#amateur giffing attempt number two!

[cakeyouareoh]

FRINGE 5.12 - "Liberty"

[glompcat]

Thoughts on your favorite companion?

Oh. Ok.

I got this ask yesterday and it very quickly became so long it had to go under a read more, and then became the sort of thing I just needed more time to work on, so here is the response a full day later because I HAVE A LOT OF THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS ON THIS TOPIC OK?

So here are some thoughts on Romana (and some of my own very amateur attempts at making gifs because why not try? Also because Britbox changed their code and it is harder to take screenshots from there now D:)

If we operate under the common assumption that the companion is the viewer’s point of reference, then by the 16th season of the show the Doctor is no longer really all that.... alien. Not only that, Season 16 was the fifth season of Tom Baker’s seven year tenure on the show. The 100th serial aired that season, and that marked 15 years of Doctor Who on TV! The Doctor is no longer such a distant mysterious figure, they are, by this point, as familiar and comfortable and known as the Doctor can possibly be (well it’s Tom Baker, so that comfortable familiar feeling is akin to that felt towards that weird relative you just can’t quite understand).

That’s why it is so brilliant that suddenly the dynamic changes entirely and the Companion sees the Doctor and the TARDIS as familiar touchstones in a stream of strange and usual settings (such as that insignificant little planet in Mutter’s Spiral the Doctor is so obsessed with), echoing the shift in the audience’s own perceptions of the show. I think it is also no coincidence that with the exception of the Daleks in Destiny of the Daleks, for the most part on television while Romana was the companion, the aliens she and the Doctor faced tended to be brand new - and many of them remain one offs on television. I have similar feelings about the fact that of her seventeen planned television stories she and the Doctor only visited the Earth in three of them, and of those three visits only two (The Stones of Blood and City of Death) made it to air (obs for unrelated reasons. Shada’s fate was of course because of the BBC wide crew strike that occurred during its filming).

Doctor Who can NOT remain stagnant, and needs to constantly change in drastic and dramatic ways to survive, and Season 16 - which was also where we see the show’s very first season long story arc - is very much an example of the show attempting to do precisely that.

This is also why I think it is so cool that the series introduced to us an even more mysterious and unknowable entity that season. Someone far more powerful than the Doctor. Who is the White Guardian, exactly? I honestly can’t tell you, other than that when he isn’t wearing a bird on his head he likes to lounge on wicker furniture and drink strange cocktails.

Plus, while the Doctor is no longer alien in the eyes of the Doctor’s traveling companion, that which is familiar and comfortable to the audience is suddenly strange and unknown and downright weird in the companion’s eyes.

Romana does not know what a crow is, nor does she know what a horse is. Nor tennis, nor wellington boots, nor the Mona Lisa nor any number of a thousand different unquestioned parts of our everyday lives.

There is a section in the novelization of The Pirate Planet where Romana even expresses that she finds the concept of a family unit to be strange, because they don’t really go in for those things on Gallifrey (said passage is made all the better by her coming to the conclusion that if she were to understand the TARDIS crew through the lens of family units, than K9 would have to be the parent).

(from the novelization of The Pirate Planet by James Goss)

Humans are just as alien to her as any costumed monster. We are the strange ones, while every nonsensical thing the Doctor has ever mentioned as being part of Time Lord biology is incredibly normal to her. The Doctor can do over the top wacky things like emit sonic screams that shatter windows, and she doesn’t bat an eye because you know she can do that too (and probably do it better).

She licks rocks to identify their composition (well... she runs a finger on the rock and then licks her finger, which tells you a whole lot about the Doctor and their habit of putting things in their mouth) and can stop both of her hearts on command. In fact, sometimes when humans ask for clarification about Time Lord nonsense, she looks so annoyed to have these obvious basic things questioned by ~lesser species~ while other times she clearly delights in telling them about the wacky Time Lord nonsense.

While Gallifrey... well that’s her home, and in both audios and books we get to see the planet from her perspective, and get her thoughts on how different it seems after seeing the universe with the Doctor.

It is also important to understand that Romana was only the second alien companion on TV, the first being Susan. Yet even when Susan was on TV, Barbara and Ian were always there as well. Making Romana the first solo alien companion on TV. In fact, after Romana leaves, it only happens again on TV very briefly in bookend scenes either after a Human companion just left, or right before the introduction (or reintroduction) of the Human who will be joining the team TARDIS (leaving plenty of space open for those human-free TARDIS teams to have plenty of stories together in the EU). 

Even better, upon arriving, Romana immediately challenges the unquestioned role the Doctor has always held of being the smartest person on the TARDIS.

Oh sure, Zoe and Liz pushed the Doctor’s buttons on that front in the past, but with them there was always the conceit that what they were really surpassing was the Doctor’s expectations for how smart a Human could possibly be. I love those characters dearly, but the fact that they never truly would fully surpass the Doctor intellectually was very much a current running under their many scenes of displaying just how much smarter they were than the Doctor expected.

Romana, by virtue of being a Time Lord - and having graduated from The Time Lord Academy with perfect grades - is immediately identified to the viewer as his intellectual superior, and it is the Doctor who has to prove himself to her. Her introduction particularly underscored that when she interacted with the Doctor, she really was just seeing ~a madman with a box~ and did so without the wonder and awe the Doctor or the TARDIS normally inspire.

Yet, this being Doctor Who, we are also shown right from the start of her time on the TARDIS that she is very willing to be impressed by the Doctor, and accept that the Doctor does have experiences she lacks.

In fact, her faith in the Doctor right from the start is fairly remarkable, and the novelization of her second story - The Pirate Planet - she is put in a machine that projects your worst fears, and it is her thoughts about the Doctor that breaks the machine.

(from the novelization of The Pirate Planet by James Goss)

Time and time again we are reminded that Romana knows more than the Doctor does about just about everything technical. She’s the better TARDIS pilot, she is a better engineer, her sonic screwdriver is better than the Doctor’s, she’s more effective at dealing with politics, she regenerates with ease and has no trouble chosing her apperance, and is just an all around a quick wit. Yet for all the technical expertise she has, she doesn’t have everything the Doctor learned in their travels, a difference which highlights how the Doctor actually is kind of a genius at what they do.

(From Doctor Who and the Krikketmen by James Goss)

One of my favorite tropes in EU stories featuring Romana are all the many many ways writers like to remind us that Romana knows more about the Doctor’s usual nonsense than the Doctor does, really highlighting how much the Doctor is just faking it until they make it.

(From Festival of Death by Jonathan Morris)

The wonder and awe we are used to seeing from companions is not fully missing from her inclusion on the show. It doesn’t come from the Doctor or the TARDIS - she is herself a Time Lord and understands the secrets of the TARDIS far better than the Doctor - but from discovering the universe outside of Gallifrey.

You see, where the Doctor had been running from Gallifreyan society and spent all this time learning from Humans how to be BETTER, Romana has never set foot off Gallifrey before meeting the Doctor. She arrives fully immersed in Gallifreyan socialization, and it is through her time with the Doctor she learns that a different (and better) way of being is possible. She evolves while traveling with the Doctor and goes from thinking Gallifrey is truly the Most Advanced Civilization Ever to finding all the pomp and circumstance of their homeworld honestly funny (to later finding it all just... too much and boring. In the audios she is always interrupting people in the middle of saying her full title and the like, no longer fully comfortable with the Gallifreyan habit of drawing things out as long as possible)

(from Doctor Who and the Krikketmen by James Goss)

Essentially the Doctor gets to pass along everything they have learned from their many Human friends before that point, but all of those lessons come through that horrible lens of the Doctor’s understanding of it all. They get to introduce Romana to all the things they have discovered and delighted in since leaving home, and Romana finds a lot of value in it all, for all that she makes fun of the Doctor for being, well, the Doctor, she clearly takes what they have to say to hearts. She gets to a place where even when noting the things the Doctor is neglecting, she is easily distracted by the same things the Doctor is.

(TARDIS materialization noises) (footsteps) ROMANA: Doctor! We’ve landed!!! That’s odd… (Console beeps) ROMANA: Environment has an unusually high sillicut content. (Scanner opens) ROMANA: Oh look, rocks. (footsteps) DOCTOR: Can you believe that dog? He says he’s not to be disturbed because he’s busy reading philosophy! Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits by Bertrand Russell. He says he finds it amusing! ROMANA: Doctor, you’ve surpassed yourself! You’ve materialized us underground! DOCTOR: Have I?!?!?! Well- I - I - uh - (laughs) Well to be honest, I can’t take all the credit. We really have the TARDIS to thank. ROMANA: Ughhhh! But there are all sorts of safety features designed to prevent this kind of thing happening! DOCTOR: Ooooh, I never bother with them. We’d never land anywhere interesting if they were switched on. ROMANA: (very VERY serious) You mean they’re switched off? DOCTOR: Take this place for instance! It has the appearance of solid rock, but with a very low density. ROMANA: (has been fully distracted) I see what you mean! The rock is clearly igneous, but with a vesicular texture?! DOCTOR: Well it’s certainly extremely porous. When the TARDIS landed, it would have just shoved the surrounding rock out of the way. ROMANA: You’re right! It is interesting! (console beeps) Semi-molten, with a large degree of seismic activity! DOCTOR: What? ROMANA: And it’s increasing. Listen! (rumbling) DOCTOR: That’s no earthquake! That’s machinery! ROMANA: In which case, it’s heading this way. DOCTOR: Some sort of digger, I imagine. Burrowing through the bedrock like a giant worm. ROMANA: Yes! Towards us! DOCTOR: Look! Look there it is! Oh I say! Look at the size of its drill! ROMANA: In front of a vehicle the size of an ocean liner! Shouldn’t we try to get out of its way? DOCTOR: Yes. It’s at moments like this that the TARDIS’s safety features really come into their own. ROMANA: Oh. The ones you’ve switched off?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! DOCTOR: Right. The ones I - Oh deary me. ROMANA: Is that all you can say!?!? It’s going to crash into us! DOCTOR: No no no, wait! The front of it is opening up! ROMANA: Like a great mouth! DOCTOR: Yes! A gaping maw! Like the Blackwall tunnel, and it’s going to swallow us up whole! Goodbye Romana.

(from Subterranea by Jonathan Morris)

Her journey is an echo of the Doctor’s in a lot of ways, and when she leaves the TARDIS she is (by virtue of regenerating during her time traveling with the Doctor) quite literally a different person than when she arrived.

She learns to relax, to have fun, to enjoy taking in the sights and to love the Earth and other planets, she comes to respect non-Gallifreyan species.

I really love Romana’s departure, how she fully commits herself to helping a species in need, promising to “be their Time Lord” and fight for their freedom.

(From A Brief History of Time Lords by Steve Tribe, notably this entry was in the chapter dedicated to Time Lords who ran away from what they saw in the Untempered Schism during their Academy induction ceremony when they were eight. Also I LOVE the implication that there may be more versions of Shada out there featuring incarnations of the Doctor other than Four and Eight.)

Eventually - in the EU - she gets home to Gallifrey where.... well ok, let’s look at a Moffat quote on the Doctor’s character that I think is really interesting to consider when talking about Romana’s life after traveling with the Doctor (the emphasis is mine):

“[The Doctor is] not particularly heroic, which is an odd thing to say about a hero. He’s sort of restless. He’s an adrenaline-junkie. He blunders into situations where a hero is required, and because he’s a good man, he sort of gets involved. He doesn’t stick around and sort out the government’s problems or starvation. There’s no post… er, there no post-trauma care with the Doctor, but he’s a restless, er, fantastical enthusiast is what he is… [there is some banter here between Moffat and the interviewer - Peter Davison - about the Doctor’s core personality traits] ...the flaws aren’t what make the show. I mean, he’s funny because he’s deeply flawed. No one has ever suggested he’s morally perfect, or that he’s particularly rational. I don’t think he’s even marginally sane. It’s all his flaws that make up the story. If he had really… if he was so concerned about all, err… all the goodness in the universe, wouldn’t he stay on Gallifrey and make the Time Lords better? He didn’t. Essentially, he’s a man who stole a car, and drove off into the night, and never agreed to stay anywhere for more than one night. What we love about him is the fact he never, ever grew up.” (from the Series 8 extras back when the show was on Amazon Prime)

Romana’s unknown length of time traveling with the Doctor (which seems to have been at least 50 years) ends with her choosing to stay behind in another dimension (E-Space) essentially to help with the follow up at the end of one of her and the Doctor’s adventures. She then stayed in that one small place (E-Space was notoriously tiny compared to our own dimension aka N-Space) long enough to really learn that post-trauma care is important and just blundering in and then leaving isn’t the way to affect real and lasting positive change.

This is also why the audio Neverland is so fascinating to me, as it entirely turns around the idea that the Doctor is continuously fundamentally rejecting any form of real maturity and growth. Having Romana as a foil in that story, someone invested in seeing the Doctor actually grow into their full potential, really makes sense. Romana is, after all, a Time Lord who is in many ways fundamentally like the Doctor and very much understands where the Doctor is coming from, and yet she has decided that for the sake of the greater good of the universe she needed to suck up her own desire to endlessly run and knuckle down and change the way Gallifrey functions (and of course Neverland/Zagreus ends with the Doctor being exiled anew, refusing to learn their lesson, satisfied to have uncovered yet another reason to hate Gallifrey as well as finding a method to martyr themself, while Romana shoulders the same revelations and decides that for the sake of moving Gallifrey into a better future she will not tell anyone that Rassilon is a bastard - a choice that seriously came back to bite her in the ass later).

Romana is going to do her damndest to fix the mess that is her homeworld, because she deeply believes that making the Time Lords better will make the universe as a whole better.

As much as everyone tells her that Gallifreyan politics will corrupt her, she basically lives an ethos of “RIP to every other leader in Gallifreyan history, but I’m different.”

This is a source of tension between her and the Doctor, who is fully unable to understand why she would stay on Gallifrey, and generally worries about how it will change her. As Eight said in Zagreus: “Why would I want to return here? When all my heroes are so damn disappointing? Omega - a madman sold out by his peers. Morbius - Time Lord of the first rank betrays his heritage. Borusa - My old friend, teacher, and mentor, all he wants is immortality. And Rassilon, oh Rassilon - the father of our whole society, a bigoted despot so consumed by love for his own self-image that he sentences the future to death. Who’s next? Hmm? You, Madam President? Is that what a sniff of power on your pathetic planet does? Enjoy your corruption, Romana. I don’t want to see or hear anything of Gallifrey ever again.” (from Zagreus by Alan Barnes and Gary Russell)

As for that political career of hers the Doctor looks down on? Romana’s political agenda is focused on pushing Gallifrey out of its long held isolationist stance, and most importantly she is trying to push Gallifrey to view other species as fully sentient, capable of being Gallifrey’s allies and even equals. She has entered an alliance with the other Time-faring races and sends Time Lords to help Gallifrey’s new allies when they have problems, expressing nothing but displeasure whenever she discovers Gallifreyan agencies use those missions as opportunities to leverage power over their new friends. She opened the Time Lord Academy up to non-Gallifreyan students, and not only are they allowed on Gallifrey to study, aliens can become full-fledged Gallifreyan citizens under her administration! She herself has an alien woman (a human!) acting as her bodyguard, and invites her into all kinds of delecatate political meetings, treating her opinions as just as (if not more) important as any of her other advisers (she is also deeply in love with this human, there is no getting around that, it’s just a fact, Romana is head over heels for Leela).

Aside from Gallifrey’s interactions with the outside universe, she has banned the use of torture devices like the Mind Probe as well as the Oubliette of Eternity, which erased people out of time wholesale. She also has also been appointing young Time Lords, not yet set in their ways, to very important high ranking posts, and often these appointees come from Chapters that are not normally placed in positions of leadership. For example, her first pick for Castilian was a recent graduate of the Arcalian Academy named Tungwynterestimount (he went by Wynter but his schoolmates called him Soggyboggy).

