#and robs us of discussion opportunities on the works of a guy who is incredibly focused detail oriented and passionate about his medium

[creature-once-removed]

.

[donnerpartyofone]

while i’m apparently still in confession mode for some dark reason: 

after i told that awful story yesterday about the degrading one night stand that an older male friend spent a year bullying me into, i started thinking about all the cliches that are sold to us about the sexuality of precocious young women: what it means for us to navigate the devious emotional traps set out by the jealous and covetous world around us. what i mean is, there’s this whole gothic narrative that never stops circulating, involving beautiful, talented, intelligent, sensitive young women who are advanced enough to start exploring their own desires independently, but not experienced enough to identify the (typically) older male predators who hunt them. these men take advantage of their uninformed curiosity, leveraging their prey’s desire to grow up faster in order to control, possess, and abuse them. while this narrative is inherently criminal, society never seems willing to fully denounce it, preferring to preserve its erotic potency for a wide and slavering audience. the iconography of this narrative is mostly derived from Lolita–

[which btw our cultural failure to see that book as anything other than a “love story” is really disturbing and speaks volumes about our willingness to project our grossest ideas wherever we want, even when other interpretations (like “black comedy”) are abundantly available]

–a mature but fragile adolescent with that /special something/ innocently hypnotizes a genteel older man whose sophistication belies his uncontrollable animal desire for her, which is less His Problem than it is a natural response to her beauty and charm; a  forbidden love affair ensues. when i was young, i swallowed this concept hook line and sinker, hoping it would happen to me some day! i hated dumb little boys my own age, and i felt that if some Humbert Humbert type were to flatter me with his highly curated attention, then i would know that i had truly arrived.

“sadly”, i made it through high school and college without ever knowing that validating thrill. i wasted the latter half of my 20s on an abusive relationship with a guy two years younger than me, who often argued that he should be allowed to wreck my life however he wanted because he was “less mature” than i was and deserved more leeway. as i turned 30, i met the extraordinary person i would marry. i felt a profound sense of relief, entering my 30s; i had finished with so many of my old delusions, and the pulverizing pressure to have The Time of Your Life throughout one’s 20s had finally lifted. i looked back on my youth, thinking of it as a period of dreary, pointless misery in which “nothing really happened”, good or bad. but recently, when i started to think about it with greater focus, i realized that some shit really DID happened to me. i had just completely ignored it, because i thought of it as the fruits of my own bad taste. 

throughout junior high, i had a bizarre rapport with a guy in his early 20s–”nothing happened”, as they say, but this guy was sort of a freak and a loner, and i’m probably lucky that there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for something TO happen. then my supposed best friend, jealous of even this non-event in my sad little existence, forced a relationship with a 30 year old man out of nowhere, and competitively abused my ears with a lot of gnarly details about their horrible sex life. then in high school, my first two boyfriends were both pretentious manipulative dickheads in their 20s who really had no business bothering someone who wasn’t old enough to vote. some of my friends suffered from the same problem, though we all just felt like we were becoming independent young women or something. then there’s some other stuff with an older classmate who was abundantly aware of how emotionally unstable i was, and took appalling advantage of that for a long time, and i probably won’t ever be brave enough to talk about it. then in college i briefly “dated” a guy around 50 with whom luckily nothing bad happened before i got rid of him, but like, it really wasn’t cool, looking back–he made me feel incredibly obligated, and as he only informed me mid-stream, he was married with children. then i spent the rest of college getting dragged through the mud by a guy in his 30s who used his professional clout and well-honed manipulative abilities to “take my virginity” (a phrase and concept i hate, but which applies here), which he was very excited about; it would have been best if he had just abandoned me after that, as so many assholes do, because he then cultivated a long tawdry and extremely damaging soap opera between us, the only point of which was to make trouble for his actual girlfriend, who was ALSO much younger than him. and the end of college and slightly after, i developed another intense connection with a man a few decades older, who would never quite initiate a relationship, but who was insidiously manipulative and made me feel terrible when i eventually got a real (age-appropriate) boyfriend, as if i owed him something; i later found out he did the same thing to another girl that i know, who is substantially younger. the terrible one night stand, previously discussed, was just a gross little footnote to this disgusting history…

…but the thing is, i never, at any time, felt like i had taken part in the overheated archetypal drama that society has built up around may-december romances. i didn’t even see myself as a victim of the bad behavior of adults, of people who should and did know better; i just felt separate from the whole thing, even though i had fantasized about it so much as a kid. the thing is, at the same time that the Lolita narrative is inappropriately romanticized, it does provide an opportunity to see the girl as a potential victim, a Little Red Riding Hood who enters a perilous erotic negotiation with a Big Bad Wolf. because i didn’t see myself as the heroine of my own iteration of this overly familiar story, i didn’t recognize the degree to which i’d been exploited by people who knew to use my youth and inexperience against me. i just blamed myself. and the reason for all this is really sad: i simply didn’t feel attractive. in my mind, the vulnerable nymphet was always delicate, doe-like, elegant; clothes hung on her alluring frame in a way that created a dizzying paradox between her youth and her emerging maturity; she could dance, play music, or write touching poetry; she was preternaturally irresistible even to “good men”. she had to be liv tyler in STEALING BEAUTY (*barf*) or some shit; only somebody that compelling could star as the doomed princess in society’s well-loved fairy tale about statutory rape. personally, i perceived myself as ugly, awkward, socially burdensome, and most importantly, the kind of girl who should count herself extremely lucky to be the center of anybody’s attention, even temporarily. because i didn’t see myself as a damsel in distress who deserved protection and sympathy, i failed to spot my own victimization. i thought of my history of increasingly negative and abusive encounters with older men as a matter of bad luck, bad judgment on my own part, and ultimately, “the best i could do” if i wanted any kind of affection. so i guess the irony is that if i had identified myself as a desirable dolores hayes type, then yes, i would have been in serious danger of fetishizing my own mistreatment–but on the other hand, i would have had a more realistic framework for understanding the sinister thing that was happening to me. unfortunately, the other side of the misogyny coin–not the side that turns you into a sex object, but the side that excludes you from feeling sexually worthy at all–prevented me from noticing that that awful Little Red Riding Hood cliche had already happened to me several times over.

tl;dr - when misogyny convinces you that you have nothing to steal, then it’s hard to tell when misogynists are trying to rob you.

it’s funny to start recognizing this only now that i’m approaching 40. i see a lot of young women on tumblr heroically fighting to strike a balance between enjoying their kinks and avoiding the corrupt elements in their communities–all the while trying to stay aware of how their personal history and mental health plays into this drama. some of them are way farther along in that philosophical journey than i was at their age, and i really admire the work they’re doing. i’m writing this more for the ones who don’t even know that they’re already a part of this struggle, because they haven’t learned to see themselves as desirable enough to be included in it. that is to say, i wrote this for myself; but i have a sneaking suspicion that someone else out there needs to hear it, too.

This post brought to you in part by the very beginning of CABIN IN THE WOODS, which, while not a deep film in any way, features a salient moment in which College Girl #1 tries to tell College Girl #2 that the professor who took advantage of her is a scumbag, and College Girl #2 defends him, humbly and maturely replying: “I knew what I was getting into.” The blood freezes in my veins when I think of how many times I said something like this about someone who did not deserve my defense. If you got dicked over, literally and/or figuratively, by someone older, sober-er, and/or more experienced than you, then this is your gentle reminder that you really cannot be accused of knowing what you’re getting into.

[d-criss-news]

In a brilliant moment of serendipity, Darren Criss discovered he had been Emmy-nominated as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for The Assassination of Gianni Versace at an airport branch of Planet Hollywood. “We were sitting there looking at the most Hollywood thing we could. That just tickled me to no end,” regales the former Glee star, who played Kurt Hummel’s love interest, Blaine Anderson, in the musical comedy television show.

At the time, Darren was on his way to a gig in Aspen, Colorado. “The Emmy nominations were coming out at 8.30am and the flight was leaving at 9.45am and we �� me, my fiancée, my manager, publicist, basically the work family – all wanted to go and watch it together, somewhere I would be close enough so that when it was announced I could run over to the gate.”

The punchline came while sitting there waiting for the nominations to be revealed: his Glee version of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” also started to play on the speakers. Looking around to see if perhaps one of the servers had clocked him and was being “cute”, because it was quite a bizarre coincidence, he realised that nope, “this is 8.30am in the international terminal and nobody gives a shit about my version of ‘Teenage Dream’,” he laughs. “But we just couldn’t fucking believe it, like what a crazy auspicious moment! But it was a nice little story.”

By now, it’s one that will have its ending fully wrapped up: the Emmys took place on September 17 in LA, which is where Darren is now on the other end of the phone. For context, it’s one of those intensely hot end-of-July days that everyone in London is complaining about. For Darren it’s a day of playing “Mr Octopus” as he puts it. “Today is insane. When you have ‘free time’, it’s actually more hectic because in the absence of stuff that you’re obligated to do you immediately see everything you’ve neglected a lot more clearly.”

In his perky twang, he gives me “the shorthand” of this: Elsie Fest to organise for autumn, the New York show-tune themed festival he founded; music to work on for Computer Games, the band he started with his brother; marketing for the new piano bar he and his fiancée, Mia Swier, have opened; projects he can’t talk about but is excited about; a wedding to plan “at some point” next year; work on the house; and that general life admin that creeps up on all of us. “Hey, we all got stuff,” he chimes.

And among all of this, he casually slips in: “I’m also reading scripts and trying to get another acting job if I can get one.” Which can’t help but make me laugh. If he can get one? Because, let’s be honest, regardless of the Emmys outcome (a big congratulations if you bagged it and if not, you were robbed!), his portrayal of Andrew Cunanan, as well as a stellar career to date (he replaced Daniel Radcliffe in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on Broadway to great success, is the mind behind A Very Potter Musicaland has starred in Hedwig and the Angry Inch), shouldn’t make that too hard. But it’s “cute” – as he would say – to know he doesn’t rest on his laurels.

Darren was terrifying and intriguing in his role as Cunanan, the serial killer who murdered four men before ending his violent spree with fashion designer Gianni Versace in FX’s American Crime Story retelling of the real-life event in Miami in 1997. When it aired earlier this year, I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t watching it. If you weren’t binge-streaming it, you were glued to BBC2 desperate for next week’s instalment to watch the unfolding plot of a story that in many ways is little known, certainly on the Cunanan front.

“A lot of it is pretty shrouded in mystery. There are two groups of people who have been particularly aware of the Cunanan story. Filipinos in my life all know someone who knew him,” says Darren, who, hailing from San Francisco, is also half Filipino, as was Cunanan. “And true crime addicts.” “The story itself, which is endlessly fascinating, is not only interesting but has significant social weight and things to be discussed and topics that I think are important. It goes on and on and on,” he enthuses. “The role is incredibly nuanced and varied and complex, which is something that actors wake up in the morning for.”

Where the first series spotlights The People v. OJ Simpson, a trial that arguably most people in the world – certainly in the US – are familiar with, the Versace murder, while shocking and awful (the designer himself being a significant cultural icon and his death a huge loss to the fashion industry) lent itself to more questions than answers. Which from Darren’s point of view gave him a certain amount of free rein. “You’re not stacked against people’s expectations of an impersonation of somebody. I think that helped audiences; it really gave me and our story a blank slate.”

It’s true. As a viewer, I couldn’t help but find my feelings and point of view change as the narrative revealed Cunanan’s own backstory. “That, to me, is the most heartening thing; that’s the most encouraging thing you could say – that’s the goal.”

His performance has been described as career-defining but it’s not the first time he’s had such an accolade aimed in his direction. Yet you can’t help but think that this one, Emmy nomination aside, might just be the one to carry a little more weight, such was the grit and darkness that came with it and played out by someone we’re more used to associating with the tween spark of Glee.

It seems, therefore, an apt time to ask what his fantasy role would be. “Oh man. I have a pretty wild imagination but I’d like to think that my brain isn’t good enough to imagine the part I’d want,” he says. “And, also, fantasies evolve throughout your life based on whatever situation you find yourself in.” American Crime Story, certainly, he says is the kind of role he’d been working and waiting his whole life to play – which is not to say he dreamt of being a serial killer! “Let’s keep turning left, turning hard rights and hard lefts as much as possible, as long as the story is good. The name of the game for me is variety and versatility. If every time I do a role we have people say that’s a real departure from the last thing that would be awesome.”

Darren got the acting bug – or “storytelling” bug as he prefers to call it – at a young age. He was a child at the heart of the Disney Renaissance era and Robin Williams lived locally in his native San Francisco. One day, when seeing Aladdin at the cinema (“I can’t even tell you how many times I went to go see it,”) and realising that the Genie was voiced by Williams, his eureka moment came.

“You know when you’re a kid and you have dreams of being something and they seem kind of far off from you unless there’s somebody you can see do it?” he offers. “I remember very distinctly watching this Genie bring so much joy to the people around me… and I wanted in on that, I wanted to be the Genie. But once you realise you can’t necessarily do that and I found out the voice of the genie was Robin Williams, I was like that’s the guy, that’s the famous guy that lives in our city! I can do that and so he was really a massive inspiration for me.”

So, too, was Peter Coyote, another San Francisco-based actor, whom Darren in fact cold-called to find out what he should do to be an actor. He subsequently enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater’s Young Conservatory Programme before studying drama at college. A keen violinist, music and acting had always worked in constant tandem. “So that’s why it’s so hilarious to me that by the time I got Glee I’d already been doing this my whole life,” he says.

At the time of the Gianni Versace murder, Darren was 10 years old. “I did [remember it] in a sort of vague sense of pop cultural event. Obviously, Versace is a massive international figure so I was aware that he was murdered.” It wasn’t until much later in 2011, when his Hollywood lifestyle led him to the world of high fashion, that the dots joined.

“We were on tour for Glee and I popped down to Milan to go to this Versace fashion show, which was an amazing event and you’re there with Donatella and there in the house, the estate of the Versace family.” On a tour of it, Darren recalls seeing beautiful home pieces and fashion works. “There were a lot of things from his personal collection and [the steward] of course was saying ‘Well this was made after Gianni’s murder in 1997.’ It codified in my brain. He was taken away a little too early.”

For ACS producer Ryan Murphy, it was Darren who codified in the brain. The Glee co-creator had long had him in mind for the part. “People like Ryan have had their eye on the Cunanan story for a long time and we had worked closely in a few capacities.” Darren just had to play the waiting game. “I honestly said just let me know when you want to do this because obviously it would be a huge opportunity for me and I think it would be an incredible story but I don’t really have the keys for that car, man. You’re the driver, let me know when you want to pick me up!” Three years later and that proverbial beep came.

In real life, Darren has to be one of the most modest and upbeat people, armed with an always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life attitude. You imagine he’s not all that good at sitting still, hence his potentially self-inflicted to-do list, which you also get the feeling is built from passion not pain. “I just feel so grateful at every turn of my career; if you’re able to do anything and that there’s any definition at all is a huge win so I’ll take it where I can get it,” he says referring to the praise he’s received in playing Cunanan, one he’s also quick to bring back down to earth with a very grounding analogy. “Every moment of your life is defining. The fact that I decided to have granola this morning defines the rest of the way my digestive system works…” he laughs. He has quite the way with words.

This too is helpful in a Hollywood landscape right now that, post-Weinstein and post-Trump, has found itself in troubling times. “What a big, big topic,” he begins. “It’s the Wild West right now, truly, there are so many things that I think it’s not necessarily Hollywood figuring itself out, it’s our whole society figuring it out as represented by Hollywood. It kind of gets the brunt of it because of its exposure and its influence,” he explains. “There are a lot of good things happening in it for people who have been marginalised and we’re setting new standards for ourselves that we should have set a long time ago, and in that sense it’s really good. But there are unfortunately other things that are happening where it’s hard to draw the line of what’s right and wrong and a lot of questions are being asked that we’ve never asked ourselves before about what’s appropriate.”

Social media, too, he thinks plays a significant role, moving faster than we are able to keep up with. “There’s a lot of things that are falling by the wayside as a result of that. I’m making very vague comments but yeah it’s very tricky,” he concludes before diplomatically topic-shifting to his own lack of social media usage. Firstly, because he’s a private person. And secondly, unlike so many people, he does realise the responsibility that comes with publishing a post. “Even when Twitter started and people would post joke-stuff and I would say ‘Woah, woah, that’s out there forever, are you sure? I think you think only I’m seeing this,’.” He says he’s always been uneasy with the idea of this kind of ‘stuff’ existing in perpetuity.

Which means that the answer to the next question requires some serious thought. Who would make for his fantasy dinner party guests? British comedian Eddie Izzard (because Darren is a big Anglophile); if we could roll back time, Sammy Davis Jr, “who the world knows as a great entertainer but he was also an insane dancer and musician”; Nat King Cole for the same reasons; and, his number one choice, Howard Ashman, the lyricist and dramaturge behind the previously mentioned Disney renaissance (aka Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast). “I’ve always admired his craftsmanship and he’s someone I’ve always thought, if I had a dinner, I’d really like to have a chat with. All of my heroes are the people who were hyphenates,” says Darren, which makes sense because he’s just the same. One small suggestion: hold the fantasy dinner party at Planet Hollywood. That would make a nice story.

