#also this is my third attempt uploading this so if you see two identical posts some how - just pretend you didn't

[i-have-art-block]

i redrew an almost year old art piece cause i got reminded of the old one recently and it's been haunting me

[mvrdermeharder]

Part 2 of Kaiser-goal analysis

[This post is a continuation to my previous one, where I tried to theorize how Kaiser’s goal celebrations differ from other strikers’ and the reason(s) behind it. I highly recommend you to read that first. I’ll also edit this post and link the third part here, when I upload that.]

[Also, tagging u @pixie05love <3]

Okay so, in this part I want to talk about what happens between the third and fourth goal: the failed attempt of the Magnus (the culmination point of Kaiser’s desperation to reestablish and reinforce his shaken self-esteem) and the events leading up to it. I think it’s important to recap these events and Kaiser’s down spiral to have a better understanding of the Magnus and it’s significance later on.

Reaction to defeat:

We have left off with the results of his shameful third goal: he fixates on Isagi more than ever, not bothering to award Ness. The game ends, with his rival as the ultimate victor. And just like after his latest goal, he tries to hold it together: covers his expression with his hair, head held down, being silent. But he obviously can’t take it anymore: his frustrations break through the surface completely, even though Ness isn’t there this time to “provoke” Kaiser’s ire.

(I am NOT placing the blame on Ness for how Kaiser responds to him in a verbally abusive way. That is not what I’m getting at. Just to be clear.)

And I want to note the obvious difference between these two responses to a loss: at first, his anger is icy and chilling, we get to see his vicious expression and eyes (they are the focal point of the panel) and it literally freezes Ness. He’s mad, it’s showing, but he still stands straight as the bet is not lost just yet. At the end however, his anger is loud and startling, he is hunched over, expression covered with shadows. He’s even more on the edge of an identity crisis, embarrassingly losing the bet that he had proposed in the first place, and having his self-obtained “humanity” (causing pain to others) ripped away from him.

So obviously, he doesn’t give a shit about his new offer. Prestige, wealth, and an escape from BM are only secondary goals: they do not “make him human”, only causing despair does. That is the source of his ego. And so, we get to the first self-harm scene.

Psychology behind the self-harm:

I think it can be interpreted in multiple ways, as there isn’t a clear indicator whether he’s punishing himself intentionally or subconsciously. I am PERSONALLY leaning towards the second possibility because of this one reason: he’s feeling like “shitty trash”. And how I see it, this feeling isn’t evoked by him choking himself, it’s quite the opposite, actually.

It is the same phrase his father had told him while putting his hands on Kaiser’s neck, the exact words Kaiser used to identify himself with as a young boy. But for a while now, he’s been considering himself as someone with success, who has built up his humanity, and so feeling like trash again this suddenly could’ve triggered his memories of the times he felt this way the strongest = under his father (who had spat these terrible things in his face) being totally helpless, with a pressure around his neck.

In short: he’s feeling worse than ever -> it triggers his ptsd of the most intense moment he’d felt this exact same way -> he’s reliving the memory -> subconsciously chokes himself, to imitate the situation in real time.

(But, as I’ve said, this is only my interpretation. I do not study psychology, nor do I have personal experience with ptsd and trauma responses.)

Between the Ubers game and the PxG one, we first see Kaiser at practice, as he acknowledges that he can’t gain back his feelings of comfort unless he beats Isagi. Later on the same day, we get to the second time he chokes himself. With recordings of Isagi playing in the background, he is literally facing his own defeat over and over again. It would be no wonder if the reasons behind his self-harm were the same ones that I had theorized regarding the first instance (feeling like trash more than ever -> subconsciously imitating a traumatic moment)

But there is another possibility as well. It’s now crystal clear to him that crushing Isagi is the end all be all. So, maybe, to come up with a way to do just that, he is intentionally placing even more pressure on himself (both figuratively and literally) to find a way out. He overwhelms his psyche on purpose, so that his base instincts for survival would kick in, searching for newfound inspiration to escape the situation. And it works:

Magnus’ failed attempt:

After Isagi scores the first goal, Kaiser’s situation is even worse. Not only is his one satisfaction of ruining other’s careers is being ripped away, but also his other accomplishments (his position, his team). Now even more things are at stake. Again, his anger is loud, bigger than ever.

But he puts a lid on his frustrations again, maybe so as not to scare Ness away; after all he needs him to set up his goal. But his emotions and desperation are clearly showing, they make him utterly irrational. Which costs him a miskick.

And at this moment, we have finally arrived at the pinnacle of his accumulated despair: for the very first time we can clearly see and observe every detail of his overwhelming frustration on his face: his hair is completely out of the way and there are no shadows to cover his expression either.

(I know this last part about the failed attempt is more of a recap, but some parts that I’ve mentioned will be important regarding the actual Magnus analysis itself… or at least I think so…)

Edit! Read part 3 here!

[englishdailydrift]

Learn English Through the Magical Tale of the Twin Brothers

Hello, English learners and fairy tale enthusiasts!

Are you looking to improve your English reading, speaking, and listening skills? What if you could do all that while enjoying a magical story? We have a treat for you—a narration of the captivating tale of the Twin Brothers from Andrew Lang's "The Green Fairy Book."

What's the Story About?

The Twin Brothers is a heartwarming story of two identical twins whose lives are intertwined with elements of magic, adventure, and moral lessons. This enchanting tale is filled with magical creatures, enchanted items, and tests of courage and wisdom. As the brothers embark on a perilous journey, they confront various challenges that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Why Listen to This Story?

Listening to English stories is a fantastic way to improve your language skills. This particular English story provides you not only with reading material but also offers a perfect opportunity for English listening practice. The narrative is filled with rich vocabulary and conversational phrases, making it a comprehensive resource for learning English.

Once there was a fisherman who had plenty of money but no children. One day an old woman came to his wife and said: 'What use is all your prosperity to you when you have no children?'

'It is God's will,' answered the fisherman's wife.

'Nay, my child, it is not God's will, but the fault of your husband; for if he would but catch the little gold-fish you would surely have children. To-night, when he comes home, tell him he must go back and catch the little fish. He must then cut it in six pieces--one of these you must eat, and your husband the second, and soon after you will have two children. The third piece you must give to the dog, and she will have two puppies. The fourth piece give to the mare, and she will have two foals. The fifth piece bury on the right of the house door, and the sixth on the left, and two cypress trees will spring up there.'

When the fisherman came home at evening his wife told him all that the old woman had advised, and he promised to bring home the little gold-fish. Next morning, therefore, he went very early to the water, and caught the little fish. Then they did as the old woman had ordered, and in due time the fisherman's wife had two sons, so like each other that no one could tell the difference. The dog had two puppies exactly alike, the mare had two foals, and on each side of the front door there sprang up two cypress trees precisely similar.

When the two boys were grown up, they were not content to remain at home, though they had wealth in plenty; but they wished to go out into the world, and make a name for themselves. Their father would not allow them both to go at once, as they were the only children he had. He said: 'First one shall travel, and when he is come back then the other may go.'

So the one took his horse and his dog, and went, saying to his brother: 'So long as the cypress trees are green, that is a sign that I am alive and well; but if one begins to wither, then make haste and come to me.' So he went forth into the world.

One day he stopped at the house of an old woman, and as at evening he sat before the door, he perceived in front of him a castle standing on a hill. He asked the old woman to whom it belonged, and her answer was: 'My son, it is the castle of the Fairest in the Land!'

'And I am come here to woo her!'

'That, my son, many have sought to do, and have lost their lives in the attempt; for she has cut off their heads and stuck them on the post you see standing there.'

'And the same will she do to me, or else I shall be victor, for to-morrow I go there to court her.'

Then he took his zither and played upon it so beautifully that no one in all that land had ever heard the like, and the princess herself came to the window to listen.

The next morning the Fairest in the Land sent for the old woman and asked her, 'Who is it that lives with you, and plays the zither so well?'

'It is a stranger, princess, who arrived yesterday evening,' answered the old woman.

And the princess then commanded that the stranger should be brought to her.

When he appeared before the princess she questioned him about his home and his family, and about this and that; and confessed at length that his zither-playing gave her great pleasure, and that she would take him for her husband. The stranger replied that it was with that intent he had come.

The princess then said: 'You must now go to my father, and tell him you desire to have me to wife, and when he has put the three problems before you, then come back and tell me.'

The stranger then went straight to the king, and told him that he wished to wed his daughter.

And the king answered: 'I shall be well pleased, provided you can do what I impose upon you; if not you will lose your head. Now, listen; out there on the ground, there lies a thick log, which measures more than two fathoms; if you can cleave it in two with one stroke of your sword, I will give you my daughter to wife. If you fail, then it will cost you your head.'

Then the stranger withdrew, and returned to the house of the old woman sore distressed, for he could believe nothing but that next day he must atone to the king with his head. And so full was he of the idea of how to set about cleaving the log that he forgot even his zither.

In the evening came the princess to the window to listen to his playing, and behold all was still. Then she called to him: 'Why are you so cast down this evening, that you do not play on your zither?'

And he told her his trouble.

But she laughed at it, and called to him: 'And you grieve over that? Bring quickly your zither, and play something for my amusement, and early to-morrow come to me.'

Then the stranger took his zither and played the whole evening for the amusement of the princess.

Next morning she took a hair from her locks and gave it to him, saying: 'Take this hair, and wind it round your sword, then you will be able to cleave the log in two.'

Then the stranger went forth, and with one blow cleft the log in two.

But the king said: 'I will impose another task upon you, before you can wed my daughter.'

'Speak on,' said the stranger.

'Listen, then,' answered the king; 'you must mount a horse and ride three miles at full gallop, holding in each hand a goblet full of water. If you spill no drop then I shall give you my daughter to wife, but should you not succeed then I will take your life.'

Then the stranger returned to the house of the old woman, and again he was so troubled as to forget his zither.

In the evening the princess came to the window as before to listen to the music, but again all was still; and she called to him: 'What is the matter that you do not play on your zither?'

Then he related all that the king had ordered him to do, and the princess answered: 'Do not let yourself be disturbed, only play now, and come to me to-morrow morning.'

Then next morning he went to her, and she gave him her ring, saying: 'Throw this ring into the water and it will immediately freeze, so that you will not spill any.'

The stranger did as the princess bade him, and carried the water all the way.

Then the king said: 'Now I will give you a third task, and this shall be the last. I have a negro who will fight with you to-morrow, and if you are the conqueror you shall wed my daughter.'

The stranger returned, full of joy, to the house of the old woman, and that evening was so merry that the princess called to him;: 'You seem very cheerful this evening; what has my father told you that makes you so glad?'

He answered: 'Your father has told me that to-morrow I must fight with his negro. He is only another man like myself, and I hope to subdue him, and to gain the contest.'

But the princess answered: 'This is the hardest of all. I myself am the black man, for I swallow a drink that changes me into a negro of unconquerable strength. Go to-morrow morning to the market, buy twelve buffalo hides and wrap them round your horse; fasten this cloth round you, and when I am let loose upon you to-morrow show it to me, that I may hold myself back and may not kill you. Then when you fight me you must try to hit my horse between the eyes, for when you have killed it you have conquered me.'

Next morning, therefore, he went to the market and bought the twelve buffalo hides which he wrapped round his horse. Then he began to fight with the black man, and when the combat had already lasted a long time, and eleven hides were torn, then the stranger hit the negro's horse between the eyes, so that it fell dead, and the black man was defeated.

Then said the king: 'Because you have solved the three problems I take you for my son-in-law.'

But the stranger answered: 'I have some business to conclude first; in fourteen days I will return and bring the bride home.'

So he arose and went into another country, where he came to a great town, and alighted at the house of an old woman. When he had had supper he begged of her some water to drink, but she answered: 'My son, I have no water; a giant has taken possession of the spring, and only lets us draw from it once a year, when we bring him a maiden. He eats her up, and then he lets us draw water; just now it is the lot of the king's daughter, and to-morrow she will be led forth.'

The next day accordingly the princess was led forth to the spring, and bound there with a golden chain. After that all the people went away and she was left alone.

When they had gone the stranger went to the maiden and asked her what ailed her that she lamented so much, and she answered that the reason was because the giant would come and eat her up. And the stranger promised that he would set her free if she would take him for her husband, and the princess joyfully consented.

When the giant appeared the stranger set his dog at him, and it took him by the throat and throttled him till he died; so the princess was set free.

Now when the king heard of it he gladly consented to the marriage, and the wedding took place with great rejoicings. The young bridegroom abode in the palace one hundred and one weeks. Then he began to find it too dull, and he desired to go out hunting. The king would fain have prevented it, but in this he could not succeed. Then he begged his son-in-law at least to take sufficient escort with him, but this, too, the young man evaded, and took only his horse and his dog.

He had ridden already a long way, when he saw in the distance a hut, and rode straight towards it in order to get some water to drink. There he found an old woman from whom he begged the water. She answered that first he should allow her to beat his dog with her little wand, that it might not bite her while she fetched the water. The hunter consented; and as soon as she had touched the dog with her wand it immediately turned to stone. Thereupon she touched the hunter and also his horse, and both turned to stone. As soon as that had happened, the cypress trees in front of his father's house began to wither. And when the other brother saw this, he immediately set out in search of his twin. He came first to the town where his brother had slain the giant, and there fate led him to the same old woman where his brother had lodged. When she saw him she took him for his twin brother, and said to him: 'Do not take it amiss of me, my son, that I did not come to wish you joy on your marriage with the king's daughter.'

The stranger perceived what mistake she had made, but only said: 'That does not matter, old woman,' and rode on, without further speech, to the king's palace, where the king and the princess both took him for his twin brother, and called out: 'Why have you tarried so long away? We thought something evil had befallen you.'

When night came and he slept with the princess, who still believed him to be her husband, he laid his sword between them, and when morning came he rose early and went out to hunt. Fate led him by the same way which his brother had taken, and from a distance he saw him and knew that he was turned to stone. Then he entered the hut and ordered the old woman to disenchant his brother. But she answered: 'Let me first touch your dog with my wand, and then I will free your brother.'

He ordered the dog, however, to take hold of her, and bite her up to the knee, till she cried out: 'Tell your dog to let me go and I will set your brother free!'

But he only answered: 'Tell me the magic words that I may disenchant him myself;' and as she would not he ordered his dog to bite her up to the hip.

Then the old woman cried out: 'I have two wands, with the green one I turn to stone, and with the red one I bring to life again.'

So the hunter took the red wand and disenchanted his brother, also his brother's horse, and his dog, and ordered his own dog to eat the old woman up altogether.

While the brothers went on their way back to the castle of the king, the one brother related to the other how the cypress tree had all at once dried up and withered, how he had immediately set out in search of his twin, and how he had come to the castle of his father-in-law, and had claimed the princess as his wife. But the other brother became furious on hearing this, and smote him over the forehead till he died, and returned alone to the house of his father-in-law.

When night came and he was in bed the princess asked him: 'What was the matter with you last night, that you never spoke a word to me?'

Then he cried out: 'That was not me, but my brother, and I have slain him, because he told me by the way that he had claimed you for his wife!'

'Do you know the place where you slew him?' asked the princess, 'and can you find the body?'

'I know the place exactly.'

'Then to-morrow we shall ride thither,' said the princess. Next morning accordingly they set out together, and when they had come to the place, the princess drew forth a small bottle that she had brought with her, and sprinkled the body with some drops of the water so that immediately he became alive again.

When he stood up, his brother said to him: 'Forgive me, dear brother, that I slew you in my anger.' Then they embraced and went together to the Fairest in the Land, whom the unmarried brother took to wife.

Then the brothers brought their parents to live with them, and all dwelt together in joy and happiness.

Thank you for visiting our blog, and we hope you find this English story for learning English both enjoyable and educational!

[script-nef]

No need for jealousy, sweetie | Kageyama Tobio

Category: fluff

2k words; Is it a famous idol? Is it a high-skilled setter? Nope. It's his own son.

Everyone knows Kageyama Tobio, the genius setter of Japan’s national team and a member of The Monster Generation, is a love-struck fool. It’s not that hard to find out, seeing how his normally rigid and scowling face immediately turns soft and full of tender affection as soon as his wife is mentioned. His reaction is the same when his son, who celebrated his first birthday just a few months ago, becomes the topic of conversations as well.

The news of his son’s birth was posted all over Japan’s news as it consisted of a video uploaded onto his SNS account where you were beaming like a sun with your newborn baby in your arms while Tobio was silently crying his eyes out. He then moved to embrace you, words of thanks and love spilling out in between hiccups and cries. You joked that he cried more than you during the labour and everyone in the room was either laughing or comforting him.