But all of that said, change doesn’t come overnight anywhere and least of all on Gallifrey. Romana has been forced to make many compromises she is uncomfortable with, and a lot of people serving in high level positions in her government deeply hate her and her reforms, and she has decided it isn’t worth the effort to investigate everything those people do or get involved in every one of the many many unethical things Gallifrey does constantly under her rule just as it has ever done. Also as President she 10000000000% has def. approved wholesale genocide and the erasure of civilizations from time itself, a fact she is deliberately keeping from people she cares about who she knows would disapprove sooooooooooooo....

And that is all before getting into Romana’s PTSD!

She experienced the rather extreme trauma of spending 20 years in solitary confinement thanks to the Daleks. According to The Apocalypse Element, the Daleks rarely took her out of her solitary windowless cell, and when she was allowed out of her cell there was never anyone around but Daleks, so she truly never had a single other being to see or talk to. The situation was.... waaaaaay more extreme than say the Doctor’s imprisonment in Revolution of the Daleks.

“Even after twenty years, heh, I still fear them coming for me. They leave me here in the cell for days at a time. No distractions. No exercise. No food. And you never hear them coming. And it’s dark and you never see them. They roll along that metal floor, closer and closer. Soundlessly. Nearer. Nearer. Stop outside the door. ...Then a voice with orders, and pushing me down the corridor for special service and you see them, crowding around you, all sharp lines and angles and sticks. Watching you do whatever it is they can’t or chose not not to do for themselves. ...They may look like the robots, but you know what - what you’ve become. And just as we wouldn’t thank a robot, when the work is done they send you away again in silence. Silently up the corridor. Black plastic poking you in the back. And you look down, and you remember when your body was full and young and fit and not emaciated. Atrophying in some stinking hole in the rock. And you count back, step after step. And the numbers are always the same. Just as the days and the nights are always the same. And all that’s changing is a little bit of you is dying. Day after day after-...” (from The Apocalypse Element by Stephen Cole)

The impact of her imprisonment is always pretty apparent in stories set after. Among other things, she seems to compulsively need to be in control, and she has difficulty trusting anyone, even her closest friends. Oh and she once tortured a Dalek to death while shouting at it about her time as a Dalek prisoner (got that casing open and electrocuted the Kaled mutant, laughing as it begged her for mercy), so you know, clearly she’s doing just fine.

She later becomes the founder of the resistance against Rassilon and the Time Lords in the Time War, and while we don’t know her own exact fate in the war, her Resistance seems to have lived on well into the War Doctor’s time.

Oh! And that’s not even getting into her life on Gallifrey BEFORE meeting the Doctor!

We know that she had little to no friends at the Academy, and would get in trouble for asking questions Time Lords weren’t really supposed to ask - such as what is the actual origin of Artron Energy.

She has her own version of the Master, a best friend from the Academy known as Sartia, who emotionally manipulated her, making Romana think they were close friends so she could get Romana to help her do better on her exams when she really hated her guts.

Sartia showed up in one amazing two part story in the Fourth Doctor Adventures which I could easily quote all day long, it is so good. Actually you know what? I’m going to get into this one audio in depth, because I really do love what it shows us about Romana’s life on Gallifrey before meeting the Doctor, the ways that influnce her time traveling with the Doctor, and it even tries to explain why the Doctor was so set on returning her to Gallifrey in Full Circle. It is a story that highlights that by the point when it takes place (between the Season 18 TV serials The Leisure Hive and Meglos) the Doctor trusts Romana to do the right thing no matter what the reward for making the wrong choice may be. Essentially it is a great story to highlight how Romana has really benefited from the wealth of additional context and content given to her by Big Finish.

Every time we learn more about Romana’s life before meeting the Doctor, it is both wonderful because yay for fully fleshing her out, but also so sad, all these further confirmations that Gallifrey is one of the very worst places imaginable to grow up.

Time and time again we are reminded that Gallifreyan culture is one where “friend” is a dirty word, and even when Time Lords use it with each other, something that only happens after decades of vetting each other, even then, it is very likely one or both of the people involved is just using the other as an end to a means. Generally within their society emotions are discouraged (and let me tell you I am FASCINATED to see going forward what it means to take a culture that already suppressed emotions to an extreme and cyber-convert them). All art is made by computers and is hyper-realistic. Most food comes in tablet or food-cube form. One foot out of line, and you might be erased from all of time and space. And to even get there, to that - the good life of the elite who qualify for the title “Time Lord” - you have to devote over a century of your life to the Academy.

Everyone looks down on those who chose other paths. The Gallifreyans who join the army, the Shobogans, the Outsiders.

The Academy rewrites your DNA as you move through it, changing you more and more until finally you can claim the title Time Lord and… stay in line, do the job assigned to you, hide all emotion, jockey for a better position, and never ever form meaningful bonds with others (which is one of the many reasons I find the Timeless Child narrative something that fits what already existed so well. We already knew the Time Lord Academy on Gallifrey fundamentally was altering its students genetics, changing who they are on a biological level. That was already a part of their story).

Like is it any wonder Time Lords are all so terrible? They all have come through these systems, from this society, that made sure they never did learn how to interact with others properly. Is it any wonder that Romana’s key focus as a politician, the issue she seems to care about the most, the thing she is so passionate about - to the point where Rassilon directly states during a War Council meeting during the Time War that it has always been her chief concern - is reforming the Time Lord Academy? Enacting radical policies like forcing the Academy to also teach the young of other species, and create accommodations for their non-Gallifreyan socialization? Encourage the Gallifreyan students to welcome their new classmates and spend time with them and see what they might learn from the so called “lesser species?” The ones Time Lords look down their noses at, yet tend to have far happier lives, really. And Romana would know. She’s actually been off Gallifrey before, unlike basically everyone else on the planet. She even welcomes alien teachers into the Academy’s classrooms, because she KNOWS that there is SO MUCH the Time Lords have to learn from the rest of the universe. SO MUCH they don’t already know!

Honestly it is part of why I ship the Doctor and Romana so hard. Oh there are other reasons as well of course, but I also love how they both came out of this terribly abusive system that destroys people’s ability to have healthy relationships… and somehow managed to, together, get things to a place where they knew they could truly trust the other (until a time came when that was no longer the case). And the memory of their time together lights the fire under Romana’s ass to get shit done.

She’s seen that actual real friendship and love is possible for her species. She’s experienced it, and simply accepting that things like that just can not exist on Gallifrey makes no damn sense to her.

She’s seen a better way!

She’s seen governments that do not rule by fear, societies where the people are allowed to have lives outside of set assigned roles. The Doctor took her to see all these amazing beautiful things she was always told were impossible. And those were the products of the so called ~lesser species.~

Of course Gallifrey has a lot to learn from them!

Of course she puts non-Gallifreyans into the classrooms, both as students and as teachers!

The wealth of knowledge they bring, ways of thinking and being unlike the doctrines taught in exactly the same way for millennia untold! There is no reason all these other lesser species can have these things yet Time Lords can not! It must be possible for them as well!

Ok I said I was going to focus on this one Big Finish audio for a sec, so why all this ranting about Gallifrey and Romana’s youth and all that? Well, in this story the Doctor and Romana run into Romana’s only best friend from her school days at Prydon Academy, Sartiacaradinora.

Romana, hoping that the Doctor isn’t the only other member of her own species she’s ever had a real connection with, falls for all of Sartia’s lies and refuses to accept all story long that Sartia isn’t actually her friend.

Early in the story the Doctor and Romana wind up separated. The Doctor winds up with the crew of a crashed spaceship that has been there for two weeks. The crew of this ship were filming a reality nature exploration tv show, and still have all of their cameras active, recording everything.

Romana on the other hand winds up in the only settlement on the entire planet, which is covered by a gelationous ocean where everything sinks very very slowly. The people there fish these small eels that live in the gelatin, and use massive balloons to walk on the waves as part of how they catch them. They have a village seer, who is chained to a massive book of futures, which they read during village rituals. It’s also a floating wooden town where everything is nautical and everyone is prone to punctuating their sentences with random arrrrs. It’s both great worldbuilding and very very silly all at once.

Sartia was one of the crew members of the downed ship, a camera operator for the reality TV show. The Doctor of course recognizes Sartia as a fellow Time Lord as soon as he meets her, and is immediatly suspicous of her.

(door opens with a low moan) KLICK: Come on, lean on me. DOCTOR: I am very much obliged to you. ORENSKY: Over here, sit down. DOCTOR: Thank you. Whew! That was a timely arrival! KLICK: Take it easy. Drink this. DOCTOR: I’m fine. ORENSKY: You were nearly drowned! DOCTOR: Jelly overdose is more like it. I have a friend. Not very tall. She’s still out there. ORENSKY: Friend? DOCTOR: Mmmm. Romana. SARTIA: Romana?!?! DOCTOR: Yes. Yes. I have to find her! She’s lighter than I am, maybe she’ll stay afloat longer. I’m the Doctor by the way. And you? KLICK: Klick Chervain, this is my ship. I’ll run a sweep. You’ll need fresh clothes too. DOCTOR: Just find Romana. ORENSKY: You’re not from Funderell. Are you from Earth? DOCTOR: I’m… is that a camera flying up there? I don’t like cameras. ORENSKY: It’s for our records. Where’s your ship? DOCTOR: I lost her too. Are you a planetary survey expedition? ORENSKY: Maybe. How ‘bout you? DOCTOR: Oh, I can’t complain, just passing through. ORENSKY: Through here? DOCTOR: Yes, and… whom do you work for????? SARTIA: Me? Uh… Mr. Orensky employs me. DOCTOR: How interesting!!! On work experience from the Academy I suppose!?!? SARTIA: I… can take a hoverbike. Out to the village, in case the locals have run into your friend. DOCTOR: That’s very kind. ORENSKY: Try not to rile them, Sartia! SARTIA: I won’t! DOCTOR: It’s hard to find a good assistant, isn’t it? Sometimes one can wait for lightyears, and then (blows air noisily) ORENSKY: You didn’t answer my question. DOCTOR: I’m not spying on you Mr. ….uuuum ORENSKY: Orensky. Eamonn Orensky. DOCTOR: But can you please call off your cameras? It’s getting intrusive. ORENSY: We’re making a video documentary. About the unexplored bionetwork of this planet. DOCTOR: Then I apologize for wrecking your recording schedule. Unfortunately the star of your film has swallowed my TARDIS, whole! And possibly my irreplaceable assistant too!

As I said, the Doctor is understandably suspicious that he’d find a Time Lady working for someone like Eamonn Orensky, so he gets to work investigating.

DOCTOR: Mr. Chervain! KLICK: What is it? DOCTOR: I’m bored. Do you need a hand with the engines? KLICK: Not exactly. DOCTOR: Photon injection are they? Can I take a look? KLICK: Help yourself. They’re burnt out anyway. DOCTOR: Ah, I wouldn’t say that! With a bit of work… KLICK: I don’t have the spares. DOCTOR: But I might! KLICK: If you had your ship. DOCTOR: You’re right. Meanwhile, you’ve got two unhappy customers poking cameras over your shoulders at every opportunity. KLICK: Oh, Eamonn’s ok. DOCTOR: More of a showman than a scientist, I’d say. KLICK: What are you after? I don’t want any trouble. DOCTOR: These are difficult circumstances, and you are keeping our heads above water. That’s admirable. KLICK: While the floatation tanks hold out. Look, sorry about your friend. DOCTOR: We’ll see what Sartia comes up with. And talking of Sartia… KLICK: You can fathom her either? DOCTOR: Oh, I’m fascinated by anyone with hidden depths. The deeper the better. KLICK: You know what? DOCTOR: Hmm? KLICK: Well it’s not exactly ethical.   DOCTOR: Ethics? They’re for moral crusaders and maiden aunts. KLICK: Sartia’s not around and… um… perhaps there’s ways of finding out her plans? (tapping on keypad) KLICK: There we go... DOCTOR: Any luck? KLICK: Damn! Sartia’s encrypted her records. I don’t recognize any of these symbols! DOCTOR: Let me try. Budge up a bit. Now then… Wait for it! Wait. For. It. Ahah! KLICK: How did you do that? DOCTOR: Oh, as a former President of Prydon Academy I retain unofficially an override key to all its systems. Et Voila! (computer makes rapid beeping sounds) KLICK: I have no idea what you’re talking about. DOCTOR: You’re not the only one. ...Oh! Oooooooh. That’s interesting! KLICK: You can read that language? DOCTOR: Well, it’s current Gallifreyan. Boringly bureaucratic, of course. It says that all records of the planet Funderell are closed! KLICK: Even to you? DOCTOR: (sighs) I’ll try not to take it personally, but apparently this world has been off limits for the past 46 millennia! A bit before my time. But, if we’re caught here we’ll be in serious trouble. KLICK: How serious? DOCTOR: Oh, sentenced to memory wiping or even… summary dispersion. It depends on what the Time Lords are covering up. KLICK: Time Lords? DOCTOR: Yes. No wonder Sartia is intrigued.   DOCTOR: Mr. Orensky, I am indebted to you! ORENSKY: It’s Saria you should thank. DOCTOR: Oh, I will. I will! Such an enterprising young lady. Remind me, where did you say you met her? ORENSKY: Eeee-yeah. That’s right. Uh… she um. DOCTOR: Yeah. Surely you remember? ORENSKY: O-of course I do! I-it’s just… DOCTOR: It feels like you’ve known her for years? ORENSKY: Yeah. Crazy. DOCTOR: Oh well, not to worry old chap. It’s the stress. It’ll come back.

When Sartia reaches the village and sees Romana, she pretends she never met the Doctor, only telling Romana that the Doctor is safe on her ship just before Romana boards the ship herself. Right away we see that Sartia - a character Romana identifies as her best friend - frames her relationship to Romana through manipulation and deciet.

ROLF: We have company, Captain. GREYGUL: Who’s there? SARTIA: Good evening, Captain Greygul. I’ve brought gifts for trade, as I promised. GREYGUL: You again? ROMANA: Sartia ? ! GREYGUL: Is this a friend of yours? SARTIA: What? It can’t be! Mana! Is that you? ROMANA: Sartiacaradinora, what are you doing here? SARTIA: Well I could ask you the same! Oh… this… it’s incredible! ROMANA: Ridiculous you mean. SARTIA: (laughing) My goodness! ROLF: Like two sleeklings on one hook. GREYGUL: Is she part of your crew? SARTIA: No. No, but we go back a long way! Mana, what are you doing here? Do you have a ship? ROMANA: I did! But it’s lost. It sank out there! SARTIA: Oh no! Catastrophe! ROLF: Seems odd that we never saw strangers before, and then suddenly they’re piddling down from the sky like the rain. More and more strangers unsettling the balance. ROMANA: Sartia, thank goodness you arrived. Do you know these people? Please explain to them that I’m not a threat! SARTIA: Right. No problem. Captain Greygul, uh, this is my oldest friend. ROMANA: Well, not that old! GREYGUL: From a second star ship? ROLF: Hah! She must think we’re fools! ROMANA: You got here by spaceship? SARTIA: At least my transport didn’t sink! GREYGUL: Bicker all you like. How many more of you are there? SARTIA: Three of us, on the Mars Beam. You’ve seen us all. GREYGUL: Have we? But she makes four! ROMANA: Because I’ve just arrived. SARTIA: Captain, we mean you no harm. We already have an agreement! GREYGUL: Oh, and then there’s this doctor of yours! ROMANA: Who I have to find! GREYGUL: The numbers keep going up! Soon there’ll be whole schools of you! We’ll be overrun! SARTIA: A doctor? You aren’t alone? Did he go down with your ship? ROMANA: No! He’s out there! He must be! (much much much later, like in the second half hour of the story later, when they are en route to the Mars Beam) SARTIA: Sartia to Mars Beam, Mars Beam can you hear me? ORENSKY: Sartia? Where the hell are you? SARTIA: Coming in. And I have the Doctor’s friend with me! ROMANA: The Doctor!?!?!?!? ORENSKY: You have Romana? That’s brilliant Sartia! Is she safe? SARTIA: Just about! Prepare everybody for trouble. It’s right behind us. Out. ROMANA: Is he there? Is the Doctor on your ship? WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY? SARTIA: I didn’t know why you were here, Romana dear. I thought you were checking up on me.