[blakes-seven-or-so-blog]

S2 E2: Shadow

On a very fancy 70′s era chandelier space station, a modern art enthusiast extorts a couple of sickly junkies who he uses for odd jobs like robbery and murder. He's a complete prick and likes to hear them beg for his hallucinogenic jello balls. The mafia is alive and well in the 28th century and still goes by an Italian name - Terra Nostra (a riff on Cosa Nostra), but they dress like Directoire bureaucrats. Turns out one of the junkies, Bek - probably no relation to the musician or the other musician - just said no and is only pretending to be a sickly junkie, and proceeds to rob the mobster when he holds out on them. They make plans to escape from the mafia-infested hive of scum and villainy along with (from what I gather, their little brother) Peety. Hanna looks too stoned to remember the gate number.

Blake is still being a fingersucking space pirate, and Avon has gone full Jiffy Pop. Vila is cosplaying Luke Skywalker, and Jenna found another gorgeous rock star chiton. Cally's lovely dress has a cape. Gan has moved on from early renaissance cleric to hairy-chested Tudor bard.

Vila is drooling over what he calls the Satellite of Sin; it's Space Las Vegas openly run by the mafia, who Blake intends to work with 'use'. Gan and Avon both disapprove of doing business with mafia because they're sane. Gan stands up to Blake’s weak semantic justifications and I'm so proud of him. Their mafia contact is the jerk who just got robbed; Jenna almost smuggled contraband for him once before finding out that he was a wiseguy and the contraband was evil jello. Vila is heartbroken when he finds out he's not getting to go to Vegas.

Hanna was too stoned to remember the gate number, and Peety is modeling a body bag made of a space blanket. I don't think he's going to retain much body heat with that, but maybe they've improved space blankets in the future. Bek thinks he OD'ed but no, he just died because DRUGS KILL. So does the space mafia, who have come for the doomed fake junkie.

Vila finally points out that Blake is a ‘fluffy-cheeked amateur’ and says he's led a sheltered life, because it’s true. Blake might have been a political rabble-rouser but he was never a real criminal until the mutiny on the London. He tries to use his powers of reason and adorableness to sway Cally but the miserable alien isn't having any.

How could you resist that face? HOW?! It strains my credulity.

Zen is a sarcastic jerk to Vila so he turns the drunken bees on. Orac isn't interested and Vila threatens to switch him off and throw away the key. And then Orac says something incredibly ominous: 'Soon, that will be no longer a problem'. ᵒʰˢʰᶦᵗ

Avon loves money, we get it Avon. Blake snaps his fingers for the pouch and Avon is so thoroughly disgusted with his hammy brojefe.

I laughed for five minutes.

The mafia insist on offering Blake & Co. refreshments, at gunpoint. Zen really hates Orac and manages to throw shade by haughtily referring to him as 'the one called Orac' like he's too good for that smarmy little pissant. Then the drunken bees take over and OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT. Vila snuck away to reenact Leaving Las Vegas. Cally wants a souvenir, but whereas most would be satisfied with a shot glass that reads ‘I survived the SOS!’, she requests some dental jewelry.

Avon and Gan are imprisoned with Bek and his stoned sister in what appears to be a large shopping bag, which Gan doubts even Vila could break out of. I guess paper bag tech has improved in the 28th century, too. Bek makes fun of Gan’s stealth capabilities.

Cally takes the entire chandelier hostage in return for her friends. Everyone needs a friend like her. They make their getaway while rudely declining to take the junkies along. Then Blake changes his mind because Vila is kicking and he needs their expertise.

Aboard the Liberator, no one can find Orac, even though Gan tried calling his name. Avon issues an unnecessarily sick burn and really, Gan, just punch him.

Blake wants to go threaten the mafia because bargaining with them backfired so well. Both Gan and Avon again tell him he’s being outrageously reckless, but he ignores them. Cally has a bad feeling and then the drunken bees get angry and Orac traps Cally in a tesseract. It reminds me of when the Mara trapped Tegan in the Dark Places of the Inside on Deva Loka.

Zen analyzes the hallucinogenic jello and says it’s made of sentient, telepathic, motile, and apparently goth cactus. Peyote has evolved in the future. Zen tries to tell Blake something else about the jello, but Blake has this infuriating habit of disregarding the sensible things his friends try to tell him. He says if they control the Spice Shadow, they control the universe Terra Nostra. So off they go to a desert planet to get eaten by giant worms I guess.

Vila finds a catatonic Cally next to Orac, who says she’s insane, probably from being chased into a hypercube by angry bees. Blake shrugs it off as ‘alien problems’, and Avon enigmatically says “she’s more human than I am”. Vila is flippant about it but Avon and Cally are close, and his statement is both insightful and a little heartwrenching.

Avon insists that Orac can’t be to blame because it’s just a computer, despite the fact that he thinks Zen is ‘just a computer’ too, yet has turned against them several times. They’re sure no one knows they’re heading to Arrakis. The mafia are well aware they’re heading to Arrakis because the jello balls are spiked with a 'not exactly radioactive’ signal. The art enthusiast’s enforcer has moved up in the gangster world by choking his former boss with mustard.

R.I.F. (rest in French’s) Largo, you prick.

Blake, Jenna, and Avon have all joined in on the Luke Skywalker cosplay now because it turns out they’re headed to Tatooine. Or Kalgash, because it has enough suns (2) that there is no night. Blake is also being a right jerk to everyone and Gan has just about had enough. According to Bek, Arrakis Tatooine Kalgash Zondar looks harmless, like a cheese pizza. Obviously he hasn’t seen that scene in Casino where Nicky goes on about pre-digging holes in the desert. This planet is probably riddled with shallow graves.

On the toasty surface they discover some whispering frisbees, the source of the hallucinogenic jello. Jenna mocks Blake’s impossible-to-count crew collection. I mean, in this episode alone, it goes from Blake’s 8 to (briefly) Blake’s 10. How many, Blake? How many?!

Unbeknownst to the other seven or so, Orac is busy emotionally abusing Cally. Only it’s not Orac, it’s The Darkness, which has possessed Orac. It makes her run and teleports her to the toasty planet where she promptly loses her teleport bracelet again. She runs until she passes out and a herd of whispering frisbee slowly dogpile her, which is... utterly adorable.

On the Liberator, they discuss what being alone means for an Auronar. Orac zaps Vila and gets even more sinister, but they still don’t suspect he’s turned to the Dark Side until he tries to crash the ship and electrocutes Hanna. Blake’s seven-or-so is down to nine now. I think. Maybe eight? I don’t know.

Cally is tripping so hard, and has lots of new friends. So many warm fuzzies.

So to speak.

She, like other Auronar, gains mental, emotional, and psychic strength from the warmth of companionship. With her frisbee friends, she is able to just psychically unplug Orac. Then she wakes up miraculously not burnt to a crisp from falling asleep in the suns.

Everything is fine without possessed Orac, except for poor dead Hanna. Thirty years later I still don’t quite understand the exposition offered but that’s okay, I’ll chalk it up to unfathomable eldritch shenanigans. Avon’s solution to Orac’s little evil susceptibility problem is to wire a bomb into him. Seems perfectly rational.

Bek is outraged that he can’t get any justice, but Blake and Avon reveal what they discovered on Arrakis: the Spice Is The Worm. Er, wait... The Federation Is the Terra Nostra. So they’ll just keep fighting the Feds as usual and call it justice. After all, the seven-or-so of them might be the sum total of the Good Guys.

Avon is disdainful of the pet frisbee in its own litterbox, and if Cally hadn’t said ‘Mine’, he would have thrown it in the trash instead of setting it back down. Blake is going to leave Bek on Space City, which he was trying to escape from, and come back in three years when Bek’s ninja training is complete.

Imagine Bek in three years, waiting for Blake to show up... :`(

Blake verifies that there are SEVEN, so I guess Bek and Orac don’t count now. Instead of firing on the evil jello planet himself, he offers his vigilante-in-training the opportunity to deal some reckless collateral damage.

Damage report:

- Peety and Hanna

- the slimy mobster Largo

- the gunship Cally blew up

- the evil jello production base which Blake & Co. sabotaged, along with several guards, the staff, and countless critically endangered sentient cactus

This is one of my favorite episodes. When I first saw it, I had a tiny knife named 'Bek' that a boyfriend had given me, and was excited when it turned out to also be the name of a cool character on my favorite new show. I love the costumes and makeup, and Cally makes friends with sentient telepathic cactus. As for those moon disks, I wonder how they move. Two possibilities: they move themselves using telekinetic locomotion, or - they undulate the base of their disk in the same way as gastropods or earthworms.

This episode also marks the initiation of Vila’s substance abuse problem. Bek said it was a powerful and dangerous drug, from which Vila never fully recovers.

I’ve heard Cally referred to as the conscience of the Liberator, but it was Gan first. Gan strongly disapproves of engaging in immoral or unethical means to an end, and he tells Blake off a couple of times for it. In the past he has supported Blake unquestioningly, but he is neither slow-witted nor blindly loyal.

Next: Weapon

[thedeaditeslayer]

Trunk Space Interview - Dana DeLorenzo.

We fell in love with Ash Williams as easily-impressionable preteens, marveling in his brazen foot-in-mouth false bravado, but had his recent sidekick Kelly Maxwell been with him 30 years ago, we’re sorry to say that the chainsaw-wielding anti-hero would have been an afterthought. Portrayed by Dana DeLorenzo in the Starz series “Ash vs Evil Dead,” currently in its third season, Kelly is, as she would say, a breath of mother f@#?ing fresh @ss air!

In reality, DeLorenzo is also one of those freshly inhaled breaths. Eager to discuss her place in the Evil Dead universe and genuinely grateful to have been invited on board, the Ohio native is ecstatic to see her character take more of a leadership role this season, which she says will culminate in a moment that has Kelly seizing upon an opportunity in a extremely unforgettable way.

We recently sat down with DeLorenzo during a bomb cyclone (yes, that’s a thing!) to discuss where the series has impacted her life the most, the star dust that follows Sam Raimi when he leaves a room, and her mother’s spot-on chainsaw impression.

TrunkSpace: How has “Ash vs Evil Dead” impacted your life the most?

DeLorenzo: Oh man, that’s such a hard question to answer because, first of all, brevity is not my strong suit. I’m trying to answer questions in a short amount of time. It’s tough, and something that big and magnified is… something that huge of a topic is still hard for me to articulate. Let me try.

Well for one thing, it gave me a steady job in the entertainment industry, which has been something I have been dreaming and making birthday wishes for my entire life, and just busting my ass, really. I’m from Youngstown, not really the hotbed of entertainment. I’ve just always loved to perform. It was very innate. I was telling jokes to myself on my Fisher-Price tape recorder when I was three, cracking myself up with my “Sesame Street” stuffed animals. It was one of those things that always drove me. And my parents have always kept me very grounded, and are two of the hardest working people I know. So in that sense, I never really thought that it would ever be something I could do for a living, I just always wanted to pursue it on the side. I was working five or six shifts a week, 12 hour shifts on my feet, when I got this audition, in fact. The bar that I was working at was incredible and kept me afloat all those years in LA, for like five years. It was called Beer Belly. The fact that I get to wake up every day and do what I love, I’d say that is the biggest thing. And then there are all the little branches. I mean, what a thrill as an actor to be on a show like this, that has all the things. I get to flex so many muscles. I get to learn so many incredible aspects of the craft, whether it’s doing stunts in action, or doing comedy, which is my number one love, opposite Bruce Campbell, the king of one-liners and comedic timing. Or, I’m there walking in the woods with Xena: Warrior Princess. And also, I get to do drama, and obviously, the horror. I have gotten to cross off so many things on my acting bucket list.

TrunkSpace: Well, and from an outside perspective, that seems like one of the amazing things about being involved in a show like this, is that, anything is possible. You could show up to work and be doing anything on any given day.

DeLorenzo: And that’s really how it is. We move very quickly. So many of the days, things get switched around, and all of a sudden, I’m hanging upside down by my ankles in a tree fight, and then the next day I’m getting covered in blood and viscera with a cannon being shot at me. It definitely keeps it exciting and keeps you on your toes. And that lends itself to the final aspect which is, having fans is obviously something new for me. I’m just so grateful because, this is so sincere, meeting fans gives me life. It’s such a symbiotic relationship to the point where I actually think I get more excited to meet fans than they are to meet me, where I’m the one creeping them out. I’m so intense all the time and I’m so passionate. I mean, I am Italian, that comes with the territory. Truly, when I get to do these conventions or comic cons and meet them, they’re the ones usually backing away from me slowly, asking for security. I just get so filled with love and passion, and as an actor that’s such a great feeling, ’cause the work is the reward, to be honest, for me. I go crazy when there’s nothing going on and I’m not shooting. Right now, usually we’re shooting in New Zealand at this time, and so, I’m having a little bit of a panic attack not being on set. But luckily, I can go to some of these conventions to meet fans and it’s like, how great to have people, first-hand, in your face, and be able to respond to your work and get as excited as you were to shoot it. That, to me, has been the crème de la crème. Like I said, considering my roots and considering the journey and the real tough road it took to get here, there’s not a day that goes by that I am not grateful and feel so lucky to be on the show about a guy with a chainsaw arm. Who knew?

TrunkSpace: As it relates to the fans, this franchise, more than a lot of the genre franchises, it feels like people have a sense of ownership in it. It’s almost like they found their indie band that they loved and they want to share it with their close friends. How long did it take for you, being a part of it, to feel that ownership as well?

DeLorenzo: You know, I don’t know that I feel ownership in this, I just feel like I’m a cog in the wheel. But in terms of when did I feel like people were receptive, to welcome us as part of the group… pretty early on.

It’s interesting you say that because I was actually terrified at the possibility that it could go in a very different direction. And that’s not a secret, if you look at the early responses, when it came out that finally, after, what was it, 20 or 30 years, they were gonna have a follow-up to “The Evil Dead” with Bruce Campbell, the response was a little bit, what’s the word I’m looking for?

TrunkSpace: Cautionary.

DeLorenzo: That’s exactly the word, cautionary, or even adversarial. And understandably so. I knew the franchise, I was a fan. It’s about one guy, and finally, finally, here we got ’em again, Bruce Campbell, doing this next leg, transitioning from film to television, and what, he’s gonna have two sidekicks? So I was a little worried that, “Oh boy, what if they hate us?” Luckily, I’d say, straight away, from the very first time I got to meet fans… I think it was New York Comic Con before the show had aired, so we did a huge thing there for like 2500 fans… and they just went nuts. Then, I think my first convention was in Chicago, my home away from home… I’ve lived there for 10 years… and it was Days of the Dead, and only three episodes had aired of the first season and already I was blown away by how receptive they were and how immediately they invested in Pablo and Kelly. And I have to give credit to Rob Tapert and Bruce and Sam (Raimi), and our showrunner at the time, Craig DiGregorio, because they knew what they were doing. They knew that in order to let this character, Ash Williams, this flawed human being that we know and love, they knew that in order to let him still be that character with some often offensive, sometimes ignorant comments and views, they knew that in order to let him still be him, they needed to surround him with someone who has a heart and who was his cheerleader, and also someone who is willing to go toe-to-toe with him and call him out and also sort of be the common sense.

TrunkSpace: It’s a new layer that didn’t exist before, this wonderful family element that binds them all together.

DeLorenzo: Absolutely. You hit the word, which is the buzzword for Season 3, because for two seasons we built up this family and even have introduced, or brought back members of Ash’s family. His father, played by the great Lee Majors, which I think is one of the best additions to the show. And then, of course, we have Cheryl, his sister, which, oh my goodness, what a thrill for the fans, the lifelong fans of the franchise, to have that. But now, for Season 3, we introduced a daughter, his actual daughter he never knew he had. So there is so much great richness and conflict that now directly affect Pablo and Kelly, who the audience has grown to love, and you see how that sets that in motion. Now it’s the family that is bound by blood, and the family that is bound by bloodshed, and I love that. I love watching Ash Williams, the last man on earth who should be, now have to be responsible for a teenage daughter, no less, who already has the rebellion that a lot of teenagers have, but then with the same stubbornness of Ash Williams. It gives a whole new meaning to sins of the father. It is heartwarming but also so funny, and often very real and emotional, and I’m very excited for fans to see how Ash grows just enough this season in such a real and fantastic way.

TrunkSpace: From what we could tell, this is the longest time you’ve ever spent with one character. What has that journey been like for you to discover somebody over an extended period of time?

DeLorenzo: It has been one of the greatest thrills of my life because I absolutely love my character. I love Kelly Maxwell, and that, again, is a testament to the writers and to the showrunners, but also, Sam Raimi set the bar from day one, about collaborating and letting me bring my own aspects or thoughts or different layers that I wanted to bring to the table. From day one, they have been so receptive and collaborative, and I think that always lends itself to being… when creatives all work together for the same goal, it takes a village to create a strong character. I’m talking down the line, not just collaborating in terms of dialogue and in terms of ideas and who Kelly Maxwell is, it’s been collaborative from behind the scenes.

So, it has been such a magnificent experience, and I feel like art imitates life imitates art, because Kelly’s journey has been very similar to my own journey playing Kelly. That sounds so meta, but it’s true. (Laughter) She was thrown into the fight against evil, I was thrown into this. Yes, I’d been working for a long time, but I think I had no more than eight seconds of screen time on any major movie or TV show. Also, just how she came into her own, how she became her own warrior by her own right, I feel like I can look back at where I started and I feel a lot more comfortable in these shoes now… and in this purple leather jacket.

I have nothing else to compare it to, so maybe we should add this to the other ways that this show has impacted me, because I’ve never gotten to create a character and never before have been able to have so much creative input in a character. That’s been a huge thing for me, and again, something that I’m just so happy and grateful for.