You once attended one of his matches with Hikari in your arms, cheering for your husband and his team. As soon as the match was finished and congratulations were given, he zipped to your side and took the baby off of you. Hikari, recognising his father, gurgled joyfully and snuggled deeper into his embrace. As you started talking to Tobio, they both looked at you with an identical expression, like it was copy-pasted, that fans nearby took hundreds of photos. It’s one of the highlights in compilations of “Kageyama in husband mode” videos. (Other popular uploads include interviews where he doesn’t shut up when asked about your health or questions about your relationships. A lot of his fans started liking him thanks to YouTube’s wacky algorithms.)

Tobio is the embodiment of a devoted husband and father. Despite his odd memorisation skill which seemed limited to all things volleyball related, he never once missed an anniversary, birthday or doctor’s appointment. He even excused himself from practices for you. You can still hear how Hinata screamed “You’re skipping volleyball practice? You?” when he delivered the news. Interviews and commentaries after matches were cut short, much to his company and team officials’ dismay, because he couldn’t waste a second returning back to your side. He always repeated “[Name] is waiting. Goodbye.” with a bow and took off. He also wakes up practically instinctively to the baby’s cries even after he’s wiped out due to his rigorous training. The amount of superhuman stamina he has made you jealous since you’re half-dead after exercising a bit while he’s fit as a horse. He says any exhaustion he has evaporates as soon as he sees his son’s cute little face. A weird and floppy smile appeared on his face whenever he took the minuscule hands in his.

Hikari is practically a carbon copy of his father. Same piercing black eyes which look odd but strangely suitable on a one-year-old, smooth black hair growing in tufts and a round face with baby fat filling out his plump cheeks. Tobio sometimes pokes his chubby cheeks while he’s sleeping, hands trembling like he’s about to touch a priceless artifact. If you took a photo now and compared it to one of Tobio’s childhood ones, even he would be confused. They’re just that much alike.

When his teammates and friends visited to celebrate Hikari’s first birthday, their reactions were… quite interesting. Apparently they didn’t expect the child, a genetic offspring from Tobio and you, to have the similarity percentage lopsided to 99 and 1. Hinata argued 99.5 and 0.5 which caused another fight to explode between him and your husband. 

It was very childish, the arguments thrown around being the equivalent of “Look at him! Are you sure you didn’t just split into half like that thing with the cell?”  “Mitosis, idiot.”  “Why are you still so mean, Tsukishima?! But yeah, mitosis!”  “What the hell do you think you’re saying, dumbass? He’s so much like [Name]!”  “Only you can see that, Mr Wife Idiot!” and so on. It was cut short when Hikari started crying due to the influx in noise and Tobio’s Dad Mode kicked in.

In your eyes, it’s absolutely adorable. Two copies of your favourite face in the world to wake up to and fill your life with. While pregnancy was a pain, right now is paradise. Especially since Hikari is a quiet and calm kid just like his father. By now, you should be concerned if they’re clones rather than father and son.

But recently, Tobio’s kind of miffed at Hikari for some reason. That doesn’t mean he’s neglecting his child, he would rather die than do that. He’s as attentive as ever, if not even more so than usual. Using his overpowered athletic skills to respond to Hikari’s whines or cries much faster than you, he drops everything and runs out at the smallest indication of discomfort. It’s also not because having a baby is a handful, they’re meant to be like that.

No, he’s just incredibly jealous of a one-year-old because “he’s taking up all your time and affection when you promised to love me most in the world”. 

When he first said that, your initial reaction was to double-take because you thought you heard him wrong. The thought of “Well. My hearing is failing now” echoed in your head. But no, this dork was being possessive and filled to the brim with envy over his son. His own. Son. As unbelievable as it sounds, it’s kind of in character for Tobio. Tobio who has various epithets like:

King of the Court

Volleyball Idiot

Number 1 Wife Fan

Mr “I have two brain cells and one’s for volleyball and one’s for my wife. A third one is sprouting for my son.”

And plenty of other variations.

So far, the attempt to make him understand the needlessness of his concerns and jealousy haven’t gone well. Generally, it starts with your defence of “Tobio, I love you and Hikari equally.” “You said you would love me the most in the world!” “Fine then, I love you the most in the world.” “I know you’re lying!” “Sweetie, please.” Rinse and repeat.

He turns dejected after every single “fight” and curls up into a ball, refusing to talk to you unless you hug and kiss him. He thinks he’s sneaky and manipulative. He really isn’t, you have him playing in the palm of your hands.

But it’s going to become a real problem if he’s going to be jealous with the tiny tenant who’s going to be around for at least another 2 decades. And the worst thing is that you can’t regularly find advice since his closest friends aren’t… much of a help.

Hinata looked at you like you were crazy in one of your rare meetups. Tsukishima acted like he was actually getting sick from your concerns, that salty bastard. Yachi, kind and helpful and sweet Yachi, was the only one who made valuable contributions with Yamaguchi. It’s such a shame they’re so busy that they can barely have a social life nowadays.

“Hmm… I mean, he stills loves Hikari, right?”

“Yes. Endlessly.”

“Well then… how about treating him exactly the same as you did before Hikari came, if not more affectionately? That’ll show him that his son, his one-year-old son who doesn’t even understand the concept of jealousy, is not a quote-unquote threat.”

“Just threaten to leave him alone for like, a month if he keeps on being possessive. That’ll wake him up.”

“Tsukki!”

“Oh hello, Satan, didn’t think you'd be contributing. How’s roasting the souls of the innocent going?”

“It’s going fine. Would they really be innocent if they’re in Hell?”

“It’s a joke, Sea Salt. Also, that would crush him!”

“That’s the whole point.”

“I think you’re using this just to annoy him.”

“You’re thinking correctly.”

“Back to the topic at hand! [Name]-chan, just reassure and spend a lot of time with him.”

“That’s literally what I’m doing right now! Ughhh what should I dooooo…”

“You know it’s really annoying when lovestruck couples come and complain about their relationship like it’s a problem when in reality you’re happy, right? Just saying.”

“Tsukki, she has a real problem here!”

“Eh, does she though?”

And of course, that line of conversation took off before you could object and continued for the rest of the visit. So all in all, the two-hour lunch date with your friends resulted in a public commotion which nearly got you kicked out of the café. You were about to return home with no solid solutions when Hinata grabbed and stopped you.

“Hinata?”

“[Name]-chan, I’m sure it’s going to be fine. I think he’s just like this because he spent his entire life looking at either volleyball or you, and now that a third party has entered, he’s just not used to it. Time fixes everything or something like that, right?”

“It’s already been a year though…”

“Yeah, well… I’m sure he’s getting better. I remember when we visited you on Hikari’s okuizome, he was literally looking at you for the entire time. The entire time. When it was his son’s 100th day anniversary.”

Yes, Tobio spent the whole 5 hour party/ceremony with his eyes glued onto you, until everyone berated him for his lack of attention. Hinata literally flung a rubber band at his head and he didn’t even flinch. It was the main topic of conversation in your friend circle for the next month or so.

“But when we came again for his first birthday, Kageyama was all over Hikari! I think the transition of his love for you to Hikari is a bit slow, if that makes sense. He probably thinks the love you have for him is getting smaller compared to his love for you. Our Kageyama’s a bit of an idiot like that, right?” You don’t really know whether to nod or shake your head. “The fact that you’re hesitating kind of says everything, [Name]-chan. It’ll get better when his love for Hikari matches yours, okay? Hang in there!”

With a swift but warm hug, Hinata ran off to do his training. 

The entire walk back home was filled with ruminations. Hinata was probably right. Kageyama’s attitude was slowly, but surely changing now that you’re thinking back. The ratio of his time with you and Hikari was 9:1 when he was just born, but recently it was more like 8:2. It should be concerning that this is the progress after a year of living together, but it’s better than nothing. You probably have nothing to worry about.

“Tobio, I’m home!” Silence welcomed you back. “Love? You home?” It was one of his rare days off and he said he would be taking care of Hikari so you could enjoy some free time while he can sleep in for the day. Also because his team instructor forbade him from meeting with Hinata since it always ends with a 3 hour volleyball match. 

“In here.” A tiny reply emerged from the nursery. He always came running as soon as the front door creaked open like an overgrown puppy since you started living together, so this was surprising. Quietly tiptoeing in, you were met with your baby sleeping soundly in your husband’s arms, sucking on his thumb and sleep-babbling intermittently. Tobio’s face was one of love and pure happiness as he watched Hikari snoozing away like he didn’t have a care in the world—the same face he made when he stared at you. When he raised his head up to look at you, his eyes were filled with joy and warmth, crinkling in the edges. 

“He’s so small.” He whispered, careful not to wake Hikari up. You joined him by his side, gently nudging your child’s chubby cheeks and revelling at its softness. “I have this… this feeling in my chest whenever I look at him… the same one whenever I see you.” Tobio’s hand came up to cup your face and he pressed a tender kiss to your lips.

“I love you both so much.”

Yeah, you have nothing to worry about. 

[rpschtuff]

Carrd.co

Hello roleplayers!! Are you looking for an easy, good-looking, and accessible place to host your blog info on outside of Tumblr? Is Google Docs just not cutting it for you? Then I have a solution for you. Consider checking out Carrd.co.

Carrd lets you create “simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.” And I know what you’re thinking -- ‘One page? Surely I can’t put all my info on just one page!’ But I assure you, you can. Despite being technically one page, your content can be easily spread across multiple sections for clear organization, much like a blog with pop-ups or tabs here on Tumblr.

Check out this sample site I whipped up to see what I mean.

In this post, I will walk through how I made this sample Carrd site, to demonstrate how simple and customizable it is. But first, to answer what you’re already wondering -- what makes Carrd any better than Google Docs? And I have three answers for you:

There is no issue of privacy or security. Your account name and email is not accessible anywhere on your Carrd site, nor are any viewers visible.

Carrd is much more mobile friendly than Google Docs. I don’t even attempt to open Docs on my phone anymore, as they’re a bit of a nightmare and I can never do it anonymously. But I’ve never once struggled with a Carrd site. Everything is automatically put into a mobile friendly format, and if the automatic settings do mess up, you have the ability to go in and manually change how things will be displayed on mobile.

This may be a bit more personal opinion, but I found Carrd easier to customize as far as colors, images, backgrounds, etc. After about ten minutes, I was comfortably manipulating all of the elements on my site, and much happier with the end result than anything I’ve seen on Docs.

Join me under the cut for a walkthrough of creating the site linked above.

As a note, I’m not intending this to be a full guide to all of Carrd’s features, just a general overview to see how things are laid out. It’s fairly intuitive so once you see the basics, you should be able to play around with it more and get your site just the way you want it.

When you create a Carrd account, you will be given this screen. (If you’re on the main dashboard instead, click New Site.)

You can either explore premade templates below, or you can start from scratch by clicking the link in “blank canvas”. I prefer a blank slate myself, but I encourage you to check out the templates if they seem easier for you.

After clicking “blank canvas” you will arrive at this screen.

These are just Carrd’s instructions. I’ll hit ‘Okay, got it!’ to get rid of it.

The first thing I want to do is customize the background. It’s a good starting point. To do that, click on the three lines in the top right corner...

...and select Background.

Options will open on the left side of the screen, as seen here. Your customization options are fairly straightforward.

You can change the color...

Or change it to something else entirely. I’m going to use an image.

After uploading your image, you have the option to recrop it.

Now I hit accept, and this will be my site’s background.

There are other options as well, that can reposition the image, change its size, tile it, etc.

I can also add a gradient or a pattern to this image. I’m going to scroll down to Overlay and select Gradient.

And change those colors and the angle a bit.

Ahh, lovely. I’ll also add a pattern...

But that looks rather ugly. I think I’ll play with the color, size, and thickness a bit more.

I like that. Nice and subtle. Let’s call the background done.

Now let’s customize the page itself. This isn’t necessary, if you like the text directly on top of your background, but I like how neat it looks.

Go back to the three lines, and this time select Page.

Under Style, I’m going to change Default to Box.

You can change the position, padding, and other settings of the box in this sidebar. Personally, I want to round the corners...

...change the color...

...and change the opacity.

I’d also like to add a border...

...plus a customized drop shadow.

And we’ll call that done.

Now! Let’s see what this site looks like on mobile. In the top right menu, to the left of the save icon, is an icon that looks like a phone. Click that.

As you can see, your view resized to demonstrate how your site will appear to a mobile user. It’s a very good reference. I’m going to switch back to desktop now (the same button, which now looks like a computer monitor).

Let’s get some content on this site now! I’m going to start with the text that’s already present, that says ‘Nothing here yet! :)’. Click on that.

Options for this text will appear. First, I’m going to click the word Text itself. This will cycle through various options, such as default text, headings, subheadings, etc. I want this to be my site title, so I settle on that. (This step isn’t necessary at all, but I find it helps keep me a bit more organized.)

Now, for the content itself. The box is where I enter what I want this text to say. Markdown instructions for bold, italics, links, etc. are always below the box for easy reference.

I want to change how this text looks. Above Site Title, you’ll see an icon that looks like a paintbrush. Click it to reveal the next tab.

Here you can change color, font, size, weight, and anything else that strikes your fancy. There are a lot of options here and they’re pretty straightforward, so play around with it. Here’s what I settled on.

Remember you can check it on mobile, as well.

Time to add more text. Let’s start with a bio, maybe?

Hit the plus sign in the upper right menu to add new content, then select text.

By default, new text will match the formatting of the most recent text used. I’m going to the first tab, the one marked A, and making this text Paragraph.

Then I go back to the paintbrush tab to make some changes to the style.

Then back to the first tab to add some content. I’m just dropping in some lorem ipsum, since this is only a sample. Obviously you’d want something a bit more practical here.

Let’s say I want a link in there. I’ll follow the markdown format to get one (instructions are below the box, as always).

Now it’s in there, as the third sentence. You can see it underlined. But I want to customize that link. If I go back to the paintbrush tab, options for Link and Hover have appeared. I can change the color there.

And if I scroll all the way down, I can change the link style from Underlined to Plain.

That looks nice. I’ll call that done.

Let’s add a subheading to that section. I’ll add another text box.

Then click and drag it above the previous one.

On the first tab, I’m going to change this one to Main Heading.

Then customize it as before.

Now for the actual text itself.

Lovely.

Let’s add some rules! I want to add a new title, so for that, I’m going to select the text that says About. Then in the bottom left is a button that looks like two overlapping squares. This will copy the text, so we don’t need to reformat it identically.

Click and drag the new title where you want it, and change the text to what you want.

I’m going to add a list now. It’s one of. the other options under the plus sign.

As you can see, some bullet points have appeared. Markdown instructions are still under the box where you enter the content. I’m going to fill it with lorem ipsum again.

Under the paintbrush tab, you’ll see that there are multiple tabs. The first lets you change some style and formatting.

The second lets you change the bullets themselves. I’m going to play with that a bit.

The third lets you change the actual text formatting. (I don’t know why my purple bullet points disappeared, I must have hit an undo at some point without noticing. Pretend they’re still purple.)

And I’ll call that done.

Mobile check!

Not bad.

But the question of the hour, how do you make these separate pages? Let me show you. Under the plus sign, choose Control.

A blue dotted line will appear. Drag this to the top of what you would like to be a new section.

On the left tab, the type should read Section Break. Type in something simple and easy to remember under Name.

This has designated everything under the Control as a new section. We need to create a link to it in the very first section.

I prefer to use Buttons for this, but any link option on this site should work. I’m going to add a Button under the Sample Site title.

By clicking the small word Button (inside the box on the left tab), I can change its settings.

The Label is what the button will actually say. The URL is where the button will take me. I can enter any URL, but if I enter the name of the Control I made with a # in front of it, it will take me to that section.

There are options to. change colors of each button individually, but I prefer to go to the paintbrush tab and change their appearance altogether, so each new button in this group will look the same.

Unfortunately, you can’t properly preview the section breaks while you’re editing. So I’m going to publish this site now so I can view it. Go to the three lines in the top right and choose Publish. Fill out all the options there, then hit Publish. (You can also save as a draft here, if you want to keep your progress but aren’t ready to publish yet, but this doesn’t let you preview it properly.)

Now, if I hit view site, I will be able to see it properly. And as you can tell...

It only displays everything up until that first section break. And when I click the About button that I made...

...everything else appears.