Sartia and Romana are so competitive with each other at all times, and Sartia is very manipulative in all of her actions with Romana. The fact that their friendship is super fake is obvious to listeners right from the start, and yet Romana apparently really does think Sartia likes her and had no idea that back when she knew her on Gallifrey she was only being used as a means to boost Sartia’s grades.

Even after Sartia tries to murder her later in the story Romana is still insistent that at least at some point in the past their friendship had to have been real. She refuses to believe Sartia had always been using her.

That said, they occasionally have exchanges where they are cute together? Almost?

SARTIA: That was disastrous! And it stinks in here! Ugh! ROMANA: (laughs) I’ve been shut up in worse! (light switch flips several times) SARTIA: Ugh the lights don’t work either! ROMANA: How can a grade nine sociological enclave like this have electric power? It doesn’t fit. (comm beeps) SARTIA: Sartia to Mars Beam, come in please. (silence) (comm beeps) SARTIA: Mars Beam, are you receiving? (silence) (comm beeps) SARTIA: Mars Beam! Ugh, something’s interfering with the signal. ROMANA: Sorry. Heh, but it is incredible to see you!   SARTIA: Yes. Oh my gosh! You! Mana! Here? ROMANA: (giggles) SARTIA: And… you’ve… changed! I’d hardly recognize… I mean… I love your hair. ROMANA: (laughs) It must look awful! SARTIA: No! Did you, um, did you choose it yourself? It’s so silky! Amazing! ROMANA: Hah! Thanks. But… we scare these people. We’re lucky they didn’t hang us out with all the other eels. SARTIA: Sleeks. They call them sleeks, it’s their staple food. They’re more sophisticated than you think. It’s something you have to learn out here, Mana, dealing with other lifeforms. ROMANA: Hmm. Yes. Of course. Thank you. SARTIA: Are you checking up on me? ROMANA: Why? What have you done? You still haven’t told me. SARTIA: Neither have you. ROMANA: Hmm. Who is Funderell‘s Daughter anyway? Can we talk to her? SARTIA: I have nooo idea. Probably some superstitious village crone. Isn’t that right, for this sort of community? (rustling noises) SARTIA: Mana! What are you doing? ROMANA: Ugh! Ug! Uh! ... I’m looking for a way out! Gah! What do you think!? We can’t wait around here for the verdict of an elderly matriarch! Agh! We have to find the Doctor!

Sartia tells Romana that everyone, everyone, who knows her on Gallifrey has been trying to figure out where she vanished to. The oh so perfect Romanadvoratrelundar just vanished out of nowhere one day. Left the Academy! Super out of character. It was quite the thing for her peers to speculate about (also note how Sartia clearly 100,000% believes Romana is a CIA agent and is trying to get her to admit it. It is very easy to see how Romana could have leveraged these rumors later in life in her political career). She is fishing for info, and thinks Romana has essentially been sent by the authorities to capture her and put an end to her plans. Also of note is how Romana does everything for Sartia, while Sartia just sits back and observes, a pattern of behavior that is unquestioned and is clearly familiar to them both.

(Romana is grunting and groaning. We hear someone trying to saw through a fibrous material) ROMANA: Oh, this weed’s tough as anything! SARTIA: Oh, they weave everything from it. Houses, boats, there’s a distinct shortage of anything else. ROMANA: Yeah. Right. SARTIA: Mana, why did you leave the Academy on Gallifrey? (sawing noises stop) ROMANA: What were you told? (sawing starts again, extra fast) SARTIA: No one told us anything! But the rumors… well… you can imagine. ROMANA: (very loud grunt) Come on! Cut through! SARTIA: You’d been expunged for being brighter than your tutor! ROMANA: (chokes laughing) Bathras the Banal? (groans) Wasn’t everyone? SARTIA: Or you’d won the public register lottery? Or…. you were on a secret mission for the CIA? ROMANA: Ha ha. None of the above. SARTIA: You have to say! ROMANA: No, I don’t! What about you? SARTIA: Oh. This is a…. A field trip. For my specialism. ROMANA: Ah! Ancient mysteries, I remember! Incredible that they let you go! SARTIA: It’s what I wanted. ROMANA: So, you know all about Funderell? SARTIA: Oh. Maybe! We’ll have to see. ROMANA: (hisses with pain) (grunts) (groans) We’re through! SARTIA: (sighs) Well done! ROMANA: (laughs) It’s getting dark out there. (is still panting and winded from cutting through the weeds all on her own) There’s no one about. How do we reach your ship? SARTIA: Not yet. ROMANA: But surely… I mean... you’ll have scanners? To find the Doctor? SARTIA: Well, I need one more thing. Something I came for.

Sartia then takes Romana back to the village, where the town’s seer is kept chained up. Chained to a book. Romana identifies the writing in the book as Ancient Gallifreyan, but before either she or Sartia can do anything more (Romana wanted to help free the poor man chained to the book, and Sartia wanted to steal the book) they were found and dragged to Funderell’s Daughter’s hut. Romana figures out who and what Funderell’s Daughter is just before Funderell’s Daughter shows up. Romana is, every step of the way, the one who is figuring out what is going on. Funderell’s daughter is a massive electric eel. She is also the village's god. It is again made clear that despite Sartia being the Gallifreyan equivalent of an archeology major, Romana is waaaaaaaay better at this sort of thing than she is. Whenever Romana displays initiative and does things fully on her own, Sartia gets frustrated, cruel, and insulting. Whenever Romana does what Sartia asks of her and allows Sartia to take credit, Sartia is complementary and loving. As Romana tries to find them a way to escape, Sartia pulls a stasar (a Gallifreyan gun) out and starts shooting. Romana tries to get Sartia to drop the stasar. Sartia, of course, doesn’t care about Romana’s opinion on anything. When Romana yells at her to drop the stasar, Sartia ignores her.

When Romana then questions if Sartia now plans to kill the entire village with her stasar, Sartia treats it like a joke.

It is abundantly clear that Sartia likes to let Romana do things for her. Time after time after time in this audio, Sartia sits back and does nothing while Romana does the actual work for both of them.

It really isn’t hard to imagine how this dynamic played out at Prydon Academy, and why Sartia initiated this friendship with Romana in the first place, despite claiming later in this audio that she always despised her.

Not surprisingly, the villagers swear they will murder both Sartia and Romana when they discover their god’s corpse. When they arrive back at the ship where the Doctor has been this whole time, Romana and the Doctor are both SUPER happy to see each other. This is tempered by the news that Romana is wanted for helping to kill a god. Romana just… kind of keeps defending Sartia, mainly by taking all the blame for her. Meanwhile the Doctor makes it clear that they are willing to protect Romana no matter what she does. They trust her to make good decisions, and will back up her actions.

(doors open with a hummmmmm) DOCTOR: Romana! ROMANA: Doctor! Oh thank goodness! I thought you might be- DOCTOR: And I thought you might be too! It’s an occupational hazard. I’m fine, how about you? ROMANA: Uh, the same, really, except… well… ummmmm SARTIA: You have to shut the hold doors. Now! ORENSKY: Why? Sartia, what’s happened? Trouble? SARTIA: I got her out, didn’t I? Just shut the doors! (doors close with a hum) DOCTOR: Sartia, I’m hugely grateful to you. ROMANA: But… it didn’t, um… quite go as planned? ORENSKY: Meaning what? SARTIA: It seems the village of the Wavewalkers is one of those zooetric divinity cults. ORENSKY: A what? DOCTOR: She means they worship animals. ROMANA: That’s not the same at all, and it’s one animal! They consult it! ORENSKY: They kept that one quiet. DOCTOR: What sort of animal? SARTIA: A giant eel. A sleek. It’s huge! They call it (laughs) Funderell’s Daughter. DOCTOR: Funderell’s Daughter? A bit portentous. I bet they sacrifice to it as well! ORENSKY: Oh, this is good! It’ll be great for the series! Did you get footage? SARTIA: (laughs) You won’t like it! DOCTOR: Why? What happened? ROMANA: They tried to sacrifice us! DOCTOR: Ahhhhhh. ROMANA: It was in the struggle- SARTIA: The sleek got… ROMANA: (sighs) SARTIA: killed. DOCTOR: Romana! You killed their god?!?!?!? ORENSKY: Oh, great. Now we’re really in trouble. ROMANA: It was an accident! The stasar just went off! DOCTOR: The stasar!?!?!?!??! A Gallifreyan stasar?!?! ROMANA: I’m sorry Doctor! It’s my fault! I’m soooooo sorry! DOCTOR: But you don’t own a stasar!!!!!! ...Mr. Orensky, are you recording this? ROMANA: Wh-what? Oh no! Take it away! DOCTOR: Get that camera away from her! ORENSKY: Leave it alone! It’s all good material! DOCTOR: Not in my book it isn’t! Turn it off!!!!

Later, once they can steal away to be alone, the Doctor and Romana check in about everything that happened, away from Sartia’s influence. It is very very clear that the Doctor already know Sartia is full of shit, but the Doctor knows better than to just say that to Romana. After all, if anyone is an expert on toxic relationships with your former Academy classmates, it’s the Doctor. Four just kind of… gently starts steering Romana towards figuring out what Sartia really is for herself.

(door opens) ROMANA: Uh, Doctor, can I have a word? Out here. DOCTOR: Of course. But I don’t want to hear any nonsense about you giving yourself up. (door closes) DOCTOR: Well, go on then. ROMANA: Sartia. Sartiacaradinora. We were in the same year at Prydon Academy. DOCTOR: Ah, well, that explains a lot. But you can’t protect her, you know. ROMANA: She was my best friend! My work partner! DOCTOR: She’s swanning around brandishing a stasar! Romana, you didn’t kill the villager’s god, did you? ROMANA: It was an accident. I’m sorry! DOCTOR: Ahhhh! Oooooh. You realize you just invented diacide? A new deadly sin! Funderell’s Daughter is dead. We can’t change that. And now the locals have to be appeased. ROMANA: I know! But in the village, there was a book! A huge tome! Really old. And they called it… “The Book of Futures.” DOCTOR: What sort of holy text? ROMANA: The illuminated script was in Ancient Gallifreyan! DOCTOR: Ah. What’s it say? ROMANA: Well I didn’t get a chance to find out. DOCTOR: Oh, Romana, you know this planet is off limits! ROMANA: Is it? Who told you that? DOCTOR: I did some research too. And on the entire surface, there is only one village. How could that evolve, eh? ROMANA: Well it couldn’t! Unless… someone… put it here? As a sort of defense? Oh! The Time Lords! DOCTOR: Exactly. Centuries, maybe Millennia ago. The villagers have been here so long they’ve forgotten what they’re guarding. ROMANA: That would explain Sartia’s project. Oh, she’s onto a real winner there!! DOCTOR: Are you sure academic glory is all she’s after?

As soon as they finish talking, the Doctor goes to confront Sartia, away from Romana. Full Circle is just around the corner, and here is a bit of foreshadowing to the Doctor not wanting Romana fight the Time Lords and become a Renegade after she is summoned home in that story.

(knocking on door) SARTIA: Come in, Doctor. DOCTOR: Sartiacaradinora? SARTIA: Yes. DOCTOR: Listen... Do I have to call you that? How ‘bout Nora? That has a nice ring, very Ibsenesque. SARTIA: I prefer Sartia. Are you going to lecture me? DOCTOR: Is that what Romana did? SARTIA: At. Length. (sighs) Who sent you? The Academy? DOCTOR: Good grief! Nooooo. I’ve a few questions, that’s all. SARTIA: Go on then. DOCTOR: Why are you on Funderell? SARTIA: (laughs) You know that! You broke into my private itinerary! DOCTOR: And it wasn’t very helpful. SARTIA: Then we’re both in the dark. Next question? DOCTOR: What have you learned since you arrived? SARTIA: Does the High Council know that you and Mana are here? Sooner or later runaways always get caught! DOCTOR: I’ve done my time! SARTIA: I was talking about Mana. DOCTOR: After you killed the god of the Wavewalkers, Mana was ready to take the blame!!!!! SARTIA: I know. I- uh, (breaths in deep) I’m sorry, I I was… I’m so scared! I tried to save her, really… but that horrible monster came at us, I had to fend it off! Look, I’m not used to all this alien… stuff. And now the whole ship’s in trouble! DOCTOR: Yes. SARTIA: And Mana’s TARDIS is lost too. DOCTOR: Romana’s TARDIS? Did she say that? (Pause) ...Don’t you have a ship of your own? SARTIA: No. No, just an old time ring. (laughs) Almost falling apart. DOCTOR: (still annoyed, but softer) Sartia, go and help Romana. She’s trying to unlock the codes on your stolen Time Lord records. SARTIA: Yes. Sorry. Um. Thank you, Doctor. I’ll see what I can do.

Once they are alone together, Sartia tries to get Romana to cut her ties to the Doctor and commit to being Sartia’s criminal accomplice instead. This attempt takes the form of Sartia, in her position as ~Romana’s best friend~, expressing concern that Romana is with a discharged malfeasance of a former President who is practically a historical figure, and hey - Romana, is he really as unpleasant and horrible to be around as all the stories about him say?

ROMANA: Oh not again! These records are too old, we’ll never access them! SARTIA: (sighs) 41st era… ROMANA: (sighs) There must have been millions of them in the Time Vaults! Why steal these? SARTIA: Well, you know me. Grade One: Access Forbidden tags are such a tease! ROMANA: No, this isn’t working either. (sighs) Apply code five three one. SARTIA: This… doctor of yours. ROMANA: THE Doctor. SARTIA: Oh my gosh! So it really is him? Ex-President? Discharged malfeasant? ROMANA: Well you knew that already. SARTIA: He’s almost historical! Is he really as cranky as they say? ROMANA: (chuckles) That’s only the half of it! Oh no, hang on! If I try… Ahah! This looks more promising. SARTIA: (sighs) Mana, whatever this planet’s hiding, treasure, or power or… ROMANA: (laughs) Let’s not get too excited yet. SARTIA: Oh, come on! It’s… just the two of us, yes? ROMANA: Sartia? SARTIA: Whatever we find, we split it. Forget the others. ROMANA: (laughs uncomfortably) Aren’t we in enough trouble already? SARTIA: BORING! This is our discovery! You’re such a k-type fluz, and when we get off this planet- ROMANA: Hang on. SARTIA: Why, what happened? ROMANA: Sartia, this is it! We’re in! Go and fetch the Doctor! SARTIA: No. Wait. Look! (laughs) Oh my gosh, you’ve done it!

The Doctor, who had earlier told Romana off for always martyring herself, gives himself to the villagers in her place. Romana then yells about how he’s always martyring himself.

Since by this point Romana is obviously not leaving the Doctor and keeps choosing them over Sartia, Sartia drives Romana out as far away from any sort of rescue ship as she can, and dumps her, leaving her to drown. Sartia then circles her vehicle around Romana, mocking Romana for ever thinking Sartia actually was interested in her friendship. With her usefulness to Sartia over, there is no point in either keeping her around or maintaining the charade of caring about her.