TrunkSpace: The bar has been set high with this job. Any future jobs will always be compared to your time on “Ash vs Evil Dead” now.

DeLorenzo: Oh yeah, I’m screwed. (Laughter) But also, it taught me a lot, and I feel like this was such its own beast, if you will. I feel like not all the characters I play will I be able to find so many ways to bring out these little aspects, so I feel like every character is different. So even if I don’t get to collaborate again, at least I have this. But I do feel like, in my experience, there are many people in this industry who do believe in the good of creating together. If you look at any of the shows that are successful, and beloved, you hear the same thing every time, that everyone gets along, everyone takes part, everyone stays in their own lane, that kind of thing. So I do feel like it is possible. I hope there’s more of that to come.

But yeah, nothing will ever top the moment that Sam Raimi sits you down day one and says, “Hey, I’d really like you to help me rewrite this scene.” And you’re like, “I’m sorry, Sam Raimi, what?” I thought he was kidding. I’ve said this before, he is both the least and most intimidating person in the room, in the sense of, when he talks to you, you’re the only one there, he’s looking at you, he makes you feel so good, he listens to what you have to say, and then he walks away, and you’re like, “Holy shit! That was Sam Raimi!” You’re talking to him, it’s like Sam the butcher from the grocery store and you go, “Hey man, how you doing?” And then he walks away and there’s like this trail of star dust that’s left in view.

TrunkSpace: (Laughter) Well, what’s amazing about Sam is that, where he doesn’t get enough credit is that he really kick-started this whole superhero craze with what he did with the Spider-Man franchise.

DeLorenzo: Absolutely. And also, things like the POV of the object, that was him. He created that whole thing of like, the ax flying from the ax’s point of view. I mean, how genius? So again, I would have been happy to be Screaming Extra #72 in a show like this. (Laughter) Which, by the way, I think that was my biggest credit before getting this show.

So I’m just so grateful to all of them, the producers that took a chance on me, because I’m not the typical horror stereotype. I’m not the beautiful blonde with blue eyes who can scream. I’m a very different-looking, different-sounding character or person that screams like a 75-year-old man. I really thought I was never gonna get this job ’cause I actually can’t scream. I have nodules. My mom, when she saw the first episode, she was like, “That was great but why didn’t they dub your screaming? You sound like you’re a 75 year-old man.” Mom, you’re not wrong. I cannot scream.

TrunkSpace: How great is it that your mom is in on the lingo with dubbing and stuff like that? That’s awesome!

DeLorenzo: (Laughter) Oh, I know. Whenever my parents will call me, immediately after the show airs, this is what I get every time… her impression of a chainsaw. So the show aired. “Hi, Mom and Dad. What’d you think?”

(DeLorenzo does an impression of her mom doing an impression of a chainsaw.)

And it’s actually pretty good. But it’s so funny, ’cause this is not my parent’s cup of tea or anything, but they have grown to absolutely love the show. They give me their full Roger Ebert critique.

[shirlleycoyle]

How Sony Forged, Then Squandered, Its Relationship With Linux Users

As companies innovate over time, they inevitably take things away. In the case of Apple’s M1 chip, for example, it took away the ability to upgrade basically anything.

As I wrote last year, the Apple Silicon shift is not its first move away from a CPU architecture, but its third, and the parallels between the transitions from PowerPC and Intel are interesting to watch in real time. Now, while it was the most influential company that offered PowerPC computers for sale, it was technically not the largest—not by a long shot.

The winner was technically the Nintendo Wii, which sold more than 100 million units during its seven-year history on the console market, all while rocking a variant of the PowerPC G3 processor line used in many early Macs. And it wasn’t alone: The Wii’s primary competitors in home video games at the time—the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3—also used architecture based on the PowerPC.

The PlayStation 3, while it did not best the Nintendo Wii, may have bested Apple at making the most popular PowerPC platform intended for a degree of general purpose computing … well, until Sony, under duress, threw that crown away.

Let’s talk about the complicated nature of Linux on game consoles—a story that gets particularly complicated when the discussion turns to what Sony did on the PS3.

Why Linux has always found a home on video game consoles

As operating systems go, Linux is a chameleon, one that can be installed on architectures both incredibly mainstream and absurdly obscure.

One architecture in the obscure category is SuperH, a chipset released by Hitachi in the 1990s that was used in three of Sega’s consoles—the 32X, Saturn, and Dreamcast—and not many other places. Where it appeared, however, made a compelling case for a powerful 32-bit chip, one capable of powering Virtua Fighter and Crazy Taxi alike.

Despite the fact that SuperH (also known as SH) hasn’t seen an architectural update since the mid-2000s, its compressed instruction set approach to code directly inspired the evolution of modern ARM processors (to the point where ARM literally licensed the functionality from Hitachi), meaning that it has maintained a degree of relevance in the modern day.

And a number of Linux developers have helped to carry SuperH into the modern age after the chipset’s patents expired about five years ago.

“We didn’t have to write new code; we just had to dig some of it up and dust it off,” said Rob Landley, one of the developers that led the effort to revive SuperH as an open architecture under the “J-core” name.

Chipsets like these would be forgotten about if not for Linux helping to push them forward.

And often, this means that you can find Linux implementations for video game consoles (admittedly, of varying age and quality). The Dreamcast is a good example. With the device sporting a VGA port, a first-party keyboard, and an optional Ethernet adapter, it has a lot of the elements that could make it a good choice for installing some form of Linux. And well, people have. It’s not going to be as updated as an implementation on an x86 platform, or even a Raspberry Pi or Pine64 device. But in many ways the fact that it can be done at all makes it interesting to some.

Among common video game consoles, probably the earliest you’ll find a working Linux variant for is the original PlayStation, which relies on a MIPS architecture. But expect to do a lot of digging on old forums or in the Internet Archive for a copy, as it was released in 2001 and the sites that hosted it are long dead.

There have even been attempts on the Nintendo 64, though they started slowly.

Back in 2016, a guy named Alan Williams shared a YouTube clip that featured StarFox 64 getting overwritten on the screen using a GameShark to boot into a version of Linux … that immediately kernel panicked. That it displayed anything at all is impressive—this is challenging work, as shown by the fact that Alex Thorlton, a Linux kernel engineer who actually worked for SGI (the company that produced the N64 architecture) back in the day, recently tried doing the same thing in an emulator, and had to do a ton of research ahead of time to figure out what could be done.

And all that work built up to something tangible: At the very end of last month, as a Christmas present of sorts, a version of Linux for the Nintendo 64 was unofficially released by developer and Linux kernel contributor Lauri Kasanen. If you have a flash cart and a desire to see a terminal on the device you played GoldenEye on, you can find it on GitHub.

And to be clear, we’re not talking about polished Live CD variants of Linux here, but code that you have to compile yourself. (If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll find a port of Debian.) As the motivations of the console manufacturers was to prevent theft or cheating on their systems, these are not particularly easy endeavors. Modding might be required, or exploits of the original hardware, such as what Williams did.

With systems this old, it’s likely that people are messing with Linux out of personal curiosity or a desire to improve their technical skills, rather than a professional need.

But by the time of the sixth console generation, Linux development on video game consoles became less of a curiosity and more of something that could be genuinely usable. There were two reasons for this: One, the fact that the original Xbox was effectively a stock x86 PC with a fancy design—meaning that standard Linux distributions could run on the machine—and two, a downright shocking willingness by Sony to open up its PlayStation 2 to end users.

It was nice for a while, but eventually the door was bound to shut again.

$299

The cost of the PlayStation 2 Linux kit, which allowed owners of the device to use a variant of Linux on their system. Unlike a modern computer that could be booted from a USB drive or CD-ROM, the PS2 required a proprietary kit that was compatible with the company’s MIPS-based Emotion Engine chipset, and specifically blocked off access to the DVD drive, except for PlayStation games. This kit included a keyboard, mouse, VGA adapter, an ethernet adapter, and a hard drive, and additionally required an 8 MB memory card for installing the operating system. It made the system functional as a programming platform, though game-makers could only develop games for other people with the Linux kit, a very small portion of the total install base of the PlayStation 2, still the best-selling console of all time. (The Linux kit itself, however, is exceedingly rare, and sells on eBay above its original list price today.)

An example of Sony’s PlayStation 2 Linux kit, which uses the NeXT-inspired Window Maker interface. Image: Colin Keigher/Wikimedia Commons

Sony’s surprising openness to Linux on the PlayStation … at first

It’s really fascinating to consider that Sony, the company whose competing interests in content and hardware have likely played the biggest role in the rise of digital rights management, that once literally installed a rootkit on people’s computers, was so willing to give Linux a first-class citizen status on its consoles.

It feels like it shouldn’t be in Sony’s DNA, right?

But Sony had tried to leverage its position as a video game player to help build goodwill among developers, and adding Linux support to the PlayStation 2 was a good way to do that. It also helped that Sony had developed a development kit for the original PlayStation called the Net Yaroze, with the goal of helping to spur interest in development among hobbyist communities. (This was in sharp contrast to Nintendo’s traditional stance, which often discouraged unlicensed development.)

It was a good idea—and Sony’s move to block off the DVD-ROM drive, while limiting the console’s capabilities as a Linux machine, seemed like a fair compromise.

But then, when Sony released its follow-up to the PlayStation 2, it did something unexpected: It included a way to natively boot into alternative operating systems. The PlayStation 3 included a functionality called OtherOS, which allowed for easy booting into other operating systems. Why was it possible to use a Live CD with the PlayStation 3 but an unacceptable risk with the PlayStation 2? It comes down to how the boot process was implemented. Simply, it used virtual machines, which were supposed to limit access to the full system. As you may know about virtualization, it naturally comes with a performance hit—but the belief was it would keep the PS3 secure while still allowing for non-gaming use cases.

With Playstation 3 devices capable of running PowerPC-based variants of Linux such as Yellow Dog Linux, it created opportunities to stretch the console into use cases that took advantage of its unique multi-processor Cell architecture, which was seen as potentially beneficial in supercomputing applications. After all, a PS3 might have been expensive for a video console upon launch, but it was cheap as the basis of a supercomputing cluster. Its main CPU unit was faster than the CPU in the last-gen PowerBook, but also had a number of co-processors called Synergistic Processing Elements that, together, helped the architecture dwarf many personal computers at the time … in software that could take advantage of it.

It was a bet by Sony (and by extension, its chip supplier IBM) that it had created something so epic that it could draw in the technical community, along with potentially the next generation of developers. In a community Q&A with Slashdot, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, Phil Harrison, said that the goal was to make room for developers to have a way to learn skills using real hardware, to encourage their improvement. He cited his own growth when doing the same thing with the Commodore 64, how it allowed him to try new things while still trying to learn how to program.

“Now, those industry doors are largely closed by the nature of the video game systems themselves being closed,” he said. “So, if we can make certain aspects of PS3 open to the independent game development community, we will do our industry a service by providing opportunities for the next generation of creative and technical talent.”

That’s all well and good, but there was still a rub: “Now having said all that, we still have to protect the investment and intellectual property rights of the industry so we will always seek the best ways to secure and protect our devices from piracy and unauthorized hacking that damages the business.”

And, unfortunately for everyone involved, that’s exactly what happened. And Sony did not look good by the end of it.

“One of our key objectives with the new model is to pass on cost savings to the consumer with a lower retail price. Unfortunately in this case the cost of OtherOS install did not fit with the wider objective to offer a lower cost PS3.”

— A message from Sony discussing the company’s decision to remove OtherOS from its PS3 Slim models. Despite the decision not to support Linux in later versions of the PS3, Sony emphasized ongoing support for OtherOS at the time, according to The Register: “SCE is committed to continue the support for previously sold models that have the ‘install Other OS’ feature and that this feature will not be disabled in future firmware releases.” That sound you hear is a broken promise.

The “fat” edition of the PS3, which had the OtherOS option available. Image: Evan Amos/Wikimedia Commons

Why Sony’s attempt to turn the PS3 into a computer turned into a case of corporate self-sabotage

Sony talked a big game upon the launch of the PS3, particularly when it came to whether the console was “hackable.” Sony very strongly implied it was not.

And for more than three years, that seemed to be the case. Well, until a hacker with a reputation decided to take a swing at it. The result killed Sony’s Linux efforts almost immediately and hurt the company’s homebrew-friendly reputation almost overnight.

The hacker that first found a way into the kingdom was Geohot, a.k.a. George Hotz. Hotz had gained a reputation as a master hacker after being one of the first to unlock and jailbreak an iPhone, and took it upon himself to find ways to exploit the console, which had a reputation for being tough to hack.

It took Hotz about five weeks to find a workaround, something he documented on a blog. The vulnerability, as you might guess by the fact that I’m writing this, involved the use of OtherOS. In a blog post revealing his success, he described how he attained hypervisor-level access to the system’s processor and full access to the system memory.

“Basically, I used hardware to open a small hole and then used software to make the hole the size of the system to get full read/write access,” he told The Register. “Right now, although the system is broken, I have great power. I can make the system do whatever I want.”

Geohot noted that in his initial announcement that there was a risk that Sony could remove features to rein in the hack.

“As far as the exploit goes, I’m not revealing it yet,” he wrote. “The theory isn’t really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder.”

He soon did release details on the exploit, and Sony responded with an aggressive firmware update. With Version 3.21 of the PS3 firmware, the company removed support for OtherOS entirely, citing security reasons, and informed users that if they did not agree to the upgrade, they would lose access to the PlayStation Network, games that relied on newer firmware, and access to copyright protected videos.

And because Sony apparently had no sense of irony, they literally released the update on April Fool’s Day in 2010.

(Side note: Poor Yellow Dog Linux, whose developers had banked its future on OtherOS being accessible … and were the first to reveal Sony’s plans to update the firmware.)

The loss of access to Linux on the PS3 didn’t affect most regular gamers, but the ones who were technically oriented were upset—and this slowly led to an escalation of energy against Sony in trying to break into the PS3.

Geohot played a role in this escalation—for example, helping to restore the OtherOS feature just days after Sony removed it. But he wasn’t alone. Others joined in, too.

Eventually, Sony brought in the legal team to take on Hotz, suing him and a secondary group, fail0verflow, for their efforts to jailbreak and reverse-engineer the console.

 Hotz, at least at first, took the lawsuit in stride, posting a music video on YouTube where he rapped about the case, with a flow highlighting the fact that he is clearly a polymath.

But the legal action took some dark turns; at one point, a judge approved a subpoena that gave Sony access to the server logs and IP addresses of anyone who accessed Hotz’s blog, the one that detailed his exploit efforts. If it seems like it was over the top, that’s because it was.

Sony eventually settled with Hotz, who wrote this in a statement about the settlement: “It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier. I’m happy to have the litigation behind me.” Some, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, took it to be something of a gag order.

(Hotz later took his hacking abilities into the startup space, launching the artificial intelligence startup comma.ai, which specializes in autonomous driving solutions.)

This decision to go after Geohot cost the company goodwill for years afterward.

As Sony had specifically marketed the first model of the PlayStation 3 as having this ability to boot into Linux, it meant that some tinkerers spent hundreds of dollars on the machine for a feature they could no longer use. Perhaps it wasn’t the PS3’s primary use, but it nonetheless gave it daily-driver capabilities for some. You literally could get work done on a PS3, which had hardware that was pretty good for its day, so good that some out there feel that the Cell architecture was never truly utilized in full. One day, all of it was gone.

This created a mess of legal action, as people sued over losing access to something that a subset of them really liked. It was like Sony had shown that it cared about the little guy, but as soon as the little guy did something it didn’t like, it pulled the rug out.

(One point of irony here: Not long after Sony sued Hotz claiming violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the company faced a class-action suit accusing the company of violating the same law.)

Ultimately, the company agreed to a settlement, which took a few detours, but ultimately led to a class-action settlement for the roughly 10 million people that bought the original “fat” edition of the PS3.

That long-running class-action lawsuit could have been avoided had Sony taken another approach to handling OtherOS. It was as if all of the good things the company had done to embrace homebrew development had been forgotten overnight by a corporate culture arguably too focused on piracy, and people instead looked to the negative stuff like the heavy DRM and the rootkit scandal, and offered a heavy-handed dose of payback in the process.

Geohot’s formative efforts in jailbreaking the console eventually led to more in-depth hacking efforts by others that took the mantle, as Sony’s decisions made the PS3 a target. By 2012, a series of codes were released that allowed for the installation of custom firmware. To this day, you can mod an old PS3 to access (an admittedly older version of) Linux, and you can even do so with low-level hardware access OtherOS didn’t offer.

Sony’s efforts to stop its console from getting hacked led to it getting hacked more thoroughly than it might have … had it left Geohot and his blog alone.

five

The number of miles of wire that were used to connect the more than 1,700 PlayStation 3s used in the Condor Cluster, a project built by the U.S. Air Force to take advantage of the console’s supercomputing capabilities. As The Verge notes, many of the consoles used in the effort were sold directly to the Air Force by Sony after the company removed them from the market after the firmware update fiasco.

I think the lesson here is that people will hack your system no matter how many barricades you put up against it. Or at least try to.

There will always be folks who find ways to unlock the Nintendo Switch with pieces of 3D-printed plastic and paper clips.

But hacking requires motivation. In the case of the Switch, it is a console that looks like it can run Android really well, and some people want that. Geohot’s motivation was that the PS3 somehow managed to survive unhacked for more than three years, and after the iPhone, he was looking for a new medium to conquer. But the average user, if they’re even aware of hacking, often just wants access to additional capabilities—and not just for reasons of piracy.