So it’s working! Let’s go back to the editor and add another section break for the rules.

(As a note, you can also set something as a Scroll Point rather than a Section Break, so that any links will scroll down to that spot as opposed to hiding then revealing a new section. You may prefer that option, it’s in the dropdown under Type.)

Now I want to go back to my button...

...scroll down on the left options tab and choose Add.

This creates a second button within this group, that I can edit the same as the first.

Lovely. Let’s preview this in mobile quickly.

Notice how the buttons automatically resized for full width on mobile, and are displaying differently than they appeared on desktop? This is by default, but you can change this behavior if you wish. Select the buttons, and on the paintbrush tab, scroll all the way down until you see Mobile.

By default, it’s set to Auto, where it makes its best guess at what will work for mobile. If you switch to Manual, you can change its behavior.

If I change the dropdown under Layout from Stack to Default, it will display as it does on desktop.

For something as simple as buttons, this likely doesn’t matter, and full width buttons may actually be more mobile friendly. But it’s important to know where these options are, in case something is actually broken on mobile and requires fixing. Check everything on your site in mobile to make sure it actually works.

Let’s publish this again to preview it now.

Our new button looks good, and both redirect you to the appropriate place.

But wait!! Once you’re in one section... there’s no button to get back!! I’m trapped!! This is very important. Always provide a way to leave the current section, so your viewer doesn’t get stuck somewhere on your site.

The easiest way to do this is to add a new Control on your first section, called #home. Then, at the bottom of each section, add a button that will link back to it. (You could also add buttons for all the sections at the bottom of each, but I find that more tedious to set up. But it’s entirely down to your preference.)

Now if you republish the site, it should all be functional, and you can navigate it with ease.

Let’s check the actual site on mobile, too. I’m going to actually get out my phone and go to the URL.

It all looks good there, so I will call this one done.

And that’s a rough guide to using Carrd.co! Obviously this is geared more towards my style and preferences, but there are so many ways to customize this to suit your needs and tastes. I also didn’t cover things like images and videos, as I feel they’re pretty straightforward.

A few notes:

Carrd currently limits free users to only three sites per account. However, Gmail’s alias trick and SessionBox totally work. I run multiple Carrd accounts as easily as I run multiple Tumblrs.

A free Carrd site can only have up to 100 items on it. For my sites, I haven’t even come close to that limit, but I can see larger blogs or multimuses potentially struggling with that.

[ashesarrows]

The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente- FULL REVIEW

This review is the complete version of its counterpart on GoodReads.

This book really disappointed me. The roughest thing is that it’s right in the middle of the series, so you have to read it if you want to continue. There are bright spots (Ell! Saturday!), and I can sense the incredible book Valente was trying to write, but overall, this was a flop. Would’ve been a DNF if I hadn’t promised myself I’d finish the series. 

So, firstly: I’m a longtime fan of Fairyland, and I commonly list the first book and Valente herself as my favorite book and author. I had no negative preconceptions about the book going in. In fact, I know I have an irrational fear of series, and at first I thought my struggles with this book could be chalked up to that. 

But I loved the second book. It was entertaining, a good follow-up, and a unique new story to explore. When I picked up the third book and only got a chapter in before forgetting about it, I had a lot of excuses—I was burned out. I didn’t like the Blue Wind, and I didn’t want to read about her. I was busy with school.

As it turns out, having picked the book up three years later and finished it this time, none of that was true. This time, I was yearning for more of Fairyland, I quite liked the Blue Wind, and I had ample time to read in. 

It just wasn’t a good book.

I talk about planning/pantsing a lot, and that’s once again relevant. I’ll excerpt from my review of another book:

There are two types of NaNoWriMo writers: the planners, & the pantsers. Planners have an outline ready before they write, and pantsers go "by the seat of their pants"—very few, or even no, plans. Both have pros/cons; here I'll focus on a common pitfall for pantsers.

Almost every Western narrative… follows something akin to the 3-act structure. There is a main conflict which builds to a climax and is then resolved (think Star Wars’s Death Star.) For any good narrative, you need MOTIVATION-GOAL-CONFLICT—and occasionally stakes[.]

This book does not have a conflict.

So where do you find 300+ pages of writing? Just have something happen & see what comes next as a response!

The problem is that this makes an unworkable first draft. Things Happening =/= Satisfying Plot Arc. In editing, you have to take everything you've written and organize it into a plot shape, often cutting things that don't fit. (Planning is the opposite; tons of work upfront/you usually end up UNDERwriting.)

...The most common method of writing on Wattpad is pantsing. 99% of the time, writers write & then post chapters on a set schedule. Can't edit plot structure when you upload one chapter a week.

Now, I knew that Valente was a pantser before I read this book, and that she originally uploaded Fairyland one chapter a week. I was very impressed when I first found out; I don’t recall sensing any of these pitfalls in the two previous books. It is hard to write a book with no editing—it is damn well near impossible. Whether I liked this book or not, the first two are a triumph just for that. Valente has been writing this entire series with both hands tied behind her back and her eyes taped shut, and I have to commend her. Even my feelings of frustration are almost overshadowed by how impressed I am that it took three books for her to fail.

Valente herself acknowledged editing concerns in multiple / interviews. From the latter link:

I remember being at a convention right after it really hit, and somebody in the audience asked, “Well, you realize you can’t go back and change anything, because you’ve already posted it online.” And I said, “Oh, shit.” It had never occurred to me that that was gonna be a problem. I kept a couple weeks ahead of the posting schedule, but again, much like writing The Labyrinth in ten days instead of thirty, I just ran ahead with something without knowing that I couldn’t do it and it worked out incredibly well.

Did it? I feel differently, and this review aims to explain why.

This book lacks plot. Valente is attempting a 3-act structure, which relies heavily on a central conflict. There has to be some big mission; some big goal. First book example: September has to beat the Marquess (goal and conflict) OR ELSE everyone in Fairyland suffers (stakes/motivation). Every moment of the book ties back to this larger goal.

The central conflict of this book appears about halfway through. You know the moon, and the yeti, and splitting things? This comes up over a hundred pages in. September, and the audience, has no idea about any of that for a hundred or so pages, and so for that amount of time, the book is unconscionably boring. 

The beginning of the book sees September afraid she’s too old to go back to Fairyland, which is a great central conflict idea for the one chapter in which it exists. Aha! A book about growing up and the associated trials and tribulations. That’s a fantastic theme, and yet I forgot about it entirely until the end, where it briefly awakens again, after an entire book of Not That At All. More on this later.

For now, the book takes September back to Fairyland, which should be wonderful, but Fairyland seems to have become all exposition and no action. A whole chapter of The Blue Wind lecturing September, for example. This is a character we don’t know, have no reason to be attached to, and are being actively hindered by as she relentlessly slows the plot down. And then September gets talked at by an alligator or something, and then another something something… I don’t remember any of this, because it was not relevant.

This isn’t like Fairyland #1, where September might need to befriend someone to gain access to magic which would help her on her quest. In fact, for this first half of the book, September doesn’t even have agency! Someone hands her a MacGuffin (I refuse to recall its name) in the form of a box, and she Must carry it to some city or other on the moon. Why? Who knows. She just must. And she does. And you’re thinking to yourself, why isn’t September making her own ship and leading revels? We know, as an audience, that she’s more than capable. What on Earth has got her seeming so meek? She even sasses characters, but somehow always ends up doing as they ask.

The book also takes all this time to reach any characters we know and love. The readers want Ell and Saturday! We do not care about a horde of lecturing adults with no connection to a central plot or September! Looking back, I can see how Valente may have been hoping to pull off something similar to Alice in Wonderland, but in Alice nobody speaks for a full page. This is just one example:

direct link

I’m hard pressed to even call this exposition, because it tells us nothing about the world we’re in. It’s just a sermon Valente wants us to hear. And worse, because I’ve read the last two books, I know she can pull this off. It doesn’t have to be this way. Many people said many things in Fairyland #1, and it worked because there was a plot that the speeches were part of. 

(If you just look at the quotes page for this book, you can see how many there are—and how repetitive they get. X is a Y, okay, alright…)

But this sort of thing reached its peak when it almost ruined Saturday. Don’t worry, he’s generally well-written, but when September meets him and he starts lecturing? It’s just awful to read. Suddenly it’s not Saturday talking but Valente speaking through his mouth, giving those sermons again, and it just makes you want to scream.

This made me recall an old writing rule—“never remind me of the author’s existence.” I want to feel as though real people are really saying these things, and when all of them speak identically, it’s really difficult to believe that. I won’t deny Saturday his right to say poignant things, obviously, but in this case due to the volume of lectures, and the proximity of his to the others, and the obvious preachiness of all of them, it really got in the way of my even enjoying the scenes with Saturday. And come on; that is unforgivable.

But there is a plot. There is an, ahem… other MacGuffin. A paw? A yeti’s paw. Something about time. Look, at this point I just wanted to finish the book. The original MacGuffin had become a new one, which would lead them to the third, and all this because at 100 pages in someone said “hey there’s this yeti we really hate around here,” and September went “sounds awful I’ll go hunt him right now.” And of course she can, because she has been DOING NOTHING FOR THE LAST HUNDRED PAGES. What is she going to do, something else? There IS nothing else to do in Fairyland apparently. Again, what this book does to the world & inhabitants of Fairyland is near criminal.

So the plot starts here, and it’s not great—September takes it up because there’s nothing else to do, and of course her friends come along, but (at least to me) it seems obvious that Valente invented the moon’s political situation and the Yeti just to come up with SOMETHING for this book. It never felt convincing that this had really been happening behind the scenes in the other books. On top of that, since we get very little context (despite the lectures!), it feels less like a vital quest and more like September (again) doing something because someone else told her to. We really don’t get any other perspective on the issue until the very end.

But talking about the end will require a spoiler tag, so I’ll avoid it for now. Let’s take a break to talk about how confusing the book was overall. I often didn’t know where the characters were heading or why, or what role a new character played, or even if they were there or not.

After seeing a GR query about this particular issue, I went back and researched it. The character Candlestick allegedly leaves the party on page 189:

Candlestick had not come with them after all, turning up her peacock tail and refusing to speak further with any of the lot of them.

But then shows up in not one but two lines in the next chapter anyway:

The Tyguerrotype, the thirteen bouncing Glasshobs, the quivering houses—and September and Saturday, A-Through-L and Candlestick—had a little thickness, but no more than a thick sheet of paper. (201)

“Did we see what?” called Candlestick. (204)

I understand why Valente wouldn’t want to make major plot edits to the books after posting them, but why didn’t an editor read through this even once? It would have been easy to fix—delete one line, or even just a word. It seems clear through surrounding context, looking back, that Valente intended to leave Candlestick out of these chapters, so why didn’t anyone confirm that for readers?

It’s just not fair to your audience to leave things like this in. It’s not professional. It makes me look down on the publisher, to be quite honest, because they apparently couldn’t take the few months necessary to re-read the draft and offer Valente edits on these bare minimum issues.

So you can understand why I wasn’t sure what was going on most of the time. Especially in the beginning, when multiple characters existed just to lecture, it was hard to get attached to any one addition to the party because I could expect them to be gone without incident or importance within two chapters. 

For example, the Periwig (whose name I refuse to look up) who works with Ell in the library says she has cursed him to stop him from flaming around the books. Yes, Ell is having uncontrollable flaming issues now. As a reader pummeled by random lectures, watching September ferry around MacGuffins, this just felt like an “oh shit we have to come up with a NEW conflict for these characters” ploy, without much thought or logic. And I had no idea what the curse was for over fifty pages, until on page 173 there’s a specific reference to Ell getting smaller after he shoots flame. I’m sure there were more earlier on, but I missed them, and who can blame me after a hundred pages of content that was not relevant to the story.

This plot point is never satisfyingly wrapped up, either. Why did the Periwig think this was a good idea? Could she have undone it? Why did nobody address her about it? And why was it solved the way it was? Nothing made sense.

What’s really frustrating is what could have been. Near the end of the book, I turned to the back cover just to avoid continuing to read, and I looked once again in total bafflement at the two starred reviews of the book pictured there. Booklist’s back cover quote reads as follows:

As usual, Valente enlightens readers with pearly gleams of wisdom about honesty, identity, free will, and growing up. September often worries who she should be and what path she should follow, but the lovely truth, tenderly told, is that it's all up to her.

And, despite having read roughly two hundred pages of this book, it was only once I saw this quote that I understood what Valente was trying to do.

This is a great idea. And there are ELEMENTS of it here, and even elements I quite like. Occasionally, the lectures September hears do in fact correspond to some aspect of this theme (“you become what you are called” is one example of a line I could tell meant something, but needed to be expanded to accomplish anything.) It’s hard, as a reader, to differentiate between lectures addressing a vital theme in the story and lectures that are just talking.

Returning to Ell’s curse, it turns out that [SPOILER] Ell was just flaming for what is essentially dragon puberty, which is a GREAT opportunity to build on this theme! Somehow, though, we don’t get that.. I would have loved to see Ell have to deal with, essentially, a sexual awakening, and that did not happen, and it feels like the cure scene is random and therefore wasted. [END SPOILER]

It doesn’t help that Valente also wastes a scene with FANTASTIC potential where September literally destroys her fate by giving it no prior context, no weight in the plot, no relevance to the conflict, and fifteen tons worth of expositional lecturing to drown in. I want to love these scenes; some of these scenes utilize my favorite tropes! I just can’t get around all the ways Valente is leaving her story out to dry.

Then there’s the clothing September wears, her new designation, Aroostook the car, the attempted blossoming romance between September and Saturday: so many elements which could have made that theme great. It’s like a broken puzzle.

This brings us to the Yeti. I’m just going to go full spoiler, because I’m mad.

[SPOILER]

The Yeti is a reverse twist villain?? Can we stop with this? It’s not interesting & not an engaging surprise & also feels like going “ha ha I fooled you.”

From the moment September set off to beat him, I was wondering—are we really doing this? Based on one random person’s complaint? September has made it very clear that she doesn’t understand the politics of the world she’s inhabiting, and yet: this. Unlike in the first book, where the Marquess’s evil is confirmed by every person she comes across and September ends up fighting her out of personal connection, this just seems like meddling. September has no skin in the game; it’s almost a white savior trope—especially when the history of the Moon parallels colonization!

And then The Gang sees future-Saturday helping the yeti, and instead of thinking “maybe we got this wrong based on one person’s lecture” they think “ah FUCK maybe Saturday is going to be evil” and manufacture totally unnecessary conflict.

But it’s not even that they misunderstood, or that their source was biased; the end result is that the Yeti was seen as evil because he DIDN’T CARE THAT HE WAS. He gives this “none of their business” answer that is fundamentally unsatisfying (and makes no sense—had he explained, THEY WOULD NOT HAVE BOTHERED HIM) because at the end of the day, it means none of September’s actions in Fairyland were necessary. She just showed up and left. Nobody, not even the story, needed her. I guess September and Saturday have now kissed (twice!) which is great for them but not something that makes the whole book worthwhile.

[END SPOILER]

And on top of this, there are typos. I already covered the issue with Candlestick, so here are the others quickly:

 “All of us,” September said gently, and held out her hands. “I know what you said, Miss Candlestick, but however you count it, our fates are stuck together and stitched up good.” She paused for a moment, looking down at her flowing black silks and her own small hands. “Closer than shadows, she finished.” (170)

“If you’re not to tired after your cannonades.” (179)

The full moon rose passed the high barn windows, spilling in like milk. (248)

(First sentence ought to have put the end quotation mark after the word “shadows,” but accidentally places it after September’s dialogue tag. The second sentence should use “too” instead of “to”. The final sentence needs to either say that the moon “rose past the high barn windows” or “passed the high barn windows”, likely the former.)

What gets me is that this last sentence is on the last page. Even if Valente and her editors never flipped through most of the book, surely someone would’ve noticed this? It just drives home how little anyone cared. About Fairyland, of all things!

And then Valente, who DID NOT EDIT THIS BOOK, has the audacity to include lines like these.

September reached inside and took out the red book. It was heavy. A girl’s face graced the cover, finely embossed, but it was turned away, gazing at some unseen thing. Perhaps it was her own face, perhaps not. A miniature version of herself, after all. Was it an answer? Was it everything already written?  “You can’t argue with something that’s written down,” she said, stroking the red locks of hair on the cover. “If the heart of my fate is a book, there’s nothing for it. Once it’s written, it’s done. All those ancient books always say ‘so it is written’ and that means it’s finished and tidied and you can’t say a thing against it.”  Oh, but September, it isn’t so. I ought to know, better than anyone. I have been objective and even-tempered until now, but I cannot let that stand, I simply cannot. Listen, my girl. Just this once I will whisper from far off, like a sigh, like a wind, like a little breeze. So it is written—but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.

