre-Alexa, but her words ring true: “Ideally, the seamlessness of ubiquitous computing devices will make even choice itself recede into the background. In the imagined near future, things will simply happen and we will simply do” (p. 3).

What does this have to do with sonic representations of hacking? It is my contention that this trend in computing is foregrounded in opposition to hacking representations in cinema specifically because of its absence. WarGames and Tron excluded, the GUI interface — whether in its Windows, Mac, or various Linux forms — was popular at the time of each of these films’ release. Yet, the predominant hacking interface takes the form of the command line, complete with black background and fixed-width fonts. There is nothing transparent about them — regardless of any literal transparency in the form of displays. This lack of transparency is augmented by the dense sound design of which they’re coupled. The command line, both in its filmic representations and real-world use, is less removed from the underlying workings of the computer than the GUI. Unlike the move towards transparency, which emphasizes usability at the expense of “under-the-hood” access, the command line emphasizes the machine. The interfaces — both sonic and visual — in these films do not seamlessly blend into the background as the Amazon Alexa does. Rather, they are foregrounded, sonically as well as visually. While transparent interfaces tend to favor silence or haptic feedback, these hacking interfaces are abundantly noisy. While it is rarely clear if these soundscapes are functional, they serve to emphasize the human-machine interaction as one that is not seamless, is not embodied, is not embedded in daily life as the dream of ubiquitous, transparent computing aspires. The objects call attention to themselves as clicking, whirring, beeping, pinging machines — laborious machines that distinguish the hacker from the mere user, the tool from the mere commodity. These sonic representations may be inaccurate, but, à la Chion, they heighten the experience of the event in a way that an accurate portrayal — again, bearing in mind the blurriness between accuracy and inaccuracy — never could.  

References Anderson, J. (2011). The body of the machine: Computer interfaces in American popular cinema since 1982. Projections, 5(2). Pp. 75-95.

Chion, M. (1994). Audio-vision: Sound on screen. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Emerson, L. (2014). Reading writing interfaces: From the digital to the bookbound. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Kracauer, S. (1997). Theory of film: The redemption of physical reality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kracauer, S. (2016). Sound-image film: On the presentation in Frankfurt’s Gloria-Palas. In Kaes, A., Baer, N., & Cowan, M. (Eds.) The promise of cinema: German film theory 1907-1933 (pp. 556-559). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Sterne, J. (2003). The audible past: Cultural origins of sound reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/battlestar-galactica-supernaturals-tahmoh-penikett-innovative-new-series-deep-six/

'Battlestar Galactica,' 'Supernatural's' Tahmoh Penikett talks up innovative new series 'Deep Six'