Perhaps the company that has managed to find the perfect type of middle ground to this situation is Microsoft. The just-released Xbox Series S already has open-source emulation software on it, thanks to a move that Microsoft did starting with the Xbox One to make the platform more welcoming to developers: Any console can be made into a development console, as long as you’re willing to pay the $20 for that right.

As the console-modding-focused YouTuber Modern Vintage Gamer noted in a recent video, this decision effectively removed many of the motivations for exploiting the Xbox One or Xbox Series architecture for those who want to screw around or learn. But it does so in a way that limits the system from being used in nefarious ways. It’s a church and state split: You can’t run a retail game in Dev Mode, nor can you run homebrew software in retail mode, and the apps that the Xbox supports in dev mode don’t allow low-level access to the hardware, meaning you’re leaving some performance on the table.

Nonetheless, the result is that on day one of the Xbox Series S being in stores, it is possible to run some really powerful emulators on the new consoles—which is honestly what hacked consoles are often used for anyway. And for the Geohots of the world, Microsoft has implemented a bounty program to convince them to use their skills for good. (Sony recently followed suit.)

Thanks to programs like these and notably strong security mechanisms, the seven-year-old Xbox One has yet to be jailbroken in a serious way, despite a hacking incident before the console’s launch that involved the theft of sensitive information related to the device.

Compare this to what happened with the PlayStation 3, where Sony’s decision to remove a developer-friendly feature eventually led the system to face more dramatic exploits than even Geohot was ever able to pull off himself (though not because of a lack of trying).

These days, PlayStation 3s are a common sight in e-waste settings, just like the Wii and the Xbox 360. The slim models and the fat models alike show up there in various states of disrepair. It would sure be nice if they could still be used for something.

One has to wonder if Sony could have figured out a way to de-escalate things.

How Sony Forged, Then Squandered, Its Relationship With Linux Users syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[its-a-queer-thing]

ICYMI Pt 9--2x08

Everything is quiet from Ian and Mickey for a little bit so it’s safe to assume they have started to fall into their routines: Ian working at the store, Mickey working for his Dad and at the Kash and Grab with Ian. Who knows what those boys do before shit hits the fan…? 

Well, we have a little idea… 

And apparently so does Frank, now.

Let us first and foremost mention that they are becoming more and more comfortable with each other at this point. Granted, it would have been difficult being caught in any position in which someone’s pants were clearly around their ankles, but this one definitely takes the cake. This position shows that they are experimenting with each other, going beyond the back to front position we’ve seen (and it’s safe to assume that’s how they have done it every time due to Mickey’s attempts to keep a barrier up, and facing away is definitely one way to keep their intimacy levels lower.) So they are growing closer in many ways basically. Of course, the one thing Mickey was terrified of slams in their faces when Frank catches them. Ian knows that Frank doesn’t care, but Mickey doesn’t have the same experience and so doesn’t have the same trust. All he’s ever known is hatred towards gay people. Violent hatred to the point where he knows for a fact his own father would murder him if he ever found out he was gay.

There are a couple of things about this scene you should notice if you didn’t already. First, look at the differences in their reactions to being found…

Mickey maintains a look of pure panic and looks like he’s steeling himself for a fight, meanwhile Ian just looks shocked and then annoyed. That right there establishes where they each stand in this situation. Mickey is terrified for his life and to Ian this is just an annoying and embarrassing classic parent walk-in moment.

So now Frank has discovered them and Mickey is so panicked he won’t even stop for a moment to listen to Ian who knows this won’t be a problem.

He is so terrified by what his father will do to him if Frank lets it slide that Mickey is gay that Mickey is not only willing to ditch a job he needs for his probation, but is even willing to risk life in prison if he gets caught on Frank’s murder.

I’ve seen a lot of people who criticize Mickey referencing Mickey’s “attempted murder” of Frank (which first and foremost didn’t happen as you’ll see) and Sammi, but let’s look at the reasons behind these actions (for Frank this time around).

Though obviously it isn’t how we should handle this situation in real life, let’s keep in mind where Mickey’s, from and who raised him. We later see in this season that the Milkovich family looks at robbing convenience stores at gunpoint just like running to the grocery store on a beer run.

This is a family who casually digs people’s graves in front of people they want gone, with a very clear intention to make good on a violent promise if they don’t duce out.

And a family who will lose no sleep plotting someone’s murder.

Mickey has been RAISED around this! This is second nature to him and frankly it’s incredible that he isn’t MORE of a terror. And just in case someone hasn’t been there yet, Mickey wasn’t afraid for no reason. *SPOILER ALERT*

So to Mickey, his attempted murder of Frank is basically self defense because he always knew the above scenarios would happen (and they did!)

Either way, people seem super upset at Mickey for putting a hit on Frank, despite the fact that to Mickey this is in self defense. He wouldn’t have a reason to hurt Frank if he was not completely convinced that Frank was going to put Mickey’s life in direct danger. Also a lot of people seem to believe Ian was concerned for Frank’s safety and so put emphasis on Mickey wanting to kill Ian’s Dad. I personally don’t think he was as concerned about Frank’s safety so much as he was concerned about how Mickey’s threatening anyone is a threat to his probation, and so a risk to their time together and Mickey’s future. I do honestly believe that Ian thinks he won’t care if Frank dies (whether he does actually feel that way, I don’t think we will ever know because he’s had so many different reactions to Frank being in danger that it’s really up in the air). In this case though, I 100% believe that his concern is not for Frank’s safety, but Mickey’s freedom. Both of the times he goes to talk to Frank, he immediately refers to Mickey’s feelings or his freedom, not even trying to appeal to Frank’s own sense of self-preservation.

The first time he goes to talk to Frank he has a demeanor similar to a teenage daughter appealing to her father who freaked out her date the night before and is upset that the guy hasn’t called back, believing her father scared him off.

The second time Ian tried to talk to Frank, Frank basically confirms the reason Ian was so unconcerned (that being Frank doesn’t give a shit one way or the other), validating Ian’s reasons for trying to convince Mickey no to worry.

Despite this, Ian knows that Mickey will not be convinced and still urges Frank to lie low specifically because he doesn’t want Mickey to go to juvie. Some may argue that he’s just not admitting to anyone how much he cares about Frank, and that may be true, but consciously the reason he most desperately doesn’t want Frank to die is because it would mean Mickey having to go back to juvie if he ever got caught. 

Frank, however is too confused about how he feels about his mother dying to pay attention, leaving Ian with the task of figuring out how to calm Mickey down.

So now we come to their “breakup scene” of sorts where Mickey is scared shitless that Frank is going to tell his father that he and Ian were having sex.

Here we see Mickey, frantic, and Ian once again trying to convince Mickey that there is nothing to worry about. In case anyone forgot how dangerous this is for Mickey, look at the sheer panic on his face.

Since these are gifs you can’t hear it, but during this whole exchange you can actually hear Mickey’s voice cracking as he relays everywhere he’s been looking for Frank almost like he was getting more and more desperate with each place he checked, and again when he almost violently called bullshit on Ian. For Mickey, it seems as though Ian is hiding him, probably because he believes he loves Frank or something; but as I’ve already discussed, I don’t think that is necessarily the case (at least not consciously). 

So with Mickey not knowing what else to do than lie low and continue hunting for Frank, he comes to the conclusion that whatever it is he and Ian have between them needs to end. 

Here we see a bit of a standoff because Ian desperately wants Mickey to stay but Mickey is too terrified. Because Ian had a smoother coming out experience (very smooth actually… Even smoother than mine come to think of it) he seems to not think too much of Mickey’s fear. This is understandable since his experience was positive, so he wouldn’t be able to empathize completely (at least not forever. Mickey’s on the other hand would not be and was not). For Ian’s coming out, no one was angry, if anyone was surprised it didn’t change how they looked at him or treated him, and Frank even didn’t bat an eye, so to Ian it’s completely logical that Frank won’t say anything because he doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, But Mickey can’t understand how anyone could react positively (or neutrally) to him coming out because in his experience the only reaction he has ever seen toward gay people has been violent and hateful. Let us remember that Mickey was taught to be violent toward gay people, and so imagine what it must have been like being surrounded by all of this violence towards homosexuality and being taught to assault gay people all while knowing (and denying that) you yourself were gay. 

Now, I love this piece of their exchange because it really emphasises where each of them are with their relationship. Ian is open and proud because he has the privilege of being so, while Mickey is a cynical realist with limited opportunities to be himself. Of course Ian is right there is nothing to be ashamed of for being in love with who you love, but Mickey for now can’t wrap his head around that and so his heart-breaking response, “What fucking world do you live in” highlights another reason Mickey always kept that barrier up. It also shows the stark differences in their upbringing and shows that despite the fact that they live in the same neighborhood, they still come from two different worlds.

I know a lot of people get upset at Mickey for saying what follows and for breaking Ian’s heart but let’s look a little bit closer here and look at those tiny details that really make up this scene and make it so powerful. When we look closer we can actually see how Mickey is feeling. Mickey is what I like to call an “untrustworthy narrator” in the first three seasons because the thing about Mickey is just because he says he feels a certain way or says a certain thing, it doesn’t mean that’s how he’s actually feeling most of the time. His feelings are in his eyes and that is how we have to decide what he’s meaning. This is a very important thing that Noel Fisher has provided us because he is able to portray what the script says and what Mickey’s feeling. Mickey grew up unable to really express himself (as we learn during his wedding in 3x11) so he’s learned to guard his emotions and cover them up with snark. But because this is TV we need to be able to see what he’s really feeling/thinking or else he comes across as an asshole and half of his actions (especially in the future) would make zero sense. Noel Fisher gives us a glimpse at the very sensitive young man hiding underneath all of that armor and it’s a beautiful thing. 

So here Mickey is saying goodbye to probably the lightest part of his life because he is terrified of the consequences of loving another guy, and Ian is desperately trying to hold on (because let’s face it that kid has been head over heels in love since the first time they had sex).

 Look at the way Mickey is looking at him. It may be guarded but I definitely see some emotion there, like he’s forcing himself to close his emotions off against Ian, like seeing this poor boy get worked up is upsetting him but he’s struggling not to show it. There he is weakening for a second until Ian reaches for him and he has to solidify his resolve:

 I don’t know about you but when I see Mickey’s face and when I see Mickey intently looking at Ian, I see a very powerful emotion. He does not want to say goodbye to this kid, he does not want to cut this off because whatever it is that they have is ending entirely too soon and I feel like Mickey is sad about that. But at the same time, this is self-preservation–this is what Mickey has been raised to appreciate above anything. This stare, this weighted moment to me reveals how untrue the previous statement was. I will not believe for a second that Mickey meant this. I believe he said these things for the purpose of closing Ian off against him, putting a firm wall between them so that Mickey could do what he felt he had to do to protect himself and keep Ian at arms length so he could finally quit this boy who kept getting him into trouble (regarding his sexuality). He has been raised to be a survivor and do what you have to do to survive, even if that means murdering someone, which to US seems like such an extreme (and it is) but for him and his aforementioned less than moral and heavily violence influenced type of family, it’s only common sense that you put yourself first and you do what you have to do to survive. So in this instance, it means breaking the heart of the one friend he really has in his corner 100% of the time, the one person he’s probably ever loved (especially outside of his family), and the one person with whom he was free to be himself with, all in order to protect himself. I feel he only said these hurtful things because he wanted a clean break, a way to keep his conscience clean for potentially hurting him by killing his dad. 

This is self-preservation at its core. There’s also a little shimmer in his eye when he takes a break to look at Ian who is getting very emotional and it almost looks like a teeny bit of regret but also like he’s convincing himself, no, I’ve got to do this, this is what’s right, this is what I have to do and finally he apologizes for having to kill Frank. 

Here I honestly believe Mickey had a mantra going in his head to convince himself that what he was doing/trying to do was justified. I believe this because notice that every time he talks about killing Frank he mentions how no one would miss him (which is most likely true) or how Frank’s death would be a favor to the community (also probably true). So now it’s like he’s already justified this murder to himself. That this is what he has to do for his own survival and that he’s probably doing the neighborhood and even Ian a huge favor. because as we’ve already established, these boys are getting much, much closer. They are true friends now who communicate, who talk, and I’m very convinced that Ian has probably told Mickey about the times that Frank has hit him, about the verbal abuse, about probably lots of messed up stuff that even we don’t know about. So with Mickey knowing all of these things (which could be nothing; I’m completely speculating. Or it could be a lot of things but either way) with Mickey knowing the goings-on of the Gallagher household, i’m sure that Mickey honestly does feel like he’s doing Ian a favor. We’ve seen Frank hit Ian a couple of times and later on in the series we see Frank verbally abuse him and also hit him again so it only makes sense to me that this is a regular occurrence and is nothing new and he probably had plenty to tell Mickey about. Obviously, Mickey is not killing Frank for chivalry or justice or any noble cause, but in its core to Mickey this is self-preservation and maybe even (he’s possibly convinced himself) a bit of a charitable act. 

I think convincing himself of these things is the only way he can stomach what he’s about to do.  But what I want to bring attention to is: WHY does Mickey feel the need to justify it? He keeps coming up with reasons why it’s justified to kill Frank, but… he’s a Milkovich? We hear about the Milkoviches random acts of violence on this show frequently which leads me to believe that this family is simply violent in general. They may do it for kicks, for money, for survival, we don’t know. But why is it that even after growing up surrounded by opportunists and lone wolves who look after themselves above anyone else, (maybe even the Ukranian mob??); people who will do literally anything to save their own skin (besides snitch), Mickey feels the need to convince himself that this is okay? I think that this is because underneath the thick skin and cold armor on top of that, Mickey Milkovich is actually a really sensitive person who hates the random violence he’s seen throughout his life and wishes it could be different–but because he’s a realist, he knows it can’t be different so he buries those feelings way down deep to continue being the survivalist he’s been raised to be. 

So even with all of that, he still is unable to take Frank’s life.

You can see right off the bat that Mickey is slowing down when he finally gets so close to this action that he’s been working toward for a couple of days now. As he’s walking down the street following Frank, you can see the war going in his eyes as he’s thinking through this and he’s realizing the moment has come, and you can almost see the thought in his head: is this really what I need to happen? Do I really need to do this? And is it actually worth it? 

You can see the struggle on his face as he’s almost mentally egging himself on, debating with himself about whether or not he has to do this. Finally, he realizes he can’t. Whether this is because he’s convinced it would hurt Ian or because deep down he knows Frank didn’t do anything wrong and so would go against his conscience to hurt him, I don’t think we’ll ever know. Either way, we do know that he does the right thing.

We don’t know if Mickey has killed anyone (I’m willing to bet not), though he has been surrounded by death. We may assume that Terry possibly also dribbles in the Hitman business because of some things that we hear throughout the series in passing, also based on Mandy’s reaction to the pedophile, and the Milkovich brothers calm and collected reaction to Mickey proposing they kill someone. It seems to me as though this family is very comfortable with death. So perhaps with Mickey, me believing him a sensitive person, he feels there must be a reason to kill someone and I think this is the moment he realizes that there is no real reason to kill Frank. It’s been over 24 hours, closer to 48 really, and Frank hasn’t said anything so maybe he realizes that Ian’s right and they don’t have anything to worry about; but he’s still so terrified that even though he can’t go through with the murder he is still back at square one with his father potentially hearing about Mickey’s sexuality, even if it’s not with this instance but sometime in the future. Whether he does the right thing because he was already going to do it and the cops showing up verified his decision or only because the cops showed up is up for debate, but I will argue to my dying breath that he looked at the cops as a way out because he had already decided not to shoot Frank, was caught wondering what he was going to do about Frank knowing his secret, and seeing the cops gave him an easy way out.

It seems strange, but Mickey definitely sees this as a relief because he’s going somewhere where Terry can’t get to him just on the off chance that he does learn about his sexuality. Plus if Terry does learn while he’s in juvie, at least he’ll have prior warning. Somehow, he’ll learn that Terry knows and he’ll be sure to skip town or find some way to gather support to keep Terry away from him. It’s not the best plan and it’s definitely not the bravest thing, but it definitely makes sense.

That’s all I’ve got for 2x08, lovelies!

Be sure to check out my full analysis, and as always if you have anything to add or a counterargument, send me an ask or submission!

[lissamems]

Shalnark’s origin story (and a little bit of the Kurta Shal theory

(I’ve never actually posted a fic before and am terrified. Excited though! Enjoy!)

There is a certain rhythm that experienced gamers fall into. One of the most obvious rules is the necessity of saving your game, of setting yourself up in case of failure so you can start again instantly, an undeniable fresh start. Anyone who had spent more than five minutes online knew that rule and Shalnark was no exception. If there was any upcoming danger, any uncertainty or unpredictability, you had to prepare, you had to set yourself up to bounce back from disaster.

Of course, it wasn’t like Shalnark had to apply that rule to his daily life. He was a teen with an overbearing mother, but nothing more painful or irritating than that. While other children may have complained if their mother constantly panicked and forced them indoors, Shal could hardly care less. Whenever Katiya had one of her “moments”, her son just shrugged and grabbed his Gameboy. Reality was more boring than fantasy after all, and at least in his games he did not have to deal with a woman who once had a panic attack over her son attempting to invite friends home.

They lived in a small apartment near Denlon, in a neighborhood far enough away from the city to be considered suburbs but too shoddy and poor to ever be known by that name. The furniture was purchased secondhand, online, and picked up in a fashion similar to drug drops, since Katiya was incurably paranoid whenever people were concerned.  One of the only perks of their home was the incredible internet service, which Shalnark utilized as much as he could.