(page 184).

Like... all of that, and then she didn’t edit September’s story? I’m appalled.

At this point, you might well say I’m being far too harsh. I understand that. These next five paragraphs are for you.

For the first few months of (re)reading this book, I genuinely felt like I must be a bad reader, or my attention span was gone, or I just didn’t like Valente or her work enough. Looking at all the incredible reviews here, I felt jealous—and frustrated. Why couldn’t I just enjoy this book the way everyone else did? 

Obviously, I never want to dislike a book, but this was one that I almost feel betrayed me. I know there’s a significant amount of entitlement there; Valente doesn’t owe me any stories, let alone good ones. 

At the same time, I made every effort. I owned all the books, was working hard to read a series despite my long-time struggles with them, and, well, I LOVE Valente! I constantly talk about her work! And even someone like me—someone who’s usually a pretty fast reader, loves the series/author in question, and was determined to finish this book—struggled throughout. 

So I’m frustrated that the book made me feel like an idiot. I’m frustrated that, for the apparent crime of being devoted to Valente’s work, I was put through this. This book would be one star if not for the world of Fairyland and the returning cast—if this had not been a Fairyland book, I would not have finished reading it. For that first half, I was bribing myself (with better books) to read one or two pages at a time. Really.

Like I said, it didn’t have to be this way. I know damn well that Valente can do better than this. If Valente had been given the opportunity to edit this draft into a polished book, she could have done it. It’s only because of these restraints that she chose—and she is a grown woman who may choose what she likes—that the book came out this way. It’s genuinely hard to review, because I understand why she wrote the book this way, and I understand why she did not later edit the majority of the text, and I also have the perspective of a disappointed reader. It’s hard to balance all of that.

So two stars it is. I’m a little sad it took so long to review this book, because I was REALLY pumped to review it when I first finished, but I hope that on the contrary letting it sit has allowed me to be more objective and less emotionally upset by it. 

I hope to pick up the fourth book soon, but with the combination of it being unrelated to the main cast and the letdown that this book was, it’ll be a while before I feel up to it. Don’t worry, though, because I will come back to update you as to whether the series overall is worth continuing. I have every hope that it will be.

[nomnomzombies]

8x06: Identity and Sigils, The Three Eyed Raven and King Bran

**this disappeared somehow in editing. idk what’s happening guys. i don’t really know how to use Tumblr. so if you saved this and it’s different for the third time I’m so sorry**

This is in response to @dr-doomsduck ‘s post 

I noticed the Raven sigil and I’m honestly not sure exactly how I feel about it. On one hand, there’s all of the pride for Bran, and this feeling of coming into his own. However, when you look at the surviving Starklings, their journey has been a process of identity conflict and reclamation, but Bran adopting the Raven sigil breaks the trend of the other Stark children. Jon and Bran are the most similar in their mentor-apprentice relationships as both of them embraced their mentors’ teachings as opposed to Arya and Sansa, who modified the “curriculum” to adhere to Stark morals and teachings.

When you look at the whole brood, when they’re ultimately faced with the decision of cloaking or adopting another sigil (as a form of concealment or denial), every single one of them has picked Stark. The only exception would be Theon (who is an honorary Starkling), but even though he donned his Kraken and fought alongside his sister, he still died for the Wolves.

Jon, who was trained by a Bear (and adopted those teachings and integrated them into his Stark-ness), was put into the position of refuting the Wolf sigil only once (although his time with the Wildlings put him in crisis in terms of his Night’s Watch oath, it never required him to strip himself of his Stark identity). I’ve discussed before how the death of Rhaegal indicated his inability to adopt a Targaryen identity, but the other part of it is his process of being susceptible to Targ indoctrination via Dany. There was a brief opportunity for Jon to be vulnerable enough to be sucked into the “fire and blood” teachings, but ultimately it just wasn’t there. He refuted Dany as a potential “mentor” for fostering the Targaryen identity, and thus there was no hope of the Dragon developing within Jon.

When Sansa was in King’s Landing, her colour changed to mauve (the melding of Lannister crimson and the blue tones of the North) and the lion began to appear in her costume decisions. Although the lion overtook the wolf in terms of visible sigils, her Northern roots never disappeared, but rather integrated into her Southern influence for strategic cloaking. When she left King’s Landing, Sansa’s clothes began to mimic Littlefinger’s in terms of colouring and cut--her infamous “Dark Sansa” dress integrated feathers into the decor, as Littlefinger’s sigil is the mockingbird. When she escapes Ramsay’s captivity, her dress is grey, and her cloak is unassuming. It’s not until she rides south with Jon to rally the northern houses that she completely reclaims the Stark fashion, and we finally see her don the Direwolf for the first time in the series. (Season 6)

As Arya is in the Riverlands, after escaping King’s Landing in season 1, she’s completely stripped of her Stark and highborn identity. In Braavos, she’s forced to abandon all things Arya Stark, but she can’t part with Needle. She dons the clothing of the House of Black and white and begins her training. In the end, though, she refutes the teachings of her mentor. When given the opportunity to become “no one,” Arya tells Jaqen to fuck right off--”A girl is Arya Stark.” Bran, on the other hand, completely adopts all teachings from the Three Eyed Raven. 

This whole thing may seem moot, because I’m ultimately arriving to the point which the character himself has been pushing onto us for the last two seasons and Meera confirmed in season 7–“You died in that cave.” Bran has been saying, “I’m not Bran Stark anymore.”

Some theorists say that Bran has become a vessel for Bloodraven—but book readers know that the “three eyed raven” (at face value) is much closer to a collective conscience. The parallel that I’ve drawn for people in the past is much like an AI, where the singular conscience becomes a node in the collective once it’s integrated into the “system” aka Weirwood net (or, weirwood.net). Bran Stark the individual disappeared once he uploaded to the collective.

This is why I’m having a very hard time being happy for “Bran”—and a very critical issue that I have with his kingship. Because... this isn’t Bran. This is the Three Eyed Raven. We don’t have any information to suggest that the Three Eyed Raven has been particularly ambitious in the past, but it’s now integrated into two high-profile and highly magical bloodlines (Stark and Targaryen. 

The narrative also proposes that the Three Eyed Raven has been  attuned to the possible timelines, and has been slowly adjusting course to eventually end up in a seat of power. **I’m asserting this based on our understanding from the show, not the books.

The Three Eyed Raven has been saying things to make itself as unassuming and non-threatening as possible, even going so far as to adopt the consciousness of Brandon Stark—who was already paralyzed when the Three Eyed Raven first started appearing to him. We know that the Three Eyed Raven has been appearing in childrens’ dreams for a long time, as it’s stated in the books that the Raven appeared to Euron Greyjoy as a child, but didn’t appear to Bran until after his fall. Was Bran’s disability a deciding factor to him being chosen as the successor?

In Bran’s first raven dream, he sees the corpses of all of the children that “couldn’t fly.” It’s hard to say if these corpses represent physically murdered children, or if they’re more likely to represent a death in the subconscious—the “death” that would leave those people susceptible to madness. Was Euron as a child one of the broken bodies in Bran’s Raven dreams? Moreover, the Raven dreams are very triggering for Bran--the Three Eyed Raven (Three Eyed Crow in the books) is a very sinister entity, and continues to make Bran relive his trauma every time. Bran refers to the Raven dreams as his “falling dreams.” 

@sayruq wrote a post, citing book quotes, as to why Tyrion providing the moniker of “Bran the Broken” completely goes against Bran’s character and monumentalizes one of Bran’s greatest sources of internal pain in the books. He laments being “broken.” 

My initial thought on the matter was that it was just shitty writing, and the point of it was supposed to illustrate that Bran has reclaimed his identity as a paraplegic—much like Sansa’s dialogue was likely meant to illustrate her reclaiming her identity as a trauma survivor. The more I thought about it,though, the more I pieced together that “Bran the Broken” was a moniker that doesn’t go against Bran’s character because it’s not Bran anymore. It’s the Three Eyed Raven, who doesn’t have the same relationship to the word that was very triggering to Bran Stark. 

The Three Eyed Raven has gone to great lengths to make themself seem as innocuous as possible with statements like, “I don’t really want anymore” and “I can never be the Lord of anything,” and integrating with a paraplegic boy. Moreover, before the Battle for Winterfell, the Three Eyed Raven even said that he “didn’t know” if their plan would work, even though we have other reasons to believe that they can see the future. They tipped their hand with the line, “Why do you think I came all this way?” So, yes, in some way, the Three Eyed Raven understood that becoming King was a possible outcome of the Great War, and maneuvered in such a way that they were in the ultimate seat of power.

Allowing the North to secede was likely of little consequence to them because there’s bigger things at play--as demonstrated by the Three Eyed Raven’s preoccupation with finding Drogon. 

Putting corrupted people in the seats of power only further drives home the point that the Three Eyed Raven in power bodes ill for the people. 

Sam is poorly trained despite being one of the most morally “good” characters on the counsel, and even though he’s shown to have the drive to stand up for what’s right, Sam clearly respects the Three Eyed Raven. 

Brienne is also a “morally good” character and she’s the Lord Commander of his Kingsguard—because she broke her oath to Sansa—so she has little say over actual matters of state. But the fact that the Three Eyed Raven was able to convince either Brienne or Sansa to break that oath makes me uncomfortable. Not only do we not know how it happened, but the end result is that Sansa is alone in the North—she doesn’t have a single loyal and true adviser at the beginning of her reign.  

Tyrion is not a good person, and will likely be easy to control as Tyrion has also showed great respect for them—even so far as to personally nominate them for King.

Lastly, I’ll refer to the part that bothered me most about the Small Council scene. As Bran is leaving, every member stands at attention and after Tyrion proclaims, “We serve at the pleasure of Bran the Broken...” everyone attempts to synchronize “Long may he reign!” and Tyrion says, “That will improve.” Implying that this proclamation will happen every time the Three Eyed Raven leaves the room. Formality is expected for a monarch, but we didn’t even see that level of regime-quality salute in the presence of Dany as she emerged to be a dictator.

So, yeah, tl;dr I think that Bran adopting the Raven sigil for his kingsguard is way, way more deeply encoded than at first glance. 

[triptocaiine]

█▓ 👋 » ARI: COMMENT.

i wrote up a whole meta post on the narrative structure of heavy rain and how it influences norman’s character, and by goodness, i am not letting it go to waste. although my original draft of this talks a bit about norman’s queer-coding, i’m more interested right now in talking about how the narrative structure of heavy rain alludes to norman’s motivations, especially in contrast to madison’s story.

so first off, to understand what's going on narratively, we have to understand that although there are four playable characters, there are only three storylines. each storyline is characterized with one stoic man who is very goals-focused and one optimistic or otherwise plucky woman who tends to be more driven by emotion. these three storylines are: ethan and madison, scott and lauren, and carter and norman.

one particular thing to note, though, is that norman's and madison's storylines are virtually identical. they both start off by investigating the case through their careers, and then become tied to the case emotionally through growing to care for someone else. they also follow very similar narrative beats and are the only two characters who can be killed off before the ending. specifically, we see some parallels:

present during the third trial and for ethan's escape or capture by the police;

a potentially deadly chapter with a serial killer who is not the origami killer, where the deadly part is skippable;

a chapter at the blue lagoon (minutes apart, by the way!!)

a chapter where the origami killer tries to kill them before the warehouse scene (for norman, that's the blue lagoon scene)

in madison's storyline, it's pretty much explicitly stated that she had originally started working on the origami killer case because of her job, and had also befriended ethan because of that, but over time, she fell in love with him and this love for him is what motivates her to continue. because it's optional for the player to romance madison at all, her thoughts don't actually reflect much of her love for ethan besides the chapter where he rejects or forgives her. her endings reflect it a little more, but it's still pretty... generic? she's far more focused on her career, and has been shown to want to risk her health and safety for a good story (like in the taxidermist dlc, or in her backstory, where she reported on a war zone and developed night terrors as a result).

norman, on the other hand, has the same thing, but it's never explicitly stated. at the start, they’re all business. but we can see that they care a little too much about everyone, even from a chapter like nathaniel, where they experience an immense amount of guilt if they shoot nathaniel. that's fairly normal, though, and makes sense for the situation, especially considering they’ve never killed anyone before. what's more notable, though, is that norman, who never meets any of the other characters (except for ethan, who they can meet up to four times depending on your playthrough), ends up risking their life for the case.

it begs the question of why they would ever do that. their job description is to provide a psychological profile for the killer, which they complete by their third chapter. the rest of the investigation is done purely out of goodwill. they risk their life for the sake of someone they've never met: namely, shaun mars.

because of the player's choice in romancing madison, her thoughts are usually goal-oriented, focusing on her surroundings or what she has to do. but since norman has no such romance route, their thoughts betray their motivations a lot. actually, the only choice you can make for norman at all besides when they die is if they take triptocaine or not, which actually has no bearing on the story at all, and after a time, they just take the tripto without you having any say in it. you don't even get a say in whether or not they risk losing their job to break a wanted criminal out of jail. they just do it. their thoughts very clearly broadcast their love and care for both shaun and ethan, where they are almost constantly worrying about them, especially about shaun.

again, they’ve never met this kid. they only have a picture.

so, where madison risks her life out of some degree of love and care, but mostly because she tends to do this anyway, norman risks their life out of pure goodwill and pure dedication to doing the right thing. they become increasingly frustrated with the police, who they decide have the wrong priorities, and ends up overworking themselves (both by risking their life and by overusing their technology) in order to save shaun. if they were a professional, they would have left after providing their psychological profile, but they don’t. moreover, they break ethan out of jail, which could cost them their job and land them in jail for years. they also specifically overuse their technology, which they know  is deadly when abused.

so now we are going to get to... the epilogues.

norman's epilogues mirror madison's, which makes sense, because they virtually have the same plotline. however, madison's has the added flavour of her romance plot.

madison's endings are:

the one where she and ethan are not together and she saved shaun at the warehouse, in which she publishes a book about the case and gets famous for it, even being interviewed for a talk show. it's shown later, though, that she still experiences persistent persecutory delusions, revealing that her sacrifices to her mental health still haunt her. (interestingly, she has the option for a good ending, which isn't even her epilogue, where she gets together with ethan and shaun lives, regardless of if she saved him or not. in that ending, her mental health is perfectly fine.)

the one where she dies, where a reporter is giving a half-assed news snapshot talking about what a hero she was, only to reveal once the cameras are off that she doesn't care at all. this is, incidentally, an ironic echo of what killed her, as madison is a journalist and died in search of a story, only to become a story herself.

the one where either shaun dies and she lives, or where she and ethan are not together and shaun is saved by someone else, in which she experiences a total breakdown and self-isolates, completely giving herself over to her delusions.

meanwhile, norman's endings are: 

the one where norman saves shaun at the warehouse, in which they get interviewed by the same talk show that madison does, and goes on to continue working at the fbi and taking on cases. however, their health starts suffering and they begin to suffer from hallucinations due to their overuse of ari and triptocaine in order to increase their efficiency. there is no romance route to save them.

the one where shaun is saved by someone else, in which norman resigns from the fbi. it's not clear what they will do after this, and this is widely considered their best ending, because they realize that they can't keep overworking themselves like this, and they are trying to detox and manage their addictions. (incidentally, madison's version of this is her worst ending, which is just kind of. an error on their part, where they forgot to account for this possibility for her.)

the one where they die, in which it's revealed that they will be buried near their workplace and that those who show up to the ceremony will be coworkers that are obligated to go, implying they have no close relationships at all. they somehow get uploaded into their ari device, which is an ironic echo of what killed them, as norman overused ari in order to save shaun, only to become part of ari themselves.

the one where shaun dies and they live, in which they attempt to take a vacation to cope with their guilt, but instead ends up holing up in their hotel room and fatally overdosing on triptocaine, completely giving themselves over to his addictions.

these parallels have my heart entirely. it’s not explicitly stated that madison and norman are fundamentally very similar people if not for that one piece about why each of them need success so badly. where madison wants success for the sake of success, norman wants it for what it implies.

but the thing i really wanted to point out with norman’s endings is that they play out in such a way where if shaun dies, they will always also die. either they will die in the process of trying to save him, or they will fatally overdose. the only other character who experiences this phenomenon is ethan, who is shaun's father.

for ethan, this reaction makes sense. but for norman, it doesn't. it doesn't make sense that norman would resign from the fbi for being unable to solve one case. it doesn't make sense that a professional would kill themselves over one murder victim, especially when they know they're dealing with a serial killer. but that's norman's entire character: that they care too much. they get too attached. ethan intentionally committs suicide in all his bad endings, but norman just takes a wrong turn in self-medicating. they intend to go back. they intend to help more people. they take on way too much because they want to be able to save everyone. they want to be able to help everyone. and they want that so badly that they would do anything, including sacrificing their health, their well-being, their job, their freedom, their life. but because of this, they can never have a good ending. either they succeed and continue to overwork themselves until they eventually die from it, or they won't be able to handle the guilt of failing to help someone and die in the process.

one of my favourite deaths for norman, which is their last possible death before the warehouse ending scene, which is where they simply use ari for too long, and there's just a shot of them still flipping through data even as they’re choking on their own blood, only for them to die at their desk from overworking.