ROMANA: What are we doing? SARTIA: Get off. ROMANA: Why? What’s the matter? SARTIA: Get off. ROMANA: (shouts with surprise) (hoverbike engine roars) (sounds of someone moving around on the planet’s surface) ROMANA: What was that for? Let me up! I can’t reach you! SARTIA: (sighs) ROMANA: What’s the matter? Come down! SARTIA: You Mana! Romana. It’s you.     ROMANA: I don’t understand. Let me up! SARTIA: UGH! How we all hated you at Prydon! ROMANA: But… but… that’s silly! You were my best friend! SARTIA: (laughs) I lied! We all lied! You were always tutor’s favorite. ROMANA: That’s not true! SARTIA: UUUUGH! The sickening prize winning perfect girl who had it all! Never got a thing wrong! What chance did you give the rest of us? ROMANA: Sartia! Please! SARTIA: Always getting the attention! So cool and sophisticated and spoiled. Everything landing in your lap. ROMANA: Sartia! Stop it! It’s not funny! We have to help the Doctor! SARTIA: WHO CARES? He’s finished already! He did it for you. ROMANA: No! SARTIA: Poor little Mana, no one will shed a tear over your untimely demise. It’s no loss, you insufferable little (engine roars) ROMANA: SARTIA! Don’t leave me! Not out here! Don’t go! SARTIA: It’s a loooong way, a loooong walk back to the ship! You better get going! If you stop you’ll sink! ROMANA: SARTIA! SARTIA: (laughs) ROMANA: Wait! SARTIA: It’s already up to your boots! ROMANA: (yelps) SARTIA: Goodbye Romana! And good riddance! Forever! ROMANA: Sartia! Sartiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Wait! Don’t leave me! Come back! (heavy sobbing) Sartia! 

Later, in the second part of the story the Doctor expresses, when Romana comes to them about what Sartia did and said, that anyone who would insult Romana’s first incarnation the way Sartia did is clearly just jealous, as the worst thing HE can think to say about her is she left hairbrushes all over the TARDIS.

DOCTOR: Romana, speak to me. ROMANA: It’s Sartia. DOCTOR: Ah. ROMANA: We WERE friends. But I never knew she was so angry with me! Was I really so obnoxious? DOCTOR: Oh… well… (blows air out of his cheeks) a little overconfident perhaps? Self assured and uh… prone to leaving your hairbrushes around the ship. ROMANA: And naïve? DOCTOR: Ahhhhh, anyone can do naïve! Look at me! How else am I so charming? People get jealous, you know. ROMANA: Yes, but I still feel guilty. DOCTOR: Don’t! Don’t. Don’t apologize for Sartia’s failings. They’re her problem, not yours! She’s the least of your worries.  

This makes me think of another audio, Luna Romana, where Romana’s third incarnation is explaining why she misses being her first self:

ROMANA III: You never really appreciate what you have when you’re young. The person you are. The foundations you’re building. I… miss being me. Being my original self. The First Romana. The naïve confidence of youth. Sent on a mission by the president, in the company of a notorious renegade! Only it wasn’t really the president who sent me. And the Doctor? Well, he wasn’t what I expected … The past is precious, because once it’s gone even a Time Lord can’t get it back. Not really. But at least we have the memories…“ (from Luna Romana by Matt Fitton)

Like I can’t! She literally takes one of the things the Doctor thought was one of her flaws, combining it with the thing she thought might be her biggest flaw, and pointing to both of those traits as strengths. Romana’s third incarnation may be a cutthroat nightmare of a backstabbing politican, but like her other incarnations I just love her to pieces.

Romana and the Doctor’s final conversation in the TARDIS at the end of this story is a continuation of this conversation. (It should be noted for full context that when the Doctor found Romana right after the story’s climax, she was trying to divert attention away from her own injuries and over to the damage to the TARDIS instead)

(console room hums) DOCTOR: Call that damage? Peanuts! The TARDIS is flying better than ever. It just needs a little bit of reassembling. That’s all. ROMANA: ….Sartia said I was insufferable. And sickening. DOCTOR: She said that! Peh! What does she know? ROMANA: Spoiled. DOCTOR: Not from where I’m standing! ROMANA: They all hated me at Prydon. DOCTOR: PREJUDICE! That’s their problem! Oooh! Do you see what I did there? Prydon Prejudice! ROMANA: Hmmmm. A literary joke. (this can easily also be heard as “Alliter-ary Joke”) DOCTOR: (laughs) Yes! Yes. Yes! Would they have got that? Of course not! None of them were hand picked to travel with me. How many times have you saved the universe now? ROMANA: I wasn’t counting. DOCTOR: You see! Modesty! That’s what counts in a companion! And ability. ROMANA: Thank you, Doctor. DOCTOR: I couldn’t ask for more. (In a low rumble, and this is Tom Baker we’re talking about here) Eat your heart out, Mr. Darcy. (music swells for a quarter of a minute. The hum of the console room and the music are the only sounds) (End theme plays)

That is without really getting to the story’s main plot at all?

Ok I got waaaaaaaaay too into that one audio, but my point here is was that Romana arrived in the TARDIS without any memory of true friendship or care. In one of the Gallifrey audios she says that her parents always disapproved of everything she did, and in various books she expresses that her tutors always had at best a disengaged interest in her. Of course there is also Brax and his fixation on her, but she can’t remember him at all.

Speaking of Brax, whenever I listen to that audio I also find myself wondering about the memories Braxiatel erased (which is a whole other long Big Finish thing about her past, connected to yet another big thing Big Finish did with her backstory and past). Obviously one can easily read Sartia’s comments about Romana being the ~tutor’s favorite~ as being about Brax (there really is no questioning that Romana is Brax’s very most favorite person in existence other than himself) and Romana’s ignorance on that topic probably really bothered Sartia, who would not know that Romana has no memories of Brax. That said, in the Gallifrey audio Lies Brax also seemed really shocked/uncomfortable when Romana mentioned remembering being bullied at the Academy and being called “Ice Maiden” so I wonder if he… kind of took her memories of that away too? Which I hate, because Romana I as a niave youth who doesn’t quite get that she was bullied in the past all on her own really makes sense to me.

.....right. I can ramble about this forever so I am cutting myself off. Like looking this over I keep thinking of more things I NEED to add (how she will casually drop info about Gallifreyan culture sometimes, like when she and the Doctor were exploring Chronotis’s library in Shada, or how she writes self insert Academy era AU fics about her and the Doctor, or her self hatred, her epic refusal to use a Chameleon Arch to escape the Time War or... or... or...) so I am just going to stop.

[pocket-clown]

With You | Arthur Fleck x reader, AU HCs;

// original request:  Alright, awesome! Something in a modern AU where he only has the PBA and he and the Reader are both twentysomethings. He got a job at SNL, but his career has now progressed past that to the point he has his first Netflix special, and people are starting to notice how attractive he is. The Reader gets a reputation for being really supportive of him on Twitter, but also being really funny. The first early interactions with the fanbase are like, making her own meme: “To everyone saying my husband is hot now,” *she tweets out one of those “Newsflash, asshole” memes with “Arthur Fleck has been hot” in the blank. (I just want an AU where they get to be snarky and happy.) 

AN: So, typically I... am not into AUs/don’t write them, but this one is cute. I hope you don’t mind that I just did some general headcanons :-) Also I’ve never watched SNL and don’t know a ton about it so?? I apologize if I got anything wrong about it.

Words: 1,044

Of course, Arthur loves the attention. From you, from his fans, the networks, the media - he absolutely eats it up.

That’s not to say he’s arrogant or anything of the sort, though; he’s still that same, sweet, kindhearted Arthur we all know and love - people just see him now, and his hard work is actually being recognized after all that time. The world of comedy was all about fine tuning your material, and it took years to perfect.

You’ve known each other for years, well before he was picked up by those late-night comedy talk shows, and Arthur couldn’t be more anymore grateful for having you in his life than he was.

You were always his number one supporter. No one, not even his own mother, had taken his goals and dreams seriously - but you were always by his side, giving him the support he needed, letting him know that he could do it. His condition wouldn’t, it couldn’t, stop him, you’d tell him. He had the drive, he had the ambition, he had the talent - he could do it.

It did take a lot of work on both ends of the relationship; mostly moral support from your end, but there were times where the two of you were living off of your wage alone while Arthur juggled attempting to find a job with trying to further his goal career and trying to find some form of management for his condition. You two were young, barely adults at the time, and it was hard - but you made it work.

It took years of hard work, but eventually it did pay off.

He progressed from stand-ups at amateur open mic nights at smaller comedy clubs (some which went wonderfully, others not so much - it was expected though; Arthur’s sense of humor was not one everyone would get, but those that did absolutely loved it), to eventually being picked up by some of Gotham’s larger clubs, to even being invited to open for some much more renown comedians at some equally as renown clubs in various cities. It was taxing, tiring work - but Arthur loved it, as exhausted as he was, and you loved seeing his hard work pay off in a way that made him genuinely happy. No longer was he being picked on, laughed at instead of with, and demeaned - people were taking him seriously.

Through his openings for some larger comedians was he picked up on by some scouts for SNL and various other late night comedic talk shows, and things soared after that; eventually leading to him and a handful of others who specialized in similar senses of humor moving on to having their own two-part special.

While this newfound fame was great, it did bring in hordes of attention - for Arthur, and a lot of it was focused on his appearance. 

He wasn’t as active on social media as many others were, but despite that he managed to acquire a fairly sizable following on Twitter, of all sites. The purpose of his Twitter was mostly just to share and retweet news in regards to his own material, shows, other comedians, and so on - but he had a reputation for always being nice to his fans and responding to a sizable amount of them, and you had a reputation for being incredibly supportive of him; always retweeting everything he put out, everything about him - anything you could. His followers came to adore you, the relationship being incredibly wholesome and supportive, and you even received some messages from people telling you how lucky you two were to have each other - a few with the emphasis on how lucky you were for having a partner as handsome as Arthur.

It was flattering, but that didn’t mean it didn’t prod at a nerve of yours. Arthur had always been this handsome, just like he’d always been this talented with his work - sure, he aged like a fine wine and his material got better the more experienced he became, but still, he’d started out as strong as any amateur could’ve and his improvement didn’t mean that his past work was less worthy of praise.

You knew it wasn’t really the fault of his fans given the fact that he didn’t have a ton of exposure in his early days, but it did bother you that a good chunk of them seemed to only focus on his more recent work from the past few years, seemingly rather uninterested in the hard work that it took for him to get to where he was now.

Arthur could sense your frustration, and had insisted that he was okay and that it didn’t bother him - but he knew how defensive of him you were. You’d seen each other at the best and worst of times, and you never wanted to see Arthur’s hard work be ignored and disregarded ever again.

And you certainly didn’t like how some of his fans seemed to so happily ignore the fact that he was in a relationship. 

While many of the replies to his tweets were sweet in nature, mentioning how handsome he was or how beautiful his eyes and smile were, there were always a handful that were as explicit as one could get on Twitter with breaking the rules - and that was what bothered you, along with a few comments every now and then that “jokingly” asked Arthur when he would be single so that they could have a chance. 

You knew they were, probably, just jokes - but that didn’t make them any less disrespectful, in your opinion. You two were very open about your relationship and how happy you were, and the fact that some of them seemed to so happily disregard that almost made you angry.

Rather than being mean, blunt, or aggressive in response to their bold flirtation with your husband, you chose to carefully craft your approach in a way that would be more well received - memes.

NEWSFLASH memes would be sent in the replies to those comments about how attractive Arthur was now, stating that your husband had always been attractive, petty gifs without any captions as responses to those begging Arthur to get single, and really any sort that you could find or make that got the message across strongly enough, without hurting any feelings.

 Of course, a handful of people didn’t like it - they were angry they were being called out for overstepping boundaries in a pretty disrespectful manner - but the majority of his followers loved it. You two were always incredibly supportive of each other, and many of his fans loved how adamantly you defended him, as well as how funny you were (some even asking if you’d show up in any future work he did, and while it was flattering you denied it as you were a bit too shy for that sort of thing).

Regardless of how well known or not Arthur becomes, one thing that was absolutely certain was the fact that he’d always have you by his side, and that was something he’d ask for over anything else, any day.

——————————————————————————taglist;

@tahliamalfoydepp​ @tsukiakarinobara​ @smol-nari​ @ajokeformur-ray​ @lavenderheartz​ @lady-carnivals-stuff​ @darknessisafriend​ @emissarydecksetter​ @soulsdontbreaktheybeeend​ @fleckcmscott​ @oldloverhippiemusic​ @hearthurfleck​ @sgtsavoytruffle​ @honking4joker​ @art-hurfleck​ @carnivalou @mr–clown​ (let me know if you’d like to be added)

[wordsparks]

An Attempt to Explain My WIPs (Warning: GIF Heavy)

Music Land Maestress

A magical girl story, only set in England, with high school girls (and one ten year old to represent magical girl teams usually having a younger member...is that an actual trope? I don't know).

Part Sailor Moon

(Cause it's my fave mahou shoujo show & also cause what mahou shoujo story these days isn't inspired by it?)

With combat more of the PreCure sort (where there's physical combat involved not just magical attacks)

+ Some of the "save a fantasy world" aspects of my favorite CLAMP work, Magic Knight Rayearth

+ The "human mentors instead of animal mascots" idea and the idea that the girls' mission is really the mentors', both from Tokyo Mew Mew. (Only the mentors in my story are from a magical land and are a magical swordsman and a young magical prodigy respectively). The Monsters-of-The-Day are also possibly inspired by TMM's Chimera Anima, not sure though.

+ other things, including music.

***

The CYA Files

The seed of this dates back to my high school years, around 2002-2003, though I didn't start writing a proper MS till 2-3 years ago. Thus it comes out of my "writing really preachy things" period, back when I was still largely in my sheltered Christian bubble. Because of this, my dislike for superhero movies (I'd seen the 2002 Spiderman and a few others and wasn't that into them; I'm still not really THAT into them, though that might be cause I've never been into Marvel & DC Comics really...though now that I'm watching and very much enjoying Supergirl that might change), and maybe some guilt over the very-X-Men-inspired superhero comic "Lightning Girl" I'd written, I came up with this story with people who save future London using powered suits and their spiritual gifts. "Christian Superheroes," basically. When I work on it for NaNoWriMo this year I may have to reevaluate it to see if it's too preachy or not.

Anyway, this novel was inspired by two things mostly:

Superheroes

And mecha

(Not Eva-style specifically, but at the time I came up with the story, I think NGE was the only mecha series I'd seen, so no doubt it had an influence)

***

Nukata: A Novel

My NaNo novel last year (which won! yay!) and the one I'm working on right now. It's a historical romance about Nukata no Ôkimi, a real-life princess from 7th-century Japan who also became one of Japan's first lyric poets of note, and the love triangle she is thought to have had with Emperors Tenji and Temmu. But aside from that it's also a story about maintaining your dignity in a strange world, and about a girl who wants respect for her mind more than for her body. Nukata, Tenji, and Temmu are the main characters, along with Tenji's good friend and chief advisor Nakatomi no Kamatari, who was the ancestor of the famous Fujiwara clan that was the power behind the throne in Japan for centuries (shortly before Kamatari's death, Tenji granted him the family name Fujiwara).

Not much has been written about Nukata in English, and only 9 of her poems (maybe 11 if you count ones attributed to others but thought to be hers) survive, all by way of an 8th-century anthology called the Man'yôshû. I first encountered Nukata in my Brit Lit 1 class believe it or not. My degree program had a global focus, so every class had to have a global element, and thus this class included reading medieval Chinese and Japanese poetry as part of that. The poem we read was Poem 16, her poem comparing spring and autumn leaves, which is probably her most famous.