Katiya considered her son’s online hobbies to be entirely harmless… no digital world could be half as dangerous as the real one in her eyes. Of course, she had no idea of the online friends he was attracting.

Bright people do not go unnoticed and that was true even in online forums and chatrooms. Shalnark did enjoy his RPG’s and multiplayer quests, but there was something supremely satisfying in actually communicating with people who did not spend hours trying to convince him that emotions were “toxic and dangerous”. He was especially fascinated with Hunters, but even that took a backseat to the Phantom Troupe.

He knew about as much as everyone else did, mainly that the Troupe was a group of thieves who stopped at nothing to take what they wanted. The internet was cluttered with theories regarding the Spiders, and they even had actual fanbases. While some dismissed them as senseless murderers, Shalnark saw in them a potential he could not coherently describe.

The strong took what the strong craved. It was only recent times that decided to prioritize the weak over the useful, which left the world with so many… nothings. It was like the world was cluttered  with extras, while only a set few stood out and mattered.

Shalnark was still not entirely sure whether he was one of those few.

“Shalnark?” Katiya slipped in the front door and shut it instantly behind her, her voice rising in completely unnecessary worry. “Is that you?”

“Who else would it be?”

“That’s entirely unnecessary.” She pulled her hair nervously, one hand tugging on her blond hair while the other adjusted the sunglasses she never took off.  She walked over to the kitchen to pat her son’s shoulder (Shal nonchalantly closed the browser he was theorizing with strangers about the Troupe on and opened a more harmless RPG as she did so).

“How was work?” Shal said brightly, then laughed. He had no idea what his mother even did for a living and asking about it had never gotten him anything but long lectures about how anger was dangerous, because those two things were obviously connected.

She hummed in answer to that and walked away. As soon as she did so, Shalnark reopened the tab on the Troupe in time to see a new message pop up on his board.

“Why do you think the Troupe is incomplete?”

It was in response to a previous comment that Shal had made during a discussion of whether or not the Troupe was attempting to stage a coup in Padokia. It was a laughable conspiracy theory, but Shal could not resist throwing in his opinion (something about how only idiots would think a partially complete group of thieves would have any interest in getting involved in government).

He opened a chatroom with the user (called HellofHeaven) and responded quickly, “One of the notes they left behind when they robbed that Gorteau warlord had a twelve-legged spider drawn on it and it’s my theory that each of the legs refer to a member. Since the current count seems to be around ten, I’d guess there are at least two more spots.”

He hardly had to wait before the response alert pinged on his screen. “And are you hoping to be one of those members?”

Shalnark laughed out loud and that, drawing a look from Katiya. “One of the NPC’s made a joke. Go back to your book, Mama.”

He typed back, still chuckling. “I read a firsthand account from one of the police authorities after the Gorteau incident that estimated that one of the members was over seven feet tall and strong enough to rip steel doors off their hinges. I doubt a computer nerd would fit in with people like that.”

Another user ( this one named BladeEnhancer) joined the chatroom. “I bet the big guy’s an idiot thouh.”

A third user (threadsandstitches) joined the group, just to drop in one comment and then leave. “Brave words from a man who can’t spell and whose username sounds like a dick joke.”

Shalnark couldn’t help but laugh when he saw BladeEnhancer change his name to IaidoMaster.

HellofHeaven responded after a brief pause, “You have access to police records?”

“The police have terrible firewalls on their sites, it’s basically a joke.”

“Where do you think they’ll strike next?”

Shalnark sat back in his chair, feeling an odd and indescribable sense of opportunity, “I don’t have any idea where they will go next, but I have an idea on where they should go. A museum in Denlon is shutting down, so all of their treasures are getting separated and sold off at the end of this month. Security is at an all-time high while all of the items are getting divvied up and there will never be another chance to get all of those riches.”

No one answered in the thread for a solid ten minutes. Shalnark was just beginning to doubt that anyone was going to respond when HellofHeaven added a final question, “Why would the Troupe go after such heavily guarded treasure?”

There was no hesitating in Shal’s answer now, “Isn’t all that danger the point?”

The only response was a notice from the message board, “HellofHeaven has left the chat.”

_ _ _ _ _

Shalnark could not help but be the slightest bit hopeful as the last day of the month began to end. Though there was no way to accurately pinpoint the Troupe’s targets, he did hope that his intuition would be correct. And as it did so, he began to tire of waiting.

Katiya seemed to sense his growing restlessness and only served to fuel it. “Where are you hoping to go? You have no idea on what this world is like, you have no idea the people that search for us….”

Shalnark had listened to his mother’s ravings about “the people” who were after them, but as far as he could tell it was just a figment of her paranoia, one likely fueled by her little drug habit.

“If you knew, Shalnark, you would thank me.”

“Knew what?” Shal did not even look up from his computer, already bored with the conversation.

Katiya turned away impatiently, waving a shaking hand dismissively.

“Maybe I’ll get to meet these people when I leave tonight.” The words were spoken in his usual bright and cheerful voice, so smoothly delivered that it took a moment for the impact of his declaration to hit Katiya.

“You what?” She spun back around and strode across the living room, slamming the laptop closed. “What are you thinking? What are you hoping to accomplish?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Shalnark, Shalnark.” Katiya grabbed her son’s shoulders and pulled him to his feet, staring him in the eyes (or at least he supposed she did, hers were still obscured by those sunglasses after all). “You can’t. You don’t know the world, not like I do.”

Shalnark sighed, looking for all the world like the typical teenager. “Then I’ll get to meet it.”

He strode away from her, graceful and confident, while she stumbled after him, still addled by drugs. As she made a final grab for Shal, she stumbled the slightest bit, causing her glasses to fall to the floor. Shalnark had always assumed his mother’s eyes to be the same color as his own, but as he met his mother’s eyes all he saw was a blazing, flaming red.

Kurta, thought Shal, not so much shocked as curious. Oh, that makes sense.

A reclusive clan of people, all in hiding due to the fact their eyes (which turned red in times of distress) were among the most prized treasures of the world. They all lived in seclusion, in a hidden city (or village, numbers on the people seemed to vary) and none had ever seen them.

“Emotions are dangerous, Shalnark,” he remembered his mother telling him. “Never, ever let them take a foothold in your life.”

For whatever reason, his mother had left the Kurta’s but retained (or maybe enhanced) their protectiveness. Her eyes (her Scarlet eyes) widened with horror as her son saw for the first time who she really was.

“I’ll make scarier friends than whoever you are afraid of, Mama.” Not entirely sure why, he patted his mother’s shoulder in comfort. “Just in case any Kurta enemies come after me.”

She held onto his hand, her grip tightening, “No! The Kurta’s are the ones I’m afraid of!”

“Then it shouldn’t be hard to make friends scarier than a reclusive clan.” With none of his belongings, no trinkets to remember his life, he left to open the door. “Goodbye, Mama.”

_ _ _ _ _

The nightlife in Denlon was interesting, far more captivating than he had been anticipating. The plan was to watch over the Denlonian museum (just in case), but he kept catching himself wandering off, drawn in by the lights and the people like a moth to flame.

He did not feel particularly guilty about leaving his mother. She had cared for him and raised him, but she also hid and neglected him. The relationship was no longer beneficial, so the reasonable (and honestly, humane) action was to leave. Maybe she would be able to begin to live a life not entirely consumed with fear or maybe not. If Shal had stayed with her, he would have stayed an extra, just decoration in the background while the real players lived.

He arrived at the museum right after the sun had set, just as the police cars began to gather like flies. He was pleased to see he had not overestimated the level of protectiveness that the museum pieces warranted and climbed one of the buildings nearby to perch on the roof and watch all of the lights gather around him.

He knew it was a tremendous gamble to assume that the Troupe would gather here. He assumed they would, simply because he knew of their love for danger (and thievery). Logically, this was an excellent target for them. But there remained a distinct possibility that they were on the complete other side of the world.

He leaned back against the curved roof, closing his eyes. If the Spiders came, he doubted they’d arrive quietly so he could just relax until then. He listened to the orders of the police officers below him, the traffic beneath him… and the unmistakable cocking of a gun not too far from his head.

His eyes flew open to see a woman standing across from him, inches from the edge of the roof but obviously unconcerned with any potential danger there. She was taller than him, dressed neatly and smartly in a business suit that would have likely fit in better at a law firm than the roof of a hotel (holding a gun) but Shal doubted that comment would get him anywhere. She was blond, with a long nose and brown eyes currently fixed coldly on him.

She also had a gun and though that had already been noted by Shal, he felt it was worth mentioning more than twice.

Of all of the feelings being held at gunpoint should have brought out in Shal, the strongest was annoyance. He had not staked out this spot to maybe see the Troupe only to be shot before he could even get a confirmed sighting.

“Who are you?” Interestingly enough, Shal had been the one to ask that question first. It took the woman by surprise, but you could only tell that by the slight widening of her eyes.

Laughter arose from the question, but it wasn’t from Shalnark or the woman. He turned in time to see another person on the roof, this one a deceptively lovely man with black hair parted over a cross tattoo on his forehead. He seemed genuinely amused at Shal and waved the woman off, “Go, Pakunoda. I can handle this.”

With nothing more than a final curious glance at Shalnark, Pakunoda nodded to the newcomer. “Got it.” Then, as casually as if she were stepping off of a step, she walked off of the roof.

Shal just stared at the spot where she had jumped off. “Did you just convince that woman to kill herself?”

The man laughed again, sitting next to Shalnark as if they were old friends. “She can handle that little jump.” He held out a hand to Shal. “I presume you are BlackVoice?”

Shal jumped a bit in response to hearing his username. Then he laughed with sheer delight. “Are you HellfromHeaven?”

The two shook hands, both grinning. The dark-haired man then led Shal to the edge, where the blonde woman had leapt off. The duo looked down in time to see two figures charging the police, causing more damage than tanks. One was a small figure darting around so fast it was nearly impossible to track him with his eyes, whereas the other was a huge, hulking man who just aimed his hands at the security force, impossibly firing countless bullets from them.

“You’re the Troupe.” Shal shouted a laugh, as enchanted as a child receiving a birthday present. “I was right!”

“In a way.” The tattooed man sat on the edge and gestured for Shalnark to do the same. “You gave us the idea for this heist, so thank you for that.”

Shal could not take his eyes off of the battle far beneath them. More figures had entered the fray, but the most noticeable by far was a beast of a man preparing to charge. Shal recognized him as the man described in the police report, impossibly tall and muscled and… well, savage.

The man roared in preparation for his battle, but the tattoed man beside Shal just exhaled impatiently. He leaned over the edge and shouted down at the now running man. “Uvogin, no! Come here!”

Another roar, this one with far less excitement, and the man came to a stop. His abrupt stop actually caused a slight trench in the asphalt and he looked up at the two men in irritation. Then he crouched a bit and jumped.

Shal followed the tattooed man’s lead and did not flinch at all as the giant leapt the entire height of the hotel and landed next to them, causing a slight indent in the roof.

Up close, he was even more terrifying. He had rough features and wild black hair, but brown eyes with a mixture of animalistic drive and childish glee in them. He looked Shal over, almost suspiciously, then turned to the dark-haired man. “What did I do, Danchou?”

“Didn’t I already tell you that you were not to participate in tonight’s job?” He looked back to Shal. “Fights are not allowed between members and Uvogin started a rather brutal one earlier today.”

“Phinks is fine now and Machi was the one who instigated it.” Uvogin crossed his arms, a look distinctly reminiscent of a pout on his face. “Yet she is never the one that gets punishments.”

Danchou rolled his eyes at that and turned his attention back on Shalnark. “Would you like to join us as a member of the Troupe?”

His question was as casual as if he were requesting Shal’s presence at some meeting. Shal could do no more than blink in surprise (Uvogin was far less subtle about it and snorted at his boss’s words) and Danchou explained himself more. “You are obviously brilliant with computers and just reading your comments online have made it more than clear you have a gift for strategy. We need more people of your intellect.”

“Oh, wait. Is he the one who let us know about this job?” Uvogin studied Shal with new eyes. “Thanks for the tip.” His voice dropped back into more sulky tones. “I’m sure it would have been a great fight to get those treasures.”

Both Danchou and Shal laughed at that and Uvo sat down next to them, his long legs stretching off of the roof much farther than the other two. “I’m Uvogin. This is Chrollo.” He reached across Chrollo to extend a hand roughly the size of a baseball mitt at Shalnark.

His skin was almost uncomfortably hot, but Shal squeezed back unhesitatingly even though his own strength was completely dwarfed by Uvogin’s. “I’m Shalnark. And the answer is yes.”

He had just enough time to see Chrollo shrug apologetically when Uvogin yanked him off of the roof, swinging him so that for a brief second he hung in the air, nothing under him but hundreds of feet of empty air and the occasional bullet. Then he landed back on the other side of Uvo, collapsed in a heap and… laughing?

He had the oddest sense that he had just passed his first test in the Troupe as the two men smiled at his laughter, Chrollo’s smirk tinged with the smallest amount of pride. “Are you ready to leave with us tonight, Shalnark?”

Shal stood back up and stared down at the fight (now more accurately described as a massacre) far below them. All of the security and police were cluttered together, as drab and pointless as background compared to the vibrant and deadly Spiders surrounding them. Players, these Spiders were actual players within the grand scheme of the world and he stood at the brink of accepting to become one of them. Death and ecstasy, savagery and comradery all swirled together in his new future and Shalnark beamed to meet it. “Of course I am.”

[whimsicallyenchantedrose]

Initial Thoughts--6x21-6x22: The Final Battle, pt. 1

Wow!  What a season finale that was, right?  I really, really liked it.  It did all that a season finale—even a series finale—should.  It had action, adventure, romance.  It tied up loose ends, finished off the story, had lots of call backs to previous seasons, and ended with the happiest of happy beginnings for everyone.  This episode definitely finished the story we’ve loved for the past 6 years, and there’s no doubt that was bittersweet, but today, I’m genuinely feeling more satisfaction and gratitude than sadness.  

In this analysis, I’ll be discussing the adventures of the heroes in the Enchanted Forest, the Black Fairy’s curse in Storybrooke, everyone’s happy beginnings, and the new story for season 7 that they introduced.  I’m planning on breaking this meta into three parts.

The Enchanted Forest

--I found it really interesting that when the curse hit, the family was sent to Snow and Charming’s castle at the exact spot of their wedding.  Throughout the episode, we saw a lot of evidence that the Black Fairy’s curse took everyone directly back to what was happening just before or after the original dark curse.  That was a cool way to call back the past.

--I loved how frantic Killian was for Emma from the very moment he woke up.  That is a man who will do anything to get home to his wife.  (I still get a little thrill at the thought they’re actually married!)

--Such a good moment when Snow White immediately gave the group a hope speech.  It’s so iconically her!

--It’s good that the gang didn’t have to wonder what was happening with Emma.  Magic mirrors are really quite useful magical inventions!

--Through the little view of Storybrooke in the magic mirror, the gang comes to realize that the final battle isn’t what it seems.  Emma won’t be forced to fight a physical battle, according to the Black Fairy’s original plan.  The battle is for her belief, for her very soul.  Nice twist!

--It’s also a nice twist that Emma’s lack of belief has yet wider implications—it causes all the realms of story to disappear…along with the people living in them.  This was an inventive way to really, really raise the stakes.

--I liked that they brought back the mad hatter’s hat.  It was a good way for all the lands to come into play, and it was also another call back to the past!

--*shakes head* Really Regina?  You’re going to dismiss Killian’s idea without even hearing it just because he doesn’t have magic?  Not cool!  Still, I love that Killian doesn’t waste time arguing or brooding.  He simply walks away, determined to follow up on his plan regardless of what anyone may think.  Getting back to Emma is always his number one priority, and he’s not going to let anyone stand in his way.

--I am so, so happy the writers gave us not only a call back to the beanstalk episode, but a Captain Charming adventure on the beanstalk!  That was something I never knew I needed.  I loved Killian calling Emma his wife.  I loved Killian telling David about his first adventure with Emma there on the beanstalk.  I love Hook admitting that he was far from heroic back then.  I loved Killian’s impassioned speech about how he and Emma have made each other better people, how they were not fated true love but rather fought for their love.  I love that David listened, and told Killian he’d help him.  Excellent brotp moment there at the bottom of the beanstalk!

--At the top of the beanstalk, the guys decide to explore the table to see if they can find a bean. Both of them want to be the one to undertake the mission in order to protect the other, and here we get my favorite Captain Charming moment of the episode.  Killian insists it should be him.  Emma may be Charming’s daughter, but she’s his wife.  This ends the argument; Charming immediately agrees with his logic, and Killian is confused at his sudden decision to trust their fates to a pirate.  Charming says “I’m going to trust my son…in-law.”  I love that; so much!

--After retrieving the one remaining magic bean (lol, exactly how many “one remaining” magic beans have there been in this series?), Captain Charming begin their descent, and it’s here that things start getting tricky.  With Emma turning farther and farther from belief, the realms of fairy tale are quickly disappearing.  This upheaval causes the beanstalk to sway and eventually uproot itself.  Scenes of the beanstalk are interspersed with scenes of Emma burning the storybook, and I thought it was an incredibly effective storytelling move.

--I have no idea why, but Killian survives a fall from so far up that there are clouds behind him. He really is a survivor!