[glitched-reflections-blog]

Hacker Matsu Headcanons

It baffles me that there's very little Hacker Matsus content on here... So allow me to contribute! I might also be a bit biased considering I preordered their merch (like my Hacker!Ichi phone case I got last week that I love dearly). These headcanons got a little out of hand so this post is a tad long.

All Matsus

- In this AU, they're just as likely to not to go out looking for jobs. Not because of laziness, but due to being awkward shut ins figuratively trapped within their computer screens. They still go out into the city for errands sometimes.

- Each of the brothers have their own desktop that they decorate according to their tastes. It's rather easy to tell whose setup is whose from a glance.

- Prone to being forgetful about basic needs such as eating. Hey, we've all been there, right? They're lucky to have a caring mother to remind them every now and then. She even installed alarms with helpful messages that are often... shut off and forgotten, as is tradition with anyone who uses them.

- True to their nature as computer enthusiasts, they would much rather rely on powerful hardware they can mod at any time over flimsy laptops that are catered for people who seek convenience rather than strong performance.

- ...That's what they want you to believe, but sometimes when you need some well deserved "privacy", a laptop gets the job done. Moving a tower along with your screen to another room is more trouble than it's worth.

OSMT

- Probably the least interested in learning how to hack but what he does know, he does extremely well. He's not very serious about it. The potential is there though.

- Refuses to pay for quality porn and has a whole database dedicated to falsified information such as credit card accounts, emails, and physical addresses. Uses these for online shopping as well.

- Oso's desktop is the sloppiest. Mountains of beer cans, empty chip bags, candy wrappers are piled on top with reckless abandon. The only thing that's clearly visible is a small calendar with women in various styles of lingerie. Todomatsu doesn't understand the need for it - the date's already there on the bottom right!

- Several attempts were made to date people online using matchup sites but his overall writing ability and photoshopped pictures were never well received. Naturally, he keeps getting banned over and over. This is the main cause for his numerous email accounts.

- Knows every single one of his brother's passwords and can bypass their security protocols. He leaves them surprises that range from replacing their wallpapers to embarrassing candid pictures or jumpscare videos when clicking a certain file.

KRMT

- Relishes in customizing his equipment. There are glowing, sparkling lights emanating from his tower that serve no purpose whatsoever. His keyboard is covered with a tacky blue flame skin that he likes to pretend is caused by his "fingers being so fast that it leaves a blazing trail".

- At one point, when you opened the CD drive, it used to play a random sound file of his own voice. Jyushimatsu broke it once from having it open continuously by button mashing. It was fixed by a begrudging Ichi who unceremoniously replaced it with an out of tune rendition of Shooting Stars by Bag Raiders.

- Likes to create his own viruses in hopes of becoming famous on the internet. They've all failed except for one: malware that causes one's computer to just display Karamatsu's face on your screen, with the option to buy one of his painful shirts. Buying does nothing to get rid of it.

- Kara owns illegally downloaded synthesizer programs. Has an extensive library of remixed music and original content.

CRMT

- Out of all the brothers, this is one hacker you should not mess with. He has every single tool imaginable at his disposal and his knowledge of them is unparalleled.

- However, Choromatsu dreams of being hired as a proud white hat hacker one day and to be recognized by a bigwig company.

- Unfortunately, he spends most of his days cheating in his favourite MMOs. He loves exploiting in game currency and dominating level rankings. Not averse to hate messages from fellow players. Lucky for Choro, he can just delete their accounts if they get on his last nerve.

- His desktop is plain but clean. It's the largest in the room, to compensate for his two high definition monitors surrounded with idol merchandise steadily amassing around them. There are countless books stacked next to his chair.

- The third brother's rival is his eldest brother, who chastises him for not taking consideration in his hacking because he secretly admires his hidden expertise.

ICMT

- Similar to Osomatsu, he only joined their destructive antics to fit in and doesn't care much about the hobby.

- More of a traditional user that surfs incognito on the web. He's good at hiding his tracks.

- Uses his hacking to target individuals and organizations that are not above endorsing animal cruelty for their selfish gains. If Ichimatsu has his eyes on you, be prepared for a life of absolute hell. He is merciless in his methods. Good luck shaking him off. You probaby will never see the end of your nightmare.

- Quite talented with a tablet and uploads his work to dedicated art websites. Never interacts with his fans but appreciates their feedback.

- Always has a cat on his lap. Or several. They love stepping all over his keyboard, shutting his computer down, and knocking off his knick knacks onto the floor in an effort to win his undivided attention. He'll usually give up and lay on the floor with his feline friends.

- The sextuplets have designated him as their personal resident computer technician because he knows his way around their parts along with their individual functions. Makes his repairs on Karamatsu's exceptionally faulty on purpose.

JSMT

- Loves playing FPS games and anything that can be modded for his own amusement. The master at finding game breaking bugs. Quite a few well known game developers have approached him for testing that he simply does for free. It's not as if he finds bugs on purpose!

- Most likely to burst out laughing by himself at a funny meme or video. He'll instantly message his brothers on Skype to send them the links even if they're two feet away.

- Big screen for watching the good ol' baseball game. The size makes his eyes cross-eyed.

- Hijacked a news site with Ichimatsu's help to make his own article detailing the cuteness of harp seals and the importance of wild animal conservation in Japan. There's an abundant use of caps lock and exclamation points.

- Jyushi doesn't spend his days inside the house as much as the rest do. Staying fit is still a crucial aspect of his life. If he wasn't so bent on becoming a baseball player, his brothers would most likely never see the light of day - he forcefully drags them outside for fresh air when he thinks they need it.

- Loves spinning on his computer chair.

TDMT

- It's not hard to imagine Totty as anything but a social media expert. He is on every popular website available, his cute and sly face everywhere you look.

- Blogs about multiple subjects to expand his horizons. His favourite is his photography blog that is updated on a daily basis. He specializes in countryside landscapes and food pictures. Of course, his selfies make their way on there too...

- Has the means to destroy your hard earned online reputation should you think of crossing him. Stay on his good side and he might let it slide. Emphasis on the word might. He's capable of tapping into your cellphone to edit information, including abuse of paid services to rack up your bills to dizzying numbers.

- A part-time graphic designer who created the Matsuno Brothers Cyber Hacking Project logo and its overall aesthetic. It's thanks to Todomatsu that they all have stylish sweaters to show off.

- The second most secretive of his hacker identity next to Ichi. His reasons differ in that he hides it to protect his social standing within his circle of real life acquaintances.

[daleisgreat]

PSP 15th Anniversary & Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary - Flashback Specials!

A couple months ago in March, the PSP hit its milestone 15th anniversary of its North American launch, just a few months after its end of 2004 debut launch in Japan. It came and went without much hubbub in the gaming media however due to that hitting around the same time the COVID-19 outbreak started to make waves in America and that pandemic rightfully getting the bulk of the press attention. Writing about game platform anniversaries over the past several weeks has been helping me get through these wild times we are now in by reflecting on my memories of these platforms, so with that said, please join me in looking back at Sony’s debut handheld….and later on in this very same flashback special I will have a bonus addendum with my memories of the Neo-Geo since it recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.

I remember when the PSP was surprisingly announced at Sony’s 2003 E3 press conference. I was there in Los Angeles covering my first E3 that year! The website I wrote for at the time, the long defunct vgpub.com, was a smaller gaming press outlet and only had one invite to the Sony press conference so our website founder, John attended the Sony conference while I and another staff writer slept in! I will never forget when John got back shortly after it ended and my colleague and I asked him if there were any big surprises (still a year or two away at this point with conferences being live streamed and with MySpace being the only major social media in 2003, there was a lack of live minute-by-minute news reporting and you would have to wait at least a couple hours until after the conferences ended to check gaming websites for news updates). John replied with an ‘oh yeah’ and proceed to hand us a little PR packet with a press release announcing the Playstation Portable (PSP) and how it would have near identical tech to the PS2 and be able to play movies with its UMD-discs. By mid-2003 the PS2 was a juggernaut around the globe and took up a little over half the market share in the home console gaming market against the Xbox and GameCube. With the PSP offering a big upgrade to the then-current GameBoy Advance out on the market and having near PS2 quality graphic capabilities, and with DVD movies being a huge factor into PS2 sales, it only seemed logical the PSP would be a sure-winner in the handheld gaming market. All three of us were buzzing about the news and how the PSP would be huge for handheld gaming and how Sony likely would take over. That did not quite happen however due to the surprise success of the Nintendo DS, but that did not stop the PSP to go on and be a viable gaming handheld alternative and have a fair amount of global success. I recall being incredibly stoked for the PSP launch, with a lot of hype going into its 20-plus launch game lineup.

I particularly remember being excited for Lumines, a new puzzler from Bandai that put a new twist on Tetris-style dropbox puzzle gameplay. It achieved this by making combo-clearing squares, instead of lines, and having a mesmerizing evolving soundtrack and graphic scheme whenever certain score targets were hit. Amazingly, the gameplay ranked right up there as top-in-class puzzler gameplay with Tetris. Combine that with its dazzling visuals and phenomenal soundtrack and it resulted in Lumines being the surprise killer-app of the PSP launch. Earlier this week I popped in Lumines Remastered on the PS4, and the gameplay is still as addicting as ever, and my anticipated quick five minute round for a refresher resulted in nearly playing an hour nonstop! From the other launch games I remember getting Untold Legends, Twisted Metal: Head-On and Tony Hawk’s Underground 2: Remix. Head-On was an all-new Twisted Metal game that was a good handheld version that also offered up online play, which was among one of the first of all handheld games to do so. I was a big fan of the hack ‘n slash action-RPGs on consoles during that era like Dark Alliance and Champions, and Untold Legends was a fun portable take on that which also offered up local wireless multiplayer. My friend, podcast co-host and also fellow VGpub staff writer Chris, along with my brother Joe, met up for a few memorable multiplayer sessions of Untold Legends.

All three of us played a whole heck of a lot of PSP in its initial weeks. At this time in early 2005, downloadable audio shows were kind of catching on but it was still a few months before Apple officially dubbed them as ‘podcasts’ on iTunes. I brought up the idea to Joe and Chris to get together to record an audio show for VGpub all about the PSP launch and our initial thoughts on the games available. We had no idea how to set it up on the technical side, so we winged it and Chris brought over one of those old-school stationary, coffee table tape recorders that are kind of stereotypical in psychiatrist or detective interview scenes in movies. We hooked an auxiliary cable from it to my PC and somehow produced a digital tin-can-and-string version of what would be the pilot of VGpub’s podcast. We sent the pilot to the VGpub editors to see what they thought, but we were dismayed when hearing back they thought it was too long at around 50 minutes in length. Bummed with that reception, we wound up not posting the PSP pilot show, but eventually gave podcasting another go when that scene took off several months later after it caught on with iTunes. We had a fun seven year run on the podcast, and when VGpub sunsetted a couple years after we started, we continued with the podcast on its own site for a few more years and as part of the launch posted the long lost pilot episode. And now in honor of the PSP’s 15th anniversary, I dug out that amazingly awful audio quality pilot from my hard drive archives and uploaded it to YouTube so now you all could relive our initial highs over the PSP’s launch. You can check it out by click or pressing here, or by checking out the embed below!

Behold our low-tech, amateur endeavor of the very first podcast I participated in that focused on the launch of the PSP. THUG 2: Remix was a nice port of the console version of that Tony Hawk game I played a lot of. It was shortly after playing this is when I realized I did not want to play PS2 ports on the PSP. While a lot of them packed in a lot of the same content as their PS2 counterparts, they suffered noticeably due to the PSP having one analog ‘nub,’ only one pair of shoulder buttons and having to dial back the graphics and/or features in order to get it running on the comparably lower-powered PSP. I realized this moreso over the next year picking up and trying out PSP versions of BurnOut, Virtua Tennis and Gun. Once again, nothing against the PSP versions since a lot of them played and looked fine on the PSP, and if I primarily was on the road or travelling I would have been thrilled with these versions. It was over this next year I realized I would rather play these PSP ports on the PS2 instead of dealing with those compromises.

Unfortunately in the early years of the PSP, it was dominated by PS2 ports and five star original titles like Lumines were few and far between. This culminated with barely getting any play out of the system and selling off my PSP a little over a year later in mid-2006. Things were looking dire for a little while for the PSP, but Sony and strong third party support from companies like Square-Enix, EA and Capcom continued to pump out games and eventually the PSP established a strong portfolio of original releases. Some of the original efforts from Sony were so strong that games like Twisted Metal: Head On, Syphon Filter and Motorstorm: Arctic Edge got remastered ports on the PS2 to keep up first party releases for the PS2 in its twilight years. I want to make sure to give a shoutout to other strong original PSP titles such as the Patapon series, WTF: Work Time Fun, both Phantasy Star Portable entries, all four SOCOM titles, Resistance: Retribution, both Pursuit Force games, Killzone: Liberation, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Final Fantasy: Crisis Core, both God of War titles, Mega Man: Powered Up and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. In 2012, I acquire PSP’s successor from Sony, the Vita. It featured digital backwards compatibility with a fair amount of the PSP’s library. I wound up acquiring about a dozen of the PSP games I always wanted to try this way that I missed out on after selling it. The Vita was also compatible with most of the PSone classics that were available on the PS3. This lead to me playing a lot of Final Fantasy VII a couple years ago in anticipation for the recently released and long coming FFVII Remake. This past week a fired up a few of them for a refresher on some of the PSP titles in preparation for this article. I had a lot of fun with the original Pursuit Force….at least the first couple missions anyways since that game had compatibility issues and frequently froze on the Vita.

I dusted off my Castlevania skills in my attempts at playing the remake of Rondo of Blood that is part of Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles. It has a challenging but fair degree of difficulty in the few levels I progressed through. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops I dug a lot for its first couple bite sized missions that focused on the origins of Snake meeting Campbell. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker I consider to be the true, fully featured fifth installment of the series since it essentially has a full length story and slate of missions available. I did not play it on the PSP, but instead on the HD remaster collection that released a year later on the PS3 and loved grinding through its wide variety of missions that set the stage for The Phantom Pain. While it is not compatible with the PSP’s physical discs, the Vita is a good alternative to experience most of the PSP’s library through digital download for those still curious about the PSP’s games. On the UMD movie side of things, launch PSPs came bundled with a copy of Spider-Man 2 which I eventually watched on a plane trip. The quality of the UMD movies were undeniably good. Later on, I got sent a UMD to review of the fun underdog sports film, Dodgeball and those wound up being the only two UMDs I owned. For the first year or two of the PSP lifespan I remember game stores being flooded with physical UMDs, but a lot of them cost nearly as much as their DVD versions at the time and I am speculating that people anticipated they would only cost half or a third as much as DVDs kind of relative to how the portable-to-console game pricing goes, and when that proved not to be the case it lead to a quick exit for UMD movies on the PSP. I look back at the PSP and will fondly remember those awesome early months I had with it, and how it later redeemed itself by having a fleshed out lineup of original games. I want to also give the PSP props for becoming the only platform that easily surpassed portable efforts from other companies that tried to compete against Nintendo in the handheld gaming market like Atari, Tiger, Sega and SNK. I adhere caution when tracking down used PSPs due to reports of some PSPs being susceptible of having bulging battery packs over time. Sony released a few different revisions of the PSP, so I do not know if that is related to only the launch version, or for all versions of the PSP. This is why I recommend tracking down a Vita instead to get your PSP fix for those interested.