It’s been a while since I had the pleasure of chatting with Tahmoh Penikett, who memorably played Ezekiel/Gadreel on Supernatural a few seasons ago. Tahmoh just finished shooting on a new digital sci-fi adventure series called Deep Six, which caught my attention as a unique and exciting project. Deep Six is a digital sci-fi adventure series that follows a group of astronauts and their military escort on the first deep space mission. They find themselves stranded after an unanticipated accident, and – wouldn’t you know it – also confronted with a first encounter that may not be very friendly. What makes the series unusual is its focus on realism – the creator is a scientist, and the show has two real life experts as consultants, including a professor of astrophysics and a space historian. With their help, Deep Six aims to portray space in all its beauty and majesty as well as its terrifying silence and endless expanse. Much as sci-fi classics like 2001 and Alien anchored their stories in realism and thus amped up the terror, Deep Six aims to be both accurate and scary. Sign me up! I caught up with Tahmoh today after a week of our schedules absolutely refusing to mesh and me coming down with a truly horrifying cold. But we persevered! You can read our other interview with Tahmoh Penikett here. [caption id="attachment_42462" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Photos: Fangasm[/caption] Lynn: It’s so nice to talk to you again! We miss you at the Supernatural conventions, by the way. Tahmoh: Yeah it’s been a while, thank you. I miss being there; those things are fun. Lynn: Well Supernatural is going into its 13th season, so who knows, you may be back. Tahmoh: (laughing) With Supernatural, you never know! So true. So what if Gadreel sacrificed himself in a moment of heroism? Death is an impediment to returning to Supernatural. Lynn: I was fascinated by what I’ve heard about Deep Six. Is that one of the things that drew you to this project, the focus on realism? Do you think that will make the series scarier? Tahmoh: I think any time that you have a creator and showrunner who is determined to make something as realistic as possible -- being honest about the risks involved with space travel, where we might be in the future, what limitations we might have, whatever exceptional technologies we may have advanced in – but being real about the dangers of space and how hard space is. And that makes it more plausible for the viewer and the audience. In general, to me, as humans, we’re moving ahead at such an incredible rate in terms of technology, and specifically rocket propulsion and traveling to other planets, and eventually getting to Mars has become a priority again. It wasn’t for about 30 years in terms of the major space agencies in the world, and for NASA, it just was not a priority. Now it’s become a priority again, and we’re seeing the possibilities, and you hear we may be getting there in ten to fifteen years. So it’s really fascinating, but there are inherent risks. And here you have a creator like the ones who created Deep Six, and they’re trying to stay true to that. They’re having scientific advisors, and as a result, they have a show that is much more realistic and much more plausible.  Audiences, in general, are educated about it because we’re watching all the programs, we’re following Elon Musk on twitter, we’re following NASA, we’re seeing all the updates, and we’re seeing what the limitations are. So in general, we’re quite educated about what is really happening. Lynn: That’s sort of what I was thinking. It seems to me the more realism, the more there’s the potential for really being scared, simply because it seems more plausible. I remember seeing 2001 A Space Odyssey – I was a kid and probably too young to actually be watching it, but that’s part of what made it so scary. Tahmoh: Yeah, Battlestar Galactica is a perfect example of a show I was on that had that – there was, of course, some technology we had, we’re doing space travel – but the Battlestar itself, it was classic, it really looked like a military vessel.  It was like a warship. We had the old school phones to communicate. It wasn’t really fancy but a lot of it was science based, we had actual rocket scientists who were consultants on the show, so a lot of the technology had science behind it.  And I think that’s what these guys are trying to do, so that’s good, man. [I’ve said this before, but I love the way Tahmoh talks – he’s clearly so knowledgeable and then he just casually tosses in a ‘man’ or a ‘love, , ’ and it’s just like, OH.] Lynn: Yeah, I totally agree. Did you get to interact with the scientist consultants as a guest act or you were just aware of their influence in the conceptualization of the show? Tahmoh: Yeah, I was just aware of their influence. I got the call, and the timing wasn’t ideal, but my agent said, just look at the script, I’ve heard good things, people have been talking about it, and it’s apparently a really good script. So I read the scene they wanted me to do, and it was literally one full day of work they wanted me to do. And once I read the script, I was like you know, this would be great to do, this is really well written. Better than most web series that I’ve seen done. And it just worked out time-wise, but mostly I wanted to do it