Nukata is still known in Japan today. There is a Takarazuka play about her (Akane Sasu Murasaki no Hana) and she is briefly mentioned in episode 12 of the anime Chihayafuru.

Not sure of the influences here since research basically wrote the plot, but I'd say Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha and Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan were probably influences, even though they are written about later eras.

This is also my first straight-up historical fiction novel (my other attempt was time travel) and my first romance. (I tend to avoid romances in my work because I've never dated, so I don't feel qualified to be writing romance...also it's a genre I really don't read). So kinda nervous but trying my best.

***

The Case of The Canterbury Colony Ship

My first sci-fi mystery, and the beginning of a series of probably 4 books (one for each year the heroines are in university). My Camp NaNo April 2017 winning novel (yay!). Also an attempt to explore my own autism, since the heroine, like me, has Asperger's, and subtly vent frustrations I have about autism (the seeming lack of treatment for autistic adults in the U.S. and a lack of awareness of girls with autism - mind you these are based on my own knowledge and experience only). She forms a mystery-solving club with a neurotypical policeman's daughter whose father wants her to go into law enforcement but who secretly loves ancient lit, a science whiz girl with Social Anxiety Disorder, and a former scholar athlete who got too into partying and drugs and is now trying to rebuild her life after checking herself into rehab for a year. She gets tired of the mundane cases they get and wants something better, which happens when they get involved with a case baffling the police - the mysterious disappearance of the passengers and crew of a generation ship.

It's kinda the classic "amateurs helping out police/law enforcement agency who might not like them but needs them" trope that has been popular on TV of late via shows like Fringe, Psych, Castle, Sherlock, its American cousin Elementary, Scorpion, Alphas, and most recently Blindspot.

But the series has a decidedly literary bent, in case the title didn't tip you off. Protagonist Sophie Hughes started her life in a writing project I did in Brit Lit 1 where we were supposed to adapt one of the texts we read into a creative writing piece. I chose The Canterbury Tales. Due to page limits, I only wrote the end. Since then, the story and Sophie have evolved into what I have today.

This may also end up being a diverse book. Being white and having had very little experience of POCs growing up, my novels don't tend to have POC characters. But in this one, I ended up making Paige (the girl with SAD) black kinda randomly when doing her character sheet, and Sophie ended up becoming half-Mexican (probably cause I made her be from Miami, and also my mom was watching Jane The Virgin at the time...and also cause I needed some kind of hearty soup Sophie could cook in a dorm room, and my first thought was posole, cause I've seen my Hispanic coworkers eat it a lot). I guess it's diverse in terms of not everyone being neurotypical too (maybe). Can someone who actually understands this whole #WeNeedDiverseBooks thing explain to me how this all works?

So it has that "amateurs helping out police/law enforcement agency who might not like them but needs them" trope (though you could probably replace “law enforcement agency” with “FBI” cause it always seems to be the FBI) but has more of a literary bent. The main inspirations for the literary bent are the awesome TNT show The Librarians (the movies it’s a spin-off of are great too, especially if you want to see how Flynn started out) and the anime Read or Die: The TV, which I was introduced to by my junior college anime club around 2003, shortly before it got licensed here. (The manga version, R.O.D.: Read or Dream, as well as the anime and manga versions of the OAV that stars Yomiko Readman, are also available in English).

(ROD gif from @nothingforkings)

***

The Stars Above Us

This was my NaNo novel 2 years ago, and the first one where I wrote a novel especially for NaNo, rather than using NaNo as an excuse to make progress on an existing work. It’s set in the 3200′s and is about a girl named Katia Sewick who is living a miserable, apathetic, lonely life in Brooklyn and doesn’t picture it getting any better...and then she inherits a space station from her grandfather. She doesn’t know the first thing about running a space station, but she decides to at least go check it out. The staff does not accept her immediately, making her prove herself before she can take command. Then, shortly after she does that, a biological threat is discovered onboard that could kill everyone if not dealt with.

I’m not really sure how it will end, but with everyone living at any rate. Also, Katia will find meaning for her life at last.

This novel actually originated from a prompt in a writing prompts book (“Upon inheriting a working space station from her grandfather, a woman tries to make it run smoothly”), so it didn’t really have inspiration in that sense. The title came about cause someone in my NaNo group said she usually looked to Shakespeare for title ideas. (The quote I used for this title is from King Lear: “It is the stars,/The stars above us, govern our conditions." I’m not sure it fits the book, but it was the only Shakespeare quote I could find that talked about stars).

The biological threat plot is, I think, partially inspired by this kinda obscure anime movie from the ‘80s, They Were Eleven. They released it here in the U.S. on subtitled VHS in the early ‘90s, but a dub also exists. The sub is what I have seen. It’s about these young space cadets whose final test for space academy is to survive for a specified number of days on an abandoned spaceship, with no contact or involvement from outside. There are supposed to be 10 in their group, but when they arrive on the ship, they find there are 11 of them -- and no one is certain who the intruder is. Meanwhile, they discover some weird plant on the ship that makes people ill, among other things.

I also did a fair amount of research about space stations, including designs that have been proposed over the years.

This book also owes a debt to Star Trek (mostly TOS cause that’s the generation I’m most familiar with, having seen a number of the TOS movies even if I have yet to see the TV show) because I wasn’t sure how to structure the station crew (like what sort of crewmembers you would need) and ended up using the TOS crew as a model.

***

Tales of Walden

My high fantasy universe, currently consisting of short stories and poems and a work in progress since 2005. I tried to write a novel in this universe, but never finished it.

I’m still trying to find a long-term goal for this universe; for now I just write stories or poems for it when I feel like it (or like when I did it for Camp NaNo and Story-a-Day in May).

As for inspirations, Lord of the Rings is a huge one.

I’m not going to lie, this universe was very influenced by Tolkien. But then what epic fantasy these days isn’t?

Narnia - the first fantasy series I was ever exposed to - has an influence here too though.

(Narnia GIF from Giphy)

***

Other WIPs

I have some minor WIPs too.

Fairy*Net and Fairy*Radio, a duo of comics I drew art for for NaNoMangO 2015

Some unfinished stories from Story-A-Day 2015

A couple story ideas from Story-A-Day 2015 I want to develop further: one about using biohacking to become pop idols, and another about two Asian idols who are forbidden to be together cause of the “no boyfriends” clause in many female Asian idols’ contracts. (The latter was inspired by this list; I also wrote a short story about sasaeng inspired by this list).

A LOT of fanfic ideas that aren’t yet written (so I guess they’re not WIPs yet, except for the Osaka Naru one, which I have partially written).

Two huge Doctor Who fanfic projects: “The Companion’s Diary of Alyson ‘Alys’ Reed,” a diary-style fanfic about the adventures of a couple OC Companions with Eleven, and “The Linguist’s Story,” a mostly Classic Who-set group of stories about an OC Time Lady.

**

Hope you liked this post!

[hmmwhatsthatabout]

Notes on Electronic Superhighway

Electronic Superhighway

From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art After the Internet

 Electronic Superhighway

Iwona Blazwick:

 Pg20

“Ways of seeing and being seen are just one aspect of the way digital technologies are changing our experience…”

 London ICA exhibition Cybernetic Serpendipity curated by Jasia Reichardt

Included live robotic and gadgetry, interactively kinetic.

Artists: Bruce Lacey, Gustav Metzger, Nam Jun Paik, Jean Tinguely and Wen-Ying Tsai

 Pg.21

“Even the hardware of the computer and the automation has proved compleeing for artists. They have deployed the robot’s kinetic life and its dexterous machine prosthetics, as it has evolved from ungainly playmate to becoming, in its latest manifestation as dorne, an agent of surveillance and destruction.”

Artists interact with the idea of the robot from its early phases as friendly robot to its new found secretive, violent war tool as drone.

 “The fate of all hardware is to shrink and flatten, so as to become ever closer to our bodies and the spaces in which we live.”

The line of separation between human and technology… Cyborgs

The ability of traditional mediums and images can be montaged in spatial and linear perspectives, existing only in cyberspace.

 Instagram, YouTube – Sites that present in infinite source of images and representations of identities and activities. “A universe of – often adolescent – exhibitionists.” Gives artists an “expanding portrait gallery” to represent the state of our current societies and cultures.

‘Superhighway’ indicates the speed of directional progress.

 “Immediate global access to information and communication enables artists…

Pg.22

…to collect and share data, images, commentary and analysis in real time. At the same time, the connecting tissue of nodes of information follows the associative, even random, paths of thought itself.”

 UbuWeb – archive of avant-garde film, poetry and performance

 Towards a Possible Future for Art and the Internet

Omar Kholeif:

 Pg.25

William Gibson Neuromancer: on inventing the term Cyberspace

 “The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled”

John Berger (Ways of Seeing)

 Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle

Thought that a media-induced, late capitalist world would lead experience to only be simulated. People’s true selves would be in the back seat as we would experience our lives through “performing phantasms”.

 Pg.26

As technology becomes more prevalent, embedded within culture be it: billboards, trains, etc. real and virtual spaces are blurring and shifting towards one in the same.

Even architecture starts to resemble aesthetics of visual material found on desktop computers.

 Pg.27

Even though there has been a rapid shift towards digital. There is still a presence of analogue material. For example the prevalence of use of vinyl records increased in 2013

 Important to note that even though the internet provides a space that can be used personally as well as a space for people to congregate about political activisim or discourse, “most of these platforms that enable these communications are owned by private corporations, governments or special interest groups who have specific agendas to promote”.

Collecting data of users and exploitation through surveillance.

“It could be argued that the Internet readily enables injustices to be made visible through the very tools that governments and corporations utilise to inflict those injustices.”

 Pg.28

Nam June Paik’s Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society: The 21st Century is now only 26 years away (1974)

Where he used the term ‘Electronic Superhighway’

 Pg.32

2006 – year that Facebook became widely available to the public.

 GeoGoo 2008 JODI

Piece on Google Maps and Google Earth

 Taryn Simon’s Image Atlas (2014)

Work uses top image results for given search terms

 Time Frames: Three Episodes in the Evolution of Digital Cinema

Ed Halter:

 Pg.35

Lillian F. Schwartz

Was offered an ‘unofficial position’ at Bell Laboratories, ran by company AT&T, from Leon Harmon. Whom she had exhibited with previously in the MoMA at an exhibition titled The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.

At Bell she was only considered a ‘resident visitor’ which underplayed her role as an artist, mostly due to the fact that the company AT&T was meant for its laboratory projects to be telephony based which Bell Laboratories was pushing enough to begin with. Bell Laboratories was an experimental ‘think-tank’

Schwartz worked as a consultant in computer graphics, one of few female workers. She utilized the Lab’s facilities for personal projects on weekends and evenings.

Documentary commissioned by AT&T: The Artist and the Computer (1976) John K. Ball

Schwartz worked closely with Ken Knowlton.

Knowlton created one of the earliest forms of computer animation: BEFLIX

BEFLIX is explained in a film titled A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies (1963) which was made with BEFLIX

Knowlton also produced a programme titled EXPLOR (Explicit Patterns, Local Operations and Randomness) – A program that allowed digital manipulation of two-dimensional shapes.

During this time Schwartz was working on a film titled Pixillation (1970) which utilized Knowlton’s EXPLOR

 Pg.36

At the time it took a lot more than just one person to create a computer movie.

The work combined EXPLOR-generated images of squares, repeating images of crystal growth, and frame-by-frame painting on glass.

Pixillation was accompanied by composer Gershon Kingsley (electronic music pioneer, composer of Pop Corn).

UFO (1971) experimented with colours and superimpositions created in post-production accompanied by Emmanuel Ghent’s electronic track.

Used three different programs as well as garbage from a scientist bin that she had taken of writing for atoms and molecules.

The film caused headaches when screened (1972).

 Pg.37

In Schwartz time the speed in which they were producing work was incredible, but when put into terms of today would be quite slow.

Yet the speed allowed Schwartz to take time to build on rich, vivid imagery.

In this time film and video were separate mediums. Film being photographic film stock running through a machine to produce an image. Video being a “continuous flow of electronic beams manipulating the inner surface of a cathode ray display”.

Production of graphics and motion pictures (EXPLOR) in computers was another aspect to consider.

Any interaction between these mediums was complicated and unusual, in its experimental stages of that time.

 Olia Lialina

In 1995 Olia Lialina helped found Cine Fantom(club for Russian experimental film) in Moscow after dissolution of USSR.

The organization screened films from outside of commercial distribution channels.

Pg.38

The organization created works referencing 80’s movement ‘Parallel Cinema’

After 16mm film was discontinued in Russia it became impossible to continue small-gauge filmmaking.

Contradictory to ‘Parallel Cinema’ beliefs many of her companions turned to video making.

However, Lialina turned to an even more advanced medium: HTML creating a website for Cine Fantom

She saw a website as a place for cinematic medium. Wanted to combine being online to being with film.

She used hyperlinks, which “allowed the users to click between connected pages, creating a series of changing images on screen as they proceeded.” Similar to film websites had their own frames only instead of moving in a stream of images the frames nested inside one another.

My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996)

Pg.39

Lialina took up HTML when the programme was only 3 years old.

“The World Wide Web with the spread of relatively low-cost personal computers, and the integration of PC’s into workspaces; HTML became its lingua franca, learned by countless users across the globe, even if only enough to write a simple personal homepage.”

Thus Lialina’s use of HTML continued to reference Parallel Cinima’s ideals of using amateur moving-image technologies.

She uses the term ‘Net Film’ to describe her work considering websites closer to film as a medium than video.

Pg.40

Montage- the editing of a series of shots

“What the web added to montage was the dynamic relationship between the work of the coder and the work of the user, allowing the user to choose the exact pathways such montage would take within the parameters set out by the author”

“My Boyfriend succeeded at creating a kind of interative movie where many had before failed, but only by leaving the cinema altogether, and transposing its logic into an entirely new medium.

Lialina’s claim of web being more like film than video became outdated as video became digital.

 Pg.41

Oliver Laric

Versions (2009)

Didn’t create any of the material, instead sourced all of it online.

He edited the images using any video editing software such as, Premiere, iMovie, FinalCut Pro. Unsure which but it is not of importance.

His work comes after the emergence of the internet and mass medias like TV. Digital technology was so readily available to a vast number of people in many different forms.

There had been a whole generation growing up using the Wed and software applications.

“No longer just a repository of information, the Internet was on the verge of becoming the central conduit of all forms of popular culture”

The focus of his work was based on an understanding of the system of media inhabited at that time as opposed to creating new uses for the technology.

Versions is an essay film speaking about vast production of bootlegs, re-edits, any other sort of duplicated media on the internet. Many variations of a meme of GIF appropriated by culture.

Larics other works have endeavoured into the ideas of appropriation before with 50 50 (2007) and Message The (2007) in which he re-orders and juxtaposes video footage.

He also attempted to create more versions of Versions by sending the video without the audio to 3 other people asking them to add a voice over of their own.

He created two more versions in 2010 and 2012 with the same title

Pg.42

He believed that because the internet provides us with a source of any sort of image we might want to use, it is unnecessary for artists to create their own material. Stock footage, Youtube, google images. “Everything you can imagine”

He thinks “I have a feeling there’s too much material produced”

“the internet has now engendered a universe in which ‘multiple realities coexist’ simultaneously.” As stated in Versions (2009)

“What is remarkable about Versions is not merely the fact that it makes use of pre-existing images, but rather that Laric uses this process to imagine how the rapid and continuing increase in both the appropriation and redistribution of media has altered the nature of images. Versions thus serves as an exemplary instance of its own theory.”