In the bonus addendum to this PSP anniversary flashback, I will touch on my brief memories with SNK’s Neo-Geo to commemorate its recent 30th anniversary of the original launch of the Japan arcade hardware. The arcade side of the Neo-Geo was dubbed the Multi-Video System (MVS) and it debuted in Japan in April of 1990, and following in American arcades a few months later in August. For those not in the know, the 24-bit arcade hardware had a home console version called the Neo-Geo Advanced Entertainment System (AES) that launched in Japan later on in 1990 and in 1991 in America. The unique thing about the Neo-Geo is both the MVS and AES used the exact same technology so it was possible to have 100% faithful home ports. SNK wanted the home experience to as close as possible to the arcade that it bundled the system with two mammoth arcade sticks. I first remember seeing Neo-Geo games in MVS format at various arcades in the early to mid-90s. The MVS cabinet was unmistakable with it having the eye-grabbing Target-red color and the two-to-four mini-game marquees listed at the top of it. The big draw to arcade operators at time of the Neo-Geo MVS was that the games came on friendlier priced cartridges that could easily be swapped out like games in a console instead of ordering whole new arcade machines to replace them. I have seen the four-slot MVS plenty of times, but I mostly remember seeing the two-slot version more frequently in arcades over the years, and for the most part it was the same two games featured on them: Puzzle Bobble (AKA Bust-a-Move) and Metal Slug. These were the two game I primarily encountered on the MVS in my childhood arcade experiences. I was not all that great at Puzzle Bubble with its unique spin on puzzle games by shooting bubbles onto the playfield from the bottom of the screen. I did however love Metal Slug and its sequel that I also recall seeing originally on the MVS. Metal Slug was arcade bliss at the time, with charming cartoony soldiers oozing with detail and twee animations as they run ‘n gunned with an arsenal of over-the-top weaponry, villains and larger than life boss battles. Metal Slug is one of the few games where slowdown is a good thing in my opinion because it primarily happened when encountering daunting bosses and explosions that filled up the screen and it felt like the machine was doing all it could to keep the action moving.

Jason and John from the MetalJesus crew do a fine job here giving a 101 lesson on the Neo Geo hardware and have lots of footage here of some of the best games to hit Neo-Geo.

A few weeks ago I did a quick playthrough of Metal Slug X on Xbox One since it was on Game Pass, and everything that I fondly associated with those run ‘n gunners was still there, even the slowdown! Thankfully the AES and MVS games did not remain trapped on their original expensive hardware. By the mid-2000s, SNK regularly started to output various collections of games both digitally and physically. I highly recommend Metal Slug Anthology that hit PS2 and Wii, and later got digitally ported onto the PS4. A majority of the individual Neo-Geo games got ported over individually in recent years on PS4, Xbox One and Switch. Since all these marketplaces frequently run sales on their back catalog, you can now find a lot of these games well under their default price of $7.99 each. Over the last few years I checked out plenty of original Neo-Geo games this way. I tried out too many fighting games to count by doing this, but also finally got a chance to play SNK’s arcade sports offerings that got overlooked by their many fighting games. Three Count Bout is a graphically impressive wrestling title, but its button-mashing leniency takes a toll on thumbs. I loved Dunk Dream/Street Hoop, which is SNK’s take on NBA Jam, but with a hip-hop makeover and catchy rap-filled soundtrack. Neo-Geo Turf Masters is a fast-paced, fun golf title and until recently I had no idea that the Super Volleyball game I loved so much on Genesis had a beefed up version and a sequel featuring amped up robots and robotic attacks on the Neo-Geo. The Neo-Geo is renowned for its acclaimed catalog of fighting games with several entries each in hit series like Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury, World Heroes, Art of Fighting and its flagship fighter, The King of Fighters which saw annual entries on the platform for 10 years from 1994-2003. Of all these, the ones I frequented the most of were various re-releases were King of Fighters ‘97 and ’98. Its team based fighting style made it standout from the other fighting games, and it was only in recent years with some longer sessions with KoF ’98 that I finally started to come around on it. One of these days I want to give an honest effort at getting into Samurai Shodown. I remember the gaming mags were hyping up its debut entry at the time as a major breakthrough to fighting games with its gruesome swordplay it brought to the table. I eventually picked up its anthology disc on PS2 and dabbled with a couple entries, but never too seriously and need to correct that sooner than later. A random memory is attempting to play Samurai Shodown II at Arcade Infinity in Koreatown one evening in the afterhours of covering E3 in 2003. Shortly after starting it up, someone sat down and challenged me and proceeded to properly dominate me. Looking back, that may have something to do with why I never gave it that much of a shot.

I never had a chance to play the AES home system until well after its lifespan in the early 2010s at regional retro game conventions. That was because I did not see one in the wild until then. Unfortunately in 1990, the home console market was dominated by the NES while the Genesis was only a year old and just starting to break in, so while the MVS was a bargain for arcade operators, the AES arcade perfect tech was way ahead of the times and cost exponentially more compared to the NES and Genesis at the time. Reading copies of Game Players and Electronic Gaming Monthly back then I associated Neo-Geo AES games as being the games that literally cost $200-300 individually in the back of the magazine ads for mail service game catalogs. Occasionally there would be SNES/Genesis ports of the popular games like the original Fatal Fury and Samurai Shodown, but obviously there quality was dialed back to run on the weaker machines and that was realistically all of what was available to a majority of the home console market until those anthology collections started to get released in the mid-2000s. I never owned an AES, but I was stunned by its lasting power with official games being released for it all the way until 2004. I only a saw a Neo-Geo AES for sale once at my local retro game shop all these years back around 2008 and I want to say it was going for about $200, and part of me wanted to get it for the standout collector’s item it would be, but another side of me knew the games went for insane amounts by that point and the games were already by then starting to get re-released on other consoles in more wallet-friendly anthology discs. If you have yet to dip into the Neo-Geo catalog, I would highly recommend either grabbing the digital copy of Metal Slug Anthology on PS4 for some awesome two player run ‘n gun couch co-op with a friend as the perfect way to start off. Otherwise, type in ‘ACA’ in the Xbox One/PS4/Switch digital marketplaces to see most of the Neo-Geo games released digitally under the ACA banner. While it was damn near impossible to afford to play the AES games at home during their initial release, I will close by giving major props to SNK for keeping their back catalog of Neo-Geo titles alive for current generations to discover on current platforms at consumer friendly prices! Thanks again for sticking with me in reliving my memories of the PSP and Neo-Geo with this two-for-one flashback anniversary special! Want more retro-game goodness? Then take a peek at my other flashback specials below!

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

[dominicrowespom]

MD6311 Major Project Evaluation

Background, Concept and Ideas

At the beginning of third year Ben and I came into this project with the intention of making a 13 track semi conceptual album based around seasons, having three songs for each season starting in Autumn ending in Summer. The hope was that it would propel ‘Two to a Room’ from an unknown name into exciting duo, the songs naturally being influenced by the music we listen to. 9 months later we’ve created a 12 track conceptual alternative hip hop album based around the same thing we originally intended, released 3 singles with 3 music videos, have a combined total of of just over 4000 steams on Spotify as well as an active following on Instagram.

Hip hop is traditionally known as a raw and honest genre of music, many artists have detailed the entirety of their life experiences onto their music in a very purposeful way. We have taken hip hop and altered it so that it applies and relates to the experience of uni students. It gives a voice to the people who are struggling during this period of life where everything seems a bit uncertain.

Some of our influences include:

Cosmo

King Krule

Loyle Carner

Rejjie Snow

JJ

Easy Life

Bakar

Many a time we’d find ourselves listening to one of their songs and being inspired by the way they’d mixed a bass line or how they added interesting/unique sounds and sections. We’re probably on the whole most similar to Bakar, however we bring our own style.

Audiences and Markets

Before deciding an audience and an artist identity we simply began playing and making music. We had a general basis as a band, having played a couple of shows under the same name in first year. Two to a Room somewhat subsided second year giving us a completely fresh start in third year, new music, new social media pages and a new image. We created personable tracks some light and some dark sounding, both instrumentally and lyrically quite downtrodden. While creating the album this helped us realise our sound, we were making the music of and relating to University students, depressed, drinking, smoking and in search for some sort of love and placeholder in this world. We continuously found ourselves adding Trippy elements to our music creating a stoner induced drug fuelled aesthetic.

The album is aimed at 16 to 24 year olds, teens and young adult transitioning into adulthood and the working world, getting by smoking spliffs and drinking a lot. For this reason we decided it would be best to push everything onto every streaming platforms though ‘distrokid’, an independent digital music distribution service. Through stats on (https://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-releases-2018-music-consumer-insight-report) I found that 86% of us listen to music through on-demand streaming. Young music consumers are most engaged streamers, with 57% of 16-24 year olds using a paid audio streaming service. This makes it the perfect place for our audience to find our music. We intend to release 10-50 exclusive copies of our album on CD due to peoples love of exclusivity and giveaways.

Our work is best understood sat back in a comfortable environment, where you can digest every word and feeling we were attempting to portray. There are hints of what our style, vibe and thought process is throughout our Instagram and music videos. The album can be related to if you’ve ever; gone on a night out, worked a dead end job or if you’ve ever just felt a bit stuck in life, so everyone. The reason it’s aimed at uni students is because they’re most likely to feel the entirety of emotions and lifestyle that we’ve displayed on our record.

There’s definitely already songs for sad people and a community for alternative hip hop but because our music experiments with so many different sounds and genres it’s hard to pigeonhole us into one that is preexisting. However the Cheltenham’s hip hop scene is the community closest to us, diverse in the artists and sonics that it holds. We’be home from hoping to get a foot in with the Cheltenham crowd, to wanting to unite it further and push it forward, there’s a lot of talent here.

Our only competition is ourselves, and that’s not the answer this evaluation requires but its the truth. If we solely see ourselves as the ones to beat and the ones to better taking influences from all sorts of places, we have no need to be in competition with anyone. I’d rather do the opposite and bring everyone so no one has competitors, just allies.

Promotional Strategies

Our journey for the public began at the start of October, our first Instagram upload being posted on the 3rd. We released a demo shortly after, mixed and mastered by ourselves to show our audience what we were about stylistically and aesthetically. For a demo it did far better than expected, accumulating close to 100 views in it’s first week, in time surpassing that. This gave us confidence to continue doing what we’d already set out to do. We kept our Instagram relatively busy, using photos taken by 1st year student Curtis, We then released our first single to all major streaming platforms mixed and mastered by Beau Peep. At the time none of this process had fully gone as we had planned, the song was released later than intended, videographers dropped out/couldn’t film for us and the B-side wasn’t mastered the desired way. In hindsight this moment was a good learning curve for future releases, we discovered the importance of planning properly and having everything set way in advance. It was also successful in how it was received, getting over 1000 listens in it’s first month.

In the time before our first and second single we wanted to keep our audiences attention so we decided to come up with a potential series idea named ‘In the Living Room’ airing our first episode on the 9th of January 2019. The idea was to do an acoustic set up, similar to The Tiny Desk concert, but in our living room. It was so that we could have a place to display the raw version of our music and potentially other artists as it’s something we’d found that a lot of music listeners enjoy hearing their favourite songs in a different setting sounding a little different.

We next turned our attentions towards Astronaut, we had the song finished and ready to release mid-January so we decided to begin a promotional campaign, doing a photoshoot a with friend of ours, third year student David Richards. We showed Ben Sanders the song, he enjoyed it and asked if he could do the visuals for it. We gladly accepted as it seemed like he was very keen, it took a few months to shoot it leaving a small amount of time to edit the video. In the meantime we uploaded several rows of promotional pictures to our Instagram building the excitement for the video. The video was eventually released in a hurry, and was still a little below the standard we were aiming for. As it was uploaded a little later than first anticipated it gave us less time to promote the album as a whole. But because we’d been promoting astronaut for so long we leaned into theme with a few more photos from another friend and third year student ‘Ryan Free’ who helped us reflect the feeling of the album being spaced out in a very concrete environment creating that juxtaposition in his photo by having us wear astronaut costumes in a fancy, old fashioned looking restaurant

We recorded the video for our third and final single a month before releasing the album so we could use it as part of the promotion cycle once the album was released. We organised for ‘drreproductions’ to shoot it for us and they agreed to get it shot in what turned out to be a very busy April. We played 2 gigs in the run up to the album launch while finishing the mastering of the album and organising both music videos. We hosted an album Launch at Smokey Joes on the 8th of May bringing in acts, photographers and videographers from uni to create a communal experience where we’re all helping each other. The laugh went very successfully, we were able to gain a profit from the night as well as a couple of new fans. At the time of writing our Instagram sits at 230 followers, the album has been streamed 3250 times

Evaluation

The album itself was successful. We released a 12 track solid body of work that will most definitely propel us into better things. There are a couple of standout tracks, Cruisn, Black Mould and Streets and Towns truly showcasing our maturity in terms of songwriting and storytelling. There were several songs that were dropped from the album and there were some last minute additions. ‘Hitting the Mark’ was one of the late attendees because we found the voice note on my phone from a few months prior while looking for vocal snippets to add to the album. Every new addition had to fit the tone of the project so it was difficult at times getting the order of tracks right, but eventually we settled on one that we both thought told our story best.

The album launch was a slightly stressful but very fun event. It took us several months to sort out, booking the venue in February but doing most of the leg work in April. We charged £2 at the door, over 60 people bought a ticket which helped us gain a profit from the night. The atmosphere was good the whole night, Toby Catt opening the evening, Beau Peep got the crowds arms moving, Real Triggz and KingOBithy brought the hype, local acts JPDL and Yogi Beats got everyone dancing and we were blessed to end the night.

In this major project we delivered what we set out to do and have surpassed it. We have the intention to continue as a duo past uni and bring this work with us. We have 2 festivals to play in the summer, the rest only the future knows.

[thousandmaths]

Multiplication: the Whats and Hows

This is the third post in a five-part sequence (1 2 3 4 5) devoted to the Rogers-Ramanujan identities, inspired by Sun Kim’s talk at 2017 Midwest Combinatorics Conference. Her explanation was the first time that I really felt that I understood these identities, and for me it shined a light on their beauty, which I had never seen before. This sequence is an attempt to pass that on to you :)

[ As usual, I am using LaTeX in this post which means that it will look (much) better if you click through to my blog instead of reading it on the dash. ]

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Using the Lemma

In the previous post, we developed a lemma:

Lemma. As formal power series, $\displaystyle\frac{1}{1-x^N} = 1+x^N+x^{2N}+x^{3N}+x^{4N}+\cdots$.

We would now like to use this to “simplify” the Rogers-Ramanujan identities by removing all of the fraction bars. It’s probably worth saying upfront that you don’t really need to read this section entirely: it’s just a lot of calculations, and I decided to include more of them rather than less... once you get the idea, you can skip to the results.

Remember from the first post that the (first) Rogers-Ramanujan identity states that the right-hand side: $$ { \color{red} {\frac{1}{1-x}} } \cdot { \color{blue} {\frac{1}{1-x^4}} } \cdot { \color{red} {\frac{1}{1-x^6}} } \cdot { \color{blue} {\frac{1}{1-x^9}} } \cdot { \color{red} {\frac{1}{1-x^{11}}} } \cdot { \color{blue} {\frac{1}{1-x^{14}}} } \cdot { \color{red} {\frac{1}{1-x^{16}}} } \cdot { \color{blue} {\frac{1}{1-x^{19}}} } \cdot { \color{red} {\frac{1}{1-x^{21}}} } \cdot { \color{blue} {\frac{1}{1-x^{24}}} } \cdots  $$

is equal to the left-hand side: $$ 1 + \frac{ {\color{magenta}{x}} }{ {\color{magenta}{1-x}} } + \frac{ {\color{magenta}{x^4}} }{ (1-x){\color{magenta}{(1-x^2)}} } + \frac{ {\color{magenta}{x^9}} }{ (1-x)(1-x^2){\color{magenta}{(1-x^3)}} } + \frac{ {\color{magenta}{x^{16}}} }{ (1-x)(1-x^2)(1-x^3){\color{magenta}{(1-x^4)}} } + \cdots , $$

where in the right-hand side we are multiplying things forever and in the second we are adding things forever.