because the script was so well done but also the consultants on it. So I went out there, and they were selling me on it as we were trying to make it happen, they were selling me on the project with all the information about how they had consulting scientists, how one of the creators is actually a physicist himself. You know, it definitely leant it some real credibility when you know that people like that are involved, and they’re trying to make something as real as that. Lynn: I’m not surprised at the quality of the script just because they seem to be putting so much heart and so much motivation into the entire project. That probably translates. Did it translate also to the day of filming? It sounds like it was a long day, but was it a set where people were motivated? Like the Supernatural set where every time I’ve been there, everyone seems to work so smoothly and even when things go wrong, everyone seems to go with the flow because they all seem to love what they’re doing? Was this a similar set? Tahmoh: Similar. You know, obviously, it’s hard to compare it with some other aspects, these guys were working with a very limited budget, but it definitely didn’t look like it. They were very efficient, everyone I saw on the crew was very good at their job, and on board and invested. So yeah, I guess they did share those qualities like on Supernatural, and that’s always a good thing. You know a project is good when everyone is really pulling their own because they believe in it, they believe in the story. If you believe in the story, you want to be a part of it and bring your best work, because the end product should be great. And I’m excited to be a part of that. Lynn: Can you tell me anything about your character? Tahmoh: I can’t speak a lot on him, I don’t know how much they’ve released. All I can say is he’s one of the astronauts’ commanding officers, so he’s kind of the veteran. He’s been around the block, and he’s someone who a lot of the other astronauts look up to. And you get a sense of his character right away, who he is, how much experience he has. Then the situation takes a turn for the worst, and that’s the surprising hook of my episode is what they encounter, what sort of problems he faces and how he deals with it.  And he’s obviously a veteran and very capable and smart and a leader and the others respect him. He’s serious, and he’s also got a joking and playful attitude at times, but it’s also, they’re astronauts and there’s no messing around, so when it comes down to business, and the situation gets serious, he’s by the book. Lynn: I’m glad to hear that he gets at least a little opportunity to do a little bit of comedy because I know from your other projects how good you are at that subtle comedy. Tahmoh: Yeah, I don’t, unfortunately, get the opportunity a lot to do it, but whenever I can squeeze it in there, it’s kinda who I am, and I think most of us have that in us, right? Lynn: Right, I totally agree. I know from talking to you at length in the past about your portrayal of Gadreel how thoughtful you are about the characters you’re portraying and creating a backstory so you can find what their motivation is and so you can understand them from a psychological viewpoint. [See my earlier interview with Tahmoh for that discussion here}  When you go in to do something like this, where you have to create a character and their arc in literally one day, is that challenging for someone who likes to really get a handle on the person you’re portraying? Tahmoh: That’s a really good point you just made because it is. Normally if I have two days of preparation, that’s still a very short amount of time. It’s kind of an essential part of my process to write the backstory. This was very very last minute, and I was travelling and there were things going on, so this was so last minute that I literally jumped on a plane after an afternoon of negotiating, flew, time difference, lost three hours, Toronto, out the next morning, shot all day. So I didn’t have the opportunity, I simply couldn’t do the work that I normally would, so I have to trust the script. I communicated to the writers before I arrived and I had a conversation with them where I said, you’re really going to have to lay out for me who this guy is, beyond what’s in the given circumstances and what’s in the script, I need you to tell me who he is and then I’ll work with that as best I can in this short amount of time we have. Lynn: That makes sense. I remember that in our last chat, in the green room at some Supernatural convention, we spent a lot of time talking about your process because as a psychologist, that’s what fascinates me. How actors make sense of their characters and how you bring that through, especially a very complicated character like Gadreel. So that was my first thought, I wonder how he’s doing that because this is a different set of circumstances. Tahmoh: Yeah, that’s very observant of you. Sometimes you just don’t have the opportunity. And I’ve said this before, sometimes you – and it’s rare, unfortunately – but sometimes the script is so good and the character is so good that you connect with the character on such a cerebral and such an instinctual level that you don’t have to make those choices. You CAN and you may, but sometimes you just completely understand that character. Sometimes