--When David falls as well, Snow feels it within herself and knows immediately that something is wrong with him.  I loved that! Such a beautiful reminder of their true love as well as reminding the audience of the first season when David felt it within himself when Snow ate the poisoned apple.

--Snow, with the help of Jasmine and her magic carpet, immediately goes after her husband, but comes upon the prone form of her son-in-law instead.  This provides a nice little moment of comic relief when Killian calls her “mummy” as soon as he sees her.  Captain Charming got an emotional moment in this episode, but Snook’s scene was comic gold.

--I love that Snow insists Killian take the bean and get to Emma.  She knows a couple of things: 1. She can’t go; she has to find David and 2. If any of them can make Emma remember who she is, it’s Killian.  This was a beautiful moment…but unfortunately the show did not follow up on it.  The perfect payoff of that scene would have been to have Killian actually restore Emma’s memories.  Quite the missed opportunity.

--Such a beautiful Snowing scene when Snow finally finds Charming.  I loved how the scene with Snow giving Charming a TLK was juxtaposed with their first TLK in the pilot.  Even the dialog once Charming woke up was similar to that very first Snowing scene.  Beautiful!

--What else was beautiful was what Charming said to Snow: “Snow, we’re going to be fine.  Darkness never wins; it just fools you into thinking it does.”  This is such a beautiful sentiment full of hope!

--I like that we got a chance to see the EQ again.  Her story seemed more or less done, but this episode kind of put a bow on it.  It makes perfect sense that she and Robin would head out of the Wish World given the danger that was waiting for them there. I also love that she and Robin are growing closer over robbing from the rich to give to the poor.  They seem to be slowly but surely helping each other along a path toward redemption.

--I love that the EQ decides to sacrifice herself to stave off the magic to give Regina a little more time to get the magic bean to work and save everyone else.  This was a totally selfless move and a great moment of redemption!

--And finally, with Emma making the choice to believe even if she can’t remember, the destruction of the realms comes to an end, and the Enchanted Forest portion of the episode comes to a close.

--Tomorrow, in part 2 if this meta, I’ll discuss what happened in Storybrooke during the Final Battle.

[angularnotions]

Right, I have to get this off my chest

I'll start off by saying I love Harry, I do. I firmly believe, even now, that he is ridiculously talented, brilliant, fully capable of producing amazing music and could have a very long career in the business. So what the fuck is this promotional campaign for his first solo album? We start off with dead silence for a year, which, fine, he was busy, he wanted time for himself, he's notoriously private. That's ok, that's perfectly acceptable and I don't blame him for one second. But to then go from that to a bizarre, creepy, cheesy commercial? What the fuck? Is that really how you want to introduce yourself to the world as a solo artist? By looking like a pretentious drowned rat? It made no sense, no one who wasn't a Harry fan would have a clue what in fuck was going on, so why do it? Since then, it's all been sort of downhill, with so many great opportunities that seem to have missed the mark or been squandered. He gets SNL, which is huge and he essentially bombs his first song performance because of a lack of practice performing it live. Yes I'm sure he was nervous, don't blame him, SNL is kind of a big deal, and he did pull his shit together for the second one, but that first one is going to stick in people's minds. Graham Norton should have been the first live performance, a much smaller stage to work out the kinks, a more familiar place, it would have made sense. But that wouldn't have fit into this metric they are pushing that Harry already is a superstar, he doesn't need practice. Pretentious, ridiculous and a incredibly stupid mistake. Then we get Rolling Stone, which again, was a fantastic opportunity for him to show the real Harry, be organic and authentic and he did to a point, but then he got contradictory, stopped making sense as this weird need to keep up the mystique seemed to battle with his desire to be honest. Harry has said he doesn't like to talk about the meaning of his songs yet he gave a very detailed description for SOTT and talked about a relationship that influenced a big chunk of the rest of the album. So which is it? Do you want people to take what they feel from the song or are you gonna tell us what it's about. On top of this, the relationship question had to be brought into the discussion. I get it, for the vast majority of the general public, the name Harry Styles is synonymous with a womanizing player who bangs everything that moves. It's not fair, we don't know if it's true, he understandably has refused to address it in the past aside from complaining that he doesn't like the reputation, so why let it become a talking point in Rolling Stone? Why let Ben Winston talk about listening to Harry fuck A-listers upstairs night after night, why let James joke about 'house guests'. Again, contradictory. Are we to believe that when Cameron asked about Taylor and Harry left the table that he was in the bathroom crying about his long lost love Taylor? Or was he outside angry about it, we don't know. But it's still weird. And the worst bit is, the only topic that made it to the media in regards to the Rolling Stone interview is the paragraphs about Taylor. Everything else he said, any important pieces about his process, writing, his personal feelings on the album were erased by that one topic. Extremely unfair to Harry in my opinion. My point in all of this is that the whole metric of his promotion has been off. And I don't think, based on the sales numbers, that it's working. Yes the fandom is losing its shit, but that's fandom, it's what they do. But I've been seeing more and more Harry fans like myself questioning and becoming disappointed by something that should be happy and exciting. Harry seems to be super proud and excited himself, the guy we see in interviews live and on radio is a funny, charming, talented, down to earth person who is easy to love, easy to be happy for, but then I look at the promo and all of that happiness and excitement fades. And I'm left with a cheesy commercial, creepy post-rape pink water pictures (complete with condom) and a guy in a hideous Gucci suit. When has having this aesthetic, being this pretentious, clothes horse, mysterious enigma taken precedence over being a person? Who came up with this promo campaign? Who sat and thought, hey this'll work? Was it Jeff 'just exist' Azoff? Was it Rob Stringer from Columbia? Or was it Harry? I still have high hopes for the album and if I'm honest, I think they chose wrong for the first single, it's way too overproduced, dreary and unfriendly for radio. I personally don't really like it and it doesn't seem to translate to a wider audience. Ever Since New York would have been a much better choice, it just feels more authentic, it's still groundbreaking in its departure from what we've heard from Harry in the past but it's more real, more genuine to me. Speaking of departures and contradictions, why the big push to separate Harry from his 1D days? While at the same time they seem to be depending on his established fan base, the majority having come from 1D, to help him in sales and charts. I get wanting to break into a newer audience but alienating the old one isn't the way to do it. Sorry not sorry, but this has been my impression since promo began, I don't want to feel negatively but it's how I've been left feeling.

[ckcker]

Spit-Take’s Last Squirt

I look down at the parking lot of the apartment complex, I briefly think the back of a woman’s head walking away from me is the front of a hot guy walking towards me.  I hear a deadbolt unlock and turn and am invited inside.  Crossing the threshold of Rob’s apartment door sinks a throttled prick through my body akin to stumbling into a rusty and bubble-wrapped metal spike apparently for sale in an antique store.  Even as the top door hinge passes by my temple as a snubbed showbiz air kiss there is a flash in my mind of something, unrelated to the physical apartment and also a thing I will never be able to remove, that asks to keep my focus in two places at once.  Between these two places, the feet and the head spitroast me with their perverse negotiations.  My initial trauma is at this point overused as a topic and let’s agree boring to think about; my mind starts to suggest trauma spinoffs instead.  I am given a glass of water by Rob but then ask for a beer as, without asking, my memory gifts me excruciating yet kinkily edited content of my attempts to recover.  One of the best ways to come back from a nervous breakdown, I decided in the aftermath of that notable moment, is to do it very very quickly, ‘few solutions are as correct as speed-processing a massive landmark shift in the perception of reality,’ I had soothed myself in the aftermath.  I was hoping for something shittier than an IPA, I drink the IPA and turn, I notice the back of what I believe is an old woman’s head and body resting on the couch.  

After my  ˹survivable event˼  it was typical for all of the dying to retire inward. I believed I could bring back my life in the same way that people made jokes about being dead inside to prepare for the end of the world.  Alright, the remodeling of total defeat into pragmatic quarantine.  Enough disaster movies had passed, everyone notices catastrophes have entertainment value, I would walk past and look in the glass reflection of a recently opened Thai street food spot run by white ex-skaters, I evaluated my drilled in face and greyed out options, my de-emphasized terror: maybe even I could be entertaining. My original twist on the concept of recovering was to imagine my strength and ability as limitless. To decide I could pre-understand the well-flung implications of my situation, of a mind unable to cope with learning all of the things that are possible.  I wanted to turbo-ravel a lights out unraveling; the poet who wanted to be a cop.  I turn to Rob and say nothing about the apparently older woman, he also says nothing about her, asks, “what kind of music do you like?” before playing an Ace of Base song and I don’t have to answer.  The woman seems to be activated.  Her limbs slide against her torso and she turns to look around the room, then briefly at us but again at the room, then one certain spot on the wall to the right of where we are standing where she settles and says “hi” in a warble expelled as a foehn.    

I return the hi and am introduced to Gail.  I thought of all my failed solutions.  For instance, attending several satellite Occupy Wall Street protests, where discussions of income inequality and widespread mobilization were annotated with shouts, why is there fluoride in our water and end the fed.  One important takeaway involved a large man yelling along to the song being played on the sound system, “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me,” for two repetitions of the lyric before realizing no one else would join him and vanishing into embarrassed aerosol.  A successful protest fixates on a way for everyone to feel more or less the same emotion at a coordinated moment.  A successful protest is very sharply art directed and does not relish the display of rehearsed outrage.  The foot I thought I’d taken out of my ass and put through the door had somehow ended up in some other ass.  Feel it for the first time again.  Though people will regularly re-watch movies only waiting for their favorite lines to be said, it seems they rarely stop to consider protest tactics they have seen before.  I thought I had the patience, the dedication for such things, I tapped out naturally and in gas form. “She needed a place to stay for a bit,” Rob tells me, Gail says nothing but smiles lightly, looking at us in some awesome combo of salivating for a response and indifferent to the fact of being trapped behind twenty successive panes of stained glass.  Tchah, the experience of watching an ancient demon fail an eight week long beginner’s course on improv. “I see,” I conclude, Gail’s expression remains the same.  “Wow…’Beautiful Life’ is such a good song,” Rob says. The song moves to the front. I say, “Yes, I do love ‘Beautiful Life.’”

I had tried walks and not just sometimes but many walks.  Down the city cul-de-sac at a certain time.  Listening to wordless music, this one some sort of ambient dramatization of Eurydice’s botched escape from the underworld, a repetitive melancholy chunnel.  Then a rotation: it becomes Britney from an era when pop turned us around an axis both blingy and higgedly-piggedly-nigh-fucky-wucky, gently increasing the healing concept with each exacting flail, that there may be a consolation for all problems leading up to and including the end of the world.  The consolation was dancing all night.  Of course the time of my walks was twilight.  Fried mindsets gave the music much power as a narrative soundtrack; as I looked at a single branch of a very tall tree overhead and caught in sunset and streetlight, jiggled evocatively by wind, and heard a sort of coincidental despair-organized belch from the buckled gut of the mp3, I attempted to speed things up by trying to lose my mind all of the way.  This did not work, I had to stay somewhere in between.  

I went on more walks alone but never too far from my amazing bed.  It was crucial to be within 30 walking minutes of somewhere unsurveilled where I could lay down and catalogue mysterious headaches, as mysterious headaches had rightfully been selected as the center of my world.  The speed of losing a mind is incredibly hard to measure.  Gail also listens to ‘Beautiful Life’ and clearly does not know what it is, I don’t feel familiar enough with Rob to confront the question of how they know each other, I try:

“Are you two related?”

“No no no, haha,” Rob’s voice enters an excited tone. Gail emerges a glacial grin that, even as it forms one of the most approachable configurations able to be realized on a face, still seems misdirected from the hook of a comforting social cue, “no, I met Gail at a bar last night.  At Tina’s.  She just needs a place to stay for a little.  She just moved back here.”  “I spent many years in Lawrence, with my family,” Gail says.  

“I see.”  

Context clues point to homeless, I ache to know much more, Rob twirls around with unbridled pizazz.  He puts his two arms straight out towards me, “what would — ohhh!!”  He retracts his arms. “I was going to ask if you wanted something to drink.” Gail rests, “but you already have a beer,” and here he must have felt the panic to entertain away a social gaffe by immediately giving a clear-cut logical explanation, “my mind has been wiped away this week.  So much molly…           Well…   good.”  

“Yes.”  

“Yes INDEED hunny. This past weekend just about mummified me, I’ve been in a sarcophagus all WEEK, did you do anything fun?”

“Umm.”

I remembered then I was trying to stop using umm. I was coaching myself to be quite fearless and brave when entering sentences.  The CEO of a major newspaper-then-media company once said, before filming a segment for an in-house spot on the company’s approach to advertising its newly launched free weekly targeting 23-35 y/o young professionals, ‘I’m not an umm guy.’  This dialogue, delivered to the video director who was reminding the CEO to look straight in the camera and avoid using expressions like “umm” and “uhh” since they communicated unpreparedness, nerves or insecurity, revealed in its choppy severity a set of verbal and body language constraints that likely this man thought of all the time in order to conjure his short and long term goals.  Likely he thought of them almost as much as I thought about mysterious headaches.  I had been hired to help craft services for the shoot and spent much of the time sitting against a wall print of a famous basketball player, staring at the glass-walled office and elevators meant to enhance, via the perspective of ‘more space’ given by such architecture, a tech-oriented workplace for the media-damaged graduates.  See-thru offices offer more natural light, the young people of the era seem to enjoy a certain kind of light.  Another two-day job to float me, and an opportunity to rebuild a stomach for being outside of my incredible room.  “I stayed in on Saturday,” then I pause before continuing, “I watched a movie.  A documentary,” which I had watched for 17 minutes before moving to my window to observe the parking lot for 45 minutes, followed by bed.  

Rob seems uncomfortable with this idea, “you should come out with us this weekend. There’s some stuff going on.  Maybe you can come to this super fun party, it’s a queer party.  In fact it’s a conspiracy theory-themed queer party.”  Gail moves her left forefinger a splanch.  “It’s really funny! And good music, people dress up, it’s called……….Femmetrails” there is a pause of expectation which I do not know how to meet and which is ignored “it’s really funny and lots of dancing. My friend Blake hosts it. But in drag.  And, guess what his drag name is” I try to remember: was it a parking lot I observed, or a man in his early 40s masturbating within a fingerprint-shrouded computer screen “Georgia SORROWS.  Gail’s going to come!”  Gail has stopped grinning and seems to be unreachable for the length of a square breath before a small shift in her sitting style punctures the proto-gargoyle droop. “Yes I am going to come” she confirms.  “Yes and you should too,” it appears Rob is attached to the idea.  I clean out my lower mouth with my tongue, with mouth closed.  “That would be, maybe” this seems to be enough of an answer for everyone.  

Rob sits on the ground, I begin to prepare my body to also sit on the ground.  It had been a meat lover’s pizza approach to self-healing.  Kava tea from the pharmacy chain, sugar abstinence, performative meditation, I slipped into nonsensical jogging regimens, coffee abstinence, I walked gently in frozen empty parking lots, I didn’t touch anyone for a full year, “my balls are lost halls,” short term CBT and do-it-yourself biofeedback, waiting for hyperventilation so I could write about it, and all this supported by typical means: substantial daily hard alcohol acceptances and fearless ibuprofen stuffings.  And to heal oneself completely, one must never enlighten others to the full extent of the problem and the drenched map of half-solutions being applied, regularly, in secret.  Yes, I had as much spiritual discipline as a teen in an Intro to Photo class taking b&w photos of homeless people on the street.  I sit down at least four feet away from Rob and twelve from Gail, who in the meantime it has been discovered does not know the story of Amanda Bynes’ breakdown.  She also does not know who Amanda Bynes is.  Neither Rob nor I have any interest in making that clear.  The super gonorrheic minutiae that line and then bedazzle the mental process of a terrified person do not enter conversations as smoothly as quotes from 23 year old cult TV shows canceled after two seasons.  Not a shock, only a condition that makes the thoughts turn ever more crunched, ever more specific and internally bound, glowing with unpopular culture.

[unixcommerce]

Rob Tarkoff of Oracle: Customer Experience Today is About Data, Content, Design and Curiosity

Last week in Vegas, my CRM Playaz co-host and friend Paul Greenberg and I were hanging out at Oracle’s annual MCX (Modern Customer Experience) conference. It’s a showcase the company uses to announce new applications and services to their customer experience platform, Oracle CX. But it also presents a nice opportunity to get a glimpse into the strategy and the direction customer experience design and thinking is headed. And some great nuggets came out of the conference that really apply to any size business.

Paul and I were able to capture some of these nuggets in a conversation we had with Rob Tarkoff, Oracle’s EVP and GM of the Oracle CX business. Topics Rob touched on included the leading role data is playing in developing customer experiences, the role curiosity plays in delivering customer experiences, and who Rob believes is the most curious person (out of 140,000 employees worldwide) at Oracle today. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To check out the full convo, watch the video or click on the embedded SoundCloud player.

Small Business Trends: You’re what, about six months in to being at Oracle?

Rob Tarkoff: Right.

Small Business Trends: I remember, I think it was OpenWorld, was like your first week there or something and you were already speaking?

Rob Tarkoff: Yeah, I think it was week three or four, yeah that was a little bit crazy, that they actually … It wasn’t crazy that I did it. It was crazy that they let me do it. When I immediately got to the company, the first thing I looked at is … And you have both said this a lot, there’s so many incredible products in Oracle CX, but one of the things that I thought there was an opportunity to improve was a real story to knit it together, and a narrative about what Oracle stood for. And so I spent about the first three weeks just in review after review after review with the engineering teams, about what are you really trying to build, and what are the problems you’re solving? Through the help of Des Cahill [VP & CMO, Oracle CX] and other members of his team we just came up with these themes, we hashed them out for two days, and came up with this Discover, Engage, Consume, Serve theme. It’s really stuck, I mean it’s been great.