Starting with the right-hand side, let’s use the lemma on the first red piece: $$ { \color{red} {\frac{1}{1-x}} } = { \color{red} {1+x+x^2+x^3+x^4+x^5+\cdots} } $$

and on the first blue piece: $$ { \color{blue} {\frac{1}{1-x^4}} } = { \color{blue} {1+x^4+x^8+x^{12}+x^{16}+x^{20}+\cdots} } $$

and on the second red piece: $$ { \color{red} {\frac{1}{1-x^6}} } = { \color{red} {1+x^6+x^{12}+x^{18}+x^{24}+x^{36}+\cdots} } $$

and we could keep going, but you get the idea. Putting it all together, we get that the right-hand side has become much longer:

$$ { \color{red} {(1+x+x^2+x^3+x^4+\cdots)} } { \color{blue} {(1+x^4+x^8+x^{12}+\cdots)} } {\color{red} {(1+x^6+x^{12}+\cdots)} } { \color{blue} {(1+x^9+\cdots)} } {\color{red} {(1+x^{11}+\cdots)} \cdots } $$

However, it is better than the version we had before in at least two respects. First of all, there are no longer any fractions. Second of all, we now see that it consists of an infinite multiplication problem, each of whose parts is an infinite addition problem. Since the other expression is an infinite addition problem outright, it seems like the two sides are starting to look more and more like each other.

But we also can use the lemma on the left-hand side: The first term is just a $1$, so that’s nothing, but the second term is $$ \color{magenta}{x(1+x+x^2+x^3+x^4+x^5+x^6+x^7+x^8+\cdots)}.$$

For the third term we can apply the lemma twice: the black part looks like what we just did in the second term, and the pink is new: $$ {\color{magenta}{x^4}}(1+x+x^2+x^3+x^4+\cdots){\color{magenta}{(1+x^2+x^4+x^6+x^8+x^{10}+x^{12}+x^{14}+\cdots)}}.$$

For the fourth term we can apply the lemma three times: the black part looks like the third term, and the pink is new: $$ {\color{magenta}{x^9}}(1+x+x^2+x^3+x^4+\cdots)(1+x^2+x^4+x^6+x^8+\cdots){\color{magenta}{(1+x^3+x^6+x^9+x^{12}+x^{15}+x^{18}+\cdots)}}.$$

Again, we could keep going, but you get the idea. Putting it all together, we get that the left-hand side has also become a lot longer:

\begin{align*} 1 &+ { \color{magenta}{x(1+x+x^2+x^3+x^4+\cdots)} } + {\color{magenta}{x^4}}(1+x+x^2+\cdots){\color{magenta}{(1+x^2+x^4+x^6+x^8+\cdots)}} \\\ &+ {\color{magenta}{x^9}}(1+x+x^2+\cdots)(1+x^2+x^4\cdots){\color{magenta}{(1+x^3+x^6+x^9+x^{12}\cdots)}} + \cdots , \end{align*}

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A Crash Course in Multiplication

As we’ve already noticed, a problem with the above expressions is that they’re way too long: not only do they have infinitely many parts, each part is infinitely long. It would be better if we could write both of them just as something like $a+bx+cx^2+dx^3+ex^4+\cdots$. It turns out that we can do this, but first we need to relearn how to multiply.

We’ll restrict our attention to polynomials “without coefficients”, since that’s all we’ll need going forward. This just means that we won’t have terms like $-5x^3$ or $+2x^4$: everything is $+x^N$.

Let’s begin with this warmup calculation:

$$ (x^2+x^6)(x^4+x^5) = ~?? $$

Grab Politely ask the nearest high school algebra student, and they can tell you (perhaps with some difficulty) that the answer is $x^6+x^7+x^{10}+x^{11}$, using the magic of FOIL. But let’s see an alternate explanation for why this is true.

We start off with a sort of visual version of the problem: when we see an $x^N$, we’ll draw a column of $N$ boxes, and we’ll use different colors to denote which parenthetical expression they fall into. So we have:

Then, let’s look at the answer, which I’ll draw in a different, but suggestive way. In each diagram each box (white or grey) counts as one $x$:

Well that’s interesting...

This pattern is no accident, and if you just trace through the algebraic manipulation you’ll see exactly what happens. But let’s skip over that for now.

Here’s a slightly more interesting calculation:

$$ (x^3+x^4)(x^4+x^5) = ~?? $$

Again, the magic of FOIL would tell us that this is $x^7+2x^8+x^9$, but let’s see the pictorial representation:

You can see the $2x^8$ in the pictures because there are two different diagrams with $8$ boxes. This idea generalizes: if you want to figure out what the number in front of $x^N$ is, you just count the number of ways that you can combine the columns, one of each color (order doesn’t matter), to get diagrams with $N$ boxes.

The advantage to the pictorial representation is that it works in cases where FOIL fails miserably: we can have more than two factors multiplied together, and each factor can have more than two parts. As we go forward, it may help to remember that $x=x^1$ and $1=x^0$.

$$ (1+x+x^2+x^3)(1+x^2)(1+x^3) = ~??$$

I’m gonna pretend that I put those two diagrams with X’s through them for pedagogical reasons, to emphasize that you can only use column of each color... but to be honest I just screwed up and didn’t notice the double white columns until I uploaded the first time ;_;

More to the point, notice that sometimes a color will be missing from a diagram; that is okay because it simply means that we chose the “zero block” column for that color.

In any case, counting up the [correct] diagrams and grouping them by number of boxes, we get:

$$ (1+x+x^2+x^3)(1+x^2)(1+x^3) = 1 + x + 2x^2 + 3x^3 + 2x^4 + 4x^5 + 2x^6 + x^7 + x^8 $$

And your high-school algebra friend will arrive at the same answer with the usual algebraic method, although their paper won’t look as pretty as yours :)

This post ended up going a lot longer than I thought when I started writing... congrats for making it through >.<

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[scootoaster]

How to protect your identity online

This dog is either extremely good at online impersonation, or the person it replaced is not great at protecting their identity. (Drew Hays/Unsplash/)

I’ve been impersonated online four times (that I know of). Three times, someone took my self-portraits and used them to catfish people on Tinder. The other time, someone created an email address and pretended to be me researching an article on Instagram accounts for a site I used to write for. They reached out to big accounts and attempted to get them to hand over their login credentials. In all four cases, I had no idea it was going on until someone who was directly affected contacted me to ask if they were being scammed. I have no idea how many other people were taken in.

Of course, it’s not uncommon for public figures caught up in the news cycle or some kind of controversy to be impersonated by trolls. For example, Katie Bouman, a scientist involved in taking the first ever photo of a black hole, was quickly impersonated online. Sexist trolls did what sexist trolls do and tried to manufacture outrage and controversy where there was none.

But if you’re not a public figure, online impersonation can be a bit more personal. If someone is posting your private information or reaching out to your friends, it’s likely someone you know—or are at least acquainted with. This is probably the hardest situation to deal with.

Having my identity stolen left me feeling pretty weird. Someone was out there, lying to people and using my face or professional reputation to do it. If you’re in the same situation, I’m sorry—it sucks. But there are a few things you can do.

That's Harry, not Cam. Cam's true face is a mystery. For all we know, he's a dog. (Harry Guinness/)

Consider why it’s happening

What the person impersonating you is trying to achieve will determine what you can do about it.

With the three catfish attempts, the scammer just used my photos. They were in a different country, using a completely fictional profile. It was me but it wasn’t me. In those cases, I found out when one of their victims reached out to me and asked if they were being catfished. They’d suspected something was up and reverse image-searched the pics. While I don’t know exactly why my photos were used, I can only assume it’s because, a) I’m gorgeous, and b) there are plenty of photos of me available online that someone could use to build a realistic profile.

In the fourth instance, the scammer was trying to leverage my identity as a writer to steal the login details to some big Instagram accounts. I’d written an article about top Instagram accounts a few months before and they were using it as part of their amateurish (and ultimately unsuccessful) con. This one struck a little closer to home since they were actually pretending to be me.

Also, before launching yourself to wild conclusions, think about whether it could be a case of mistaken identity. Unless you have a super-rare name, there is almost certainly someone out there who shares yours. There are even two Harry Guinness-es (Harry Guinnessi? Harrys Guinness?). Just because someone has a Twitter or Instagram account with the same name as you doesn’t mean they’re impersonating you—unless, of course, they’re stealing and sharing your photos. Your name might be Will Smith, but you’re not entitled to the Twitter handle @willsmith.

Report the profile

If someone is truly impersonating you on a social media platform, online dating app, or elsewhere, your first step is simple: report the hell out of them. Impersonating someone is against pretty much every site’s terms of service—Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram all ban it. If you can show that someone has set up a fake profile as you, report, report, report.

Unfortunately, as with all things internet, this doesn’t always work. Twitter, in particular, seems to be willfully obstinate when it comes to shutting down impersonation accounts. There are plenty of examples of Twitter refusing to take action, even when present with evidence that people’s accounts have been directly copied. Tinder, at least, was quite responsive—the three profiles impersonating me were quickly shut down once the victims reported them for catfishing.

But if someone is impersonating you with an email address, website, WhatsApp account, or some other non-identity linked platform, there’s not a lot you can do. For example, Gmail’s terms explicitly state that they are “unable to participate in mediations involving third parties regarding impersonation.” If someone is impersonating you by email, Google won’t do a thing.

Minimize the damage

Impersonation can do a lot more harm when other people don’t know it’s going on. If someone is pretending to be you, don’t stay quiet: announce it on your Facebook profile, pin it to the top of your Twitter timeline, and rant about it on any soapbox you have. It could scare them into stopping.

And even if it doesn’t stop them, at least their attempts at deception have been made public. Someone who searches for you online will be able to see which are your official profiles—and which aren’t.

One idea that gets thrown around a lot is verification, but it’s not really a solution for most people. Twitter’s verification program is currently undergoing review (though I was able to get verified after the Instagram impersonation incident) and was pretty capricious to begin with. Instagram still has a verification option, but it’s aimed at “public figures, celebrities and brands.” You can apply for verification by going to Settings > Account > Request Verification and uploading a photo of your ID, but you’re unlikely to be successful unless you’re a genuine public figure—there’s no way to plead your case or explain why you need to be verified. My verification request was rejected. Facebook’s process is a little better, but it’s still just for public figures and celebrities. You can apply by filling out this contact form, and there is a place where you can explain why your account should be verified. Still, you’re unlikely to be successful unless you really are a public figure.

The legal route isn’t easy

If nothing’s working, it might seem logical to go to the police, but the legal situation is actually pretty complicated.

The laws to stop someone from impersonating you online depend on where the impersonator lives and where the company hosting the posts is based, explains David Reischer, attorney and CEO of LegalAdvice.com.

“The criminal online impersonation laws vary from state to state, as does the threshold for triggering the law,” he says. “There are, at present, no federal internet impersonation laws, and only nine states have laws that make it illegal to impersonate another person on the internet.”

Your attorney would need to file a court-approved subpoena forcing the website to stop the impersonator from making new posts, remove any old posts, reveal their identity (if it’s known), and disclose their IP address.

Things are a little easier if you know who is impersonating you (or get the website to reveal who they are). You could consider a civil lawsuit, but your ability to prove your case against the impersonator will depend on the applicable state laws for claims of defamation, harassment, professional impersonation, or false light, Reischer says.

In other words, there’s not a lot you can do if you don’t know who’s impersonating you. And if you do, you’re most likely going to need to pursue a lengthy civil action, unless you live in one of the few states where impersonating someone online is a crime and you can get the police interested in pursuing it.

Let it blow over

Unless someone is taking things to the point that getting lawyers involved makes sense, there’s not a lot you can do but wait it out.

As far as I know, no one is impersonating me online at the moment. The three catfishes seemingly stopped when Tinder quickly shut down their profiles, and the Instagram impersonator didn’t get anywhere with their scam, so they wound it up after a few weeks. If you’ve found an imposter, report them; shout about it from the rooftops; but, once you’ve done that, ignore them. If you can, move on. That’s what I had to do.

[pinkanchorlovestuff-blog]

I keep in mind when Instagram was yay high. Once we have been just youngsters importing filtered pictures of road graffiti

That each one modified once I signed in to YOGABODY's personal word processor.

The company's Fb recreation was in place, but we needed to give it higher access, and we also promote our products on Instagram.

Whoa, who, who. You imply I can't simply use footage of excellent yoga ladies and quote "If you can't handle me in the worst sense, you don't deserve me at my best" and call it a day?

No extra.

Oh, they develop so quick.

For starters, its customers aren't simply completely happy to hand out those red-heart-like candy on Halloween night time. They’re additionally… purchasing.

Instagram users spend a mean of $ 65 on a purchase (greater than Facebook), and "gram has increased engagement by 115% since 2012.

What does this imply for your ecommerce business?

Instagram Captions Do Better when they use conversion copy methods.

A replica is the distinction between a follower (who holds pictures) and a customer (who buys products).

Footage can catch the reader's consideration as they endlessly browse, however in accordance to Instagram's algorithm, likes, feedback, shares, and tags), are thought-about priceless and are subsequently promoted off the feed.

Instagram caption – AKA copy (we use these phrases interchangeably in this article) – brings new followers to your brand, main to conversions and sales. [19659002] Take Glossier for example Vogue staffer Emily Weiss took a life-style and magnificence blog and developed it right into a highly regarded Instagram account, the place she launched her magnificence line Glossier. The account now has over 2 million followers and an e-commerce company value $ 1 billion.

On this in-depth take a look at Sked Social, Glossier's Instagram advertising strategy exhibits that its posts typically hit a 10% turnout common of 3%. "They knock it out of the park," writes Kat Boogard. He says:

“They weren't part of the trap shared by so many companies where social media was a afterthought – they were proactive ever since. In fact, Glossier's account had attracted 13,000 Instagram followers before all products were even opened on the brand's e-commerce site. ”

Sked Socialin Kat Boogard

You possibly can proceed to develop your Instagram with a very good copy even for those who don't have Emily Weiss's cultural culture

Let's take a look at sensible captions that make you snug.

Instagram provides you 2,200 characters of play caption.

That's so much. This is sort of a retail page!

Although you could have about 300 words, not all will seem in the follower feed. Instagram will reduce off your caption. Subsequently, it will be significant to rigorously design these first two (cellular) three (desktop) strains so that they don’t break in an immediate.

In contrast to Kanye, Instagram does this with interest. They do that to forestall it from supporting the feed. The next might show the maximum (in purple):

Dermstore, which sells skilled magnificence products online, makes use of these bite-sized moments to highlight its ordering supply. This can be a good example of readers getting their heads eagerly requested "yes" to your question. It's all the time a superb copy… even on Instagram.

Gold Commonplace: Enter 125 vital characters before "More …" seems.

There's really so much you are able to do about it.

Like using it to upgrade your followers from re-stock

Point out sales.

Or use popular culture reference

Hi… if Joann Shops (previously often known as Joann Fabrics) – you already know, those you associate with your older neighbor who knit a scarf each Christmas – could be fashionable, then you’ll be able to.

Again, Instagram rewards posts with tons of comments and likes by posting them over the wall – ahem, outdoors the feed. So EVERY submit doesn't have to sell-price-product-oriented.

But how do I do every little thing and not using a huge finances?

Nicely you asked…

Upload user-created content material.

Here's the factor:

Instagram customers love to distribute content material.

So how are you going to reap the benefits of it?

For novices, you possibly can repeat what others have stated about you (hey, Voice of Buyer Knowledge!) – or – this might imply that authors and clients can send details about your products instantly.

I'd like to concentrate on merely returning user-generated content: Show clients who present your products, identical to in the GoT example above.

Somebody creates something superb through the use of a product.

You’ll be able to see their message.

You submit your message. #repost

It leads to belief in your followers. And the viewers will get to see what the product appears like in a real sitch.

Right here is an instance of @yogabode. We shared a native message from Yoga Trapeze (YOGABODY product).

I’ve all the time spent a sure period of time to expel the native messaging are on the lookout for something that I might use – primarily in gold mining.

If the unique title accommodates a constructive remark about our product … YOINK!

This can be a golden alternative to submit a buyer evaluate instantly to your feed, giving the audience a quick, actual insight that also feels very real.

If your product has not been talked about (yet), you’ll be able to #regram someone in the dialog.

Dermstore uses the original caption to present their voice and then shortly mentions the consumer's image (for actual credit).

Upward it is potential to get to this particular somebody's radar. The draw back: it might appear to be you're unable to create your own content material. Use this tactic very sparingly.

The next is an example of #regram:

For pictures, you can do this manually.

Take a screenshot of the picture you want to edit

Use the photograph editor on your telephone to crop all the things besides the image.

Share to Instagram.

Add a singular title and @ mark the unique consumer in the submit.

You want a resubmit app for videos. I like to recommend SkedSocial.