you understand them so well that you trust in the script 100%, but because I like to do my due diligence, I’ll still –  it just makes it that much easier to color his backstory if I do have the opportunity to write some of it, you know? Lynn: Yeah. Tahmoh: It always helps, because it layers the work and it makes it more real, and you don’t just forget about it. Helo (on Battlestar Galactica) I definitely ended up writing a lot of backstory, but also when I had the audition, I just understood him 100%. I got him. I was like, just let me in the room. I didn’t have to use those techniques that you use to get you in an emotional place, whether it be substitution or sense memory or things like that, it was just there for me. Every once in a while in your career you’re blessed with things like that. Lynn: That must feel really good when it happens. Did you have to do more work with the Gadreel character on Supernatural because it was such an unusual character and had such an unusual evolution? Tahmoh: I had to do some work, but for that – and I’ve told this story before – it threw me off at first when I found out that Jared [Padalecki] was already playing the character. Because he’s one of the leads of the show! So Jared and I were playing the same character, and me not knowing that – I thought that I would be playing Ezekiel or Gadreel first, and then when I found out he had already played him – on the day that I was playing him – that threw me off. Lynn: I guess so! Tahmoh: But I got to see, and like I said before, he was doing very specific stuff, so I was able to incorporate it. But it was also not far off from what I was going to do, so that made it easier. And then, getting a sense of where they were thinking of taking the character, that’s when I started changing some of – not changing, but I started adding to who I thought Gadreel was. And I started making some different specific choices. Because the unfortunate thing is when they don’t really give you a sense of where your character is going to go and their arc, but only a loose idea, you also have to remain open to changing some of your choices. You might be making some strong choices, but they just might not work. Lynn: [nodding] Tahmoh: And so you have to be open to that as an actor. And I’ve done it before, I’ve put in a ton of work and made some strong choices, and then you come in, and the producer or director is like, actually no, we need you to do more of this, and you’re like welp okay! Lynn: (laughing) You don’t really think about the amazing flexibility that acting requires. Especially when you’re a guest actor I think, you’re always going in and creating characters who aren’t the leads and so there hasn’t been the amount of backstory given to you. I remember talking with Curtis Armstrong about how he struggled sometimes with Metatron on Supernatural because he was never given the whole story and didn’t know where the character was going. So like you he kept making choices and sometimes they worked and sometimes… Tahmoh: (laughing) Yeah! I totally can relate to that, and Curtis is so fantastic and did such a fantastic job. I could definitely see that was the case with him too, you know?  I felt that the writers were taking Gadreel in a very sort of evil nemesis sort of way and I just felt like I wanted to play against that a little bit.  And when Jared was playing him, he was doing it too – I could see it clearly in his performance, so he kind of set that up for me also, which was great. Lynn: And I think it really worked out in the end because Gadreel did get to be heroic. I think that all of us who were feeling a fondness for the character – much like Metatron –  were second guessing ourselves going hmm why am I feeling this way? We were probably picking up on those subtle things that you and Curtis and Jared were doing, but it made sense eventually because both of them got to be heroes ultimately. Tahmoh: That’s awesome, yeah. Lynn: It was, it was cool.  I won’t keep you too long – and I’m astounded that I’ve managed not to have a coughing fit for 20 minutes – but is there anything else you’re excited about or going up for that you want to talk about? Tahmoh: I’ve done three episodes of Incorporated, a new sci-fi series which is really well done. I got to work with an actor I’ve long admired, Dennis Haysbert, and with Allison Miller. I’m having a blast doing that right now! Lynn: It was so great to talk to you again – we really do miss you on the convention circuit, and I hope our paths cross soon. I’m really looking forward to seeing you on Deep Six. Tahmoh: Great talking to you soon – be well, love. ETA: Imdb tells me that Tahmoh is also part of the new series that’s generating a lot of buzz, Netflix’s Altered Carbon, a futuristic show in which your consciousness can be saved when your body dies and then implanted into another. Some big names are attached, with a very diverse and international cast, so stay tuned for that one also! In the meantime, you can come along for the ride with Deep Six.  Check out some behind the scenes videos on their IndieGoGo page, follow them on @DeepSixSeries, and stay tuned for more! https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/deep-six-a-hard-scifi-with-practical-fx-series-space#/ Behind the scenes stills courtesy of Deep Six.