The process has become self-aware.

Pg.43

“By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the digital realm criss-crosses and intersects at every point with physical existence.”

 Hito Steyerl: Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?

e-flux journal no.49

“Far from being opposites across an unbridgeable chasm, image and world are in many cases just versions of each other.”

 On the Grid

Erika Balsom

 Pg.45

All digital images started on a grid.

Over time in computer imaging advances have allowed that grid to vanish and fliud curves are in its place.

Looking through a grid like in Albrecht Durer’s woodcut in which an artist places a naked woman behind a grid-screen to mathematically organize the shapes before him. This is the power of the grid in its all-knowing regulations or space and things before it.

From the otherside of the grid as the women she is now rendered knowable and manageable within a mathematical space.

The grid is a technique of management.

Allan Kaprow Hello (1969)

Tele-happening in which four locations were connected through five cameras and 27 TV monitors.

Users could communicate with each other from one location to the next through live feed.

Engaging them with a virtual network in which they could become a part of a data stream.

Pg.46

“…the exercise of power does not cease to exist over distributed networks, it simply functions differently. Time and time again, the Internet has been heralded as harbinger of freedom, progress and the expansion of democracy. For many artists, the task is not to deny such possibilities, but to offer a deflationary, ambivalent form of engagement that stems from within the technosphere and emphasises the extent to which we all operate within a system founded on principles of algorithmic control.”

“…in order to access information, one must become information, taking up a position within the network that promises the possibility of connection and exchange, but only on the precaution that one makes oneself visible on the grid of communication, and thus vulnerable to its modulations.”

Pg.48

Asymmetric Love (2013)

Chandelier made of CCTV cameras and DSL internet cables.

It speaks about our acceptance of surveillance and how they become as common as light fixtures to us just blending in to our surroundings in plain sight.

We give ourselves up to the machines but get nothing in return.

Pg.51

“Today, to be invisible is no longer simply a promise of validation, civil participation and connection, but also a threat, a form of exposure and vulnerability.”

“There are lines on the grid, but empty spaces, too.”

[sheminecrafts]

Zuckerberg misunderstands the huge threat of TikTok

“It’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok during an all-hands meeting. But it’s not. TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that’s vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a selfie, show something pretty, or pan around what you’re up to. TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded, and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Insta.

That’s why Zuckerberg’s comments cast a dark shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps. How can it beat what it doesn’t understand? He certainly can’t ignore it. Facebook’s copycat Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installs in the same period outside of China. Oh, and TikTok has 1.4 billion total installs beyond China to date.

TikTok

Casey Newton of The Verge today published two hours of audio and transcripts from two internal-only all-hands Q&As held by Zuckerberg at Facebook in July. His comments touch on the company’s plan to fight being broken up by regulators, especially if Elizabeth Warren becomes President. He thinks Facebook would win, but on resorting to suing the government, he says “does that still suck for us? Yeah.” Zuckerberg also describes how Facebook is working to launch a payments product in Mexico and elsewhere by year’s end as Libra deals with regulatory scrutiny.

But beyond his comments on regulation, it’s his pigeonholing of TikTok that’s most alarming. It foreshadows Facebook failing to win one of the core social feeds that its business depends on. Perhaps his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak portrays him as thinking TikTok is just the next Snapchat Stories to destroy.

Zuckeberg’s Thoughts On TikTok

Here’s what Zuckerberg said about TikTok during the internal Q&A sessions, (emphasis mine):

So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

And the way that we kind of think about it is: it’s married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app. And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that’s a standalone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.

We’re taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there. But yeah, I think that it’s not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing. But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what they’re doing, I think it is quite interesting. I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend. It is growing, but they’re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we’ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising. So the space is still fairly nascent, and there’s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here. But I think this is a real thing. It’s good.

To Zuckerberg’s credit, he’s not dismissing the threat. He knows TikTok is popular. He knows it’s growing in key international markets Facebook and Instagram depend on to keep user counts rising. And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.

Lasso

But while TikToks might look like Stories because they’re vertical videos, and TikTok might algorithmically recommend them to people like Instagram Explore, it’s a whole ‘nother beast of a product and one that may be harder than it seems to copy.

To crystallize why, let’s rewind to Snapchat. With the launch of Stories, it started to blow up with US teens. Facebook’s attempts to clone it in standalone apps like Poke and Slingshot never gained traction. In fact, none of Facebook’s standalone apps have succeeded unless they splintered off an already-popular piece of Facebook like chat and users were forced to download them like Messenger. It wasn’t until Zuckerberg stuck his clone of Stories front-and-center atop Instagram and Facebook that Snapchat’s user count went from growing 18% per quarter to shrinking. There, Facebook used the same strategy laid out in Zuckerberg’s comments — push its good-enough clone in countries where the original isn’t popular yet.

But Facebook was fortunate because Stories really wasn’t that dissimilar to the content users were already sharing on Instagram — tiny biographical snippets of their lives. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had originally invented Stories as a vision of Facebook’s News Feed through the lens of an ephemeral camera. All users had to know was “I take the same videos, but shorter and sillier, posted more often, and then they disappear”. The concept of Instagram and Facebook didn’t have to change. They were still about telling friends what you were up to. Choking off TikTok’s growth will be much more complicated.

Why TikTok Is Tough To Clone

TikTok isn’t about you or what you’re doing. It’s about entertaining your audience. It’s not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It’s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else, and acting out jokes. It’s not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage. And it’s not about originality — the heart of Instagram. TikTok is about remixing culture — taking the audio from someone else’s clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a video you record.

That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they add the remixing functionality. Most videos on those apps aren’t designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are. Insta and Facebook’s social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but don’t encompass the new wave of amateur performers TikTok elevates. And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone else’s creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesn’t offer much to remix.

That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph, and retrain users’ understanding of these apps’ purpose…at the risk of distracting from their core use cases. This leaves Facebook hoping to grow its standalone TikTok clone Lasso which TechCrunch scooped a year ago before it launched last November. But as we’ve seen, Facebook struggles growing brand new apps, and that effort is further hindered by its increasingly toxic brand and sheen of uncoolness. Nor does it help that Facebook must divert development resources to comply with all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of its $5 billion FTC fine and settlement.

The Next Feed

Facebook’s best bet is to assess the future value of the ads it could run on a successful TikTok clone and apply some greater fraction of that grand sum to competing directly. It’s already made some smart additions to Lasso like tutorials for how to remix and the option to add GIFs as sections of your video. But it’s still failing to gain serious traction in the US. While typical TikTok homepage videos have hundreds of thousands of Likes, the top ones I saw in my Lasso feed today received 70 or fewer.

I had Sensor Tower run some analysis comparing TikTok with Lasso since its launch last November, and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the US. Some more stats:

US Total Downloads Since November: Lasso – 250,000 // TikTok – 41.3 million

US Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 760 // TikTok – 126,000

Average US Google Play Social App Chart Ranking: Lasso – #155 // TikTok – #2

Beyond the US, Lasso has only launched in one other market, Mexico in April, where it’s been faring better but could hardly even be considered a competitor to TikTok. They won’t even coherently fit together on a graph. Facebook needs to lean harder into Lasso:

Mexico Total Downloads Since April: Lasso – 175,000 // TikTok – 3.3 million

Mexico Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 1,000 // TikTok – 19,000

Zuckerberg may need to find a coherent place for TikTok style features inside Instagram and potentially Facebook. That could be another horizontal row of previews like with Stories and/or a header on the Explore page dedicated to premeditated content. Certainly something more prominent than a single button like IGTV that still no one is asking for. One opportunity to best TikTok would be building a dedicated remix source browser into the Stories camera to help users find content to put their own spin on.

Facebook will also need to buy out top TikTok creators to make videos for it instead, and even quasi-hire some of the most prolific video meme or challenge inventors to give users trends to jump on rather than just one-off clips to watch. Its failure to offer IGTV stars monetization has led many to ignore that platform, and it can’t afford that again.

If Zuckerberg approaches TikTok as merely an algorithmic video recommender like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed. If he doesn’t decisively move to challenge TikTok soon, its catalog of content to remix will grow insurmountable and it will own the whole concept of short form performative video. Snapchat’s insistence on ephemerality makes it incompatible with remixing, and YouTube isn’t nimble enough to reinvent itself.

If no American company can step up, we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese political values at odds with our own.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2nqeOxP via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

“It’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok during an all-hands meeting. But it’s not. TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that’s vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a selfie, show something pretty, or pan around what you’re up to. TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded, and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Insta.

That’s why Zuckerberg’s comments cast a dark shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps. How can it beat what it doesn’t understand? He certainly can’t ignore it. Facebook’s copycat Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installs in the same period outside of China. Oh, and TikTok has 1.4 billion total installs beyond China to date.

TikTok

Casey Newton of The Verge today published two hours of audio and transcripts from two internal-only all-hands Q&As held by Zuckerberg at Facebook in July. His comments touch on the company’s plan to fight being broken up by regulators, especially if Elizabeth Warren becomes President. He thinks Facebook would win, but on resorting to suing the government, he says “does that still suck for us? Yeah.” Zuckerberg also describes how Facebook is working to launch a payments product in Mexico and elsewhere by year’s end as Libra deals with regulatory scrutiny.

But beyond his comments on regulation, it’s his pigeonholing of TikTok that’s most alarming. It foreshadows Facebook failing to win one of the core social feeds that its business depends on. Perhaps his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak portrays him as thinking TikTok is just the next Snapchat Stories to destroy.

Zuckeberg’s Thoughts On TikTok

Here’s what Zuckerberg said about TikTok during the internal Q&A sessions, (emphasis mine):

So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

And the way that we kind of think about it is: it’s married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app. And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that’s a standalone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.

We’re taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there. But yeah, I think that it’s not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing. But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what they’re doing, I think it is quite interesting. I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend. It is growing, but they’re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we’ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising. So the space is still fairly nascent, and there’s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here. But I think this is a real thing. It’s good.

To Zuckerberg’s credit, he’s not dismissing the threat. He knows TikTok is popular. He knows it’s growing in key international markets Facebook and Instagram depend on to keep user counts rising. And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.

Lasso

But while TikToks might look like Stories because they’re vertical videos, and TikTok might algorithmically recommend them to people like Instagram Explore, it’s a whole ‘nother beast of a product and one that may be harder than it seems to copy.

To crystallize why, let’s rewind to Snapchat. With the launch of Stories, it started to blow up with US teens. Facebook’s attempts to clone it in standalone apps like Poke and Slingshot never gained traction. In fact, none of Facebook’s standalone apps have succeeded unless they splintered off an already-popular piece of Facebook like chat and users were forced to download them like Messenger. It wasn’t until Zuckerberg stuck his clone of Stories front-and-center atop Instagram and Facebook that Snapchat’s user count went from growing 18% per quarter to shrinking. There, Facebook used the same strategy laid out in Zuckerberg’s comments — push its good-enough clone in countries where the original isn’t popular yet.

But Facebook was fortunate because Stories really wasn’t that dissimilar to the content users were already sharing on Instagram — tiny biographical snippets of their lives. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had originally invented Stories as a vision of Facebook’s News Feed through the lens of an ephemeral camera. All users had to know was “I take the same videos, but shorter and sillier, posted more often, and then they disappear”. The concept of Instagram and Facebook didn’t have to change. They were still about telling friends what you were up to. Choking off TikTok’s growth will be much more complicated.

Why TikTok Is Tough To Clone

TikTok isn’t about you or what you’re doing. It’s about entertaining your audience. It’s not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It’s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else, and acting out jokes. It’s not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage. And it’s not about originality — the heart of Instagram. TikTok is about remixing culture — taking the audio from someone else’s clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a video you record.

That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they add the remixing functionality. Most videos on those apps aren’t designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are. Insta and Facebook’s social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but don’t encompass the new wave of amateur performers TikTok elevates. And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone else’s creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesn’t offer much to remix.

That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph, and retrain users’ understanding of these apps’ purpose…at the risk of distracting from their core use cases. This leaves Facebook hoping to grow its standalone TikTok clone Lasso which TechCrunch scooped a year ago before it launched last November. But as we’ve seen, Facebook struggles growing brand new apps, and that effort is further hindered by its increasingly toxic brand and sheen of uncoolness. Nor does it help that Facebook must divert development resources to comply with all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of its $5 billion FTC fine and settlement.

The Next Feed

Facebook’s best bet is to assess the future value of the ads it could run on a successful TikTok clone and apply some greater fraction of that grand sum to competing directly. It’s already made some smart additions to Lasso like tutorials for how to remix and the option to add GIFs as sections of your video. But it’s still failing to gain serious traction in the US. While typical TikTok homepage videos have hundreds of thousands of Likes, the top ones I saw in my Lasso feed today received 70 or fewer.

I had Sensor Tower run some analysis comparing TikTok with Lasso since its launch last November, and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the US. Some more stats:

US Total Downloads Since November: Lasso – 250,000 // TikTok – 41.3 million

US Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 760 // TikTok – 126,000

Average US Google Play Social App Chart Ranking: Lasso – #155 // TikTok – #2

Beyond the US, Lasso has only launched in one other market, Mexico in April, where it’s been faring better but could hardly even be considered a competitor to TikTok. They won’t even coherently fit together on a graph. Facebook needs to lean harder into Lasso:

Mexico Total Downloads Since April: Lasso – 175,000 // TikTok – 3.3 million

Mexico Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 1,000 // TikTok – 19,000

Zuckerberg may need to find a coherent place for TikTok style features inside Instagram and potentially Facebook. That could be another horizontal row of previews like with Stories and/or a header on the Explore page dedicated to premeditated content. Certainly something more prominent than a single button like IGTV that still no one is asking for. One opportunity to best TikTok would be building a dedicated remix source browser into the Stories camera to help users find content to put their own spin on.

Facebook will also need to buy out top TikTok creators to make videos for it instead, and even quasi-hire some of the most prolific video meme or challenge inventors to give users trends to jump on rather than just one-off clips to watch. Its failure to offer IGTV stars monetization has led many to ignore that platform, and it can’t afford that again.

If Zuckerberg approaches TikTok as merely an algorithmic video recommender like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed. If he doesn’t decisively move to challenge TikTok soon, its catalog of content to remix will grow insurmountable and it will own the whole concept of short form performative video. Snapchat’s insistence on ephemerality makes it incompatible with remixing, and YouTube isn’t nimble enough to reinvent itself.

If no American company can step up, we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese political values at odds with our own. If only Twitter hadn’t killed Vine.