Emoji is that this emoji emoji?

I don't await you…

The reply is…

YES! They are a fast method to look human. That you’re an clever individual. That you’re a fashionable, sensible individual behind a caption. No aaaal copywriter / business individual sweats which emoji makes use of and where. And what is this eggplant and why is it so common? And oh my God, how can I emoji ?! ????

I gotchu. The following is an app where you’ll be able to say the city dictionary instantly from these small hieroglyphs in advance, so you gained't by accident miss it. Or just take a look at which emojis are trending so you will get an up-to-date copy.

To be trustworthy, emojis are additionally good at breaking up text by copying your copy visually and saying things less phrases. Here, Glossier uses the down arrow to mean "post your reply to comments."

. As an alternative of saying "click here," you’ll be able to as an alternative ship the pointer with your finger. Listed here are some concepts for a shared Instagram copy of emoji:

☝️ Click on the link above / verify the bio

👉 Right here hyperlink

👇 Verify the link under / Depart a remark under

🙏 We are grateful / we love it!

🔥 Scorching Sale

🚨 New Gross sales / Essential

💣 / ⚠️ Time delicate Gross sales

💯 Greatest Supply / We Accept

📷 This picture was taken by: / Photograph cred:

💬 ⬇️ This asks the viewers to depart a comment

this Use this to separate new factors

But more than that, they really stimulate the texture of an excellent response from readers who say it with me, creating engagement.

Pastime audience reads the complete caption (300 words)

Because individuals spend much less time studying their desk and a mean of 53 minutes a day on Instagram, this implies it is attainable to give them info on their

is sensible for your business:

Present product benefits.

An trustworthy company, based and run by none aside from Jessica Alba, specializes in protected baby products created from renewable components. They emphasize their organic stomach balm in this submit with textual content and pictures.

Tell a narrative from case research or other stories.

You’ll be able to attempt it in the third individual because @trustworthy is doing it right here:

Or interviewing clients and sending their story to the primary individual:

Such real human stories are 22 occasions more memorable than details.

Ship replace to company (or other really priceless info).

By now, you could be considering … yeah, yeah, yeah I'll take your clients with these nice ideas, Kaleena, but how can I get more of these Instagrammers-shop to comply with my account?

Use hashtags to assist clients discover you easily.

Instagram permits up to 30 hashtags, more than sufficient for the typical ecommerce enterprise. These tags will not be only a fashionable method to play Instagram, however relatively a enterprise device to assist individuals find a brand.

Consider it as Instagram web optimization.

With out them, clients won’t ever see your content. You don't have to embrace them in your posts. There are three levels of decentralization that you simply intend to assume and use.

ONE: Geotags

They get 79% extra dedication and solely 5% extra posts are!

Geotags mean that you are situated on the geotag page for that city / place. And the better your mail is, the extra possible it’s that Instagram will push it to the top of that web page.

These tags are great when you also have a brick and mortar retailer or pop-up, like the Glossier instance

At YOGABODY we saw a 10% peak in consumer engagement once we went from easy #yoga to adding #yogainbarcelona and #yogalosangeles geo .

TWO: Branded hashtagit.

These characters have to be associated with products, brand, and brand.

For instance, in case you are a zodiac inspired jewelry company referred to as Gemini Jewellery and sell necklaces on Instagram, your branded products could be #geminijewelry and #whatsyoursign.

Quest Vitamin, which sells protein-rich delicacies akin to This White Chocolate Under the Raspberry Quest Bar, sprinkled #OnaQuest and #Questify on virtually each message.

THREE: Niche hashtagit.

At YOGABODY, we shortly realized that #yoga is just too broad a term – there are about 70 million (!!) posts for that word in the Instagram part at any time. Content material is buried for a moment when only the most important and worst corporations are proven.

Michael Aynsley describes this further in his 2019 hashtag guide:

“Suppose you are a social media manager for a travel company. There are a selection of hashtags which might be fashionable with jet seters: #welltravelled, #justbackfrom, #whatsinmybag and # passportexpress – to identify a number of. Tag your message with any of these numbers and you'll in all probability get a couple of additional Likes. "

But don't make any guesswork right here.

Want to play with totally different Instagram keyword tools First, take a look at Instagram analytics for some time to see what works and what doesn't.

However like running a blog search engine optimisation keywords, many Instagrammers see too many hashtags as spam.

To keep away from this, merge the brand-related characters into captions, as they present a very good reply and add audio to the copy.

Depart geographical marks and keywords in the first comment of the keyword.

They discovered you, adopted you, interacted with you and saw your products … Now what?

Let Instagrammers know what they should do next with Simple Actions (CTA). You’ll be able to ask them to buy a product, buy at your retailer, or share with a pal.

You’ll be able to choose your CTA ad by considering what your business objective is. in building a group? Brand consciousness? Product Consciousness

On different platforms, CTAs often embrace a link to make the subsequent step as straightforward as a pie. Nevertheless, Instagram eliminates click-throughs in headlines to enhance the consumer expertise (and let's be real, hold you on the platform for as long as potential).

That's why the most typical CTA on Instagram is "Click the link bio!"

Reformation, a sustainable trend firm, makes use of this tactic superbly. Maintain in thoughts that they have written a mere bio-link because it is so 2018.

As above, CTAs are on the end of the title when you might have already warmed up on "grammar", why they should care and what's in it for them.

Subsequent:

Individuals love to speak about themselves.

Not solely does it start a dialog, it could possibly additionally offer you a clean voice about buyer info.

(BTW – you’ll be able to create graphics in less than 5 minutes with Canva.)

Listed here are some other CTA information you need to use:

Determine on Stories for Purchasing!

Be a part of Our Affiliate Network

Obtain Complete Information

Inform Us Your Favorite

Mark Somebody Who Seems to be Good Right here (emoji)

Share (add brand identify) down

Contact Gary Vee -hopping, jab, jab, proper hook, asking for some straightforward questions like "enjoy!" "Comment!" "Check out the link! "Before the bigger one asks," shop, "" stock, "or" buy. "

Music: Instagram Elevator Peak

You could have ~ 10 words to promote yourself.

What do you might have to say? It will make or break you!

Simply kidding. It's truly utterly interchangeable at any time.

As Allie Decker writes in this advantageous article from the Instagram copy:

“Brainstorm some of the key terms that people may be looking for in relation to a brand, product or industry. Add these to your bio if necessary. As an example of using Foundr, you see words like epic, not awesome and word-kicking, knowing our audience responds positively to such terms. ”

Allie Decker

If and when you’ve got branded products that you really want to encourage followers to use, it's an excellent apply to listing it on your Instagram bio for straightforward reference – identical to Joann does.

The track continues to be the only place the place you possibly can submit a reside hyperlink. But you don't have to maintain it static.

Actually, I like to recommend that you simply continuously change. Perhaps as typically as you modify sheets. I know it's a problem, nevertheless it must be achieved weekly.

Why? This link is an opportunity to improve visitors to the advertised content material.

Play your whole Instagram track based mostly on the product or sales you need to spotlight or drive visitors to affiliate accounts similar to a blog, podcast, ecommerce, or different enterprise.

Since most Instagram users are on cellular units, you either want your link to drive visitors to your touchdown page or use a bit to link to a store.

If in case you have so many issues individuals need to see, and you're not speaking about ever-changing bio-life, attempt an software like Hyperlink.tree or tap.bio that accommodates all of the hyperlinks you want to drive followers. Here's what it seems like:

How to write an Instagram copy that isn’t overshadowed by a nasty Insta-photo

Be unbeatable inside the first 125 characters (first seen by the audience)

Function clients and your brand helped them by storytelling

and brand-related emoji; use emojis to disperse textual content and point readers in the correct course

Submit user-created content material to interact and really feel like rockstars

Let readers find you thru the following hashtags:

Geotags like # yogalosangeles.

Brand-like #geminijewelry #whatsyoursign

Niche phrases like #yogaeverydamnday

Cut up a couple of brands in the event you like, everybody else belongs in the primary remark remark

Use the CTA information on the end of your submit like examine, comment, buy, go, tag, verify, buy or tell

Picture not value a thousand words – select rigorously and #shineon.

The post How to participate in Instagram followers so they love your brand and buy products appeared first on Android Illustrated.

[aracelishaynes-blog]

This Technologies Can Assist Make Highly-priced

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[topmixtrends]

BEFORE HER 2016 novel Chanson douce won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Leïla Slimani had already made a splash with her 2014 debut Dans le jardin de l’ogre, about a young mother caught between her bourgeois marriage and her sex addiction. These two novels, published by the prestigious press Gallimard, have earned Slimani a reputation as one of France’s brightest young literary talents, a writer whose work attends to the plight of young women struggling to conform to the competing demands of modern urban life. Slimani’s astute sociological gaze was refined through her work as a journalist covering her native Morocco, writing primarily for the online newspaper Jeune Afrique; three volumes of her journalism have been published in Paris in the last year. Recently, she was selected by President Macron to serve as his personal representative to promote French in the Francophone world. Chanson douce, meanwhile, is slated to appear in translation in over 35 languages, and has just been released in the United States as The Perfect Nanny.

The Perfect Nanny is inspired by a notorious 2012 murder case, in which Lucia and Leo Krim, only six and two years old, were stabbed to death in a Manhattan apartment by their nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, who then attempted, unsuccessfully, to take her own life. The question at the heart of the novel is one that journalists reporting on that crime also sought to answer: what could possibly motivate a caregiver to kill the children in her charge? After opening with a scene of the murders, the novel flashes back in time, to the moment when Myriam and Paul Massé hire Louise to watch their children, Mila and Adam, and then charts their path back to the present. A wonder-nanny, Louise cooks like a first-rate chef and brings order and calm to the couple’s chaotic work lives, but her troubled past is glimpsed in snatches, suggesting a basis — if not a motive — for the crime she will commit.

Though we know how the story ends, the novel remains primarily focused on the mundane daily rhythms that structure the Massé household. Louise arrives early and leaves late. She transports the children to school and to various outings, hosts their birthday parties, and regales them with fanciful stories and games. “You’re part of the family,” Myriam tells Louise as she mounts her framed photo on a bookshelf in the living room. Within their family unit, Louise occupies the role not of a replacement mother but of a third child whose presence, repeatedly described by Paul as “doll-like,” becomes a fixture in their home.

Most of the novel takes place within the small Massé apartment in the gentrified 10th arrondissement of Paris, a confined space that is exceedingly quotidian but never boring. Paul and Myriam aspire to a conventional upper-middle-class life, where she can escape from the claustrophobia of full-time parenting while he guiltily embraces urban amenities, rejecting the austerity of his own childhood. They celebrate their career successes — Paul is a music producer, Myriam a trial attorney — and their fancy dinner parties, replete with cooking by Louise, make them the envy of their social circle. Their main worry is keeping Louise happy at work: without someone to take care of their kids, the rest of their carefully curated lives wouldn’t be possible. The novel’s insistence on their professional success, and the general sense of plenitude in their work-life balance, augur all the more sharply the downfall that awaits them.

As a fiction writer, Slimani seems most at home in the present tense. Her first novel was told almost exclusively in clipped sentences that dramatized the urgency of the protagonist Adele’s physical needs and gnawing inner voice. In The Perfect Nanny, a similar prose style evokes the repetitive cycle of daily existence. There is something disquieting in Slimani’s present tense, which seems always about to rupture the veneer of equanimity. Occasionally the narrative breaks away from the everyday, splicing in chapters that transport us to scenes from Louise’s past, to her eventual trial, or to a hypothetical future envisioned by one of the characters. Anxious to see her children after a busy week, Myriam imagines that tonight:

she would devote herself entirely to them. Together, they would slip into the big bed. She would tickle them and kiss them, she would squeeze them against her until they were dizzy. Until they struggled.

It’s when the novel ventures out of its comfort zone of the present that it inclines too strongly toward such melodramatic flourishes that forebode a tragic ending.

Although Slimani has said that her work “never meant to describe any true or real event,” The Perfect Nanny tracks the well-known Krim case from New York, even while relocating the story to Paris. Mila and Adam are the same ages as the Krim children were at their deaths and are similarly discovered by their mother in the bathtub, with a kitchen knife in the hands of the nanny. Descriptions of her “scream from deep within” echo the initial news reports of the case. Kevin Krim, the children’s father, was met at JFK airport by policemen to break the news of the murder, just as, in the novel’s closing pages, Lieutenant Verdier awaits Paul Massé at the Eurostar section of the Gare du Nord.

References to Louise’s increasingly unhealthy physical appearance, troubles with her landlord, and history of mental illness all echo news coverage of the Krims’ nanny. One article from The Daily Beast, for instance, describes how Ortega had “continued hearing voices, male and female, speaking in Spanish but still unintelligible to her save for when they urged her to hurt others.” Likewise, in the novel, a voice speaks to Louise:

Someone has to die. Someone has to die for us to be happy. Morbid refrains echo inside Louise’s head when she walks. Phrases that she didn’t invent — and whose meaning she is not sure she fully grasps — fill her mind.

There’s nothing new about a novelist drawing on sensational newspaper reports; that’s been common practice in US fiction since at least Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). In France, the faits divers tradition popularized by Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, and others in the 19th century pursued a similar topical strategy, and the success of Emmanuel Carrère’s L’Adversaire (2000) attests that this tradition is alive and well. But in its translation into a Paris-based literary thriller, the Krim case has undergone one noteworthy transformation: the novel both flips and elides the dynamics of ethnicity from the news story, with the Dominican New York nanny becoming a white Parisian, while the white employer turns Maghrebi.

This inversion is signaled very subtly — you could almost miss the fact that Myriam Massé, née Charfa, is ethnically Arab, or that Louise is white. Indeed, Louise bears no trace of ethnic origin for half of the narrative. Only when she is firmly anchored within the Massé family, accompanying them on their summer vacations, do we glimpse a few strands of blonde hair peeking out from underneath her swim cap — a suggestive metaphor for the ways that markers of ethnicity unwittingly escape from the novel’s efforts to contain them.

Sam Taylor’s confident English translation retains all French place-markers and cultural signposts. It carefully adapts the pleasing simplicity of Slimani’s prose and adheres to her rigorous resistance to making ethnicity a centerpiece of the story. The book’s paratexts, however, tellingly contravene this thematic reluctance. The English title — itself sensationalistic in tone, and nothing like the original, which literally translates as “sweet song” — is plastered over the image of a woman’s torso, dutifully dressed in a British-style nanny uniform, her pale neck prominently exposed. Meanwhile, Myriam is identified in the back cover copy as a “French-Moroccan lawyer,” and Slimani’s author bio refers to her as the “first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize.”

In other words, where the Gallimard edition makes no reference to the ethnic identity of either the characters or the author, the English translation places this issue front and center. The two versions conform almost too neatly to their cultural contexts: the French political project of laïcité systematically rests on a refusal to acknowledge or privilege forms of identity, while in the United States, race becomes the book’s raison d’être.

As intriguing as The Perfect Nanny is for its translation of an American crime into a French context, it is most compelling as a reflection on how we consume the media today. The novel brims over with visual references to media technologies and texts: Louise leaves the television on all day long, watching “apocalyptic news reports” with the children “in rapt silence” by her side. Slimani describes photographs of the crime scene and of the children taken before their deaths — photos matching those that appeared in newspapers and magazines in the wake of the New York case (such as one of the “bouquets of flowers and children’s drawings” littering the entrance to the couple’s apartment building). She even references pictures from the Krims’s personal blog. “Just uploaded photos from my iPhone,” Marina Krim wrote in one of her last blog posts before the murders, and some of the images of her children — wearing a white dress, lying on the ground half-naked, visiting a friend’s farm — emerge in the novel, recast as Massé family snapshots taken on Myriam’s iPhone.

All of Slimani’s characters, in the end, are stuck behind screens, and if Louise’s crime is figured, at least in part, as a result of our apocalypse-focused news culture, so too does Slimani register her own position as a media consumer, transfixed by images of the event, molding them into literary form.

The novel in that sense can be read not only as an obsessive account of a crime, but also as a meta-story about the ways in which we obsess about crimes today. It bespeaks our era of easy and unfettered access to online media and compulsive news cycling. The Perfect Nanny offers a window onto the experience of being immersed in someone else’s tragedy, all the while expressing deep ambivalence about the contemporary media culture from which such stories emerge.

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Sara Kippur is associate professor of French at Trinity College in Hartford and the author of Writing It Twice: Self-translation and the Making of a World Literature in French.

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