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Power, Politics and Star Wars: Armitage Hux Edition

I read this article that tried to explain what Hux did in TROS and justify it and I was just not feeling it so I wrote a whole thing about it. So I thought, why not post it.

https://dorksideoftheforce.com/2019/12/22/star-wars-tros-general-hux/

I just wanna start by saying yes, I understand the logic of what happened in the film as explained by this article. I'm just here to challenge exactly what happened, why, and the article writer's attempts to justify it, because I don't find them to be an accurate summation of Hux's character. 

"It’s not hard to miss that the way The Last Jedi framed his character was very different from what we saw in The Force Awakens. At first, it almost felt as though he was a completely different character, having gone from Nazi-like general to an officer everyone refused to take seriously."

Right, and I think it's worth trying to examine why that shift in portrayal happened – behind the scenes. The writing changed hands from TFA with Lawrence Kasdan & JJ Abrams to Rian Johnson. So, clearly Johnson decided to go in a different direction with Hux. But why? Was it a continuing ploy to "subvert expectations" like he did so much in TLJ? Hence, if Hux was big and scary in the first film (obvious Nazi parallels in imagery and speech, commits literal genocide while hordes of stormtroopers look on), he had to be... silly, ineffectual and easily mocked in the second? Why?

Maybe it fits into a larger theme with Rian Johnson's writing, like... it seems like authority figures can (and should, maybe?) not be taken seriously? Think of all the authority figures in the Last Jedi. With the notable exception of Leia (who has such an iconic history) and Holdo I guess (random insert without much substance in my opinion), every single character who is, could be or once was in a position of power is cut down to size in some way. 

Luke Skywalker - crotchety old man. 

Poe - too hotheaded, needs to learn his place. 

Kylo - emo boy in a mask. 

Hux - butt of yo mama jokes. 

Snoke - literally cut in half. 

While I like this technique in some ways (I think I'm in the minority as someone who actually liked Luke being a disillusioned asshole lol, I thought it made him more interesting; and pointing out the obvious that Kylo is a conflicted try hard made him way more human and relatable to me), doing it to this extent was excessive. Especially in a film series that is supposed to have clearly defined villains. While I like the murder of Snoke because it was unexpected and it let Kylo actually have some agency to try to take over the galaxy on his own, you can't do it with every villain, or the audience isn't going to think anything is at stake anymore. So it always played really weird to me that Hux was taken from General Genocide to the target of slapstick humor. Which brings me to the next point...

"Looking back, it’s possible to interpret this as the result of how other characters viewed and treated him from that point forward, rather than an actual drastic change to the way he was portrayed. It’s possible that after Starkiller Base, the masses lost great respect for him — on both sides. He is no longer a man to fear. He’s General Hugs. He doesn’t scare anyone."

I just don't see how this is possible, to be honest. Like yeah, Starkiller base was lost, but surely not before it destroyed the entire Hosnian system, which, from what I understand, contained the entire seat of New Republic government. So I assume that means the president, vice president, whoever else was in the executive branch, all of the Senate, etc etc. Like imagine some terrorist leader called down a laser from space and obliterated all of Washington, D.C. while the President and all staff were in the White House, Congress was in session and the Supreme Court was hearing cases. We'd be like, oh my god, everyone's gone, we have no federal government, what the fuck. Even if the American army managed to destroy the weapon that did it, there'd still be basically irreparable damage to the very structure of the government and its ability to function. (Sounds like the plot of a future Michael Bay movie, but I digress.) 

The point is, whoever was responsible for the attack would probably still be pretty fearsome to the masses. And in Hux's case, considering his goal in TFA seems to be to usurp the New Republic and replace it with the First Order, at the end of the first film, he seems to be in a perfect position to do exactly that... which is why I was super confused as to why he spent TLJ chasing down like 30 rebels, who were already basically defeated?? Like, now would have been the time to take over! Don't just leave that power vacuum sitting there, buddy! Someone else is gonna fill it if you don't! (More proof I don't think Rian Johnson has cracked many history books, but the lack of coherent political framework is a major failing of the sequels in general, so it's not all entirely on his shoulders. He did seem like he was trying to engage with some of these ideas i.e. Canto Bight illustrating the evils of the military industrial complex, but they fell so flat because he just wasn't that informed about the socio-political commentary he was trying to make.) 

"This is further evidenced by the way Kylo Ren treats him the moment he becomes Supreme Leader of the First Order. Kylo quite literally begins pushing him around, constantly putting him in his place, belittling him, and making him look incompetent and expendable."

LOL this is such a fundamental misinterpretation of Kylo and Hux's relationship at the end of TLJ. Kylo didn't start pushing Hux around because everyone had lost respect for his authority. Kylo starts pushing Hux around because Kylo killed Snoke and took the Supreme Leader role himself, giving himself a BIG promotion over Hux. He went from like, army commander to freaking king. He's on a power trip, trying to assert his authority not just over Hux, but literally everyone in the First Order. The dialogue (handily linked by the article above) between them after Snoke's death very clearly states this:

Hux: Who do you think you're talking to? You presume to command my army? Our Supreme Leader is dead! We have no ruler!

Kylo: *starts choking him* The Supreme Leader is dead.

Hux: *choking* Long live the Supreme Leader. 