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2nqeOxP ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

[infotainmentplus-blog]

15 best camera apps for Android Cameras on smartphones are a much bigger deal than they used to be. Companies are chomping at the bit to make their cameras more reliable, work better in low light, and add features that people want. Many will base their purchase decisions on the strength of the camera. The point is that cameras are important on mobile devices these days. Usually, that makes stock camera apps better than third party apps. OEMs simply know their camera setups better and optimize more appropriately. This is especially true for Google, Samsung, and Huawei phones that use AI and other software optimizations in conjunction with the camera hardware. Related: Best Android smartphone cameras There are still plenty of excellent apps to help you make the most of it, though. Here are the best camera apps for Android! More camera apps 15 best Photo Editor Apps for Android for 2018 Thanks to the vast improvements made to smartphone cameras, mobile photo editing is more popular than ever. Everyone wants to add those little tweaks to make their photos really pop and there are a metric … 10 best DSLR apps for Android Most serious photographers have DSLR cameras. They're the current gold standard in photography. You can get buy various cameras and lenses. It can be expensive, but worth it. However, you can expand the experience even … Camera FV-5 Price: Free / $3.95 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Camera FV-5 is one of many camera apps for manual camera fans. It emulates various DSLR features. That includes manual shutter speed, ISO, light metering, focus, white balance, and more. It also supports JPEG, DNG (RAW), and PNG file formats. There is support for 30 langauges as well. There are a ton of features. However, it does a good job of not feeling bloated. It even has support for volume key usage. You can pick it up for free or go pro for $3.95. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Camera MX Price: Free / Up to $1.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Camera MX is one of the oldest and most popular camera apps. Developers update the app regularly and that keeps it current. It works best for simple stuff. The app has a variety of shooting modes. You can also use it to shoot photos or videos. There is even a GIF mode to make your own GIFs. The built-in photo editor can do the basics as well. It's a decent all-in-one solution. Serious photographers may want to look elsewhere. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Camera Zoom FX Price: Free / $3.49 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Camera Zoom FX is another one of the older camera apps that aged well. It's a good mix of simple and serious. You'll get manual controls for things like ISO, shutter speed, exposure, and more. There are also filters, HDR mode, various photo modes, and more. There are also a few plugins that add even more features. It's not as mainstream as Camera MX. However, it does have more features than most manual camera apps. You can try it for free before paying $3.49 for the pro version. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Candy Camera Price: Free DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Candy Camera is part of a new wave of camera apps. This one is specifically for selfies. It has a bunch of filters. It also includes makeup tools, stickers, and additional stuff. There is also a collage mode. The UI is a little hard to use at first. It gets easier the more you use it. It's not something a serious photographer would want to use. It's more for things like Instagram photos or other social media stuff. The app is completely free to download. It has advertising, but no way to get rid of them. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Cymera Price: Free / Up to $3.49 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Cymera is another one of the older and popular camera apps. It focuses more on mainstream features. That means you'll get a bunch of filters, stickers, special effects, and similar features. It also has a beauty camera mode. It can add or take away features from your face and body. We're not big fans of such dramatic alterations, but to each their own. It also includes a photo editor for minor edits. It's free to download. You can buy additional stuff as in-app purchases. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Related: Best Beauty Camera Apps for Android (AndroidApps.com) DSLR Camera Price: $2.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DSLR Camera has an ambitious name. However, it's one of the better manual camera apps. It features a decent number of manual controls. That includes white balance, light metering, a live histogram, ISO, and more. It also has various shot modes, geotagging, and you can use the volume buttons as shutter buttons. That's it, really. There isn't a lot of bric-a-brac to gum up the works. It works really well on most devices. It has a few bugs, but nothing major most of the time. The only downside is the lack of a free trial. Make sure you test it inside of the refund time. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Footej Camera Price: Free / $2.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Footej Camera is one of the newer camera apps. It has a good mix of mainstream and serious photography features. It uses Android's Camera2 API. That means it has a full assortment of manual controls. It can also shoot video, make GIFs, a photo histogram, and burst mode. It also supports RAW format as long as your device does. You can try it out for free or pay $2.99 for the pro version. It's quite excellent without too many serious bugs. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Google Camera Price: Free DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Google Camera is Google's official camera app. It's the one you'll find on most Google devices. It has a small, but effective set of features. They include a lens blur mode, slow motion (on supported devices), photo spheres, video stabilization, and more. The only downside is compatibility. You can only use this on devices running Android 7.1.1 and up (at the time of this writing). Even later on, only devices running the most current Android will likely be able to use this. Otherwise, it's free and it's really good. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Google Cardboard Camera Price: Free DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Google Cardboard Camera is a camera app for Google Cardboard. It allows you to take and view VR images. You'll be able to take 360-degree photos. It's similar to panorama shots, except it goes all the way around. You'll need a Google Cardboard to get best results. Thankfully, they're cheap and easily accessible. The app itself is also free with no in-app purchases. It's a niche product to be sure. It's also the easiest way to take those types of photos. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Manual Camera Price: Free / $2.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Manual Camera is exactly what the name implies. It's a camera with a bunch of manual settings. It attempts to take full advantage of the Camera2 API. That means you get access to shutter speed, focus distance, ISO, white balance, and exposure compensation. It also has a timer and support for RAW. Your device needs support for RAW as well in order to use that feature. It's incredibly simple to use. Just make sure you try the free version before buying it. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Many actual cameras have apps too! Check these out! 5 best Canon apps for Android Your shiny new Canon camera is your best shooting buddy. You take it everywhere, shoot beautiful photos, and upload them in various places. It works well enough with the right glass, right? You can do … 5 best Nikon apps for Android Nikon is one of the big two when it comes to cameras alongside Canon. Their midrange models are inexpensive, and they work quite well. Much like Canon and others, you can also control them with … Motion Stills Price: Free DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Motion Stills is one of the newer camera apps. It's also an extremely niche app. Its main function is recording short bits of video. It can turn that video into a GIF or it can stay a video for later viewing. It also has a fast forward option for super quick videos. It's not useful for taking photos. However, it's about the only app that does what this one does. It can't hurt to have it in your repertoire. It's completely free to download and use. It is a tad buggy, though. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Open Camera Price: Free / $1.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Open Camera is one of the most popular camera apps for serious photographers. It has most of the serious features we've discussed before. That includes manual camera controls. It also includes a timer, support for some external microphones, HDR, exposure bracketing, and more. It's also a great option for both photographers and videographers. The app is completely free with no in-app purchases or advertising. It's also completely open source. That's always a plus. There is an optional (and separate) donation app if you want to support the developer. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Snap Camera HDR Price: Free / $1.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Snap Camera HDR is a good between for serious and amateur photographer types. There is support for manual camera controls, 4K video recording, RAW support, HDR, and file size options. It also includes fun shooting modes, effects, borders, color effects, and vignettes. There are camera apps that do manual controls a little better and apps that do fun filters and such a little better. It's rare to find an app that does both as well as this one. Make sure to try the free version before buying the pro version. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY VSCO Price: Free with in-app purchases / $19.99 per year DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY VSCO is a popular and somewhat powerful camera app and photo editor combo. The camera side is a little simple and not as powerful as your native phone camera app or some others here. However, the photo editor side is among the best in all of mobile. It has a variety of filters, effects, and settings. Additionally, it has most of these same videos for video content as well. This app does get fairly expensive, though, and many of its most desirable features are behind a $19.99 per year paywall. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Whatever camera app your phone has Price: Free DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Every phone comes with its own camera app. You should definitely give that app a fair shake. Manufacturers develop these apps specifically for the camera on your device. There are often features these apps have that others do not. For instance, the manual focus in the LG V20 makes whatever is in focus glow green. Thus, you visually see where the camera is focused. We really only recommend changing your camera app to expand your feature set rather than replace it. Every app on this list does best when it's used alongside the stock camera app. You're usually leaving features at the door if you don't use these. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY More best Apps 10 best cloud storage services and apps for Android of 2018! We're not in an era where having cloud storage is a good idea. It's efficient, doesn't take up your internal storage, and it's far more convenient than carrying a hard drive around everywhere. it also … 10 best gallery apps for Android Despite the simple premise, not all gallery apps are the same. Some of them work fantastically with great designs and quickness. Others suffer from poor design and slowness. The good news is that you have … If we missed any of the best camera apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments! See all our best apps and games lists here. , via Android Authority http://bit.ly/2FqzRmI

[survivormyanmar-blog]

Ep. #3 - “I Will NOT Be Dick Blinded” - Tommy

Returning to camp after voting Maranda out unanimously, the Fans tribe was determined to change their losing ways.  The Immunity Challenge was announced and it was an Endurance challenge called Sharp Shooter.  Both tribes came up with their unique strategic plans and both had early success taking out members of the other tribe.  As the challenge progressed into the night it was pretty much a stand still with no one being taken out from either tribe.  Linus and Keegan battled hard for the Fans throughout the night slowly taking out all of the Favs as they fell asleep until around the 12 hour mark of the challenge when they finally took out Christian who was the last Fav standing.  Heading to Tribal Council for the first time, the Favorites tribe majority alliance of “The Golden Girls” were trying to decide whether to take out Richie or Gaston while telling the others the fake plan of voting out Ashley.  They ended up deciding that Richie was the best choice to vote out as he is the bigger threat later on in the game.  The vote was 8-1-1 with Richie throwing his vote at Steffen for making him suffer through Gilmore Girls and Gaston voting for Ashley to make it look like he didnt know what was going on.

This immunity challenge is still in and we are in hour 4 and I’m fucking out. Endurance comps like this are made for me and the fact I couldn’t spell Steffen’s name right pisses me off. I am paying attention very well to the faves who are still in this game. Those are threats I need to target as soon as I can. Obviously when I get on a tribe with them I won’t do it so fast but more so Natalie Anderson style. Got my kill list ready and when time aim that AK 47 and boom send their asses out. Steffen’s at the top cause i’m a petty bitch.

It’s 4am …we’ve been doing this challenge since 11pm…i have to be up in like 4 hours…im gonna DIE http://68.media.tumblr.com/392dc0d4e441985657d1572b6ca2abc7/tumblr_ohjn57cUZu1vaedr6o5_400.gif

Me right now in this challenge: https://68.media.tumblr.com/115b4df19a6863f5ec4f42b4b3eb84e1/tumblr_nrxeqavSoh1uafkuoo1_500.gif http://67.media.tumblr.com/1c93afbff2e88c104cd62d06726d9024/tumblr_inline_obxjdkpKfA1rirbae_500.png

I am up watching this immunity competition still go at 5 fucking am crying my eyes out becaue I’m out. Of course I’m gonna be talking game. I told Brett and Keegan tonight i want Linus out over Leah. I know hands down if we loose immunity Carlos is going but if we loose another they may turn against Leah and I need Leah. I trust Leah. So I’m trying to get them to turn against Linus but Brett was being a stuck up bitch and wouldn’t agree to it as he said him and Adrian have Linus under their fingers. Which is why I want him out!!! Like I want my 5 to be having side alliances. Only I am the one to have side alliances. While I’m talking to Linus as well but more so just trying to bond with him so he likes me.

Well holy fuck I’ve been going for like 7 fucking hours at this comp. I feel like before an issue my tribe was having with me was the fact that they kept doing challenges when I wasn’t around so they didnt know if I was able to help the team in that way, so at least that perception has changed. I really don’t think theres any way Im the last person standing in this challenge, but god knows I dont want to drop at all now :(  . The most exciting thing about this whole ordeal is the cave. Advantages are like kryptonite to me, so I don’t even particularly want one, I just want to see whats there. Plus if I get whatever is there, that means someone else wont be which is a plus. Onto the news of tribal, yes!! Everything went just as was planned! I recieved a vote again, which meant no one was actively trying to protect me from Miranda, but whatevs, I live to see another day!! The huge irony in all this is how everyone is worried about Maranda flipping at a swap, yet the tribe has given nothing but reasons for a couple people to flip. Im starting to feel a little (Not a lot) more comfortable with my people. Carlos might be at the bottom now which would buy me one more round, and if we swapped I’m still thinking I stick with the Mata, but still. The tribe were grade A morons for allowing people to feel so on the outs at all. I understand Im playing with a bunch of amateurs here, buuuuut come on! Don’t give people a goddamn reason to be against you! Whatever though, if I can ride this out just a little longer I feel like Im in the spot where I can see where the numbers are. Im really about to die of exhaustion, but I can’t stop now so Ima put on some hard rock music, and Ill report back whenever it is I wake up tomorrow haha.  

So Im out earlier than I had hoped because of a bit of a sketchy ruling which sucks. I understand stand that Kait was trying to follow the rules to the best of her knowledge of what they were, so this isn’t meant to throw shade at her, and I get that the main hosts have to sleep, but I just have to get some therapeutic ranting off my chest (I might sound pretty angry, because I am, but Ill get over it haha, just ignore the rest of this confessional if you want  :P ). I was going hard for this, and this was supposed to be the comp that got the fans out of the fucking gutter, but now we are left with one completely demoralized player in Keegan when I should still be there fighting the good fight. Despite things I’ve said in the past I really do want a fan to win this game (No matter how stupid some of their gameplay is haha). Call me crazy old school or whatever you want to say, but I am for my allies and teammates first, and myself second. Sure, maybe my whole tribe isn’t my allies, but some of these people are, and even though we may not be aligned yet I see Keegan working her ass off for the tribe and now she has to go double time because of this!

Well, we lost, unsurprisingly. I pretty much went in with an “I’m gonna go to bed when I want and see how it goes” attitude so I woke up ready. I’m gonna try not to play too aggressively so early because I don’t want to be seen as a threat until later on in the game, but I also know I want to vote out Richie since he’s a huge long term threat and didn’t pull his weight in the challenge. I’ve got my core alliance and I know that I’ve got Steffen and Sam, so I think we’ll be alright.

ok i’m kinda sorry but also extremely not for falling asleep because i swam well today anyway i’m hoping that within the next 24 hours i get word of a plan. jay wants to vote either richie or gaston which is probably smart because maldives is powerful but i’m really hoping to hear more ability strategy than just with jay!! but i’m about to nap so i’m blessed

After Immunity: The fact that more than half the Mata tribe dropped within the first hour just irritates me to the core. Like seeing that Keegan and Linus, who lasted 12 hours and myself lasted a good 6 hours, it just sucks that people are making us to be the tribe strength and carrying this once failing tribe. I won’t be at all surprised if people start to revolt to get rid of the physical threats before we merge. I’m just over it.

I’m happy we won the challenge. I really couldn’t go to a third tribal countil in a row. Tribal council constipates me.

Day 4/5 Getting the squad to vote MARANDA off was not difficult at all. It required no explanation whatsoever. Unity is required in situations like a tribal swap and they happen as early as the third round. MARANDA would have been a major liability in that case. NEHE postured to get rid of CARLOS instead just because he’s an enigma to NEHE. I have a lot more control over CARLOS than MARANDA, so I was adamant that NEHE see reason, but didn’t want to push too much social capital. Fortunately, as KEEGAN and ADRIAN also spurned MARANDA, they pushed to stay the course as well. She will be a lovely bride. She is a lovely mother. She played this game pitifully. She claimed in her tribal answers that we were petty and gave her the silent treatment and that was extremely laughable. She didn’t try. At all. She called herself a fighter and then she laid down to die. Eight fans remaining with ten still on the opposition. The situation is dire, but not impossible to recover from. No swap this time and ADRIAN, KEEGAN, KRYSTEN, and I all see LINUS as a great potential #6 to our squad–an Edna Ma from Survivor: South Pacific, if you will. NEHE, however, fears ADRIAN is getting too close with LINUS and wants him out next. NEHE told me he hates predictability and that is a major red flag with me. Will NEHE throw a wrench into the works just to keep things entertaining? Will I respond to his cry for attention and pull LINUS in to vote him out for being a loose cannon? NEHE favors LEAH (and it looks like no one favors CARLOS–I did until he proclaimed I was the leader at our first tribal council, a major disappointment). I am very wary about LEAH. If it were up to me, she’d be the next to go because she knows more than she claims, transparently so. The live challenge comes on a Friday night and I, of course, have plans, but with the insane nature of the challenge and my level of competitive edge, I decided to attempt to balance both the challenge and my evening with my friend. That didn’t end up working–I think I was probably the 2nd of the fans to be eliminated. I was picking up cake ingredients at the grocery store and the Skype chat was updating too slow for me to react in time–I could only dodge two of the three shots fired at me. I felt bad about letting down the group, but I know I can come back from this. I enjoyed my evening with my friend, popping in here and there to check on the others. NEHE rashly fucked up even though he poured his soul into the challenge. KEEGAN proved to be a very worthy leader in the challenge and he and LINUS fortunately carried us to victory after 12 hours of fighting. I couldn’t believe how much of themselves they gave to the challenge. It’s incredible and I owe both of them a lot. LINUS far and away recovered from his poor challenge performance from the first two challenges and NEHE has no leg to stand on for wanting to eliminate him. Both LEAH and CARLOS haven’t contributed to any challenge success.