Small Business Trends: What’s been the biggest surprise in your time at Oracle?

Rob Tarkoff: I feel like I worked at every company but Oracle before this, and Oracle was always this 140,000 employees; we’re in every business, and I have the chance tomorrow to interview [Oracle co-CEO] Mark Hurd on stage, talking about Oracle sales models. You think about we’re in hardware, software, digital mid-size business, digital large enterprise, we have vertical businesses, just basically a whole migration from on-premise to cloud, infrastructure, everything.

The thing I found is Oracle is one of the more curious companies in terms of people are really curious about what’s happening. The engineers are not set in their ways at all. I’m amazed the product and the business people at Oracle just get behind it so if there’s ever like a story of Oracle stuck in its ways, I haven’t experienced that.

Now there is something to being successful in that a lot of people will come in and ask why do you gotta change it, and will say there aren’t that many $40 billion software companies out there so obviously Oracle’s been doing something right for a long time. But I would say the most curious person in the company actually is Larry [Ellison, Oracle founder]. And I get a chance to work a decent amount with him and came out of the last earnings call that Larry, his people are impressed with how involved Larry is. I’ve only seen him involved so if he wasn’t involved it wasn’t a time when I was here. But he is super involved in the products, he’s super involved in the strategy, and he’s deeply curious about all the new things that are happening with CX and so that just makes it a great place to be.

Small Business Trends: I gotta ask you … I’m still like, if I were one of the top five richest people in the world, I’d probably be away on my own island, chilling-

Paul Greenberg: He has that too, Hawaii.

Small Business Trends: He has it … but during Oracle OpenWorld [the company’s annual user conference] he’s there front and center. I mean, he’s into it. And that’s just so surprising to me that after all these years he’s still like that. He’s still into it.

Rob Tarkoff: I would say that he’s so much more into it than people appreciate and the fact that he’s into it is such a powerful weapon for Oracle because he has such broad perspective about all these different technology trends that have happened. He’s deeply technical and he also is willing to engage and debate any topic that comes up for hours on end and I’ve been involved in these discussions. And he’s deeply motivated by … If you think about, and I don’t know him well, but if you think about the kind of expertise he has – he’s a champion sailor, fighter pilot, obviously one of the most successful business people and technologists in the world – but also just deeply curious about so many different things.

So I just think he would never strike me as the kind of person that would be on a, I mean he has an island, but be on an island sort of not doing anything. He’s just … I mean when I’m in meeting with him he always reads the deck the night before, he comes with a set of prepared questions, and we launch right in. There’s no preamble and he usually goes right to the point in three seconds. So it’s pretty amazing, yeah.

Paul Greenberg: Wow. I probably wouldn’t actually get along with him if there’s no preamble. My preamble is like 30 minutes.

Rob Tarkoff: Less preamble than you.

Small Business Trends: You do like a good preamble.

Paul Greenberg: I do.

Small Business Trends: Well one of the other things, a lot of companies like to talk about experience, customer experience, they really do focus heavily on the content which is really important but you guys not only focus on the content but with what you’re doing with data, and marrying it to the creative experiences using data and content. Seems like that’s really driving what you’re doing here.

Rob Tarkoff: Yeah, so in addition to people at Oracle being interested in learning about a lot of new things, that they wouldn’t have been able to experience unless they’ve been outside of Oracle, the other thing I found is just this rich heritage in data is truly an enormous asset. And so when you’re … Paul and I were talking about this a little before, when you’re a company the scale of Oracle you can look out and there’s so many different capabilities, if you can just find the one or two things that you can really get people aligned around you can make progress really quickly. So CX Unity which was not an idea I came up with, it predated me, but I immediately latched onto it because it is just this ability to manage data in ways that have been hard for a lot of other companies to do. To really build something that’s not just some big data lake that nobody does anything with but to really make it a persistent store that can be plugged into apps.

Oracle has all the capabilities to do it, it was just about finding the focus to go make that happen. And so I couldn’t do that, we couldn’t do that, at any other company. You have to … and it’s funny because when I was at Adobe, when I first got there and really kind of started the Enterprise business for them, it was all about design and I remember one of the conversations we had was about boy, if we could just bring the creative suite concept of design into Enterprise, we’d do away with ugly apps.

I gave a keynote to a large conference in German, a bunch of German CIOs, and I talked to them about consumerization of IT and I remember they were looking at me like this guy from Adobe is talking about consumer apps in IT. Who is this, what are they talking about. So we’re a long way from that in CX, but now I think it’s a data game.

This article, “Rob Tarkoff of Oracle: Customer Experience Today is About Data, Content, Design and Curiosity” was first published on Small Business Trends

https://smallbiztrends.com/

The post Rob Tarkoff of Oracle: Customer Experience Today is About Data, Content, Design and Curiosity appeared first on Unix Commerce.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2OvSeN8 via IFTTT

[thepermanentrainpress]

THE PERMANENT RAIN PRESS INTERVIEW WITH GABRIELA GENEVA

Gabriela Geneva has been honing her craft since her relocation from Vancouver to Toronto. The rising pop artist has been keeping busy with writing and recording sessions, and of course, live performances. Just this week, she released her latest single “You Were Right,” an electric and empowering track about self-discovery. 

"You Were Right" is an empowering track about self-discovery, take us through the writing process and its sound.

I really wanted the main focus of the song to be the embracement of the person my ex told me I probably shouldn’t be. He played a role in the situation of course, but I wanted the song to be less of a finger pointer, and much more of a celebration. I wanted it to feel big and chanty because I wanted to shout the message loud and clear, and I’m so happy to have worked on it with Rob Wells and Shobha (The Fourth Floor) because from the get go we were on the same page and it just made the song fly out so effortlessly.

You're determined to present positive messages through your music; why is this important to you as an artist?

Because I think music has such a magically easy way of entering people’s minds and subconsciousness and it’s important to know that words have power. So, what we sing along with is what we take in, actively or not, and I want what people take in from my music to be positive and strong.

We've known you since your time as vocalist in GreenTree, how have you grown as a songwriter and performer since then?

You totally have! We go way back <3 Thank you guys for all your consistent support, as an emerging artist it means the world. Back to the question… I’ve seen my confidence as an artist grow - as a performer, as a singer, as a writer. I’m really happy to notice more and more that I feel like I’m holding my own in writing sessions. I’ve been really fortunate to work with some amazing songwriters and I’ve just learned so much from each and every person. I’m still developing every day, don’t get me wrong, but it’s really validating to see your own growth and see every bit of hard work and sacrifice pay off bit by bit.

Following the release of your summer single, what's on the horizon for you? Can we expect an EP to follow?

An EP is in the works, absolutely. I’ve got lots to share with people, and I want to make sure I do it right, so I’m super super excited. I’m taking my butt on the road as well, I can’t wait for that.

Since your relocation to Toronto from Vancouver, how have you navigated the landscape for artists on the east versus west coast? Take us through a few of the key differences, for you personally.

I will always love Vancouver because I found my footing as an artist there, but in Toronto I’ve definitely seen more enthusiasm when it comes to going to see live shows and supporting the live music scene. I’ve also seen quite a big variety of genres in Toronto, which makes it more accessible for musicians to pursue and thrive in most branches of music. I think that probably just has to do with the fact that there are exponentially more people here than in Vancouver. I feel like the industry is more saturated here, but at the same time because so many people are doing the same thing it creates so much opportunity for collaboration, which I love.

For young artists, pursuing a career in music can be a scary and overwhelming decision. What are some factors that impacted your decision to move and follow your dreams?

Honestly, for me it was the simple fact that my parents brought our family to Canada so that I could have a life with more opportunities and freedoms. In my mind, I owe it to my parents and to myself to give my dreams their best shot because I’ve been allowed the freedom to try, and I can’t waste that.

We couldn't help but notice on your social media, your friendship with fellow Canadian artists Alexis Lynn and the Command Sisters. It's so great to see female artists supporting fellow female artists, the definition of girl power. How have your friends and collaborators driven and inspired you?

I’m happy you mentioned them specifically because they inspire me every single day. Being surrounded by young women who are so incredibly driven, talented, and first and foremost humble and supportive is incredible and it has helped motivate me on days when I don’t want to move a muscle. I look at them hustling and I just think girl… they can do it, you can too. Supporting each other is the only way for anyone to get anywhere, in my opinion. Especially Alexis, she’s an angel and she’s one of my biggest cheerleaders and I am hers all day everyday. There seems to be this weird misconception that if someone else is succeeding it means you can’t, which I think is ridiculous.

You have the cutest kitten, Kovu. What's the best part about coming home to him?

This is already my favorite interview because you brought my cat into this. He is a living breathing stress reliever. He’s the softest cuddliest little fur ball and whenever I’m having a bad day and I open the front door to be greeted by his little meows and purring is heaven. He’s absolutely amazing.

For those who haven't visited Toronto, what are a few places you'd recommend for a bite to eat or fun tourist activity?

Okay, your FIRST stop should be “La Cubana,” which is a restaurant on Ossington St. I’m a huge foodie and usually I’d find it hard to pick just one restaurant, but my god... GO. I think everyone probably says this but I’d definitely stop by Kensington Market, pretty much any time of the day. There’s always music, there’s great food (did I mention I like food?), and there’s really cool vendors and stores that can keep you busy for hours.

______________________________________________________________

Thank you to Gabriela for answering our questions, and congratulations to her on the release of “You Were Right.”

Written by: Chloe Hoy

[fullbacksview]

Rassie’s Springbok Squad - The Right Calls

The job of Springbok coach and selector must be one of the best and worst jobs at the same time. On one hand you are in charge of arguably the most talented pool of players and coaching a team that captures the nations imagination and on the other hand, the “fans” are going to criticize you at every opportunity on performance, selection, etc. It was no surprise to hear in a recent podcast that a former South African player, currently on the edge of selection for England, saying that the biggest reason for our players succeeding overseas is that regardless of how they’re playing the fans are 100% behind them. Something a vast group of South African’s struggle to offer our players and coaches.

As a passionate Springbok fan and lover of rugby who spends far too much of my day pondering these things I thought I would put into words my opinion on Rassie’s first Springbok squad.

Coach: I think Rassie is a great call, he is a proven winner as a coach, demands respect and is meticulous in his work. Just over 15 Months out from a World Cup, he is the sort of person you want at the helm.

From what I can see, Allister was free to pick all the international players Rassie has (Bismarck, Willie, Duane, Francois, etc. all are heavily capped and were available to him), while the local players were all available to him as well. Don’t get me wrong, yes, a year on there are players who are performing much better and it has given Rassie more options, but a coach cannot argue if his team does not perform with what is available to him. That is the sad reality of professional sport.

 Props: There is very little to not like about Rassie’s selections here, barring possibly the omissions of Vincent Koch and Lizo Gqoboka. These are the form front rankers. I’ll admit I haven’t watched a great deal of the Pro 14, but Ox Nche was very close to selection last year and if he has improved, his call-up is well deserved and exciting. Malherbe is probably the lucky one, based solely on his lack of game time, but when fit there aren’t many better defensive and scrummaging tightheads in world rugby and with the short prep time, Rassie has worked with him before.

 Hookers: Malcom Marx’s injury was always going to be a huge blow to the Boks. He is by far and away the best hooker in the country and quite possibly the world. That being said, we’re kidding ourselves if we thought he was immune to injury and would be fit all the way to the World Cup. However, what it has done is shown our lack of depth in this position. I back Rassie on excluding Strauss, though the one justification I would have seen for picking Strauss would have been that both his locks (and would have been Lood as well were it not for injury) have made the squad and you cannot underestimate combinations.

Bringing back Bismarck ensures the squad has experience in the position but also that we lose very little in physicality on Marx. Both Bongi and Chilliboy can feel fortunate to be in the squad, not on talent, but purely on lack of game time. Bongi has been injured for ages but based on last year does deserve his place and I thoroughly enjoy the impetus he brings to a game.

Chilliboy however has been fit, but for whatever reason has lacked game time under Rob Du Preez Snr and although talented is the surprise selection. The final hooker in the group, Akker, has been one of the duo keeping Chilliboy out of the Sharks team and for good reason, he has been dynamic, physical and game breaking and justifiably makes the squad.

 Locks: It is scary to think that even without Eben and Lood, there are still this many good locks in the country. Especially when you think of all those not picked as well. In Mostert and Pieter Steph you have two of the most inform locks in Super Rugby (albeit both also looking equally at home on the side of the scrum) and in Jenkins and Snyman you have a combination that has played together for the SA U/20’s and the Bulls and have shown moments of brilliance that justify their selections. I haven’t seen much of Marvin Orie this year due to work during Lions games, but I know he has been highly rated at every level he has played and is definitely one with Springbok potential. For me the only lock I think can feel hard done by is Ruan Botha, but we are well stocked at no. 5 and his opportunity will come.

 Loose Trio: This is probably the position that most divides South Africa and that is because everyone has loyalty to their team, their opinions on loose trio make-ups and most significantly a number of players to choose from. Personally, I like the Rassie’s picks and for me the 1st choice trio picks itself: Vermuelen, Du Preez, Kolisi, but who makes up the bench, etc. is a lot more interesting. In Notshe and Kwagga he makes up in speed and dynamism what he loses in size to the others, with Kwagga also being the only recognized fetcher in the group. Mohoje has been a stalwart of recent Bok teams and never gives an inch, but I do wonder whether he fits this new Bok loose trio template as he is not a recognized skillful player but will carry hard and never shirk on defense. In Du Plessis and Carr he has chosen two different options at 8, Du Plessis is the power player who will bash players on attack and defense, while Carr is probably the best linking 8 (Whiteley aside) in South Africa and someone I often feel is underrated because he is not flashy in his play and it helps that he can cover the side of the scrum as well. 

There is obviously a limit on squad sizes (though 43 is huge) but I think all three Bulls players of Bholi, Van Staaden and Smit have a right to feel aggrieved at their exclusion as all have been very good in an up and down Bulls team.

 Scrumhalf: I hate to say this, and I know many will disagree, but ABF (anyone but Faf). With him recently having been nominated as English Premiership Player of the Year this is going to alienate most people so let me justify it. Faf is an incredible rugby player, but not an incredible scrumhalf. For me, a scrumhalf is so instrumental to a team’s performance and if he cannot do the basics of his position well (pass from the base, kick and read a game) then he is no good to an international side. Faf always looks busy, is exciting, gets involved physically and that excites fans, but he walks before he passes and makes too many bad decisions and that doesn’t win you test matches.

Rassie said it in an interview “Do I select someone who has been tried before but not convinced and give him 19 more test matches to prove to me he deserves it, or do I give someone who I think has what it takes 19 test matches to get to where I need him to be?”. To me the answer is the latter and the player he has to back is Cameron Wright. No-one has completely put their hand up to say “pick me” but Wright has definitely shown the capabilities to be that guy. He passes crisply from the base, has great vision, kicks well, organizes and barring his missed tackle on the weekend is generally good on defense. He certainly has some rough edges but not for a long time have I seen a scrumhalf who excites me as much as he does.

Van Zyl has also been good for the Bulls this year and will be there and thereabouts in selection discussions, but I think he is marginally pipped by Wright. In Papier we have incredible potential but he has lacked game time and I think his selection is more to experience the culture, knowing he has the ability to be a Bok performer in the future.

 Flyhalf: When was the last time we genuinely had this much potential at flyhalf? Jantjies has once again been great for the Lions (not as good as the last two years, but still very good), Pollard has been exciting, intelligent and physical but also not completely consistent at times, while Rob Du Preez started slowly but is now the leading point scorer in Super Rugby and arguably the most inform of the three.

I imagine Pollard will be Rassie’s man, but Elton and Rob will push him hard and be there to take their opportunity should Pollard show any hints of bad form.

Add to that Willemse, who is away at the Junior World Cup, Du Plessis, who has recently returned for the Stormers and looked exciting, physical and clinical and Bosch, who is being seen more as a Fullback for now and suddenly the Flyhalf stocks look pretty good for the Springboks going forward.

 Centres: Once again there is not much you can fault Rassie on here. He has picked the form players from Super Rugby in Am, Esterhuizen, Kriel and De Allende (I know he divides opinion, but he has looked the part this season again) and then throw in a World Cup winner and player who seems to always be in form in France, Francois Steyn.

Esterhuizen and Am have formed an incredibly effective partnership at the Sharks, on both defense and attack and would certainly not look out of place against England. Esterhuizen’s physicality as well as useful left boot would come in handy, while Am has been exciting on attack and clinical on defense. 

Kriel last year looked lost, he was running sideways, never passed and typified the lack of threat the Springbok backline posed. A pre-season under John Mitchell and he suddenly looks like a rugby player again, he knows when to pass, when to straighten and even has a handy grubber to open up defenses and will certainly bring something to the Boks in 2018.

The same could be said of De Allende, his 2018 and 2017 performances couldn’t be further apart and although he’s not completely back to the player we know he can be, he is causing havoc at times on attack with his straightening and ability to break the line. 