Kylo is subduing Hux by violence and coercion and filling the power vacuum himself (see, that's what happens to power vacuums, usually the most brutal asshole around arrives to fill it!). That's not something Hux brought upon himself in any way; it's something Kylo took by force. Hux isn't the only one following Kylo's orders by the Battle of Crait, the rest of the First Order army is also because they're all too terrified of Kylo to question him. Somehow making this only about Hux and Kylo as individuals is a really narrow-minded, boring interpretation of pretty much my favorite part of TLJ. 

"And here lies the deep change within Hux that leads us into The Rise of Skywalker. General Hux knew he would never regain anyone’s respect. He knew that Kylo Ren would continue to publicly humiliate him. He knew his chances of ever being able to regain power in the traditional sense were lost."

I still don't see how this is possible, especially since as far as I know there's no supplementary canon material to back this idea up. The article writer is grasping at straws trying to make sense of TROS's nonsensical character choices for Hux. There's all sorts of ways Hux could still regain power. I don't even know what "in the traditional sense" means? Hoping for a promotion, maybe? Sure, he could suck up to Kylo and make himself invaluable to Kylo's continued status as Supreme Leader (this is the route I took in my fanfic, since it seemed pretty plausible; Hux is set up to be the brain to Kylo's brawn). He could have Kylo assassinated and take over himself. He could recruit a whole faction of people to mutiny against Kylo. He could even sell out Kylo to the Resistance, sure, which I guess is what he was doing in TROS, but all of that is still in service of regaining power for himself.

"Hux is so angry with Kylo Ren, and filled with so much rage toward all he is and all he stands for, that he decides it does not matter which side of the war wins as long as the Supreme Leader isn’t on the winning team."

Again, I don't think this has shown to be true at all before TROS. By all appearances, Hux's goal has always been obtaining power, and the supplementary canon with his backstory seems to support this. There's so much with his father being an old Imperial and Hux growing up with the old imperial ideology and the belief that returning to some semblance of the Empire would be the most ideal outcome of the First Order's war on the New Republic. And by this logic, shouldn't Hux be thrilled by the (totally outlandish) possibility that Emperor Palpatine himself would come back to rule? Imagine all the Nazi holdovers after World War II finding out Hitler had RISEN FROM THE DEAD. They'd probably be pretty excited, no? 

But this is why reducing Hux's character to some petty asshole who has no personal values or larger ideology and just "wants to see Kylo Ren lose" is so dumb and boring to me. It means he literally no longer cares about his own personal ambitions or that of his larger ideological ones. Everything he worked for his whole life, countless hours of blood, sweat and tears, deciding to commit genocide of billions of innocent people to get the galaxy to fall in line with his vision........ amounts to literally nothing. As long as Kylo loses their little schoolyard tiff. 

Nah, I don't buy it. 

But this just speaks to generally larger problems in the sequel trilogy with the writers not having a strong grasp on the mechanisms of political power in the universe they're working with. In the films, who's fighting who and why has always been painfully vague and often confusing (why wasn't the Resistance just the New Republic army in TFA? etc), but while at least Rian Johnson used TLJ to try to engage with some of these questions of politics and power – albeit at times with cringeworthy naïveté  – TROS abandons it completely. It never once clarifies who's actually in charge here. Ostensibly it should be Kylo since he’s still got the title “Supreme Leader” in the opening scrawl, but he's running around chasing zombie Palpy! And the First Order is still very obviously still just a military operation focusing on the Resistance, so are all of the galaxy's sectors just... self-governing right now? If so, why? 

TROS's complete abandonment of the notion that anyone in this universe could even want power was completely baffling to me. It's always about power. The original trilogy was about power. Even the prequels were about power (to a micromanage-y, super boring degree. Embargoes! Trade disputes! Senate meetings with votes of no confidence!) To bring Palpatine back from the dead to make him some weirdo with a death cult who just wants the whole galaxy to die (I guess?)... none of that's compelling to me. And it seems to completely misunderstand (or willingly sidestep) any kind of interesting real world parallels, of which the original trilogy had plenty (and the 90s era EU/Legends novels in particular were really good at engaging with, probably why they're my favorite entries in the whole franchise). Which does play into my cynical suspicion that TROS was deliberately sterilized of any potential political commentary by Disney to appease the increasingly authoritarian governments in their international market. Can't have those pesky human rights cutting into their profits. :/