It’s always really funny to see someone who is on the outside still scramble to make bonds with people, despite winning immunity. Like, are you trying to make yourself a more distinct target? Please, take a chill pill or two cause you’re ruining this harmonious vibe.

Twelve and a half hours. That’s how long I sat at my computer during that challenge. It was worth every second. To push through that long without sleeping, without a lapse in focus and win immunity for my tribe is such an invigorating experience. Linus and I broke our losing streak through pure determination. Winning this challenge could be a double edged sword though. We won immunity, I’ve gotten massive respect from my tribe but I’ve also put a huge target on my back as a challenge threat. The only thing I can do is wait to see how this all plays out.

We made it boys! So after 12  hours the final favourite finally dropped, and oops, now Im way behind on my philosophy paper because  I had to sleep all day but it’s #worth! I finally did  something for my tribe, we got some moment changed and all seems pretty good :D . At the cave I found a flashlight down the right path, and I came across a body of water. Well what a lucky coincidence because Keegan just so happened to find some darkness and a snorkle :^) .  Honestly, do I reaaaally care whats at the end of this cave? Probably not, I likely wont be the  first to get there. However, I now have a secret Keegan and I share and we are both hunting for whatever is in this cave together, so that should definitely bring the two of us closer! On top of that we we’re the  two who stayed up so I think we both have some respect for each other. Nehe is also finally giving me the time of day which is good because I get the feeling he’s playing a strong social game with  those he’s close to, so thats another in. Also, if Brett is actually with me like he says, then now if people do push me he has something he can point at and say, no, Linus is with the team and worked hard for us so lets keep him for now! Im back off to my paper, but Ill keep yall posted :D

The bottom line is that we’re gonna try to blindside Richie at tribal tonight. I want to get him out because I see him as a huge long term threat, but he also flopped at the challenge, so he’s very easy to throw under the bus this round. We’ve got the votes. Now everyone just needs to keep their shit together.

Okay so its 1:30 and tribal is at 10. Current situation: Jay told me that Tommy and Sam came to her wanting to vote out Richie. Then I was talking to Steffen and she told him the same thing so I think the majority is probably voting Richie. But here’s MY current dilemma. Gaston just told me him and Richie were talking about voting out Ashley. I know the votes wont be there but I don’t know if I should tell Gaston or not. I REALLY dont want him to be in the dark because i’m totally genuine in wanting to work with him but i’m worried that he’ll tell Richie and then i’ll look like a snitch. Jay also made a comment lumping together the maldives people which worries me because i dont want to appear as unapproachable so while I love Richie and would love for him to stick around I feel like voting him out is the best thing to do right now to show that i’m my own person and not playing for my season you know? I just need to figure out what to do about Gaston cause i dont want him to lose trust in me.

[12:23:28 PM] Richie: Thanks Ting :) [12:23:40 PM] Richie: Hopefully we both survive and we get to know each other better [9:32:17 PM] Ting Ting Shi: yes i agree I waited 9 fucking hours for that shit THIS TRIBE IS FULL OF FUCKING LOSERS ALL TOO SCARED TO BRING UP A NAME! I’m throwing Ashley out there YOLO I was gonna throw out Steffen’s name simply for being forced to endure Gilmore Girls on skype last night. But that payback will have to come later.

So no one is talking about the vote. We were down to 7 hours until the vote was due and I needed to go to bed. So I had to do something which I really didn’t want to do because I don’t care enough about who goes to put myself out there like that. They could literally approach me with ANY name and I’d vote that person out. So now I have to be the douche bag who throws out names. MY PLEASURE. So I size up my fucking loser tribe mates: Gaston - We’ll work well together but if we stick together it will eventually get us targeted. For now though, we need each other. Tommy - He tries so hard to win challenges. Useful. Steffen - is one of the chatty ones in a tribe that’s socially dead. We need people with a heart beat so he’s safe. Sam - He’s a guy. He can’t be voted out pre-merge that would be feminist. Jay - Her days are numbered. NUMBERED!!! But for now she’s fine. Amanda - I get “sneaky chaotic neutral” vibes from her which I like so I want her around just to see what she will eventually do. Ting Ling - I feel bad cos she was first boot in her season so I want her to stay so she can play a bit. Christian - I haven’t talked to her yet and have no plans to do so. But she did amazing in the challenge. Useful. Ashley - Who? Guess I’m throwing Ashley’s name out there! HEEEEEY!

OKAY hi, me again. Its 2:43 now and SHITS HITTING THE FAN. Gaston messaged me with updates saying that JAY MADE A CHAT WITH HIM RICHIE TINGTING AND STEFFEN. Either Jay is a mastermind that I can’t figure out or she’s just cracked. She literally came to both me and Steffen earlier saying the vote was Richie but now SHES MAKING A GROUP CHAT WITH HIM AND PLAYING GASTON LIKE A FIDDLE. So obviously that being said i’m gonna be a loyal ass bitch and decided now was the time to fill Gaston in about the Richie situation and hes pisssssssed. But he agrees thats Richie leaving might be better for both of us in the long run. But he said he might still vote with Richie so i dont look like a snitch to Jay which is super nice of him. UPDATE WITHIN THE UPDATE ITS NOW 3:00 and JAY JUST MESSAGED ME TELLING ME THE GROUP AND THAT THEYRE USING IT TO MAKE RICHIE AND GASTON FEEL SAFE FJDJDKDKD She also was giving me a heads up that Richie might come talk to me about voting for Ashley and i said thanks and she was like “yeah of course i wanna keep the people i trust in the loop” SO SHE TRUSTS ME? AM I LIKE THE MALDIVES QUEEN OR SOMETHING? Why is she trying to mist Richie and Gaston but trusting me? Do i have fairy wings and sneeze trust glitter? I just hope im not actually a target and i’m the one getting misted. Also im curious to see if Steffen tells me about the group or if he decides to be a shady bitch lmfao okay i’ll be back later checking in again

Its 3:11 and Gaston now thinks they’re actually trying to blindside him and telling me Richie just incase i spilled to them. This tribal is gonna be the death of me

So now that we are going to tribal, alliances are finally forming. I am currentlt in two, one is “The Golden Girls” consisting of Ting Ting, Jay, Tommy and I. And then the other is “the hosts attack us” and that is everyone listed above plus Steffen. I really vibe well with Jay and Tommy, and I already know Steffen from a previous game. They are all people I trust, cant wait to see how it goes!! Vote tonight is supposed to be Richie, and from what we have all talked about it looks like it will be unanimous, but ya never know.

We lost immunity sadly, kinda bummed about that. Now we have to vote one of us out and I like everyone here. I like my place on the tribe but my instinct tells me not to trust anyone. My relationships have changed within the past few days, I feel like I’m less connecting with Ting Ting, she’s not so much a ride or die. I really don’t have anyone I can trust 100% on this tribe. So I’m just gonna have to deal with for now, I feel kinda lonely on this tribe just because I don’t feel anyone cares for me that much. I actually feel closer to Richie/Gaston more than most the people I’m in an alliance with but there’s really nothing I can do since Jay/Steffen have control of the numbers so I’m gonna sit back, relax, and try to get on their good side so they don’t feel compelled to target me anytime soon. Lastly hopefully we win next immunity (if I’m still in) because the fans are trying to stay “8 strong” and their tribals have been so boring, I want to see something fun happen to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34q25IKADvo

okay ugh i made a messy mistake and it’s my first one like god richie asked if i anyone talked to me and i wasn’t thinking so like i said no STUPID!!!! I WAS SUPPOSED TO SAY ASHLEY I don’t think anything will come of it but it was a wake up call that i gotta stay woke and trust the process. but i definitely think he’s being shady now damn

I’m honestly so humiliated right now.

Figured I should do a confessional for this round!  The challenge was a good one - definitely more endurance than anything.  I am so glad we don’t have to go to tribal tonight and we owe that alllll to Keegan.  He killed it!  He stayed awake for 12 hours to play.  Nehe helped him stay up and Linus did well too.  I am hoping that we keep our alliance strong if we have to go to tribal again soon.  Bye to a fave tonight!   I also have to get into doing video confessionals again.  So much more fun.  I feel like I’m boring typing out my thoughts in the game.  But the beginning has been stress-free and predictable saying bye to Caroline and Maranda.  

That endurance challenge was something else. I can’t believe that I lasted that long. But that was kind of my plan to start with. Since day one I’ve felt on the outs I guess, so my plan was to not sit out this immunity and prove myself as an asset to the tribe in case we lost and had to go to tribal. Well, we did end up losing, but I was the last one standing. Woo hoo! So obviously my plan worked, because from what I’m hearing the majority is on Richie tonight. Which is great since he didn’t help out at all. Time zone difference or not, he’s never active to begin with and we need to keep our tribe strong so we don’t have to go to another tribal. I feel like a tribe swap is on the horizon, but I could be wrong. If one does happen, please rig me on the same tribe as Ashley, Steffen, and even Jay.

Update: it’s 9:03 as far as I know the vote is still going to be Richie, with Gaston and Richie voting for Ashley. If i’m getting misted and i’m fucked this week then there’s nothing i can do but that would really suck. As always I wont feel safe until tribal is over but we’ll see.

[technicalsolutions88]

“It’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok during an all-hands meeting. But it’s not. TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that’s vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a selfie, show something pretty, or pan around what you’re up to. TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded, and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Insta.

That’s why Zuckerberg’s comments cast a dark shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps. How can it beat what it doesn’t understand? He certainly can’t ignore it. Facebook’s copycat Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installs in the same period outside of China. Oh, and TikTok has 1.4 billion total installs beyond China to date.

TikTok

Casey Newton of The Verge today published two hours of audio and transcripts from two internal-only all-hands Q&As held by Zuckerberg at Facebook in July. His comments touch on the company’s plan to fight being broken up by regulators, especially if Elizabeth Warren becomes President. He thinks Facebook would win, but on resorting to suing the government, he says “does that still suck for us? Yeah.” Zuckerberg also describes how Facebook is working to launch a payments product in Mexico and elsewhere by year’s end as Libra deals with regulatory scrutiny.

But beyond his comments on regulation, it’s his pigeonholing of TikTok that’s most alarming. It foreshadows Facebook failing to win one of the core social feeds that its business depends on. Perhaps his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak portrays him as thinking TikTok is just the next Snapchat Stories to destroy.

Zuckeberg’s Thoughts On TikTok

Here’s what Zuckerberg said about TikTok during the internal Q&A sessions, (emphasis mine):

So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

And the way that we kind of think about it is: it’s married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app. And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that’s a standalone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.

We’re taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there. But yeah, I think that it’s not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing. But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what they’re doing, I think it is quite interesting. I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend. It is growing, but they’re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we’ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising. So the space is still fairly nascent, and there’s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here. But I think this is a real thing. It’s good.

To Zuckerberg’s credit, he’s not dismissing the threat. He knows TikTok is popular. He knows it’s growing in key international markets Facebook and Instagram depend on to keep user counts rising. And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.

Lasso

But while TikToks might look like Stories because they’re vertical videos, and TikTok might algorithmically recommend them to people like Instagram Explore, it’s a whole ‘nother beast of a product and one that may be harder than it seems to copy.

To crystallize why, let’s rewind to Snapchat. With the launch of Stories, it started to blow up with US teens. Facebook’s attempts to clone it in standalone apps like Poke and Slingshot never gained traction. In fact, none of Facebook’s standalone apps have succeeded unless they splintered off an already-popular piece of Facebook like chat and users were forced to download them like Messenger. It wasn’t until Zuckerberg stuck his clone of Stories front-and-center atop Instagram and Facebook that Snapchat’s user count went from growing 18% per quarter to shrinking. There, Facebook used the same strategy laid out in Zuckerberg’s comments — push its good-enough clone in countries where the original isn’t popular yet.

But Facebook was fortunate because Stories really wasn’t that dissimilar to the content users were already sharing on Instagram — tiny biographical snippets of their lives. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had originally invented Stories as a vision of Facebook’s News Feed through the lens of an ephemeral camera. All users had to know was “I take the same videos, but shorter and sillier, posted more often, and then they disappear”. The concept of Instagram and Facebook didn’t have to change. They were still about telling friends what you were up to. Choking off TikTok’s growth will be much more complicated.

Why TikTok Is Tough To Clone

TikTok isn’t about you or what you’re doing. It’s about entertaining your audience. It’s not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It’s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else, and acting out jokes. It’s not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage. And it’s not about originality — the heart of Instagram. TikTok is about remixing culture — taking the audio from someone else’s clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a video you record.

That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they add the remixing functionality. Most videos on those apps aren’t designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are. Insta and Facebook’s social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but don’t encompass the new wave of amateur performers TikTok elevates. And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone else’s creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesn’t offer much to remix.

That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph, and retrain users’ understanding of these apps’ purpose…at the risk of distracting from their core use cases. This leaves Facebook hoping to grow its standalone TikTok clone Lasso which TechCrunch scooped a year ago before it launched last November. But as we’ve seen, Facebook struggles growing brand new apps, and that effort is further hindered by its increasingly toxic brand and sheen of uncoolness. Nor does it help that Facebook must divert development resources to comply with all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of its $5 billion FTC fine and settlement.

The Next Feed

Facebook’s best bet is to assess the future value of the ads it could run on a successful TikTok clone and apply some greater fraction of that grand sum to competing directly. It’s already made some smart additions to Lasso like tutorials for how to remix and the option to add GIFs as sections of your video. But it’s still failing to gain serious traction in the US. While typical TikTok homepage videos have hundreds of thousands of Likes, the top ones I saw in my Lasso feed today received 70 or fewer.

I had Sensor Tower run some analysis comparing TikTok with Lasso since its launch last November, and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the US. Some more stats:

US Total Downloads Since November: Lasso – 250,000 // TikTok – 41.3 million

US Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 760 // TikTok – 126,000

Average US Google Play Social App Chart Ranking: Lasso – #155 // TikTok – #2

Beyond the US, Lasso has only launched in one other market, Mexico in April, where it’s been faring better but could hardly even be considered a competitor to TikTok. They won’t even coherently fit together on a graph. Facebook needs to lean harder into Lasso:

Mexico Total Downloads Since April: Lasso – 175,000 // TikTok – 3.3 million

Mexico Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 1,000 // TikTok – 19,000

Zuckerberg may need to find a coherent place for TikTok style features inside Instagram and potentially Facebook. That could be another horizontal row of previews like with Stories and/or a header on the Explore page dedicated to premeditated content. Certainly something more prominent than a single button like IGTV that still no one is asking for. One opportunity to best TikTok would be building a dedicated remix source browser into the Stories camera to help users find content to put their own spin on.

Facebook will also need to buy out top TikTok creators to make videos for it instead, and even quasi-hire some of the most prolific video meme or challenge inventors to give users trends to jump on rather than just one-off clips to watch. Its failure to offer IGTV stars monetization has led many to ignore that platform, and it can’t afford that again.

If Zuckerberg approaches TikTok as merely an algorithmic video recommender like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed. If he doesn’t decisively move to challenge TikTok soon, its catalog of content to remix will grow insurmountable and it will own the whole concept of short form performative video. Snapchat’s insistence on ephemerality makes it incompatible with remixing, and YouTube isn’t nimble enough to reinvent itself.

If no American company can step up, we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese political values at odds with our own. If only Twitter hadn’t killed Vine.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2nqeOxP Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com