Francois Steyn has lived a roller-coaster as a Springbok, from World Cup winner at 19, to being discarded by the Boks, going overseas, being picked and then not picked again but one thing has stayed constant; his ability to perform week in and week out. Unfortunately, the SA public expects miracles from him at every opportunity but ask anyone in France and they will tell you that Steyn is one of the most consistent performers in the league, this despite being shifted from 12 to 10 to 13 to 15. His experience cannot be underestimated in this Bok squad and he would be my first choice 12.

 Wings: In Mapimpi, Nkosi and Dyantyi we have 3 of the most exciting wingers in Super Rugby. Mapimpi and Dyantyi are clinical when it comes to finishing and will score many tries for the Boks, provided we get the ball to them. While both are physical, Nkosi is a step up on that front and what he could do for us really excites me.

In my personal opinion I wouldn’t have gone for Ismaiel, I think we have players in the squad who offer the same and more and if I were to include others it would have been Tambwe, who is arguably the most clinical finisher of the lot and Leyds who I think is one of the smartest players in SA rugby. We have seen the All Blacks consistently use Fullbacks as wingers to incredible effect and I think Leyds could do the same job for the Springboks.

 Fullback: Gelant.

I really could just leave that there as he has made that position his and I am incredibly excited to see what he will do there. Having watched him as a 17-year-old playing 12 for SWD at Craven Week, I could see he was special. He seemed to have more time than anyone on the park and I am just glad to see how has progressed into a potentially world class Fullback for the Boks.

His back-ups (as I see it) in Willie and Curwin are both incredibly exciting players and bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the team. Curwin has unquestionably, the biggest boot in SA Rugby and his game breaking ability with drop goals and speed is going to be a major asset to the Boks over the years and if he gets his defense sorted, he will be major threat at 10 and 15

Willie in his prime and at full confidence is one of the most exciting and devastating outside backs in world rugby. He can pick a pass, cut a line, chip and chase at will and word from the UK is that he has been doing that, profiting greatly from Cipriani’s ability to create the space for him to work his magic. If he can find that sort of form for the Boks, he offers significant experience and value going towards RWC 2019.

However, Le Roux is a confidence player and by his own admission, the unconditional support in England has lent itself to his form. We know the South African public will not be so kind and I wonder whether he has the ability to bounce back from a bad game (should he have one). On the other hand, Bosch seems to have the right amount of nasty and self-confidence to bounce back from any errors and drop a goal from 60m, etc.

Test Matches: With that all being said, there is no way we can pick the same squads for the Wales Test in the the USA and the 1st England test and with that in mind, the teams I would select from Rassie’s above squad would be:

Springboks vs Wales: 1. Steven Kitshoff 2. Akker Van Der Merwe 3. Trevor Nyakane 4. Jason Jenkins 5. Pieter Steph Du Toit © 6. Kwagga Smith 7. Oupa Mohoje 8. Dan Du Preez 9. Faf Du Klerk 10. Elton Jantjies 11. Aphiwe Dyantyi 12. Andre Esterhuizen 13. Jesse Kriel 14. Willie Le Roux 15. Curwin Bosch. 16. Chilliboy Ralapelle 17. Ox Nche 18. Frans Malherbe 19. RG Snyman 20. Sikhumbuzo Notshe 21. Embrose Papier 22. Rob Du Preez 23. Travis Ismaiel

Springboks vs England: 1. Tendai Mtawarira 2. Bismarck Du Plessis 3. Wilco Louw 4. RG Snyman 5. Franco Mostert 6. Siya Kolisi © 7. Jean-Luc Du Preez 8. Duane Vermeulen 9. Cameron Wright 10. Handre Pollard 11. Sibusiso Nkosi 12. Francois Steyn 13. Lukhanyo Am 14. Makazole Mapimpi 15. Warrick Gelant 16. Bongi Mbonambi 17. Steven Kitshoff 18. Trevor Nyakane 19. Pieter-Steph Du Toit 20. Nizaam Carr 21. Ivan Van Zyl 22. Elton Jantjies 23. Damien De Allende

[gunnersalley]

Thinking You’re a Hero, The John Wayne Syndrome

Making the decision to intervene with deadly force, requires much consideration.   You’re a civilian concealed carrier, out and about on a typical day. You stop into the grocery store, turn to grab a box of Wheaties and hear screaming coming from the front of the store. Unsure of what is going on, but knowing you are armed, you now have to make a decision … investigate and possibly get involved, or avoid the area.  In this article, I am not talking about being personally attacked inside or outside of your home, or your family member being attacked. Of course you should defend yourself and your family against any attack with appropriate force. Instead, I want to address deciding to use force on a stranger’s behalf.  There are hundreds of considerations you should be processing before you decide to intervene with deadly force on another’s behalf. The type of crime being committed and the number of attackers are just two of these.  But…  there is one mindset that can cloud your decision-making process, and get you killed . I have seen it in the Marine Corps during firefights and as an LEO.  Thinking You’re Invincible:  Seeing well-trained people do things contrary to common and tactical sense is not uncommon. In the Marine Corps, we said the guy had the ‘John Wayne Syndrome.’ The ‘John Wayne Syndrome’ or the ‘Hero Complex’ is something that affects the person’s ability to properly calculate the risks and develop the proper response. This comes from a belief that the individual is invincible or bulletproof.  The exaggerated belief in one’s abilities is a double edged sword. Controlled, this mindset allows us to persevere and succeed when our mind is telling us we can not. Uncontrolled, or used misguidedly, it can get us involved in situations where we are ill-prepared and ineffective against the threat. This is the situation we need to watch for.    Don’t be a victim of the ‘John Wayne Syndrome’   Should You Get Involved?  This question is common in my Concealed Carry Class. There are legal issues dictating when you should use deadly force to intervene on someone else’s behalf. Generally speaking, a civilian incurs an incredible amount of liability when they intervein on someone else’s behalf. In some states, the person may face both civil and criminal charges if he/she mistakenly uses force against the wrong person. For this and many other obvious reasons, the legal implications should be one of the first things you should understand before carrying a firearm.   Legal issues aside , the question of  should  you get involved is extremely difficult to answer, and an individual decision based on countless factors.  I recommend you play ‘what if’ scenario games. Wherever you are, think about what your response would be ‘if this happened.’ For example, while in line at the bank (if people still go into the bank) think about what you would do if someone came in with a gun through that door, or the other door. What about your response if there were two bad guys etc.  Watch videos of shootings or assaults. Study how the person responded and what they did well, or what they could have done better. Study how bad guys react to certain actions. A quick internet search of something like ‘concealed carrier shoots bad guy’ will return a plethora of pertinent videos. We can sometimes learn more from seeing poor decisions because the tragic results of those fatal flaws burn into our minds.    Sometimes what we think we can do, and what we can actually do are entirely different.   Know Your Role:  I know many of the readers have a desire to protect and help others, and this is a noble trait. But if you’re are not a Law Enforcement Officer, don’t act as one. As a civilian, you are not protected criminally or civilly like an LEO.  Don’t get me wrong, you may be a high-volume shooter who possesses fighting and gun skills the average police officer doesn’t. But knowing your role doesn’t have anything to do with your skill set.  Your role as a civilian is to protect yourself and family FIRST, then, if appropriate and necessary help others. As a civilian, you may feel a moral obligation to help, but it’s not your job and you have to differentiate between the two.  A police officer’s job is difficult, dangerous and thankless. But they are the ones who protect the public and keep the peace. They possess other, less-lethal force options may be more appropriate in a given scenario. They also wear body armor and can radio other officers for assistance. Also, think about trying to detain someone if you don’t carry cuffs.  Know Thy Self:  Be honest and know your abilities and limitations. If you haven’t found your effective distance on the range, you should. Get an idea of the zone where you are a ‘can’t miss’ guaranteed hit, and where you have to get on the sights a little harder. This will help you determine realistic response to threats.  Know your level of physical fitness or hand to hand fighting skills, as well as physical limitations. Understand what you can and can’t do, if the situation involves intervening without using a firearm.  Also know what you feel is worth risking your life for. Some of us posses the ability or nobility to risk our own lives on behalf of others. Some of us either lack this noble trait or just may feel that the need to continue to live as a dad or mom outweighs the potential good that can come from risking one’s life on behalf of a stranger.    If you are a parent there are few things more important than staying alive for your children’s sake.   Know Your Gear:  Every tool you carry has a specific purpose and may be more appropriate in a given situation. Sometimes the response may call for a gun sometimes not. Sometimes a knife,  hand strikes or a blunt object may be the ‘proper tool .’ Remember every tool has its limitations, respond accordingly with the tools at your disposal.  Handguns are great but they are not a magic wand. Part of knowing your gear involves trusting that it will work. So maintain your firearm, knife, holster etc. You must be able to trust that when you present your firearm and pull the trigger you are sending bullets into the bad guy, not hearing…CLICK.  And while we are on  knowing your gear , you must know the condition of your firearm. By condition, I mean if it has a round in the chamber or not, and if the gun is on safe or not. This is not the article to discuss if you should or should not  carry with a round in the chamber , or if you  need a safety on your EDC . Whatever you choose to do, know the condition of your firearm so you don’t screw it up.  Do You Really Know the Whole Story:  Before jumping into a situation where you don’t know who the players are, pause and reflect. Do you REALLY know what’s going on? For example, you exit a 7-11 at night, turn the corner and walk to your car. As you reach a poorly illuminated area of the parking lot, you see two men. One is kneeling and the other has a firearm drawn and pointed at the other guy. Both men are in plain clothes, and you hear ‘don’t move or I’ll shoot you!’  Is the guy kneeling on the ground being robbed by the guy with the gun? Could it be a narcotics detective in plain clothes (and we all know these dudes usually look grimier than the guys they arrest) effecting an arrest and you can’t see his exposed badge?  Point is, we can come up with a lot of scenarios where things are not always as they seem. This is why intervening on someone else’s behalf, is so risky.    It isn’t always easy to identify who are the good and bad guys in the situation   Think About Tactics:  You can avoid getting involved in situations where you are ill-equipped if you think about tactical considerations, for example:  Intervening in a bank robbery where there are multiple suspects with rifles, while only having a 5 shot revolver is probably not the wisest thing to do, tactically speaking. This incident may devolve into one where engaging is your ONLY option, but it certainly is not preferable.  Getting involved in a situation when you have your toddler with you, will place you at a severe tactical disadvantage. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, it just means it is something that you HAVE to take into consideration when formulating your plan and decision to intervene.  While this point could really be found in any of the above sections, I am going to put it right in here. Remember, you are in plain clothes. The opportunity to be  mistaken as a bad guy , not just by responding law enforcement, but an over anxious fellow concealed carrier is there.  Be a Good Witness:  Sometimes intervening, while legally and morally justifiable, is not the best solution. After weighing all the facts, you may determine the risks just don’t outweigh the reward. In these situations, gathering as much information as you can, statements, descriptions, the direction of travel, vehicles people involved etc. can help in catching the bad guys.  AGAIN, I am not talking about hiding in the back snapping photos with your cell phone during an active shooter. But I think you get the point.    Not getting involved does not always mean you are a coward. Sometimes not getting involved and just being a good witness for Law Enforcement is the better thing to do.   You Expect me to Take All This Into Consideration Before I Act?  Yes, absolutely! I know it’s a lot to contemplate, so don’t try to do it all in 0.005 of a second. Think about scenarios, train for the known and possible contingencies,  c ome up with a plan on how to secure your family, know your gear and your limitations ,  and know the law   before hand .   So when the time comes, you can focus on the specifics of the incident, and make a decision.  Last but Not Least:  Make a decision and live with it. This doesn’t mean make a bad decision and justify it. Sometimes indecisiveness is worse than making a bad decision. After weighing all the options you may only have two courses of action. Bad course number one, or bad course number two.  Think back to that active shooter. You may be out gunned and out manned. If it were just a robbery, you may choose not to intervene. But this is an active shooter incident, people are dying by the second. Each second spent weighing odds, another person dies. Do you intervene with the odds stacked against you? And if so when? Make a decision and live with the results.  It is natural to second guess your decisions in retrospect. But do your best and live with your decision to, or not to get involved. Don’t ever feel like a coward for not getting involved, or a hero just because you did get involved.  Thinking that you are a hero is one mindset we want to avoid.  Check out this list of 55 other concealed carry mistakes, and how to avoid them .  As always stay safe and God bless.

https://www.concealedcarry.com/training-2/thinking-youre-a-hero-the-john-wayne-syndrome/

[oldmancopper]

2018 Spring Evaluations

The good and the bad, lol: GAME 2001  (only taught one week, so minimal reviews)

•             While i definitely learned a lot, it felt like a majority of different small lessons rather than one buildup. On the note of disjointed lessons that felt out of place, i feel that Y______'s presentation in class was considerably less professional than the other professors. He talked about his firing at Turbine, and how many others he'd already fired before his own termination. It felt shallow and bitter. Videos were shown of himself doing well in video games, but combined with the above topic repeatedly gone over, it felt egotistical and loosely tied into the topic he was teaching at best.

GAME 3900

(None)

GAME 3175

•             Walt's anecdotes and industry stories are possibly more helpful than even the class material. Always a pleasure.

GAME 2175

•             This course is very well structured and I enjoyed it •             I loved this class. My only complaint is that the full class assignments where my grade is dependent on everyone in my class to do work is ridiculous. This is unfair to the students who do their work. •             I want to flat out thank you for being such an incredible teacher in the past couple years. I feel guilty for having reached the personal conclusion about my career path --game development isn't something for me. Yet I still hold in dear in my heart and have continued to learn as much as I could before moving onto the next stage of my life. I will use the great knowledge you've taught me in other aspects of life, especially within interpersonal business relationships and just general social managing. I can without a doubt say that you are one of the reasons why Princeton agrees that at its core Becker actually has some great knowledge and skill in game design and development. In objective review of the class' structure reflected against the information received over the course's duration, I would have to say the quizzes and the book integration were the weakest aspects. I felt as though I truly understood the material, given by the high scoring homework which proved little challenge to me, yet I struggled to retain the knowledge required by the quizzes. Although the application of the skills learned proved perfected, the retention of supposed key details was not strong. In addition, I did not feel it necessary to obtain the knowledge within the course literature, whether intentional or not (because who wants to pay for books these days). Personally, I cannot retain enough attention in order to utilize written material under forced circumstances, and I can feel this is simply a trend within modern generations. One replacement to a single, outdated albeit useful data source is a weekly/monthly article system. These articles serve as an addition to lecture outside of class by linking topical themes with current events/news, providing relatable meaning for a wider audience. I wouldn't want to say this will necessarily give you more work to correct and return, but you could either require a quick paragraph summary of the article through a Canvas text box (which will take you, like, 5 minutes to read) or have an in class assignment where everyone gives one question and one comment. Like you'd go around the room in some order and everyone would take their turn to provide those to the class, in the sense of a class discussion. These weak points could be due to many factors, and I do not want to essentially claim your teaching method to be err; I only wish to provide my user experience in hopes to better future iterations of the course. I know you of all people understand that. Cheers, and a blessed 2018! •             This was a particularly eye opening course if you ask me, and I'm glad that any regards towards the industry and the way it functions wasn't obscured or 'glamored' to be something it wasn't. Professor Y_________ was particularly truthful with us on the way it functions, which if you ask me has better prepared us for the job market we'll eventually be entering. Beyond that though, understanding and learning about production methods in this class showed its usage since you can apply the majority of what you learn here to game studio or any game studio, allowing you to see where there are currently fall backs from a production stand point and how you can properly revise the current methodology to correct such fall backs. Additionally I appreciate that the lectures given after notes are decided as a whole by the class through voting, allowing the class to 'plan the course of direction' so to speak for those lectures and generally allowing us to gain some sage advice whether it be in production methods, or if it's even just life advice that's typically applicable in a work environment or even outside it. •             I thought the assignments, lectures, and readings were all very helpful and well planned, though I thought it should've been a bit more clear how the game we first pitched will be used for all the future assignments in case we accidentally pitch a game that will give us trouble with everything we have to manage about it later. •             Good professor, wants students to succeed and be prepared for a real job environment. But difficult assignments and quiz/test, quizzes have trick answers. •             More small group assignments would help the stragglers understand some certain things more. •             This man knows what he's doing and teaches the course in an extremely interesting manner. •             Old pro game manager teaches class on the reality of what is expected in the game industry. 10/10.

GAME 3901

•             Live Studio is well structured and (in my opinion) the best class at Becker. •             Please let incoming/current freshman take this course instead of ______. The experience is so incredibly invaluable, you'd be robbing them to not let them take Live Studio instead. •             It is a shame that the course requirements were changed to punish those who are taking a minor or extra classes. No matter what happens, Live Studio is objectively a more useful class and changing the requirements to force more talented students into it is a mistake. Walt and Monty will always manage their class better than in Game Studio, fortunately I was lucky enough to get onto a Greenlit studio, but my opinion still remains. I learned so many useful things in Live, worked with an amazing team, and got full-hands on experience that I doubt I will get in _________. •             Please let incoming/current freshman take this course instead of __________. The experience is so incredibly invaluable, you'd be robbing them to not let them take Live Studio instead. •             Thank you guys for such a wonderful opportunity. I really do wish we could expand the scope of the games we are working on, but I understand you guys want to give variety to the resumes of everyone who comes out of Live. Quality over quantity, I assure you! After learning of the production methods from Walt's Life Cycles class, I am eager to see a project of larger organization size and structure. Allowing students to fill the roles in a tiered system similar to a genuine AA or AAA game development company would allow the students to attain experience, knowledge, and skill through a simulated job/internship platform. Then again, I assume that is what SIP is for haha...]

.... calculating....